Episode 132: Living Stoically with Seneca and Massimo

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 132 is something like, what is it to live stoically? And we read several of the moral epistles of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, aka Seneca the Younger, from around 65 AD. You can join the discussion, get the texts and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer speaking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:34 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:36 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:39 Massimo: And I am Massimo Pigliucci from New York City.

0:42 Mark: Massimo, welcome.

0:43 Massimo: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

0:45 Wes: Nice to have you on.

0:46 Dylan: Yeah, thanks for coming.

0:47 Wes: I was a longtime fan of your site, Rationally Speaking.

0:50 Massimo: Oh, thank you. That was a long time ago.

0:54 Mark: So that's a podcast you ran for several years and now you've switched to doing. Tell us a little about just your current efforts in the area of Stoicism here.

1:01 Massimo: Yes, now I switched to two blogs. One is called platofootnote.org and that's my sort of general philosophy blog where I publish things that are concerned either with my profession as a philosopher. I'm a philosopher of science by day, or with general issues in philosophy that I find interesting. The other blog is howtobeastoic.org, and that's exclusively devoted to my exploration of Stoicism, which started a little bit more than a. A year, year and a half ago. And basically I keep the blog as a open diary of my own readings and commentaries and thoughts about Stoicism, both in terms of theory and in terms of practice.

1:37 Mark: So this episode is a follow up to our Epictetus episode from a few months back. I just freshly went back and listened to it and actually it was one of the most text oriented episodes that we've ever had. So I don't think we were unfair to Epictetus in terms of we were tussling from multiple points of view with the actual wor that were said. And this is one of the prime Stoic texts. But we did go into that not really having in mind that this is a live, I was going to say pseudo religious, but it's a live practice movement that was very popular, as these things go, as non established religion practice movements go.

Some of our fans encouraged us to get Massimo on here, knowing your work. And so we read Seneca is very practically oriented, and the epistles that we picked out. Well, Massimo Picked them out. So these are among those that you said your daily practice includes picking a passage from Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or one of the other Stoic masters, and just contemplating it a little at the beginning of the day, and then as you go through the day, seeing how it hooks up with things, or looking at ways in which all the choices you make have ethical implications.

2:45 Massimo: I thought it was interesting that you used, or almost used the word pseudo religion. I would stay away from that. Meaning that one of the reasons I'm attracted to stories is, you know, I'm an atheist, and I've been an atheist since I was a teenager. Before that, I grew up Catholic because I grew up in Rome, literally next to the Pope. I mean, my apartment in Rome was not far from the Vatican. And one of the things that I do find very attractive about Stoicism, other than that it is a very practically oriented philosophy, it's that it's inherently ecumenical, meaning that you can be a theist, an agnostic, a deist, a pantheist, or even atheist within certain limits, and be okay with most of what Stoicism teaches and most of what Stoicism practices.

It's not a religion, it is a philosophy. It's a philosophical framework, which means that it evolves over time. And, you know, we will be talking about what Seneca wrote 2,000 years ago, but of course, there are no sacred scriptures. It's not that because something was written by Seneca or Marcus or Epictetus, then that's it. That's the last word on the matter. Modern Stoics are inspired by the ancient ones, just like I think a better analogy would be modern Buddhists, especially secular Buddhists or ecumenical Buddhists, are inspired by the Buddhist tradition, but they don't necessarily treat it as a religious text or anything that has to be followed to the letter.

That was my first comment. The other one is, and that brings us actually to Seneca, one of the things to understand, especially because you're making, rightly so, I think the contrast between Seneca and Epictetus is that, of course, the Stoics themselves had a certain number of disagreements on specifics of their doctrines and specifics of their ways of thinking. Stoicism started out in about 300 BCE in Athens with Zeno of Citium, which is modern day Cyprus. And then eventually it moved its center to Rome, especially during the imperial period.

Of course, over the course of those about five centuries where Stoicism was an actually actively practiced philosophy, things changed. You know, people made discoveries. For instance, one of the most amusing ones is that the early Stoics, like Chrysippus, who was the third head of the Stoa, believed that the seat of reason was the heart. In fact, Aristotle agreed as well.

4:53 Mark: Yes, we just covered De Anima.

4:54 Massimo: So it's the whole thing, both in terms of sort of empirical evidence and in terms of concepts changed over time. And there are some major differences conceptually between Seneca and Epictetus. Epictetus was perhaps one of the most sort of ascetic of the Stoics. It was very much an admiration of the Cynics. The Cynics were one of the Hellenistic schools that inspired Stoics initially. But Cynics were very much minimalist about life. You know, they believed in having basically almost no possessions, no family, no friends, nothing. They were just wandering around teaching their philosophy.

And Epictetus was very much attracted by that end of the Stoic sort of continuum. And in fact, there is a bit in the Discourses where he essentially says, you know, if you cannot manage to be a Cynic, at least be a Stoic. So for him, Stoicism was sort of a second choice. Seneca was very different. Seneca was much more worldly. He was a senator, he was wealthy, he was in the court of Nero, of course. So he was a very different kind of character. And he had a much more palatable, much more sort of mainstream version of Stoicism. So what we're going to be talking about today is quite different from Epictetus.

You can think of Epictetus as a sort of the equivalent of almost a Christian monk, while Seneca is more like your priest in a big city or something like that.

6:10 Mark: So the reason I was saying pseudo religious is actually more in connection to the episode that we just had on faith, where the emphasis was not on are there matters of alleged fact that are improvable or something. And arguing about whether we can hold those rationally, but whether the overall point of view involved in a religion, that there are many breeds of almost any religion that strive to be compatible with science, that if they make factual claims at all, then they're the kind that certainly are not within the purview of science and you can even reinterpret it. Many of the alleged factual claims, like even God, exists in a not quite factual way. In other words, closer to the way you would establish a normative claim.

6:52 Massimo: Right.

6:52 Mark: And in reading through Seneca here, and also just in having some back and forth conversation with the various advocates of Stoicism, in light of our Epictetus episode structure, wonder about the epistemic status of Some of these claims of this is what virtue is, or Seneca approaches well. So he wrote over a hundred of these letters. We only read six of them or so. But you could see why he could come up with so much material. It's not because he has so many ideas. It's because he's like a preacher on Sunday who is pulling out. Just like you could pick a different passage every day, or even the same passage in different days and mull them over. You know, it's about truth is supposed to be simple in some ways for him. And he even says this straight up. He eschews philosophy that is too complicated.

7:36 Wes: He's not delving into the sort of theoretical underpinnings of Stoicism, although he does allude to some of those, I think. But I think that's the. At least in what we read, you know, he's giving advice. So it's an ancient advice column, correct?

7:51 Massimo: That's exactly right. In fact, let me give you some context about the letters. So the letters were written all to his friend Lucilius a year or two before Seneca's death. So he was retired at this point, not officially, because Nero the emperor would not actually allow him to retire officially. But basically, Seneca spent the last two or three years of his life away from Rome, trying to disentangle himself from what was becoming an increasingly uncontrollable nutcase of an emperor. And of course, as we know, that eventually cost him his life, because after conspiracy against his life was discovered, he thought that Seneca was involved.

Probably Seneca was not actually involved, but he certainly was sympathetic to the conspirators and so ordered Seneca to commit suicide, which he did. So you need to keep in mind that, yes, these letters were written toward the end of his life, specifically, as you say, almost very consciously, as the equivalent of a modern advice column. He's writing for posterity. He's not just writing a letter to his friend Lucilius. He's always careful when he mentions, for instance, other people. He either doesn't mention their names because they're irrelevant to the point that he's making, or when he mentions them, he makes very clear to explain the background so that a reader who is not Lucilius will know what it is that Seneca is talking about.

So it was a very conscious collection of Stoic advice. And so it makes perfect sense that it doesn't go into the theory at all. It only alludes to the basic Stoic theory because he sort of takes it for granted. He's talking to an audience that knows the theory. In fact, one of the best places to go for an expression of the theory is Cicero. Cicero, who was not a Stoic, he was a Platonist, was very sympathetic to the Stoics, especially in terms of their ethics. The other one is Diogenes Laertius, who has an entire book in his Lives of Philosophers on a number of the Stoic philosophers.

And he also goes into the theory. Seneca definitely doesn't. He just takes the theory for granted and then he talks about specific practical things.

9:41 Wes: And Diogenes Laertius is our primary source. And Sextus Empiricus for Chrysippus, one of the better exponents of Stoic theory.

9:49 Massimo: Correct. Chrysippus was the third head of the Stoa when it was still located in Athens. And Diogenes Laertius thinks that Chrysippus innovations and systematization of the Stoic philosophy was so important that he actually writes, without Chrysippus, there would be no Stoa, meaning that Chrysippus was crucial. Sextus Empiricus needs to be handled a little bit more carefully because he was openly hostile to the Stoics. And so what he says about the Stoics needs to be taken with a

10:15 Mark: grain of salt before we get into the texts themselves. Dylan and Wes, can you say a little more about what you wanted to get out of this time as an addition to our previous discussion here?

10:25 Wes: So when we did the Epictetus episode, it had been a long time since I'd studied Stoicism in grad school and we were dealing with the enchiridion and just a kind of limited text and wrestling with all the sorts of usual things you would think about when you begin thinking about Stoicism. So what are they calling for? A suppression of emotional life and what does that mean and how is that supposed to work? So I wanted to get deeper into the theoretical background. What we read of Seneca doesn't do that. But I had a chance to read some secondary stuff, including Tad Brennan's The Stoic Life, Emotions, Duties and Fate, which I think is a really good, well written and kind of absorbing introduction to Stoicism.

Good for beginners, but doesn't shy away from rigor. So coming to this, I feel I have much more of that background. And also I've been writing this essay relating Stoicism to Freud and Nietzsche. So what interests me is sort of the Stoic approach to mourning versus mourning as a central concept for Freud and for psychoanalysis, and then also anti moralism. I see in Stoicism this Idea that many of the things we typically think of as good and bad are not actually good and bad. And the fact that stoicism is. You could see it as a kind of virtue ethics.

And so Nietzschean virtue ethics, I think, despite his criticisms of stoicism, is actually related to it. And so Nietzsche anti morality and Stoic anti morality. That's another thing I'd like to explore eventually.

11:47 Mark: Dylan, did you have any sort of opening statements before we jump into that or jump into the text?

11:51 Dylan: I don't have anything in detail. When we had the Epictetus podcast, I found myself in the position of just generically being very sympathetic with the point of view and. But finding myself a bit at a loss for how could it possibly be right if it involves such absurd conclusions as I must deprive myself of all sorts of desire. And you're left with the question of how do you get any directedness at all if you don't want anything, why aren't you just a lump on a log? Or isn't there something terribly anti human, anti our own natural state to cut ourselves off from the very connections that seem to make us live flourishing human beings?

And so I found myself, especially in reading Epictetus, not having a very good response to that, but nonetheless being very sympathetic to the practice, as well as a certain kind of pragmatic disposition of cultivating a way of being that is resilient, as well as having a lot of integrity, being concerned with the notion of who you are and maintaining that integrity as being sort of the linchpin of the understanding of virtue. And so coming into this, I felt like, well, I'd like to understand more about how all that works.

13:11 Mark: Yeah, that was in the Brennan, too. The intro to his book said, before I learned a lot about stoicism, I had these caricatures of it. And the things that he goes through were very much some of the same things that came out of our actually reading Epictetus.

13:23 Dylan: It's like you listened to the podcast

13:25 Mark: and quoted, yes, Y and the basic breakdown seemed to be that either the stoic is fooling himself, right? You think you can suppress your emotions, but actually they just get bent in a different way. And really the emphasis in the popular culture on stoicism might be show a brave face. So it's not a matter of actually being at peace. It's a matter of being afraid of social condemnation that you are showing emotion and thereby choosing one pain, the inner pain of stifling this stuff over another pain, the social embarrassment pain. And so clearly, that's not what stoicism actually is.

But on the other hand, if it's not just faking stifling the emotions, what about the alternative, successfully stifling the emotions? Well, making yourself into a robot, is that really something that you would choose? Isn't that kind of cowardly, the fact that there's some suffering in the world and if you fall in love, things might not work out, or you're giving up control and so you'll inevitably get hurt if you take on these responsibilities. Loved ones, if you really invest your personal self into these things with the arrangement, you're going to have suffering at the end of it.

If you buy a pet, the pet is going to die. So therefore you should have some sort of emotional withdrawal. And is that really something that we want to choose? And Brennan says, well, no, this is not stoicism either. So those are the two caricatures. So, Massimo, before we get into the Seneca, what's the right answer? That's neither of those.

14:50 Massimo: So the first thing to understand, I think, is that there is an issue here with word usage right now. As you know, philosophy depends very much on careful understanding of the use of terms. And the Stoics, for better or for worse, introduce a lot of technical terms. So when people talk about, let's say, emotions, for instance, in this particular case, we need to be careful because today we mean something actually quite different from what the Stoics meant. So the word that they used was pathos, which is actually better translated as passions. They made a distinction between pathe, which were the unhealthy passions, and eupatheiai, which were the healthy passions.

So right there, that tells you that the point isn't to suppress the emotions or passions, is to keep in check the negative ones and develop and nurture the positive ones, which gives you a very different idea of what the Stoics were after. And then if you start getting into the details, you'll find out that they listed four, four unhealthy passions. One was pain or suffering, which they defined as the failure to avoid something that you judge bad by mistake. Fear, the irrational expectation of something bad or harmful, craving or lust, the irrational striving for something that you mistakenly judge as good, and then pleasure, the irrational elation over something that is actually not worth choosing.

So it's not even pleasure in general. It's just pleasure about things that are really not worth choosing. That's a very, very specific one. If you go to the healthy passions, they include things like discretion, which is a sort of A rational aversion of vice. This idea that you go after things that are actually worth it and not things that are not worth it or willing, which is a rational desire for doing the right thing, for living your life in a constructive way, or joy, which is for the Stoics, the rational elation over virtue, over cultivating a good life.

And the overall goal of the stories was not to suppress the emotions, not to suppress the passions, but to reach what they called apatheia. Now, apatheia, it's an unfortunate term because of course it sounds a lot like the English apathy, right? Which is like, oh, so I'm supposed to be a stoic. I'm supposed not to care about anything. To be apathetic. No, to be apathetic in the stoic sense and in the Greek sense means to actually look at things with equanimity. So let me go to your example of falling in love. I mean, the Stoics fell in love. Musonius Rufus said that it's a good thing to have a family and you have a relationship and have children and so on, so forth.

So it's clear that the Stoics were not counseling not to do those things.

17:22 Wes: Well, a good thing or a preferable thing?

17:25 Massimo: It was a preferable thing. That's right. Yes. We need to get back into that distinction as soon as you want to go there. But let's finish this thing about emotions. So you fall in love. Well, okay, how can you possibly apply equanimity to that idea? Well, what it is is that you realize that falling in love is in part sort of an instinct. It comes out of your biology. It's something out of your being a human being. You just have certain lust and certain cravings and so on and so forth. Then you develop, you know, the good love, long lasting love is actually developing a much more calm relationship for the person you stay with.

The initial phase of falling in love, it's, you know, it starts out with lust essentially. It eventually develops into sort of romantic phase. But the only thing that we call long lasting love, it's a much more calm kind of emotion in that sense. I actually think it is a stoic type of emotion. It is that kind of content pleasure in being with that person, in having a relationship with that person, in appreciating that person for what he or she is doing. And the equanimity comes in because the relationship is not entirely under your control. The only thing that is under your control is how to behave your best and how to give it your best shot to.

To the relationship. But ultimately the outcome depends also on another person and probably on things that are outside of both of your control. Stuff just happens. And so having equanimity means that even if the relationship should in fact end, you take that as well. This is one of the things that happen in the world. And I just gave it the best shot that I could. I really was into this thing, but now it's time to move on. I think that's actually a very healthy attitude, but it's certainly not an emotional attitude.

19:03 Wes: Filling out this picture. It gets us into this distinction between what is good and what is preferable. Because for the stoic, the only thing that can be good is one's own virtue. And all the things that we might think of as good or bad, for instance, health or sickness, or being wealthy or poor, or even having someone to love, if we think of that as good, we are engaged in the typical passions and we're engaged in a kind of error, right? Which is not to say we can't prefer things or select things. So there's this sort of two tier system evaluation.

And the idea that we can prefer things or select things has to do with their being in accord with nature. So for instance, when we choose to have a family and a spouse and health and all those sorts of things, it's not because we think they're good, it's because it's natural for us to choose those things. It's in accord with human nature to do those things. And even if we lost them for the stoic wise person at least, or the sage, really, they're indifferent to that outcome from a higher standpoint. So they're indifferent in the sense of you really haven't lost anything.

If you lose everything in our terms,

20:12 Massimo: it's not that you haven't lost anything, it's that you haven't lost anything that pertains to virtue, right?

20:17 Wes: Okay.

20:18 Massimo: Your moral character has not been affected, and that's true, of course, and you

20:22 Wes: haven't lost anything good, which is to say you haven't lost anything good.

20:26 Massimo: Right? You have, however, lost something preferred. So you have in fact lost something. It's just that it's not that kind of something that is really, truly have to do with your inner moral fiber. And of course it's outside of your control.

20:39 Dylan: I read some about this distinction in Seneca, where he doesn't become actually genuinely theoretical, but there are a number of letters where he talks about the good and what the good is. And it's all in this kind of language where there is an all or nothing distinction between good and bad. And then there's this move to get around back into our own language of degrees by using words like preference, or that you can have progress without being good and so forth. And I'm wondering a little bit about that distinction. Having on the one hand this binary character of goodness that you've cleaved it off from, what we often would think of as a continuum scale and say, well, is it that you're going to say that it is something that's utterly different in kind?

21:32 Wes: Yeah, I think it is, yeah.

21:33 Dylan: If it's utterly different in kind, then it's just that we want to make sure as a Stoics, we're being precise about where goodness is. And that the criticism would be that if we talked about, well, all the conundrums you get into about talking about goodness of this food, or the goodness of a marriage, or the goodness of exercise, or the goodness or badness of any other kind of action, the Stoic criticism would be, look, you're just making a category mistake.

22:02 Massimo: That's right.

22:03 Dylan: That those things have a whole different way of being understood that has its own consistencies, and the notion of goodness is something else. And so if that's the case, then I think we need to say a little bit more about that to really parse that difference out.

22:17 Massimo: So maybe one way to say something more is to look at where the Stoics were coming from. Because one of the things that is problematic for us moderns is that we take these notions in the abstract without necessarily going into where these notions came from. Why the hell did the Stoics make this distinction between the virtues, on the one hand, which are the only good, and the preferred and dispreferred indifference? And I think that once you look at the history of the Hellenistic philosophies, it's very clear what they came up with. The two contrasts with the Stoic positions are the Aristotelians and the Cynics.

So for the Cynics, they were not even preferred. Indifference. It was all about virtue. That's why the Cynics went around with no property, no family, no friends, nothing. There was nothing at all. They were just ascetics, kind of like Buddhist monks or something like that. So they had no room whatsoever for anything that most of us would consider worthwhile in life. It was all and only about virtue. That's on one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum, the Aristotelians, the Peripatetics, as they were called. And Aristotle said, look, in order to have a good life, a eudaimonic life, you need virtue.

Virtue is a necessary component of the eudaimonic life, but it's not sufficient. What else do you need? Well, you need some degree of health and some degree of wealth and some degree of education. And he actually said even some degree of good looks, otherwise your life is going to be miserable. Okay, now this sounds actually like a commonsensical notion, right? I mean, it's like, yeah, it's true. You know, to have a good life, I do need a little bit of money, a little bit of education, you know, a little bit of good looks. Doesn't hurt. Health certainly doesn't hurt, and that sort of stuff.

Otherwise I'm going to have a miserable life, or at least a more complex and more difficult life. Right.

24:04 Mark: So virtue is maybe necessary for goodness, but not sufficient.

24:07 Massimo: Exactly.

24:07 Mark: You can be as virtuous as you want, and if just things go badly and your whole family gets killed, then nobody is going to call you happy when you die, if that's what happens.

24:14 Wes: Although the way Aristotle puts it, it's more like extreme misfortun is an impediment to virtue.

24:19 Dylan: I don't know how this particular point of word meaning parses out for the Romans, but in Aristotle, virtue, that word is translating a word that is also used in ways by him, arete, that isn't used by us moderns that way. And in fact, using the word virtue doesn't quite hit the mark in terms of the notion of excellence and inherent excellence that's coming across in Aristotle, where it brings along a stronger moral component.

24:49 Wes: Yeah, so we tend to think of virtue in terms like that ethically, as in terms of how we treat other people. And Aristotle is focused on an individual's happiness as a function of activity in accordance with virtue, which is to say these excellences of character like justice and temperance and things like that. So it's more focused globally on all of your behavior. It's not just thou shalt not kill. It's a much thicker and richer conception of morality.

25:19 Mark: I agree.

25:20 Massimo: So the word virtual, it is unfortunate to some extent, although I don't think we're going to get away from it, because the whole approach is called virtue ethics.

25:27 Dylan: You know, we're not going to get out of it, but it's worth.

25:30 Massimo: Right.

25:31 Dylan: It's worth bringing up.

25:32 Mark: You don't think we should try to get aretaic ethics as a.

25:35 Massimo: Well, actually, you know, I'm surprised that the people use more and more the term eudaimonia, as opposed to just flourishing or happiness. So, you know, who knows, maybe people will eventually use aretaic. But you're right, I mean, that point was very important because virtue today does have too much of a sort of a Christian connotation to it. While not just Aristotle, but the Greeks in general, Greek, Romans in general, they really did mean more something like excellence of character, which is a much broader perspective than just sort of Christian virtue.

But to finish the comparison then between the schools. So here's the situation. So you're absolutely right, you can put it in this way, that for the Aristotelians, virtue or arete, was necessary but not sufficient for eudaimonia, for the flourishing life. For the Cynics, virtue was both necessary and sufficient. Now here come the Stoics and they said, no, wait a minute, you're both wrong and you're wrong in different ways. It's ridiculous to say that virtue is necessary and sufficient because clearly human beings want other things and they have good reasons for wanting other things.

It's not crazy, it's not irrational to want to be healthy and not sick or wealthy and not poor or educated and not ignorant and so on and so forth. So the Cynics are too extreme in that perspective. But the Aristotelians were a little bit too aristocratic. I mean, they basically left a lot to chance because things like health and wealth and education, all that are not entirely under your control. It's not that you can decide to be wealthy, you can work in that direction, or to be educated. And certainly you can't decide to be good looking. So there are things they said.

So let's make this distinction that what makes your life worth living, what makes you a good human being, an excellent human being, is the thing that is under your control. And what is under your control is the development of your character. Everything else becomes indifferent in the specific sense of being indifferent to your moral character, to your excellence. Now within those indifference, then we're going to recognize that some of them are preferred, rationally preferred, and some of them are not rationally preferred. And as you said earlier, that distinction is basically made on the basis of human nature.

There are certain things that human nature prefers and other things that this prefers.

27:42 Wes: So I was trying to describe the hard line Stoic position that what's preferable or not is not relevant to one's happiness unless it's relevant to virtue. Are you saying it's broader than that? That these preferables are actually relevant to happiness?

27:57 Massimo: No, they're not relevant to happiness, as long as one understands happiness as eudaimonia, which for the Stoics was the perfection of character.

28:05 Mark: As long as happiness is defined as virtue before you even start.

28:09 Massimo: Well, yeah, that's right, because that's one of the reasons why translating eudaim with happiness is problematic, because we have a very different concept today of happiness. And they say, well, how can I possibly be happy if I'm poor and sick and so on and so forth. Right. Well, you can, in the sense of being a moral person, even if you are sick and poor and uneducated.

28:29 Dylan: Part of what you have to address there is how that happiness is in some way like what we would normally consider being happy. It has to be that it lines up in some way like something like happiness properly understood, as opposed to just another word that you just misused.

28:47 Massimo: Right.

28:48 Wes: Well, another way of putting this is. Yeah, I don't see the Stoics as simply arbitrarily defining happiness as virtue, or Aristotle or other virtue ethicists, for that matter. There's a real causal claim here. And this sort of concern goes back to Socrates and Plato, of course, the idea that, well, is it wealth and those sorts of things that will give us a good life and make us happy, or is it justice or virtue, justice as a virtue, or other sorts of virtues? So, yeah, I think there's a real claim here that if you have the right frame of mind, then you can be happy despite worldly misfortunes, just by being a good person.

29:25 Dylan: And that happiness that you have is a happiness that would be recognized as other people.

29:30 Wes: It's not the same, obviously, as the momentary, subjective feeling of. And Seneca even brings this up in his letter on pleasure. Right. There's a distinction we need to make between joy and pleasure and pleasure and happiness. So that's part of the danger here is, yes, we want to say it's not completely unrecognizable, really, defined as activity in accordance with virtue. But we don't want to make the mistake of simply identifying happiness with a kind of subjective, pleasurable experience beforehand.

29:58 Massimo: No, that's right. And in fact, Aristotle himself, even before the Stoics, basically, it was pretty clear what he meant by eudaimonia. So eudaimonia is the kind of life that you are on your deathbed and you look back to it and you say, yeah, that was good, that was worth living. Which is nothing at all to do with happiness in terms of sort of pleasure on anything like that, because you could imagine easily somebody having had a Very easy life. Right. And yet one during which that person completely wasted time and did things that were completely inconsequential and arriving at the end of his life and say, oh shit, I really wasted my life despite having so many resources.

And equally, you can imagine somebody not having those resources, even living actually difficult your life, and yet living it well, and then arriving at the end of life. Yeah, well, you know, I didn't have this and that and the other, but I did what I could with the hand that was given to me and I'm confident that I did a good thing. I had a good existence. So that, I think, is the meaning of what in general, the virtue ethical schools are talking about in terms of a good life.

30:56 Wes: Yeah. Another way of thinking about it is how we assess the value of our lives as a whole. Or sometimes this is often related to whether or not we think our life is meaningful. And of course people will pursue meaningfulness even at the cost of great pain. So it's obviously that that could be a choice worthy thing, despite its conflict with a pursuit of pleasure.

31:17 Mark: The way Brennan puts it is that by the time we got to the Stoics, and certainly by these Roman Stoics, then the ancient Greek ethical tradition had already done the work in establishing that virtue equals happiness. That that had become just a point of not really in contention in philosophy. Even though we see in some of these essays Seneca at least saying things like, well, certainly you can't consider mere pleasure, which could be associated with vice, to be part of happiness. But it's the way he does that is more just reminding the person he's addressing that this is of course something you believe, that this has already been something on the table.

The way Brennan put it was that in the Republic, one of his prime concerns there was to establish this equation between happiness and virtue against claims that few had the ring of Gyges and could be invisible and steal things and be the best tyrant and that all that wouldn't you be really happy. The way that he ended up doing this was hooking both up to mental health. So that a properly ordered soul with the rational part in control is the best kind of soul, is the virtuous kind of soul. You can see it's the healthiest kind of soul. And that's also going to be what makes the person.

And this is appealing to your sentiment, to your phenomenology, it's also what makes the person ultimately happy that you can reflect on.

32:30 Wes: It's the harmonization of those different parts of the soul that makes you happy, and it's the control of the rational over the irrational that makes you virtuous. So that's what Brennan calls a bridge argument, where you bring those things together and it's intuitively plausible because we can intuitively understand how conflict between those parts of the soul would make you miserable. So it's not like there's no argument for this sort of thing.

32:52 Massimo: Yeah, and actually, some modern philosophers have made the similar argument from a completely different perspective. Like think about Robert Nozick thought experiment of the pleasure machine, for instance. That idea that if I told you that you could step into this machine and you would live a life that is entirely fictional, there's nothing really about it, but you'll be constantly in pleasure, you can be fulfilling your every fantasy you want. His intuition is that most people would say, no, that's a wasted life because it's not real, even though it has the maximum amount of pleasure you can possibly imagine.

And in fact, even without going to Nozick experiment, most people, I would wager, would say that a life lived in pure pleasure, let's say that it's given to you by constantly being hooked up to drugs, it's not a life worth living. And that is the same basic idea that not only the Stoics, but the ancient Greeks and Romans in general were after. That pleasure, of course, except the Epicureans, that pleasure by itself is just not. It's not going to do it. In fact, it leads you down to a road where at the end of your life you say, well, that was wasted time.

33:50 Mark: But it's certainly not sufficient to argue that pleasure is not going to be enough to give you a meaningful life. There's a giant leap between that and saying, what will give you happiness, what will amount to virtue is the harmonization of your faculties and the rational ruling over the irrational. Etc. Etc. I mean, somebody like Nietzsche is going to violently reject that.

34:10 Wes: But keep in mind that that's not the Stoic model of the soul. They reject that model. And this is sort of relevant to this idea of the passions versus the healthy passions. Right. So we might better think of them as impulses.

34:23 Mark: I see this in Seneca.

34:25 Wes: And impulses can be rational. It's not that you have to have the rational part of you put down all those other passions. It's just that you need to cultivate the rational passions, the healthy passions.

34:38 Dylan: Well, how is that different than the dichotomy that Mark was bringing up?

34:40 Wes: The passions in question are things like joy and volition. They involve knowing that certain Actions are actually good because they're virtuous, as opposed to mistaking food for a good thing when it's not. It's a way of changing what you believe to be true. It's a way of acquiring a certain kind of knowledge. And it's not like by acquiring that knowledge, you are simply repressing the old knowledge, right? You come to know something and that changes you. I know now that it's not food that's good for me, it's being temperate that's good. And once I have that knowledge, it's no longer a struggle not to be a glutton, for instance. It's not a putting down of the irrational, passionate side of myself.

35:21 Dylan: That's an interesting leap right there. What you just described is that I will no longer struggle against these passions and desires when I actually know what's going on. And the flip side of that, of course, is that what's wrong with me when I want something that's bad for me is that I don't really know that it's bad for me.

35:40 Wes: Because knowledge is a very. Is also a technical term for the Stoics. You might believe it's bad for you, but knowing it's bad for you is a whole different thing. It involves not just that belief, or what the Stoics would call assent to that impression, but it involves a certain amount of commitment to it and involves you not being thrown off that by the circumstances of life. So to know that food is not good, to actually know that doesn't involve just believing that. Because I read it in the Stoics, it means you'd have to be tested and you'd have to pass those tests of temptation, let's say.

36:14 Massimo: Yeah, which is why the Stoics had an emphasis on practice. You know, not only Seneca, but Epictetus. Epictetus in several places says, you know, it's all good to study the theory. But then, you know, people forget the theory as soon as they are actually faced with a real life situation. Which is why you have to constantly remind yourself that that's why the Stoics had this emphasis on these short little reminders, phrases to themselves. Whenever you are exposed to a problem, you remind yourself forcefully of the way you should be thinking about it. And hopefully over time, your cognition changes your actual desires.

36:48 Wes: At least for the hardline Stoics, it's only the Stoic sage or the wise person who can know these things and who can act virtuously. It's sort of an all or nothing. And I think we See, some of this in Seneca, it's sort of an all or nothing thing. So even if we're making progress, even if we start selecting things and not seeing them as good or bad necessarily, but just preferable or not preferable until we've rounded everything out and reached Stoic sagehood, we're not actually acting virtuously and we're not acting on the basis of knowledge. Seneca might be a little more lax on that. Or conflicted is what I thought from reading the letters.

37:25 Dylan: But I'm just wondering about the lumping in of the knowledge with the cultivated, practiced virtue. They don't seem to me like the same thing. I mean, it seems to me perfectly understandable and admissible that you would know what was good, but that you were incontinent with respect to it. In that distinction is where the whole notion of progress would come. And it's not a question of your knowing, it's a question of your ability to accede to your own best practices.

37:55 Wes: But you're just redescribing the difference between them and a more Platonic conception of the soul. So you couldn't be a cratic once you have knowledge. But again, it's not unmotivated, and so there's room for disagreement. I think Dylan is disagreeing, but it's this different conception of the soul where to know something, you might believe that something is good and then be.

38:15 Dylan: Yeah, no, it's Platonic in that respect. Right. It's a funny kind of combination of Platonic conception and Aristotelian conception. Right. Is that you don't actually know your knowledge is linked with your virtue. Whereas in Aristotle you would know, but you could be incontinent. There's a distinction to be made there. And here the Stoic is saying, well, if I'm not actually fulfilling that virtuous act, that's a sign that I don't actually know it's all or nothing.

38:39 Wes: In that respect, knowledge confers virtue, which is. I think there's some of that in Plato and Aristotle too. But it's, you know, I don't want us to get bogged down on that. I think we have enough of the background to actually get into the text now before it's too late.

38:52 Massimo: Sounds good to me.

38:53 Mark: A lot of the way you're putting these things, I don't see very much in Seneca at all. Maybe we can start on the happy life. Since we've been talking about Eudaimonia and Wes. You were just saying that. No, no, Seneca doesn't agree or you know, the Stoics don't necessarily agree with Plato about how the irrational has to be subservient to the rational. Well, on the Happy Life Verse 1, he gives this whole schematic how the different parts of the soul. Okay, you and I will agree, I think that outward things are sought for the satisfaction of the body, that the body is cherished out of regard for the soul, and that in the soul there are certain parts which minister to us, enabling us to move and sustain life bestowed on us just for the sake of the primary part of us.

Okay, well what is this primary part of us? In this primary part there is something irrational and something rational. The former, the irrational obeys the latter. So this is not obviously a pure description. This is like in the well functioning body, how it's supposed to work. While the latter, the rational part is the only thing that is not referred back to another, but rather refers all things to itself. For the divine reason also is set in supreme command over all things and is itself subject to none. And even this reason which we possess is the same because it is derived from the divine reason.

That sounds very much like what we just saw in Aristotle's De Anima, that the rational part is. Well, okay, this is straight out of Plato, but the rational part should rule over the irrational part. And then the part from Aristotle, which I guess is also from Plato, is that, well, the reason for that is the rational is somehow hooked up to the divine reason. What did you guys think of this phrase, the latter? In other words, the rational part of the soul is the only thing that is not referred back to another, but rather refers all things to itself.

What does that mean?

40:34 Massimo: Yeah, I have, as you know, I'm using a slightly different translation, but in this case it's pretty close. It says the former is at the service of the latter, which is the one thing that does not look to anything else, but rather refers everything else to itself.

40:46 Mark: Yeah, look to everything else, in what sense?

40:49 Wes: Reason finds ends within itself.

40:51 Mark: Okay, so it's not obeying anything else.

40:54 Massimo: Yes. No.

40:55 Mark: So it's not obeying divine reason then? It is participating in divine reason. It is divine. I mean, this sounds exactly like what we uncovered in Aristotle's De Anima, that insofar as we are controlled by the reasonable part of us, we in a sense are God. We are participating in Godness. This is.

41:11 Dylan: Yeah, well, in that language though, is throughout Seneca.

41:14 Wes: Right.

41:14 Dylan: Is the whole idea being godly? Not necessarily in the Christian sense, but maybe even just the Greek sense of just that. The Ways in which human beings are like gods is through our reason, in the Greek sense.

41:27 Mark: Like a womanizer, Zeus. No, not that Greek sense.

41:29 Massimo: Not that Greek sense, no. We need to remember that the Stoics had a particular conception of God, which definitely it's not the Christian God outside of space and time, you know, a personal person or anything like that. God is nature. God is the universe. I mean, Epictetus, for instance, uses those terms interchangeably throughout the Stoic tradition. It's clear that what the Stoics mean by God is the sum total of the causal powers that make nature. So when Seneca is saying that we are part of God, that we participate in God, that's what he means. We're part of nature. More importantly, we are actually blessed, so to speak, with participating in the rational part of nature. It's not that somehow rationality is connected to God in the sense that God is an external thing. God is everywhere, and therefore it's also in us. We are part of the universe. We're part of God.

42:21 Mark: And is this associated with Logos because the divine reason is also set in supreme command over all things. That sounds like a fancy way of saying nature obeys natural law.

42:31 Massimo: That's right, exactly. The Logos for the stories. The Logos has a long history, and of course, it's been interpreted in a number of ways. As a concept, it precedes Stoics, and of course, it was used then later by the Christians in a very different way. But for the Stoics, the Logos is the rational principle that permeates the universe.

42:47 Mark: Yes, but here's the difference is that when we say natural law, we're giving something that's purely descriptive. We come up with the law of gravity or something by just looking at a lot of instances and putting them together. And there's some sort of normative component that if you say, well, it looks like that thing is not obeying the law of gravity, then you don't say the law of gravity is wrong. You look, for some reason, you know, something that is preventing the thing from falling, or there are other bodies acting on it. You look for other causal factors that are involved.

So in that sense, it's normative in that it controls how we explain some of the details. That's quite different than the basically teleological view of nature that he's saying. At the same time, people are prone to fall into error. People are prone to obey the irrational part of them. But yet the way of nature is for the rational to be in control. So even though nobody is the Stoic sage. We all are infected with this imperfection. So much of this is so obvious why Augustinians would leap on this. Oh, yes, original sin. We're all. There's nobody's really this age.

It's only Jesus. You know, Something like that.

43:48 Wes: Yeah.

43:48 Mark: So this great distinction between saying, oh, yes, it's natural, the good is natural. But what I mean by natural, oh, it's natural law. But that's describing things. But it's not kind of describing how things. Actually, it's describing how things are if they're really working properly, which they hardly ever are.

44:03 Wes: So following nature is one of these big Stoic themes, and it really means two things. One has to do with human nature, but then there's this idea of nature in general. And I think the idea of following that has something to do with accepting one's fate, even when it's unfortunate, because it happens according to nature. It's sort of the laws of the universe are executed, and sometimes that's not so hot for us, but that's what we will. We will things to happen as they happen, because it's according to that sort of nature.

44:36 Massimo: Amor fati. Right. Love your fate.

44:38 Wes: Exactly.

44:39 Dylan: That doesn't seem very far from Mark's criticism of it being essentially teleological. That is a proper end. It might not be an end in the sense of flourishing that we would normally think of it that way, but it would be a proper end that

44:53 Massimo: it was directed towards an end according to nature. So here's one way in which I've heard a number of modern scholars of Stoicism put it. The view of the cosmos that the Stoics had was of the universe as an organism, as opposed to contrast that with the Galilean Newtonian view of the universe as a machine or something close to it. Right. So the mechanistic view, which is the one that modern science has, as opposed to a sort of an organismic view. So if you think of the cosmos as an organism, then it makes perfect sense to say that certain things work properly or improperly.

Right. It's like, imagine the analogy with a human body. I mean, your heart can work properly and improperly, or your legs can work properly and improperly. And the Stoics apply the same thing to the universe. That's why I think their metaphysical position is best characterized as pantheistic, because they saw the entire universe as permeated by basically being an organism.

45:48 Dylan: I like that. And it makes a lot of sense because we sort of intuitively know what it means to talk about Being healthy. Unless we start asking more questions about it, you can often just look at an organism or being an organism, understand what it means to be working right, and understand that that's not merely a normative thing. Exactly. Speaking of it as this is what legs were supposed to do, and to see them doing it and doing it well is natural. It's fulfilling its own natural character. There's a lot of intuitive sense to that way of saying, speaking about it. It seems like if we talk about the universe as an organism, it makes the language that we're talking about more sensible. But it also sort of dodges the question about what we mean by talking about an organism fulfilling its needs.

46:33 Mark: Because you wouldn't think that a properly functioning organism involves the liver killing the kidneys, but yet we can have things in nature that, oh, you know, there's a cataclysm and the earth blew up, but that was part of a natural process.

46:46 Dylan: Diabetes is a perfect example. Because my pancreas isn't working properly, then I have all these sorts of metabolic problems that mess up my body and I might lose my feet or I might go blind. On the one hand, we want to say there's something wrong with your body. Your organism is not working properly. And it makes sense because there's a system in your body that has an organ, and that organ isn't doing what it's supposed to be. And now your body isn't working as it was before. But it's also true that the fact that you're going blind and the fact that you lose your feet is an utterly natural consequence of the fact that this organ died or this organ isn't working properly.

So this is where the notion of using the word functioning naturally as a goal of Stoic philosophy or anything else. It's like saying, the food is more natural and therefore I should eat it. Right. Or there are chemicals in my food and therefore they're bad. You sort of understand what they mean, but it's sort of misunderstanding what's going on. It's making a normative claim about those things and trying to be rhetorical about it rather than say, well, look, you know, my body's full of chemicals and it's a natural process for me to lose my feet if I put a tourniquet on my leg.

47:59 Massimo: Right. You brought up very clearly that there are different ways of interpreting the word natural. And I think that that is something that the Stoics were definitely aware of. They were not counseling going back to nature, as in your tree hugging and living in a cave or something like that. That's why we made earlier on the distinction between nature as in cosmic nature on the one hand, and also nature as in human nature on the other hand. For the Stoics, human nature was the nature of a social animal capable of rationality, which means that to act according to nature for a human being, as Seneca famously actually put it in, I think it was De Tranquillitate Animi, he says, bring reason to bear upon your problems.

That's what it's in the nature of a human being to do. We are social and we're capable of rationality. So to follow nature for a human being means to use reason to help with social life. And it's very distinct from saying, well, an earthquake is natural. And so I had to accept it.

48:54 Wes: Yes, yeah. It is interesting here, though. So in this letter 92 in the second section, the question here is what happiness requires, and as he puts it in my translation, requires our attainment of perfect reason. So what does that mean exactly? And it does have something to do with this comportment towards fortune or these external events that occur according to nature in some sense or another, and it allows us to be untroubled by them. That's really what reason is good here for. This is section.

49:23 Massimo: Yeah, section two. Right. So at the end of that section, the very last phrase is in my translation, who wants to rely on fortune? And what intelligent person flatters himself because of things that do not belong to him? This is a classic Stoic theme of, you know, your happiness, the goodness of your life, depends on things that are under your control, not on things that are up to fortune.

49:42 Wes: Which sounds like a sort of, as it's argued, a kind of wishful thinking. Right? Well, if the only way to be undisturbed. Do you see what I'm saying? So the idea is that if we allow fortune to have the upper hand, then we're going to be disturbed by it. But maybe fortune does have the upper hand. So it's phrased in this sort of pragmatic, well, what's going to make us happy, but maybe the way things are is just are such that we can't be happy. Right? So you actually have to make the argument that good and bad is not external to us in our virtue. That actually has to be argued on its own terms if this is to be successful. You can't simply say, well, I can't be happy, you know, and it must be the case that we can be happy, maybe we can't be happy, or

50:20 Mark: let's redefine happiness so that it's something that we can attain because we still want to have that concept on our plate. If fortune has the upper hand, would make us unhappy. Then let's redefine happiness so it only concerns things that we can control.

50:31 Massimo: There is the famous metaphor that Epictetus uses of the dog on a leash connected to the cart. Right. Which actually goes back to Nietzsche's Amor Fati. Because of the causality of the universe, the causal web of the universe, things just happen in a certain way. So we are like the dog that is connected by a leash to a cart. And the dog has two choices. He can either drag himself in the ground kicking and screaming because he doesn't like where the cart is going, in which case he's going to be miserable and hurting himself, or he can just gingerly trot along with the cart and enjoy the landscape because he's accepting his fate.

He's accepting things that he cannot control, like the cart. I actually find that metaphor fairly useful in terms of. There are certain things that you really just. There's no sense in reacting against or trying to change them because they're not in your control. They're not in. There's nothing you can do about it. You're getting upset at the weather. It's just so.

51:24 Mark: It's reinterpreting the. When it says, who desires fortune to have the upper hand? Well, of course, fortune, if it's like the cart, does have the upper hand in, that is an objective thing that we can't rebel against effectively. But giving it the upper hand is really something that's psychological.

51:39 Massimo: Yes, that's right.

51:40 Mark: You don't have to give the person holding you prisoner control over your soul. This makes it then sound like not so much an argument for stoicism, but yet another way of expressing stoic sentiments that are already on the table.

51:52 Wes: Yeah. Again, I think you have to make an argument about what is actually good and bad. And we gave some of that in our background when we discussed the parts of the soul and harmony. And that's a deeper and more complex question of how we justify that.

52:05 Mark: And that's what makes me see is the religious aspect in this, that going back to the discussion we were having near the beginning, if you lose something that's merely preferred, your wife dies, your kid dies, then it doesn't really count as a loss because it's ultimately not something you're not losing something that is ultimately important. And epistemically, what justifies this claim? What is important? What is not important. You would think, as an empiricist, which, at least reading Brennan, he's saying the Stoics, like the Epicureans, didn't buy Plato's solution of, well, we know the good ultimately because of the forms.

No, they seem to know it's because of our experiences. In other words, it's appealing to phenomenology. This whole, like, looking at nature is a matter of you're supposed to be able to open your eyes and see, oh, this is nature. This is what it's about. So it has to have some relation to what people actually find important themselves. But in the same way, this issue that I brought up with teleology, well, maybe some people find things important because they're just wrong, because they're corrupt. And in fact, that is the norm. Most people are in error about what the good is.

So to figure out what is truly important, we can't just ask them or ask them even to think deeply, though that's getting more in the right direction. It has to go in the direction, like you were saying, Massimo, of you're on your deathbed and you reflect back what is, what's not important. Well, let's talk to people on their deathbeds. Let's do a poll of what they find and then use their wisdom back to us. But it seems that ultimately these things come down to some sort of phenomenology. So what are the epistemic issues involved in arguing either against someone else's phenomenology?

You have heterophenomenology. So we are discussing, in the faith episode, people that just, I just see as a basic thing, this is Plantinga, the goodness of the flower is a product of God. I'm not actually putting forward a physical theory there. I'm just stating this is my narrative of explaining the world. It's a way of expressing really, ultimately a moral position. And so there we were, left in that discussion with, okay, I guess intelligent people can differ in these phenomenological calls. And I'm not in an epistemic position to say, you are venal.

You don't know it, but you are not wise. I have the proper story. But yet, of course, we do this. And so as an atheist, I do find, even though I can't have this strong epistemic ground to condemn the religious for their narrative, I still think it's crazy. And likewise, with this stoic stuff, if you want to say, you know, I know that losing my wife, my kid, that's not preferred, is normal, that that would make me want to cry. But what's really important is my own reaction to that. And these loss of these preferred things are not ultimately the loss of something that's important, that the deepest fundamental moral principle is something that you just can't read off of your immediate emotional reactions to things because those things are corrupt.

I see that take on Stoicism as crazy in the same way that you probably think that some religious points of view are crazy.

54:54 Massimo: But I also think it's not necessarily the best take on Stoicism. So the way Epictetus uses that metaphor of. Or the situation of, you know, sort of losing somebody, it says, it was never yours to begin with. You didn't lose it, you just gave it back. I think that is an interesting nuance there that needs to be emphasized, because a reasonable way of interpreting what Epictetus is saying there is not that losing somebody is not important. Of course it's important, although it's not in the same category as virtue. Right. So we talked earlier about a category mistake.

So there are two different ways of being important. If a preferred indifferent is in fact preferred, then in some sense of the word important is important to you, but it is in a different category than the pursuit of virtue and being a moral person. But putting it in terms of you didn't lose something because it was never yours to begin with. It's a way to put things in perspective. It's a way of saying, look, you enjoyed the company of that person while she was alive, and you were lucky enough to do that. And now that it's gone, the best thing you can do is simply to accept the thing with equanimity.

There's nothing you can do about it to reverse it. It is part of the cycle of the universe. Death is part of what happens. It's a condition to be alive. As Seneca says, at some point, one of the conditions to be alive is that eventually you're going to die. There is this sort of broader perspective, cosmic perspective. Things are never yours. When you talk about your children or your wife or your husband, they're not yours. They're just lent to you by the universe. And then the universe takes them back.

56:24 Mark: And I like that you're using this sort of theological language there, because you're completely, completely illustrating my point that this sounds very much like the Plantinga example that I just gave of. He wants to take us properly basic, these sorts of divine things that, of course, I would say my wife, my kids were not actually mine, but to then extend it and to say, oh, well, they actually belonged to the universe, and now I'm giving them back. That's a bit of artistic sophistry. That's a narrative. And that's exactly the kind of thing that our guest on the Religion episode was saying.

You can't argue with. I have my own narrative for making sense of this crazy universe, and you have yours. And it's just a matter of heterophenomenology. The fact your narrative doesn't make any sense to me and mine doesn't, you know, so we're always just appealing to each other. What Seneca is doing in these letters is he's appealing to his reader, which of course, they have, you know, a common belief system. But by extension, since apparently these were meant to be literary efforts and not merely personal letters as well, the language is quite formal and not.

There's some things that he's referring to in passing, as if we should know what Lucilius just wrote to Seneca. That would be nice if he had put that in these essays as well. So there's some evidence that they're not purely literary, that they are also personal. But in any case, he's trying to make the case to a wider audience, a persuasive case, that you should accept this narrative, that it jibes with your intuitions, that you have already.

57:36 Wes: There are no theoretical justifications in these letters, which is why we're not discussing these. You want to discuss these theoretical justifications, but that's not the text we have in front of us.

57:47 Mark: So we had just gotten up to section three here on the Happy life, which starts off. What is the happy life? It is peace of mind and lasting tranquility, which should be obvious from many things we've said here. But this seems a good time to jump to the letter 116 on self control, the stoic view of emotions, because that's where it addresses pretty directly some of the issues that we've been talking about here, and the loss of a loved one in particular. Wes, do you want to start us on that?

58:12 Wes: It begins with this idea of whether we should have moderate emotions or no emotions. And the answer is going to be that any emotion is sort of this slippery slope. So the way he puts it, a middling level of sickness can't be useful. That's at the very beginning of the letter.

58:27 Massimo: I myself don't see how it can be healthy or useful to have even a moderate amount of an illness.

58:32 Dylan: It's interesting because wouldn't we also characterize our own living as being partly dead?

58:37 Massimo: Yes.

58:38 Mark: So I Found it difficult to read this passage without keeping in. As you were saying, Massimo, that, oh, what they mean by emotions is just the bad ones. It sounds like he's talking about all emotions here. Are you thinking that Seneca is using that term as you thought he was?

58:51 Massimo: I think so, because otherwise it wouldn't make any sense. Because in other letters he talks about friendship, he talks about positive stuff, and he clearly isn't saying that those are things that one shouldn't have or do. Anytime you see something like this, like this passage, imagine you're talking about, let's say, take the typical emotion that Stoics have a problem with in particular, Seneca, anger. So he's saying that anger, for instance, or emotions like anger, they do come in degree. And Aristotle would say, you know, some degree of anger, you know, sort of righteous anger, for instance, is actually a good thing.

Proper anger is a good thing. And Seneca, on the other hand, says, no, it's inherently destructive. It's madness. It's a temporary madness. And so it's not good in any measure whatsoever. Which doesn't mean that you shouldn't be doing something, you know, reacting to certain things. If you see an injustice, for instance, you should have your sense of justice, your virtue of justice should be exercised, and you should do something about it, but you shouldn't be angry about it.

59:46 Wes: Yeah. And in fact, in this passage, he alludes to this distinction between good and bad emotions. So he says, don't be afraid. I'm not snatching you from any of the emotions that you don't wish denied to you. And then later on, he says, for when I bid you to desire things, I shall permit you to wish for them. So that's a classic Stoic distinction between an emotion per se and then the replacement that the Stoic sage will have, which is volition, which is here translated as wishing. So there's a healthy version of desire, in other words.

1:00:12 Massimo: Correct. In fact, even before the end of section 1 of letter 116, he says, after I have banned desire, I will allow for wanting so that you will do the same things without anxiety and with firmer resolve. That I think actually really does get at the distinction there. So you do want things, but you don't desire them in the destructive sense. It's not like, if I don't get that thing, I'm going to be miserable. No, it's okay to desire things, but with equanimity, without anxiety, as he said, with firm resolve.

1:00:41 Dylan: But the rest of his sentence makes me think a lot of Pascal, like he's trying to win us over with the bargain. Because the end of that sentence is so that you will have the same things without anxiety and with firmer resolve, and will experience even your pleasures with greater intensity.

1:00:58 Mark: Right.

1:00:59 Dylan: He's saying, well, even the things that you really want, you don't want to give up your pleasures. I'm trying to convince you to be a stoic. And the reason you don't want to be a stoic is you feel like stoics have no fun. There's no good times if you're a stoic, I don't want to give up my good times. And he's saying, if you follow the stoic way, you will in fact have your pleasures even with more intensity, and

1:01:18 Mark: you'll get to them more rationally. You won't be distracted by other things that would keep you from your purpose.

1:01:25 Massimo: Correct.

1:01:25 Wes: Where is he saying pleasures more intensely?

1:01:28 Dylan: In my translation, which is the same one as Massimo's, it's in the second to last sentence of the first paragraph.

1:01:35 Massimo: You experience even your pleasures with greater intensity.

1:01:39 Dylan: The second to last sentence is, after I have banned desire, I will allow for wanting. So you will do the same things without anxiety, with firm resolve, and will experience even your pleasures with greater intensity. So that's all positive stuff.

1:01:50 Mark: So our translation, Wes, this is the end of paragraph one. I shall permit you to wish for them so you can act in the same way without fearing and with a more reliable intention, so that you can even be more aware of those pleasures. Surely they will reach you more effectively if you command over them than if you are their slave.

1:02:06 Wes: Yeah. It's not about heightening pleasure, though.

1:02:09 Massimo: No. Well, it's not. Well, that depends on, again, on the different translations, which is, I think, actually good that we're comparing a couple of ones, because so much hinges on exactly what he said and what he meant. But I think the general sense is pretty clear. If you arrive at things with reason and equanimity, you actually will get a deeper enjoyment from it than if you arrive from craving, from sort of being the slave of passions, as you would say, as opposed to their master.

1:02:33 Wes: So this whole section, it starts out with his interlocutor saying, it's natural for me to suffer from loss of my friend. And then he's giving warnings and then saying, he could do this moderately. And then Seneca's argument is that, well, every emotion starts out weak at first, or, you know, so even if you have a moderate emotion, it'll gain strength, there'll be a certain kind of snowball effect. So he argues against that. And then the same thing with falling in love. So I took 116 as sort of a pretty direct argument against investing in the kinds of things that we usually think of as pleasures.

And when he talks about volition, a volition has to be for a good thing, which can only be with respect to our virtue. So even though there can be these healthy emotions, these you pathi or whatever they're called, they have to be directed towards being virtuous. And there is a little complex layer here in that virtue can involve the diselection or selection of the unpreferred or the preferred. Because there can be virtue in that act. Actually, Seneca says this in one of the letters. I think the good is not in the thing that you've preferred. The good is in the act and acting naturally towards it.

Yeah, correct.

1:03:41 Massimo: But let me read you in my version, part of section five, the bit about love, it says, as regards the wise man, he said, we shall see. But as for you and me, who are a long way from achieving wisdom, we had better refrain so as to avoid a condition that is frantic, out of control, enslaved to another and lacking in self worth. Now, when I read that, to me, it wasn't describing love as a good emotion. It was describing lust, which is a whole different thing. It was describing this being mad and doing crazy things. Which of course, as a stoic, it cannot condone.

I don't recognize that as the mature love that I was talking about earlier. When you love a person in a mature way that has been developing over months and years and so on and so forth, that's not what you do. You're not frantic, you're not out of control, you're not enslaved to the other. In fact, even modern psychologists would say that being enslaved to the other, it's not a good thing, it's not a healthy thing, right?

1:04:36 Wes: So you look in their eyes and you say, I prefer you. That would be a less anxiety producing way to say things in.

1:04:49 Dylan: I think it's actually a product, right? The stoic cards. The stoic Valentine's Day cards.

1:04:53 Mark: You have to say, yeah, I love you, but if you died, I'd be okay. Put that in your valentine, just so you know.

1:05:00 Wes: But he does just use this in my translation, this phrase, keeping aloof. So let us keep aloof, staying aware of our weakness. You know, I think it's still open. Massimo, your suggestion is a very interesting one. That there is a stoic version of love, which I think would still be different than what we typically think of as love. But maybe it is just what we would call mature love. Because what he rebels against is this idea that, well, it's all well and good when that person is kind to you, but when they. If the beloved despises you, then you're inflamed by pride. And it seems to me if there is a stoic version of love, it's hard to reconcile what we think of as romantic love with that.

1:05:34 Massimo: Yeah, I think that's a fair point.

1:05:36 Mark: It's like filial piety, but with your spouse. That's the stoic kind of love.

1:05:40 Massimo: That's right. Just respect.

1:05:42 Dylan: You wouldn't be swept off your feet or run into a jealous rage if you're a stoic in love.

1:05:47 Massimo: Correct. And I don't know you guys, but I've. I'm pretty sure I'm the older in the group and I better be careful. Yeah, I certainly have had. And now in a much better relationship because it is in fact that kind of calm love rather than being swept and being a slave. But you know, that may be my personal preference.

1:06:05 Mark: It is interesting that all the immature kinds of love get lumped together. That I think that a purely lust based one and something that is swept away in this sort of romantic ideal are actually quite different. I mean, you can make an argument that one is just a sublimated version of the other in the classic romance of knightly courtship or something that carnal desire doesn't explicitly come into it. But you know what's going on, you know why this person is freaking out quite that much. But certainly in the experience of it. I just find it interesting culturally that in this kind of setting they're always of course just lumped together. Even though presumably this guy didn't read Freud.

1:06:38 Massimo: That's right. That's right. Modern psychology does make this distinction fairly clear. In fact, you can actually study the hormonal profiles that characterize the last, the romantic phase and the more quiet mature phase. And they're very different. So biologically we react differently in those cases. And it is the case that we value the long lasting love, the third kind. And we think that the romantic stuff actually goes well only if it does in fact eventually translate or mature into the long lasting, more quiet emotion. If it just stays romantic and your people commit suicide or something, or they do crazy things because of that. We don't really value that much as a society.

1:07:18 Dylan: Right.

1:07:18 Wes: Or the romantic part goes away and they find out they have nothing in common. Which is a very typical.

1:07:24 Massimo: Yeah, reason comes Back, and then you say, oh, crap.

1:07:27 Dylan: But the Stoics would have nothing good to say about Romeo and Juliet, right?

1:07:31 Mark: No, but they would probably like computer programs to supplement our matchmaking and stuff like that. Objective. Find a partner that objectively matches your needs, not that you actually like, unless

1:07:43 Wes: you're using the computer program to objectively match your romantic needs as opposed to your mature love needs.

1:07:49 Massimo: I think that's getting pretty far from Seneca.

1:07:53 Wes: Maybe this is a segue back into 92, where there's this broader idea that. Well, I like this idea that pleasure is the good of cattle. So the key to happiness is not pleasure, but virtue and reason and things like that. So I think we are about to

1:08:09 Mark: get into section three, Peace of mind and tranquility. How does a man reach the condition of peace and tranquility? By gaining a complete view of truth by maintaining in all that he does order, measure, fitness, and a will that is inoffensive and kindly, that is intent upon reason and never departs therefrom, that commands at the same time love and admiration.

1:08:28 Wes: So that's sort of hinting at this idea that knowing what is truly good and what is not truly good is the key. So knowing that these external circumstances are not truly good or bad, but only virtues.

1:08:38 Mark: I just found in the combination of this and one of the earlier letters where he admonishes people that use words that are too big, that make things more complicated than they are, and really says straight up, pretty much that what you need for virtue is simple. That really the challenge, which is why, again, we have epistle after epistle after epistle, is keeping it in mind is meditating upon it, is doing what you actually know to be true. So it seems like it's not a very difficult task here to keep a complete view of truth like that. Truth itself is something that is not esoteric.

And you need to go up on a mountain or become as wise as Plato to gain it. But it is something that the Stoics already know. This. It was figured out by Zeno, or at least Chrysippus. And it's a matter of getting a complete view of it, keeping it in mind, and maintaining it through all your actions. Which seems very fatuous to me.

1:09:24 Wes: Well, he. Yeah, he uses in my translation this phrase, clinging to judgment. So that's the hard part, because the formula is rather clear, right? It's this very hard and fast distinction between your own character and your own comportment to the world, which is the domain of the good and of virtue and of vice. And then everything else. So to know what is true, to have a complete view of truth, is to just know all that external stuff is not actually good or bad, but to actually know it. It's one thing to believe that, but actually to know it involves this resolute clinging. And to live that way is the hard part.

1:09:55 Massimo: You guys mind if we go actually, now that you mentioned it, to 49, which is on the shortness of life, or in the more recent translation it's called Remembering Old Times, but It's letter number 49, that bit I think, that you mentioned about the logicians wasting time. I think it's interesting. So it's right at the end of section five, into six and then seven, these logicians think they are accomplishing something. I am not saying one should not give such things a look, but it should be only a look, a grinning from the doorway, just enough to make sure we're not taken in by them thinking that there is something deep and arcane value in what they do.

And then skip a little bit and go to the beginning of seven, I have no time to spare for chasing down ambiguous terms and exercising my ingenuity on them. And then in 2H8 of 8, while enemy spears come flying within the gates and the ground beneath our feet quakes with tunneling and sapping, I should sit there idly posing little conundrums like this. What you have not lost, you have, but you have not lost horns, therefore you have horns. That or some other intellectual lunacy along the same lines. I find this interesting because this is a sharp reminder of the fact that the Stoics were interested in practical philosophy, but they were not anti intellectual.

I mean, as we know, they made major contributions to logic. They basically invented predicate logic. And they came up with an entirely different type of syllogistics compared to Aristotle's. They wrote about what today called natural science or natural philosophy. In fact, Seneca himself wrote essays on comets and things like that. So it's not like they were anti intellectual. They studied epistemology, they studied philosophy of language, they studied natural history and metaphysics, but it was all toward the goal of figuring out how to live your best life.

And I think these bits that I just read from Seneca are clearly reminding of that. There's something very similar in Epictetus, actually, where he says, you can spend a lot of time after playing the games of the logicians, but in the end what matters is how you're living your life the way you should be living it.

1:11:51 Wes: Yeah.

1:11:51 Mark: 12. For as the tragic Poet says the speech of truth is simple, so it should not be complicated. For nothing is less appropriate than that tricky cleverness for minds that are attempting great tasks. It's easy to take these kinds of comments about philosophy, and we saw him in Epictetus too, that he emphasized the practical, to take them personally. I kind of think that if we had in mind clearly who he was reacting to, we would probably think that those people were spinning bullshit too, and not that he's not actually talking about philosophy, the kind that we would like. So it could just be a personal grudge here.

1:12:24 Massimo: It was mostly reacted to sophists. Sophists loomed very large still in Rome. And of course, you have to remember a major inspiration for the Stoic philosophy in general is the Euthydemus by Plato. And that's the dialogue where Socrates actually has a conversation with the two Sophists. And it is there that Socrates makes the argument that virtue is its own good. It's the supreme good, it's the chief good, because it's the only thing that it's good by itself. Everything else has limited value, but virtue is the thing that actually it's always good. Right. And the Stoics were very, very much Socratic from that perspective. And therefore they were also anti sophists.

1:12:58 Mark: An element here in this essay that seems new as compared to Epictetus is this idea that life is war. That's why we should not waste ourselves listening to the dialecticians, is because life is a war.

1:13:12 Wes: Yeah, very. End of 96. Life is a battle.

1:13:15 Massimo: Life, Lucilius, is a campaign. That is why those who endure the trials march uphill and down to rough country and put themselves into the most dangerous sorties. Are the heroes and leaders of the camp, the ones who are quietly running away at ease, while others do the hard work are turtledoves. They are only safe because they're despised. It's pretty flowery language, true. In Latin. It sounds even better, actually.

1:13:40 Mark: Oh, yeah, No, I love this from a poetic. From a rhetorical standpoint, I thought this was a great reading. He definitely could have been giving these as sermons or orations. So he's trying to say you shouldn't complain about things. This. This whole. On facing hardships, really, the evil is not that you're suffering the hardship, but it is that you chafing complain that is the problem. And this. This should sound very familiar by now. And says again, things that are similar to Epictetus in there, that all these hardships, they're not there just by accident.

They're by design, they're part of the tax on life. Just so. You should pay your taxes without complaining. You should pay the taxes on life. All your loved ones will die. Things are not going to work out. There's going to be a lot of dis. Preferred things that are going to turn up. If you want long life and immunity from ills, why, that's a womanish cry. Come on. And he gets this very. That's when he just goes into this. Marshall, the thing that Massimo just quoted at the end that people who live in. Come on. Would you rather live in a life in a cafe or in a camp?

So what is it? What is it?

1:14:34 Wes: So it is really about, you know, it's sort of analogous to the Nozick thought experiment that Massimo mentioned. It really is about what's implicit in your attachment to life. What does life mean? Does life just mean one long sort of hedonistic trip? Or is my attachment to life actually. Does it actually include an attachment to struggle, which is, I think we think, necessary to meaningfulness and necessary to evaluating our lives as a good thing. So those two things start to pry apart at that point. So it's not just we got to pay our dues if we want to have pleasure. It's that there's actually something preferable about the struggle.

1:15:13 Mark: Well, and this. But struggle that doesn't feel like a struggle. I'm having a hard time putting together this. Life is a battle with this stoic orientation. Overall, what is the battle with? It could either be a battle with life's misfortunes. So it could be like the first noble truth in Buddhism. Life is suffering, life is a battle in death sense. Or it could be like, was it the second or third noble truth? In other words, the battle is with yourself, which seems to be more in line with overall what all the Stoics are saying throughout. Which in that case it just again seems like kind of a weird self reinforcing circle that you should eschew pleasure and the easy life because life is a battle to resist pleasures in the easy life.

1:15:52 Wes: I think not in that sense, just in the sense that there are misfortunes, there are bad things that happen and things go wrong and you have to.

1:16:00 Dylan: You shouldn't resist them because they're painful.

1:16:03 Wes: Well, the thing is, winning the battle means some degree of aloofness from that. Right? So not seeing them as inherently good or bad and so not being as distressed by them. And here I think we get to this distinction between the stoic sage and everyone else. The stoic sage is almost an ideal, right. Who's really going to reach the point where they have complete equanimity? I mean, I know the Stoics thought it was possible, but it's also very, very difficult. So for the average person, even if you're improving, even if you have embodied a significant amount of Stoic practice into your life, there's still the usual sort of struggle. It's not, oh, I haven't made. And now I have complete equanimity in the face of misfortune.

1:16:44 Massimo: I think it helps if you go. I mean, somebody mentioned it very briefly. The passage before, it's still on 96. But the passage before, before the one about the bottle and stuff, section three. I think it's very indicative of what Seneca may have meant there. He says, you were troubled by pain in your bladder. You received worrying letters, your losses continued. Let me get to the point. You feared for your life. Well, didn't you know that in praying for old age, you were praying for these things? A long life contains them all, just as a long journey contains dust, mud and rain.

Again, I find this is very sort of pragmatic and realistic attitude toward life. It's like, okay, you want to live a long life, Great. It's like going on a long journey. Not everything is going to be pleasurable. Not everything is going to go your way. In fact, lots of things can go wrong. The longer the journey, the more things are likely to go wrong. And just, you know, if this is what you want and you have certain benefits from living a long life, you have exercise your virtues for a long time, but you also have these things that just come with it.

That's just the way the world is. This is just the way human nature is. And so you should accept them and not complain about it.

1:17:49 Mark: You want to live to be 100, you better start saving for your medical bills.

1:17:53 Massimo: Yep, that's right.

1:17:55 Dylan: Part of what's a little bit weird is that the rest of that paragraph, it's a kind of, you wanted a long life. Don't be such a pussy and don't be bitching so much and puffing up man. You know, be a man. And the part of that is, besides the tone, is the notion that. But he seems to be appealing to the virtue of manliness and the virtue of steadfastness. Not from the sense of being oriented properly towards the good as a good stoic, but from being a badass. The virtue of being a badass. That's what he seems to be appealing to.

1:18:28 Mark: This kind of value that he should have overcome himself already. That is the kind of thing the Stoic thinks is beneath him.

1:18:33 Massimo: Okay, I kind of like the idea of a Stoic as a badass, but

1:18:38 Wes: I think this whole. This is the womanish cry part of the argument, which I think is not exactly an essential part of it, because he starts out with this idea, okay, yeah, here's what life is. It includes also dust and mud. And then the interlocutor has an obvious response. Well, I want a life that's long, but also immune from all ills. And then there's the womanish cry remark. But then there's this remark, may gods and goddesses alike forbid that fortune keep you in luxury. So what's the idea here? And then the final sort of coup de gras, the cafe life in a cafe versus life in a camp.

There's that badass element. But I think again, the idea is that there really is something preferable about what we would think of as the bad things that happen. Think about the implications of struggle. Perhaps those are the things against which we exercise virtue. I mean, maybe virtue becomes less relevant if there's no struggle or something like that. So there's something about inherent value in the. The struggle itself.

1:19:34 Massimo: But don't we have something like that also? Of course, not of Stoic origin. But it's a modern society, right? I mean, look at every movie you go to see. And what is the movie about? It's about its struggle. And then it ends with, you know, and they live happily ever after. And you never see actually that living happily ever after. Why? Because it's boring. There's nothing going on there. Right. So what you like today, even today, we go to see a movie or we read a book, either drawn from real life examples or not, or entirely fictional. What we value is the struggle is the overcoming of obstacles.

That's what we think makes really a person, the test, the character of the person. That's, I think, where Seneca and in general, the Romans. We also need to be wary of not making the sort of the presentist mistake of sort of projecting too much of our own values and situations into different culture to these 2,000 years ago. That part, however, remains valid today. We do think that people's worth is tested in battle, so to speak. Not literally in battle necessarily, but in adversity. Because otherwise. And that's why, for instance, he says in my translation in that part that we're reading now, may neither gods nor goddesses keep you in the lap of luxury.

Why not? Why would I want not to be in the lapse of luxury. Well, because my character isn't going to be tested there. I have to think my life is going to be easy. And so I will never know if I actually am a good person or not, because everything comes easy to me.

1:20:54 Mark: So we maybe leave to the side the question of whether any of the preferred things are of ultimate importance. Because it seems we've already said on the Stoic picture, no, no, it's just virtue is of ultimate importance, but life is a battle is not just. It wasn't an accident that I gave the two options as being recognition of the first Buddhist noble truth, life is suffering, and recognition of the third truth, that suffering can be addressed, that these things, of course, are supposed to hook together. So life being a battle, well, it is a battle for the stuff that we're trying to accomplish, whatever it may be.

It's gotta be something that is honorable. But certainly, Seneca had no problem with you as a Stoic. You didn't have to be a monk. You could take up a public life. You could try to make the world a better place. This was an issue that was raised in our last. In our Epictetus discussion. It seemed there was no room for Stoic revolutionaries. It seems like, though Seneca does say things like, come on, don't dress funny, you don't. Don't buck the trends. Partially for the same reasons Epictetus had, that we don't want to make Stoics look like freaks and we want to spread the Stoic word, but also because it seems that there are legitimate political purposes that you could have and you could work very hard toward them, not because the thing that you're working toward is ultimately of value, but because you're working toward it exemplifies your great character, which that itself is of value.

So the same thing, you know, the way value gets treated throughout. Which reading was it, Wes, that you were referring to? I know we pulled it out of the secondary source that we read, but I forget which one that we read that says, yeah, these things we're working toward are not valuable in themselves, but it's the fact that we are doing it that has the value.

1:22:30 Wes: It's section 11 of 92. This is good, because I think there's a lot more to discuss in 92, so it's good that we get back to that. What then comes the retort. If good health, rest, and freedom from pain are not likely to hinder virtue, shall you not seek all these? Of course I shall seek them, but not because they are goods. I shall seek them because they are according to nature and because they will be acquired through the exercise of good judgment on the my part. So good judgment there being critical because it's about the virtue involved in good judgment.

What then will be good in them? This alone, that it is a good thing to choose them for. When I don suitable attire or walk as I should, or dine as I ought to dine, it is not my dinner or my walk or my dress that are good, but the deliberate choice which I show in regard to them as I observe and each thing I do a mean that conforms to reason.

1:23:17 Massimo: Yeah, that actually is perfectly in line with the standard Stoic teaching, that is the things are not good in and of themselves. It's your judgment about things, if it's good or not, that makes them good

1:23:27 Mark: or not, which I don't know that it helps. So verse 12 here. Let me also add that the choice of neat clothing is a fitting object of a man's efforts, for man is by nature a neat and well groomed animal.

1:23:40 Wes: Okay, yes. This actually, you know, this points to a real problem which is that we have these two levels of evaluation. One is the good and the bad, which applies to virtue and to ourselves. But then the preferable and the not preferable. Where does that plane of valuation come from? And how is it really justified to say it's natural? Because it happens very often. Mark, I think you were kind of alluding to this earlier, but this for me is one of the real problems. Once you're not judging things in terms of happiness or some other end, it's easy to see the idea of, okay, I am making a deliberate choice according to reason and that relates it back to virtue. But why is neatness according to reason as opposed to sloppiness? That's really unclear in my translation.

1:24:24 Dylan: That phrase that began section 12, what was it in yours, Mark?

1:24:27 Mark: It said, let me also add that the choice of neat clothing.

1:24:30 Dylan: Yeah, so when I read mine says, let me elaborate. Selecting clean clothing is something a person ought to do because a human is by nature a clean and seemly animal. Accordingly, while clean clothing is not in itself a good, the act of selecting it is because goodness is present not in the thing, but in the quality of the selection. It is the doing that is honorable, not the actual thing we do. You were saying, Wes, that there seemed to be a question of why it is that this particular thing is. There's a virtuous act in it. And when I had read it originally, I had picked out the part about it Just being in the selection itself, that activity of selection.

And I thought that the problem there would be the question of how you do that selecting well, like, so you want to select it according to quality and according to nature. And that seemed to be where the challenge would be. You've sort of put it in the activity of selecting. Not that you have good clothes, so you push off to the side that you have fancy clothes. It's just the fact that you selected well is what becomes the virtue.

1:25:28 Wes: Yeah. So I think the strong part of this is once you've established that being clean or being neat is reasonable, then I think you have a really strong argument for saying the reasonable selection itself is virtuous. So that's why I do these things. But saying why that particular thing is reasonable is the hard part. Because I can no longer use health or. Well, can I use health? Maybe I can use health, but I can no longer. Yeah, I could use health, but I can no longer use my happiness as the ultimate standard for why I'm clean. Right. So I no longer get the typical tricks of justification here. So what makes this reasonable as opposed to not reasonable? That, I think, is the hard part.

1:26:06 Massimo: That's an excellent point, but I think there are a couple of ways to go about it. One is that one of the four Stoic virtues was practical wisdom. And practical wisdom is the idea that if you're practically wise, you always know how to behave, no matter what the circumstances are. Right. So selecting the right clothing for the right occasion, so to speak, can be an exercise in practical wisdom. Because depending on where you are, depending what the situation is and so on and so forth, there are certain things that are going to be appropriate and other things that are not going to be appropriate.

1:26:34 Mark: And this is a categorical, not a hypothetical imperative here. It's just strain. Appropriate. It's not appropriate given your desires. Is that right?

1:26:41 Massimo: No, I would say that everything that Stoics do is. It's always conditional. That is, if you want to act virtuously. Right. If you want to do certain things, then certain choices become rational and others become not rational. In that I'm actually using Lawrence Becker's A New Stoicism, where he tries to update and sort of interpret pretty much all of the Stoic ethics in terms of sort of conditional imperatives, not in terms of absolute imperatives. Right. But now the other way of going about it maybe is going back to Aristotle. So Aristotle famously said, at some point, I think it's in the Nicomachean ethics that what goes in Athens doesn't go in Sparta and vice versa, meaning that the Greeks and the Romans were very keenly aware of the fact that things like customs change with location, change with the situation.

And so again, to do the right thing in terms of things like selecting your clothing or to do the virtuous thing depends on the situation in which you find yourself. And so there is a right selection. But that right selection doesn't go as deep as human nature itself. It just goes into, okay, well you find yourself in this situation. So what is the good selection, the best way to go about this particular situation?

1:27:46 Wes: But what are the standards of that? So it certainly can't be pleasure, because implicit in pleasure is that this thing, you know, dressing neat or being clean is good. That's right out the window.

1:27:54 Mark: So it's a custom, just that, cleanliness.

1:27:57 Wes: But why not act against custom? Why not say, okay, I'm going to show up to this party dressed really sloppily, which actually some people might see as being uber fashionable. But anyway, I'm going to dress really sloppily. And that's what seems reasonable to me. How do I make the argument to someone, well actually no, it's, you know, dressing neatly or cleanly is what's reasonable in this case. By what standard do I make that argument?

1:28:18 Massimo: Because what is your goal in going to the party? Right? I mean, remember for the Stoics the important part was in terms of sort of following human nature was this idea that human nature is the nature of a social animal. So you don't want to go. Presumably it's not reasonable to go to a party with the intention of disrupting it or the intention of, of causing embarrassment to your host or something like that. That would be the non social thing to do. And therefore it's not reasonable to do

1:28:40 Mark: it right, unless it was to show them a more virtuous path. Because you, like Socrates, want to show that wealth is not important and so that care to grooming is trivial. And I'm deep and I want you to be deep too. And so that's why I go to the party.

1:28:55 Wes: Yeah, but it's not. Keep in mind though that proselytizing about virtue is not automatically virtue.

1:29:00 Mark: For The Stoic, writing 120 letters about virtue is right.

1:29:06 Massimo: But not only that, actually I think that your point is interesting because it does bring up this idea that Stoicism was not a monolithic doctrine. So for instance, you see Cato the Younger, who apparently did on purpose, even though he was of senatorial rank, he actually did often Go out in. Not in ranks, quite. But certainly underdressed for a senator. And he was going in the field and walking instead of being on the horse. And he was doing that to make a point. To make the point that dressing, you know, fancy in a fancy way is not important, that having the luxury of going in, marching on a horse is not important.

So Seneca probably had a different take on things than Cato, and Cato had a different take as Epictetus. So we should be wary of sort of trying to fit every, you know, all of stoicism into one mold because clearly that they disagreed among themselves, as it's reasonable to disagree with in a philosophical framework.

1:29:57 Mark: Well, and I think that you bringing up these differences and the fact that these are hypothetical imperatives is the key to making this relevant. I mean, it's fun for me to go through and pick out goofy things in the text. And that's kind of what we did with Arictidus. But the way we started this discussion is how could you interpret it charitably or update it for the current day? And if we say that what stoicism is trying to tell you is to deal with the challenges that you face, and even though Seneca might sound very fatuous in saying, oh, well, just, you know, the truth, pretty much what should do is just laid out in front of you, just pay attention.

And no, we think that there's more tussling that goes into figuring out actually what you should do in all the circumstances and really what goals, what very high level goals you should pursue, and therefore how you should then align a lot of different preferences. It's not just as simple as thinking, how can I be virtuous today? But once you've figured out being as deep and reflective and sensitive to the ethical implications of what you might do in the environment that you're in, once you come up with a life plan, then on a daily basis I could see how the sort of practice, Massimo, that you've been were describing of.

I don't want to get distracted by getting jealous of somebody. I don't want to get irritated by people in traffic. There's just so many things that could just.

1:31:11 Wes: Yes, well, which is my.

1:31:15 Mark: You don't want to get sucked into other people's conflicts. Right. That you want to really keep perspective. And it just seems, seems whatever the details of what your life plan turns out to be, that the stoic tools of approaching your psyche in this way and that, yeah, I could exert quite a bit more control than I do over making sure that what I decide in the morning that I want to get done actually gets done, and that it gets done in a way that doesn't step on toes, in a way that I don't intend to, et cetera, et cetera.

1:31:43 Massimo: Yeah, I wonder if you guys mind going to letter 62, which is really brief, but I think it makes an interesting point. That's the one that it's entitled, depending on your translation, on Good Company or Living the Inner Life. So it starts out as saying, you know, they're lying, those people who want it to look as if the pressures of their jobs prevent them from engaging in liberal studies. It is all pretense, for they themselves keep adding to their activities. If they're busy, it is their own fault. And then in continuous, a couple lines later, I do not give myself over to activities.

I only lend myself, and I don't go looking for reasons to waste my time. And then in section two, second sentence is, and I don't linger with the people I am thrown in with merely by circumstance or by some reason arising from public service. Instead, I choose the very best company, and it is to them that I entrust my mind in whatever place, in whatever age they have lived. I find this very helpful in my own framework for making decisions. One of the things that people that know me will tell you is I'm pretty efficient about doing things. You know, I get a lot of things done.

And one of the ways I do that is because I follow precisely what Seneca is saying here. I don't give myself to activities just for the idea of being busy. I choose very carefully what I spend my time doing and why I do it. And the same goes, and this has been more clear to me more recently, the same goes for the company that I keep. You know, I've always had this idea that, you know, good friends. And this is a Aristotelian idea, really, that friendship is important, and so you want to spend your time with what Aristotle would call friends of virtue.

But since I've started reading and practicing Stoicism, this idea is becoming even more prominent. I've actually literally been examining my acquaintances and my friends and saying, okay, so what do we spend time doing and talking about? And who are these people? And which one of these are really good for me to hang around and which one are not? It sort of really makes you think about the urgency of, you know, you only have a finite amount of time on Earth, and why the hell are you wasting it with people that are not worth it or doing things that are not worth it.

1:33:45 Wes: Well, in light of that, we are. We're flattered that you preferred to do this podcast as opposed to didn't prefer to do it.

1:33:53 Massimo: Yes, that was a backhanded compliment, my friend.

1:33:55 Mark: You know, I read this wrongly initially, that when he gets to number three, he says, demeterius, for instance, the best of men, I take about with me and talks about. I thought he was talking about, because he says, I spend my time in the best company. No matter in what lands they may have lived or in what age, I let my thoughts fly to them. So what I thought he was talking about is not Demeterius being an actual real acquaintance of him, but this being an author.

1:34:16 Wes: Demetrius. Right.

1:34:17 Mark: That he would carry around the text that. In other words, a lot of these people that want to deal with me on a daily basis are kind of a waste of my time. I'd rather spend time with Seneca. I'd rather read a book from a thousand years ago. So it kind of resonated with me, even though taken to an extreme, that would be a little silly. But what else could he mean by this? My time in the best of all men, no matter where they may have lived and what age, I let my thoughts.

1:34:40 Wes: Yeah, no, I think being alone is actually a crucial part of this, because if you fear being alone to a great degree, you're driven into the arms of whoever's around.

1:34:47 Massimo: I read it the same way. That is, if I do not have a friend that is worth spending my time right now, then I'd rather go to a book and read a classic and have a dialogue with this author. And actually, again, this is the way I've always thought about engaging with good literature and good philosophy. I do think of it as a conversation with really interesting people, and I'm much ready to spend my time, you know, significant portion of my time doing that than, you know, watching the Kardashians or something,

1:35:15 Wes: or football, which is what I'm about to do.

1:35:18 Massimo: Yeah, well, I do watch some soccer. So it's like.

1:35:22 Mark: Do people have notes on any of the other essays that like, oh, man, I. I need to read this quote because this is so awesome.

1:35:28 Massimo: Okay, since you're asking, I do have one.

1:35:30 Mark: Sure.

1:35:30 Massimo: It's on the first letter that we were supposed to read the number four on the terrors of death and coming to terms with death, because that's a topic that. It's actually particularly interesting to me. This is one of the topics that actually has brought me to stoicism to begin with. I found this image interesting it says, this is number two of letter four. Surely you remember what joy you felt when you set aside your boy's clothes and put on a man's toga for your first trip down to the Forum. A greater joy awaits you once you set aside your childish mind, once philosophy registers you as a grown man.

This resonated with me personally for a number of reasons. First of all, I grew up in Rome. I know what it is like to walk down the Forum. Now, of course, it's not the same, you know, it's not the Forum as it was 2000 years ago, but I literally walked inside the Forum. I wasn't wearing a toga. I was probably wearing T shirts and jeans, but nonetheless, I know what he's talking about. I know exactly the environment that he's talking about. I know what it kind of. What it looks like. And this was a major thing to do for romance, right? So to shed the boy's clothes and put on the man's toga.

This was an important rite of passage for Roman youth. And it marked the passage to maturity, and so on and so forth. And then the second bit, the one that says, you know, imagine that what awaits you now is. It's a similar experience where you let go of your childish mind and you approach philosophy. This is exactly the feeling that I had the first time that I did encounter philosophy. I studied philosophy for the first time in high school, because in Italy, you have to study three years of philosophy in high school. And I was lucky enough that my teacher was very enthusiastic, very, very brilliant, you know, that she really made the topic come alive.

And that was the feelings like, wow, all of a sudden, my mind was sort of expanding very rapidly beyond anything that I had conceived before. And that's because I was all of a sudden in dialogue with all these dead white people who had written all these interesting things so long ago. So this particular passage, know, letter four, section two, really resonated with me personally.

1:37:24 Wes: That's interesting. So I do have something in my notes here about 4. It's not related to what you just said, but I think it's worth mentioning. So this idea near part six, that no good thing helps its possessor unless his mind is ready to lose it. And here I would. I would say, to be technically strict, he must mean no thing that seems good helps its possessor unless his mind is ready to lose it. And then in 12, we get this idea that, in a way, being conscious of death helps free us from the necessities of life. In other words, we can be by accepting death.

It's not that we're just less afraid of death, but we are less driven by the necessities of life in general. So in this case, this idea of being preemptively ready to lose things. So it's not in a way just abandoning these things that, you know, these preferables, in a way our experience of them is enhanced at least, you know, according to my reading of this passage, we can enjoy, in the lowercase sense of enjoyment, things in life in a deeper way, if we're ready to lose

1:38:23 Mark: them, we can have joy as opposed to pleasure. Yeah, that was a whole other essay. Yep.

1:38:27 Wes: Well, except that joy would have to be virtue directed. But anyway, it's always entangled.

1:38:32 Massimo: And there are some modern philosophers who made the same point. Right. So there's this famous essay on the Makropulos Case, I think it's called, which is sort of based on a fictional story where this woman has basically this drink from the fountain of youth. And so she keeps living for a long time, but in the end she decides consciously not to drink anymore from the fountain. She wants to die. Because things become less and less meaningful precisely because they sort of blurred one into the other. They all become the same thing because it's always the same sort of set of experiences over and over and over. There's nothing special happening. There's nothing that has meaning anymore. And so she decides death. So this is the idea that it is death. It is the impending death that makes things urgent and meaningful. Otherwise it would just be one long blur.

1:39:18 Mark: Well, being unto death. I mean, it's interesting what a different. If you just compare the sees the day, right? You might be dead tomorrow. That's the romantic ideal. But yet what it would command you to do is exactly opposite to what the Stoic would command you to do, seemingly.

1:39:33 Massimo: That's right.

1:39:33 Mark: And we get that in this really on both on old age and on the shortness of life essays that we read. One weird thing in this on old age, one that jumped out at me was he quotes Heraclitus. He's arguing why it's okay if you're gonna die tomorrow or you should live like it's okay like you're gonna die tomorrow. And he quotes Heraclitus. One day is like every day. One day is equal to the others by resemblance. Or maybe this is not a quote of him, it's a discussion of him, since even the longest lapse of time contains nothing that you would not find in one day.

So he seems to say that what is really important. I mean, this. This of course, lines up with everything else we've said here. If what's really important is very virtue, then as long as you're not sleeping through the day, as long as you're awake and thinking about this, then everything that is really important is right there. You don't need it to be there. Tomorrow you can fulfill the purpose which I'm trying to think how this connects to the Nozick thought experiment. Like, you know, you can get in the machine and live weeks of pleasure. Or let's say this was a sci fi thing.

I can't remember exactly where this is from, but you're about to die. Maybe this is Doctor who or something. You're about to die. So we'll put you in a machine machine that instead of you dying now, it'll kind of speed up your consciousness. So you will live like in Nozick's experience machine, and get to have lots more adventures. And that's preferable, though, to you simply dying tomorrow. And so that's a sort of variation on a thought experiment that. Yeah, okay, of course we'd like to have a full life lived outside the machine than in the machine, but would we prefer a full life lived in the machine or, you know, a life of hedonism lived in the machine to you're going to die tomorrow.

And Seneca is taking the hard line and say, no, no, no, you'd want the day out of the machine, even if it's your last day. Because the reality, the meaningfulness, reflecting on your own virtue or acting virtuously, all that's there, right here, right now, he's

1:41:12 Massimo: taking the red pill, right?

1:41:14 Wes: There's the risk of death, which we get rid of by going into the machine, at least temporarily, right? So if we live with the risk of death, we can treat every day. So the way he puts it is if we were bringing up the rear and rounding off and filling out like life, which is a variation on carpe diem, but it's not the same thing. It's not just the Stoics used to

1:41:32 Massimo: say, hic et nunc, right? So here, now, as in that's where you are, you are here, you're now, and that's your life. But not the same thing as carpe diem. It's more a thing like it can be actually connected back to the Epictetus dichotomy of control, right? So what's gone, it's in the past, it's not in your control. So why the hell are you Worried about it. And what it's in the future is not here yet either. So that's also outside of your control. Well, the only thing you can control is how you act and how you think right now, right here.

1:41:59 Wes: Yeah. But it's also that you see this day as the last day, and you see the last day as a telos in the sense of completion. This last day completes everything. And I'm going to live it as if it were the, you know, the sort of the period at the end of the sentence, which is a different way of living than if you think the sentence is just going to keep going on.

1:42:17 Massimo: That's right. And in this, I have to say, all of the Roman Stoics agree. I mean, you find something like that in Seneca, in Epictetus, and in Marcus Aurelius.

1:42:25 Dylan: The way you guys are talking about it right now, I'm not sure that it disagrees with what I was reading in the Stoics, but it does seem in contrast, this idea of living as if every moment is the end of your sentence. That seems different to me than being present in an activity that's ongoing, even if you. With an eye towards what would be in the future. Right. Because it seems to be hard, very hard to account for something like ambition or even wanting to do anything if you're really in the mode of being present at the end of your sentence all the time. So there seems to be something you have to hold together at the same time. You have to be in the midst of an action in which you are present for that action, but also conscious of it being an action, an activity

1:43:10 Mark: that you're going through, and that the emphasis is the journey and that it's the virtues in what you're doing. Not that you actually accomplish it, but you have to still want to accomplish it.

1:43:19 Dylan: Yeah. It's like being on a ship and you're sailing while you're sailing towards something. Right. But you're not there. You have to be on the ship to tend to the sails and tend to the lines and adjust the tiller. And there's all kinds of things you have to do in order to get there. You have to be present in that activity and to do that successfully, to have the mental fortitude and the discipline to do it. You have to be there on the ship then. Right. In order to make it. But you have a goal. You have. You know, there's a place you want to reach right here.

1:43:45 Massimo: I think that what might be helpful is a metaphor that comes out of Cicero, De Finibus in Book three, what he talks about, what he has actually Cato the Younger, explaining the stoic system. He brings up this metaphor of the archer and trying to hit the target. And so he says that what is under control of the archer is to make your best effort to, you know, try to aim as best as you can and tense your muscles in the best way you can, so on and so forth, forth. But once you let go of the arrow, of course the ultimate outcome is not up to you because all sorts of things can happen.

A gust of wind and your arrow is going to go away completely outside of the target. And so what he says, Cato, well, Cicero, through Cato, says, you do prefer a particular outcome, but the only thing you can choose is your effort. And that actually makes sense. So it makes more sense than just saying, oh, live right here, right now. It's not that you don't have goals. I mean, clearly everything we know about the biographies of these people, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and so on, it's clear that they did have long term goals and acted accordingly. But what they were also trying to do in reminding themselves of this thing, you could die any moment.

It's like, don't live as if you had forever. Make every single action that you have count and remind yourself that certain things are not in your control. And so you're going to accept the outcome with equanimity.

1:45:02 Wes: Yeah, and I think it's also worthwhile pointing out that this passage isn't exactly. That we were just reading, isn't exactly about living in the moment moment, it's about the last day. So it's like I get up in the morning and I make my to do list and I plan out what I would do with my last day. And the idea of having it round off, if it is the last day, in what sense could I make it round off the rest of my life? Well, it's not going to be because I finally finished the novel or something like that. The rounding off has to do with precisely all these stoic comportments to things.

So it's not, for instance, treating objects of pleasure as if they were good things to be pursued. But of course, when I make that to do list, if I'm going to do anything at all, there have to be things that I select to do and things that I diselect that have nothing to do with good and bad. But the rounding off part comes in the sort of second level virtue of the reasonable way I selected them and the focus on being a virtuous person. Let's say that's the telos, and that's the way the last day becomes a telos, by focusing on what's truly good.

1:46:03 Mark: It does seem that the Stoic, in addition to making the to do list, part of that would have to be making the not to do list.

1:46:10 Massimo: There's one other thing that I'd like to bring up and maybe get your feelings about it. This is actually in letter 12 on old age or in the new translation, visiting a child at home, number 11 in particular. Now, let me set this up. So you might have noticed that in several of the initial letters of the early letters, eventually it drops this thing. But in every one of the initial letters, he ends always the letter to Lucilius by saying, okay, I need to pay my tribute to you. And the tribute is usually a phrase or a saying by somebody that he thinks may be useful to Lucilius.

And you may have noticed that very often, in fact, almost always, that someone is actually Epicurious, which is kind of curious, because the Epicureans in the Stoics didn't really see eye to eye at all. If you read the discourses in Epictetus, he has a couple of places where he really goes after the Epicureans in a pretty strong fashion. But that is one of the things that I like about Seneca, that he was in some sense more ecumenical about things. There is a bit. I don't remember where it is. It's not in the letters where he says that we're not the last generation.

Other people will come by and learn new things. And so we need to be open, sort of change our minds about stuff. But in this particular case, he explains to Lucilius why he keeps citing Epicurus. So he's at number 11 here of letter 12. He says, Epicurus said that you say, what business have you with another's property? Whatever is true is my own. And I find that beautiful. It's like, you know, just because somebody from another school or from another persuasion said that, hey, if it's right, if it gets at something interesting, if it gets at something truthful, what the hell, it's everybody's property.

1:47:44 Mark: Well, and truths are immortal outside space and time, and they can't perish away. So, yes, it's mine.

1:47:52 Massimo: But notice that he does attribute it to Epicurus. It just doesn't make it take. Just make it into its own.

1:47:57 Wes: It's fair. It's fair use. That's right.

1:47:59 Massimo: It's fair use.

1:48:01 Dylan: And there's no tragedy of the commons. You're not going to Use it all up for everybody else. That's right.

1:48:06 Mark: So just for proper attribution, the sci fi that I was thinking of, where you're about to die and so you get put into a machine that slows down your consciousness and lets you live for a long time, is Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.

1:48:18 Wes: Oh, really? Huh?

1:48:20 Mark: Yes. A fun book. I love any Murakami. The other cultural touchstone. As we've been going through this and as I was reading it, I had just watched again with my family, they really liked the Pixar movie Inside out that just came out.

1:48:31 Wes: Yeah, yeah, I thought it was great.

1:48:33 Mark: So thinking of this, you know, in terms of what emotions are you tolerating? What are you neglecting? Is all anger bad that it's got a very teleological take on that. Each of the emotions is a little homunculus that's sits in your head and it has its own role to do. And disgust and anger are put out there immediately as things that have a positive function, that they both serve to achieve your goals and keep you from getting poisoned and certain things. And then the big puzzle of the whole movie is like, well, what is the use of sadness? Why is sadness even there?

Can't we just shove sadness in the corner? And the big revelation of the movie is like, oh yes, sadness has a function too. It has a social function, which I won't give away. No spoilers, but. And so I kind of like that take on, you know, I would hope that a good interpretation of stoicism would take more of that functional take on the so called negative emotions than what is actually written here in Seneca. Talking about the negative emotions of how, yeah, I don't see why you'd want a moderate amount of sickness.

1:49:32 Wes: Well, this is why I'm interested in this whole Freudian notion of mourning. And my psychoanalyst friends, of course, love this movie Inside Out. This whole idea that that sadness and mourning are important and they're important for maturation, which is what Inside out gets really right. It's a maturational step to be able to mourn. And on the face of it, it looks like there's this conflict. It looks like the Stoics are advising us that mourning is a bad thing. The maturational mourning, the mourning you do as you grow up on the psychoanalytic view, sort of prepares you to have a different comportment towards the world.

It's no longer, you know, if you don't mature, then things are Good and bad in this very amplified sense. In other words, in precisely the sense that the Stoics disadvised. So you could see Stoicism as sort of a preemptive morning. I'm conscious that I might die. So I think there's some hidden commonalities there between Stoicism and other ways of looking at things.

1:50:24 Massimo: That's an interesting point. And of course it's hard in the movie to get upset with anger because it's played by Lewis Black, who is absolutely brilliant.

1:50:34 Dylan: The point you're making, Wes, is the one thing that I wonder, is it there in the stoicism or is it a case that it ought to be there in the stoicism, meaning that you mourn but you understand that that is you have sort of the right disposition with respect to it. It doesn't overtake you completely. You have a perspective on it and it's part of being fully human as well as same things with pleasure or with other states of emotion, that it's not that you would repress them, but you would have the right comportment with respect to them. Now, what I don't know in saying that is it sounds like it could be in line with the way I read Stoicism, but there's so many other things that are said outrightly that makes it seem like, well, maybe it ought to be the way one thinks of Stoicism, or maybe that's the way like Stoicism 2.0 would be a living tradition.

Yes, but it doesn't sound like what I read in Stoicism. What I read in Stoicism sounds much more hard bitten.

1:51:32 Wes: I think it's a difficult question and a lot of it depends on how much we can fit into this context. Concept of joy, for instance, or the other healthy emotions.

1:51:40 Dylan: But yeah, well, I look forward to your essay, as I do all of them.

1:51:45 Mark: Can we just put all this.

1:51:46 Wes: It's going to take some time in

1:51:47 Mark: objet A or what I'm trying to remember the Lacanian term where you dump all the stuff you can't articulate.

1:51:53 Wes: Well, it's precisely the point is not to be fixated on the objet. That's what the. I mean, that's really the non stoic, you know, if you want this kind of synthetic interpretation where we put all these ideas together. The non stoic is entranced with what Lacan calls the imaginary. So anyway.

1:52:10 Massimo: Oh, that's an interesting one. I'll have to think about that.

1:52:13 Mark: I hope this serves as an adequate invitation to go to Massimo's blog and follow him on his stoic adventures. And you know, I've been suspicious of using philosophy to actually help yourself. That just as I am suspicious, suspicious of people using philosophy. You know, the only kind of good philosophy is like the science philosophy because that actually has a practical benefit and you can get a job. Likewise, I'm very suspicious of many of our other competitor philosophy podcasts that try to turn it into a self help, you know, that it just seems like that sort of stuff really oversimplifies things in a disgusting way.

And Seneca is full of. That is the closest we've come to reading a self help guru that oh yeah, you just have to have the truth layer laid out completely in front of you and have perfect wisdom completely in mind and it's all easy, you don't need big words to describe this. But if one reads charitably and sees it as a living tradition and maybe allows the interesting things that Nietzsche and Freud and everybody else has discovered since then, you know, maybe following the more Nietzschean, listen to my body and don't impose principles on myself.

And I got to admit it, on a day to day basis that doesn't always work out all that well just in terms of maintaining good dietary and exercise, having habits and all the other stuff that you want to do. So I, I do see quite a lot of value, you know, when I was looking at your website, Massimo, and just thinking about Stoicism as a way of having a practice that is free of things that people like Alvin Plantinga would have you have to accept, even if it's not really accepting a matter of fact, even if there's more complicated than that, I do see the advantages of doing this over a regular religion.

So this is not the text that I found was the most meaty that we've ever taken on or that had the most great insights in it. But certainly there's a lot of nice quotable stuff and I appreciated being introduced to this realm of practical Stoicism.

1:54:05 Massimo: Yeah, I'm glad. Remember again that we're talking about the project that I'm interested in and that a number of other people are interested in is to use the ancient Stoics as a general framework and as an inspiration, but certainly not as the equivalent of a religious text. Whatever Seneca said something and it doesn't make sense to me. I'm just not going to do it only because Seneca said it, I should do it. But at the same time I also appreciated your point about reading these texts. Any text really charitably I mean, that, to me, is. That is one of the values of good philosophy. You always try to read even your worst opponents or people that you don't have particularly high regard for, charitably. Because there may be something you can learn there, even if you end up disagreeing with them.

1:54:46 Wes: Yeah. So I will say I'm enormously attracted to Stoicism, although, you know, I'm. Obviously, I've spent a lot of time with psychoanalysis and sort of the friends of instinct, let's say, and the friends of the passions and the idea of taking a therapeutic approach to them. But again, it's agnostic about the degree to which they're in conflict and the degree to which they're having interesting commonalities. But, yeah. So, for instance, when I read Epictetus, not only was it interesting, it sort of was profoundly affecting. It was like a little dose of cognitive therapy, which, unfortunately, I find, because I don't have a practice, it doesn't last, but it remains something that's attractive to me and, you know, as do other practices, practices like mindfulness and things like that. So, yeah, it's something I still want to explore further.

1:55:31 Mark: Dylan, you were the most nice about Epictetus, I noticed, when reviewing that. So you didn't maybe have as much of a chip to knock off your shoulder here.

1:55:39 Dylan: I didn't. I find the Stoics attractive mainly from the standpoint of a combination of thoughtful discipline and the kinds of things in Aristotle's Virtue, the notion of habit and cultivation of. Of what one wants to do. And to me, the way I often frame it to myself, which is not exactly in line with the Stoics, but is more like, it's work to do what you really want to do. That is, it's work to become who you want to be. That kind of thing. And whether you call it a practice, whether you call it habits, whether you call it having a equaniminious disposition towards the world around you, or your own successes and failures, I think there's something in common with all of those things that I find myself resonating with.

So all the crazy stuff that Epictetus says, it just kind of rolls off because I sort of secretly feel like, no, he didn't really mean that. And I know that's not very disciplined of me in terms of reading it,

1:56:34 Massimo: but I know what you mean. I actually have had similar reactions sometimes. And also because it is actually hard to tell exactly what he meant. First of all, remember, Epictetus didn't actually write anything down. What we have are students notes. And I can only imagine and with shuddering terror what would happen if the only things of mine that reached the next generation were notes taken by my students in class. It's like, oh no. So you gotta be careful because it may very well be the case that in some cases he really did not actually mean that and that was just his student's misinterpretation of things. So there's quite a bit of room for interpretation there.

1:57:14 Mark: Well, unlike what you said, Dylan, I like Schopenhauer, who I think is a very good stoic in many ways. I like to blame others for my lack of success rather than there you go, buckling down.

1:57:24 Wes: So,

1:57:27 Mark: all right, next time we are going to talk about love. I'm glad we got going on this. Somebody said, somebody emailed us and said, hey, Valentine's is coming up. You should do that. You should do something about love. And so we had something in the kitty about love. Anyway, we're gonna read Erich Fromm's the Art of Loving in honor of Valentine's Day. Hey everyone, this is Nathan Hanks with the Partially Examined Life. And I have just a short update

1:57:51 Wes: about our not School and Citizens Forum.

1:57:53 Mark: That's the place where you can find other members to talk about interesting topics. Maybe you want to start a group on consciousness explained by Daniel Dennett. That's going on also. Intro to Analytic Philosophy. That's just right now you can propose your own in the citizens forum. Just go to the partiallyexaminedlife.com if you'd like to contact me with any questions you can.

1:58:13 Wes: That's nathan@partiallyexaminedlife.com thanks for listening.

1:58:17 Mark: I hope. Folks, in addition to checking out Massimo's blog, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com check out all the blogging that we have going on there. If you listeners are interested in stoicism or any other topics we talk about, want to maybe contribute to the blog? Go look for the link that says write for us there and see what kind of stuff we accept. We'd love to have more voices on there. Easy way without our policing. To get in dialogue with us and other Partially Examined Life listeners is to go on our enormously active, active Facebook group. Put some things in there, follow us on Twitter, connect with us on LinkedIn, follow the wisdom of Ask Chicky on Instagram. That's instagram.com askchicky I'm just gonna keep pushing this thing until it breaks.

1:58:58 Wes: And Massimo, Your blog is howtobestoic.WordPress.com yes.

1:59:02 Massimo: Or how to beastoic.org okay.

1:59:05 Wes: And then you have a book coming out next year, right? How to Be a Stoic.

1:59:09 Massimo: I'm actually working on it. I'm on sabbatical right now and I'm. I'm working on the book. Yes, it's the. The manuscript is due to Basic Books at the end of August. Great.

1:59:17 Wes: All right. Yeah. Thank you very much. This was great.

1:59:19 Dylan: Thanks for coming on, Massimo. It was wonderful.

1:59:21 Massimo: It was a lot of fun.

1:59:22 Mark: All right. Good night, everybody.

1:59:24 Wes: Good night.

1:59:24 Dylan: Good night.

1:59:51 Mark: I told you I love you. I didn't mean to make you cry. Guess I'm just a careless guy me. There's something insane Something inside me Something I just can't control and I can't get out my soul. I lose control I see that look in your eyes and my heart goes insane I. I lose control when I see the light on your face and my pulse starts to end I lose control and I no longer fall Unless I feel my soul to you to you. Maybe I'm crazy Don't be so crazy. Over you but it's all that I can do. You I lose control I see that

2:01:23 Wes: look in your eyes and my heart

2:01:25 Mark: grows insane I lose control when I see the light on your face and my pulse starts to radiate I lose control and I'm no longer h. My soul to you to you. When it'll build up inside of me I lose control. When the walls were closing I lose control and my heart was burning I

2:02:00 Wes: lose control and my eyes were blinking

2:02:02 Massimo: I was not thinking conscious shrinking was sinking. I see the look in your eyes

2:02:48 Mark: and my heart grows inside eyes I lose control I see the light on your face and my pulse starts to race I lose control the whole life. You know I really can't control it. You make it so I forgot to show it I scream I could tell But I can't sit still when I'm with you.