Episode 158: Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 158 is something like what are the consolations of philosophy? And we read the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius from the year 524 Christian era. To get the reading and more information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, captive of my own freedom in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:29 Seth: Hmm, that sounded vaguely existentialist. This is Seth Paskin contemplating the nature between simple and conditional necessity. In Austin, Texas.

0:37 Wes: This is Wes Alwan ready to play Wheel of Fortune. In Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:43 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey wondering whether my disease of guilt might be cured by punishment. I am in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:50 Seth: I think Wes wins on this one.

0:54 Mark: All right, we did Augustine a little while ago. Who was. When was Augustine?

0:59 Wes: About 100 years before Boethius.

1:02 Mark: Right, that sounds right. And then Seneca also was around that time.

1:05 Wes: So 4 BC to 65 AD Seneca and then St. Augustine, 354 to 430. Right. And we're around 500 AD with Boethius. Right.

1:15 Mark: 524 is when I read that it was actually written near the end of his life because he's in. In prison waiting to be executed. Although I guess he doesn't know necessarily that he's for sure going to be executed. At least he doesn't read that way.

1:27 Dylan: Oh, poor guy. He got executed when he's 44 years old. Damn.

1:31 Wes: Yeah, after lady philosophy gave him all that.

1:34 Dylan: That sucks.

1:35 Wes: All this positive, all the hope.

1:40 Dylan: She's no Diotima though.

1:42 Wes: That's right. She's a little bit more staid, a little bit more rational.

1:48 Dylan: Yeah, she felt a little bit too much like Virgil.

1:50 Wes: She did, yeah. I thought of Virgil. Yeah. Although she's commonly. It's the comparison is to Beatrice in Dante's Divine comedy.

1:59 Dylan: Oh, a 12 year old girl.

2:00 Wes: Yeah, Sorry. But yeah, this was enormously influential and it was influential in the Divine Comedy and influential for centuries to come basically in medieval philosophy. This and a lot of all the other work that Boethius did which had to do with logic.

2:16 Mark: Yeah, translating Aristotle. So he was a scholar of Aristotle and Plato for the most part. He early on critiques Epictetus and the Stoics as having had just one part of the truth and thinking it's the whole thing, but it's really the Aristotle, Plato. That's where it's at. Pretending that they say approximately the same thing and at least the important parts and are entirely compatible with each other.

2:38 Dylan: Well, Plato, Aristotle and Christian doctrine.

2:41 Mark: Christian doctrine, though, not Jesus y Christian doctrine.

2:45 Dylan: Well, Jesusy in the sense of love is the center of all things. Right.

2:48 Wes: If you guys read the introduction or any commentary, a lot has been made of the fact that he's a Christian theologian. I mean, part of what he does is theology, but in this text it's very pagan. There's not any talk of Christianity except indirect allusion.

3:03 Dylan: It's not apologetic in that sense. Do you mean pagan in the sense that it's framed in a pagan way as to some ways be persuasive to people to be, quote, Christian, but from a pagan perspective?

3:16 Wes: No, I mean, it sounds. His interlocutor is philosophy, not some representative of the Christian church. And the consolations come not from faith, but from something that looks a little more like Stoicism.

3:32 Seth: A lot like Stoicism.

3:34 Wes: That's the sense in which I mean pagan. And obviously there's lots of Platonic influence.

3:40 Mark: And it's definitely not pagan in the sense of there being multiple deities. Or at least by the time we get to Aristotle, insofar as he's a pagan, maybe there are multiple divine forces, but they all must be just participants in the one. That's one of the main theses of this book is that there has to be ultimate unity in the source and object of all things. So it's very much a theological treatise when it comes down to it. It's not pagan in the sense of there could be multiple gods or pagan in the sense of we don't have to talk about God. It's very God. Yeah.

4:12 Wes: I think what scholars mean when they say pagan is they mean non Christian.

4:16 Dylan: I'd be interested to talk about to what extent the theology is super added onto the Stoicism or abstraction from it, or what that role exactly is.

4:26 Mark: Right. It is five books. The whole thing is a dialogue between the character of him, of himself, and lady philosophy, which is of course also himself. But it's. It's presented as a dialogue. And each of these five books is broken up into prose sections and poetry sections, which even though they're not metrical in this translation or anything, they're still more flowery.

4:49 Wes: Yes. I forced you guys into the prose translation without telling you that I was doing that.

4:55 Mark: I probably can pay attention better to prose than poetry myself. If it actually has a meter my

5:01 Wes: eyes gloss over, it's prose, but it's still very poetic. And I just think it's better The

5:07 Mark: Richard Greene translation, which is not the one. I will provide a hyperlink to an online version, a free version, WV Cooper, but that's not the one that we used for prep here. Let me also point people to the History of Philosophy without any Gaps podcast for more on Boethius. They have two episodes on Boethius, including a Scholar coming on, and then a much more thorough account than I'm sure we're going to give about what exactly was going on. Why was he in trouble? It doesn't really matter. He was not a church father, I guess, is an important thing, even though he wrote on theological topics, but he was involved in the Roman government. He was a Roman citizen. This was right near the fall of the Roman Empire. And there was a lot of fighting amongst factions in the wake of the impending doom in different strains of Christianity,

5:56 Wes: including, yes, what it means to be a Roman citizen is changed at this point because there's a guy named Theodoric the Great. He is the Ostrogoth. The Ostrogoth who rules the Roman Empire, at least the western portion. I'm not sure exactly how that worked, but it was known as being a fairly benevolent ruler and sort of let the old institutions do their thing, including the Roman Senate. So I think what got Boethius in trouble, right, was that he defended the Senate or he wanted the freedom of the Senate. Was the charge one of the charges. And I think there's this idea that loyalty to Rome might make someone disloyal to the current regime, something like that,

6:36 Mark: if only that were relevant to today's politics. One of the things he makes hay of near the beginning is that because the people. It was the Senate that convicted him for defending another member of the Senate who had kind of come out against in some way the ruler here, taking the part of the Eastern side, apparently, with the theological differences involved in that. Because according to his account, those senators, they even realized what they were doing was wrong in condemning him. So they had to. They couldn't just charge him for defending the Senate, they had to charge him with impiety. And so actually, his doing of philosophy, his concern with philosophy, was something that they used against him, according to his account. So he therefore can lump himself in with Socrates and Seneca. He names a bunch of other philosophical folks that were martyred for their studies.

7:26 Wes: Yeah, he was accused of being a magician or using magic. Right. Which is what being a philosopher or being interested in these types of things amounted to, I guess, to the average Ostrogoth, I don't know, to the average person at this point, I don't want to diss the Ostrogoths, but he would

7:42 Mark: gaze into his philosopher's stone and chant things about the cosmological proof man. Spooky guy.

7:50 Wes: Just opening up a book at a certain point and probably still today, to some extent, is a cause for suspicion.

7:56 Mark: I believe some scholars criticized Trump and then he tweeted and called them magicians. Isn't that what happened? Witchcraft. All right, no more Trump moratorium from me on Trump references. I got, in fact, scolded for that at my holiday gatherings, that I kept making some wisecrack and the conversation would come back to discussions of Trump. And that was bad.

8:19 Wes: Yes. It's not a consoling sort of thing. Keep referring back to that.

8:24 Mark: So there's sort of two takes we can approach this with. One is, of course, just going through the arguments that he gives, how he consoles himself, this sort of stoic picture of the world of, you know, how he shouldn't be so upset about being in prison, condemned to death, because the kind of things that can be taken away from you, those aren't really the things that are worth whining about anyway. It's. It's your own virtue. It's that kind of stuff. And then he goes, it's more positive stuff about virtue and its relationship to God and how. Why God might let apparently bad things happen to good people.

So there's the story that we can give a lot of details of. I'm a little more interested, frankly, in this idea of the consolations of philosophy, that this is something relevant to every single one of our listeners, to us. We just got to hear an episode, a couple back, of us trying to console ourselves with our oh so wise, philosophically informed take on politics and the world.

9:19 Seth: I never, ever, ever presented myself as wise or rational or coherent in any way. Just FYI.

9:25 Mark: Seth knows that he's not wise. That makes him the most wise of all.

9:31 Seth: Yeah.

9:32 Mark: But in any case, when we're getting involved in philosophy, even as youngsters, I'm sure as teens that we used the intellectual life as a retreat from all those stupid bullies and stuff that was going bad and girls that wouldn't go out with us or whatever, the particularities of your case. So even if I can't console myself by referring to that this is the best of all possible worlds run according to providence by God, I can't do that. But there is some kind of equivalence that we turn to time and again. And one of the reasons why we

10:06 Wes: continue to do philosophy, we should distinguish here between what you're describing as the consolation of intellectual activity, of that sort of retreat, so the activity itself, and then the activity as a means to truths about the world that are consoling. So for Boethius, it's not just that he can be confined and exiled and get pleasure in thinking about philosophy, it's that lady philosophy will reveal to him things about the world which are consoling if we know them.

10:37 Mark: I'm not sure of the sharp division between those things though, that clearly one of the things that is consoling him is the act of writing this book, of doing the philosophy and the way he puts it, just turning away from base earthly things, from these petty annoyances of life, you know, like your freedom to higher things.

10:58 Wes: Yeah, but there's a difference between being told that the only thing that's really important is your virtue and simply just retreating from the world. And whether it's philosophy or some other discipline or something creative, those are two different forms of consolation, I think.

11:17 Mark: So you really considered it when you've been engaging this as purely a retreat from the world and not a matter of all the bullshit of day to day existence. That's not worth my attention. I'm actually turning myself to something ultimately more important. And of course that viewpoint goes much better with a religious point of view, which I did have as a teen. So that turning to philosophy was, in a sense the most important thing is my personal relationship with God. Even if I wasn't thinking that specifically, it was somehow your own spiritual well being, which then you could see in atheist existentialists. It seems like, oh, the most important thing for Camus or somebody like that is your own attitude is how you hold yourself. That's how you raise yourself above your situation for Nietzsche, for many, many folks like that. So the act of philosophy itself becomes consciousness raising.

12:10 Wes: There's a lot of crossover with existentialism. I actually have my De Beauvoir notes open as well, because there are a lot of very similar concerns, like for instance, the relevance of the free will versus determinism debate, which is what lends itself to ambiguity in De Beauvoir. And this idea that we have to embrace our ambiguity and embrace our lack, that's actually pretty clearly related to the Stoic idea. And also this idea in De Beauvoir that we detach ourselves from this idea that we can complete ourselves, which is what I mean by embracing the lack.

And I think it's very similar in Boethius, because when you talk about this retreat from the things that aren't important in the world. What you realize is that the fantasy of the thing that they're going to do for you, the kind of unity they're going to give you or the happiness, they don't actually do that. And it's something else that you need to focus on.

13:02 Dylan: I agree that there's this link, particularly along this vector of Stoicism, but I have to pull open that chapter. I think it's chapter Book four in there, where he's talking about more of a theological point of view. And there's this absence of the notion of lack for a human being. So even if there's this overlap, there's something really incongruous about it. At parts, it feels existential. But then the backup for it is that the conduit for completeness as human beings is through God. And in fact, it's not embracing your lack and understanding, that it is oriented towards completeness and oneness and transcendence, which even if you end up with a similar kind of Stoicism, it's a very different underpinning for that.

13:49 Wes: Yeah. Although I do think that the role that freedom plays in existentialism, actually that sort of plays that transcendent element instead of God. But, yeah, I understand where you're coming from.

14:00 Dylan: Yeah. It seems worth pointing out the similarities, but there are important differences, particularly in how you would negotiate yourself through it in those two. And also the consequences of how you would act and interact with other people and in your community and the demands you'd put on your community and for those two cases. And I'm reluctant to equate them too much even with acknowledging some similarities.

14:29 Mark: So what did people think of this book? Did you like it?

14:32 Seth: I did, which surprised me. It's a remarkable book. Obviously, a translator can work wonders. But I kept having to remind myself that it was written in 524 in some state of distress. Because it's a remarkable work of disciplined thinking and, one might say, rationalization. But it's compelling narratively and yet has a very rigorous structure. Logically brings in elements, sort of. I think, Mark, while we were warming up to this, you said that there's nothing in the book that's original. That if you read the notes, everything is taken from somewhere else. If so, it's a master of synthesis, which is not something that I think is degrading at all. I think. Take that as a compliment.

15:15 Mark: It may be some of the book 5 stuff is original. That's apparently the most famous part. The stuff about Providence. How can an all knowing God make it so that we still have free will even though he knows what we're going to do?

15:27 Seth: Still be surprised.

15:29 Mark: Yeah, that apparently is new, but I'm just going on what the introduction said, which is. And then also what the history of philosophy without any gaps podcast said. It was like, oh, this part is from Porphyry. And like that was not a bad thing in that age to be recycling the old wisdom. If you think truth is something that any reasonable person will arrive at, then of course all the philosophers, insofar as they get it, are going to arrive at the same exact view.

15:52 Wes: Yeah, I'd say. I mean, there's little of this that we hadn't seen in Plato or St. Augustine or Stoicism, really. But yeah, that doesn't detract from it.

16:02 Dylan: So I decided that I was going to have to come here to have a discipline of exercise, of generous reading, because I found myself getting sourer and sourer as I read it.

16:13 Seth: Really?

16:14 Dylan: Yes. And in fact I was a little self disappointed in that. I agree that it's readable, but I found it barely short of an apologetic. I found it so enabling, even if there was the stoicism in it, so enabling of the worst form of justification of inquisitional authoritarianism and self serving degradation of individual souls for the sake of higher power based upon the authority of the Church, that I was coming here looking for help in a sympathetic reading. So that's sort of where I was at.

16:50 Mark: Well, I agree in that I found at the beginning I liked it in that I liked the style. And yeah, the Stoicism was a little bit warmed over, but come on, this is a very compelling circumstance in which it was written. And I love the part of him talking to Lady Philosophy and the whole description of that she chases away the muses of poetry that offer only their poison. They do not liberate the minds of men but disease, but merely accustom themselves to it. In other words, thinking about singing a song, writing a song, doing art, the kind of stuff that I often do to soothe myself, that actually you can write very nasty songs anyway, they don't necessarily heal you, they can just reinforce whatever emotion.

And there's another discussion to be had about that relation. Anyway, I thought even though that bit is displaying some very typical Plato favoring philosophy over poetry, but then the whole thing is filled with poetry. So obviously he's down with poetry. He's just, it needs to be in the service of reason or something like this. But yeah, just as it went on, I Just thought the arguments were so bad, and they're bad arguments that we've run across before in other things. But when we see them in Descartes or Plato or Aristotle, there are usually so many other interesting things in those texts to kind of distract from the badness of the particular argument.

Just the things like anything, any effect can only contain what was in the cause. So the cause always has to be greater. So actually applying that principle to the notion of goodness, the notion of greatness. So there must be a most good thing that caused everything, because the effect couldn't possibly be better than the cause. That kind of stuff, this kind of value ordering of the world is just frustrating. It's irritating.

18:26 Dylan: Yeah. I mean, there's another way in which, in that respect it was deeply irritating is there's this constant fast and loose leveraging of infinity. And it's infinity in many garbs. And so there's always the divide by zero or the truth, you know, so in the end, something has to be infinite. And because it's infinite, it's bigger than anything. And there's always this. I want to say trump card, but I don't want to say trump card.

18:54 Mark: So there's always this no T word.

18:59 Dylan: Infinity's always trumping everything. And it's this constant divide by zero. Error.

19:05 Wes: Goddamn infinity.

19:06 Dylan: It drives me crazy. The thinking is shoddy and self serving. And you know what it reminded me of? You guys have seen the Princess Bride?

19:16 Seth: Yes, of course.

19:17 Dylan: And so in the middle of it, when. Oh, what's the little guy's name?

19:22 Mark: Vizzini.

19:23 Dylan: Yeah, Vizzini.

19:24 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

19:25 Dylan: He has the challenge regarding the challenge of wits. And so he has this whole thing about how smart he is. You know, you remember those guys, Aristotle and Plato. They're stupid, you know, compared to me. And they go through this pseudological argument, which is just like this in Boethius. It's just sort of deeply unpersuasive in this part. I mean, absolutely, sincerely, it's a ruse to convince you of somebody else's authority. And it's exactly the kind of rationality, pseudo rationality, that's used to subjugate thousands of years of people.

And the part that most irritates me, I think is most despicable is the notion that when misfortune attacks us or when we fall in misfortune, it's because we did something wrong. And in that way, it's not even stoic. There becomes a point towards the end where our experience of misfortune is a result of some kind of either misdeed or it's part of some kind of cosmic balance.

20:31 Mark: It's a test. That's the other thing. It could be a test that to

20:36 Dylan: me is the most obscene form of thinking because there are so many examples of people who are undergoing misfortune for patently unjust reasons, and that there's no way that you can weigh those as being balancing or just or even worse for the sake of some kind of misdeed that they implicitly did that they owe atonement for. And it's borderline unforgivable to me. So now you have to help me with having a sympathetic reading.

21:13 Mark: Well, that view that he says at page 14 I have, he's complaining about his own situation. He's complaining that when these bad things happen to you or to anybody, everybody assumes that it's because you did something wrong. And so he says the first thing that an unfortunate man loses is his reputation. That they don't even consider that this could have been an unjust punishment that you must have deserved it in somehow. So it seems like the thing you're complaining about was kind of common parlance. And he's in fact objecting to that. Like, that's a big problematic of.

The thing is, hey, I and many other people really am good, and yet these bad things happen to me. So it can't be that, oh, well, if something bad happens to you because you deserved it, it has to be, well, this is not really bad. I admit you are virtuous, but this thing that's happening to you, not really that bad. Come on.

22:05 Dylan: But that turns around at the end when the wicked are impotent and miserably unhappy. And that whole argument in book four and five, in which in the end part of it is, you're being tested. And anyway, you asked my opinion and I got a little bit stronger in my. I was not consoled. How's that sound?

22:24 Mark: Were you consoled, Seth?

22:26 Seth: I was. So, first off, I would say, you know, in response to Dylan, nobody is less sympathetic to the, you know, evils visit upon us to test our. We only get what we can bear and the answer of theodicy that, you know, it's all just a test for the greater good. Nobody's less sympathetic than I am, but I guess I didn't have the visceral reaction to. We've read enough ancient and medieval philosophy to, like, we get triggered, you know, when there's the first cause argument or the, you know, that stuff, all we get it right? So there's a sense in Which I appreciated the structure and what I thought was the commitment.

And the whole time I was reading it, I was thinking, granted, this is kind of like, you know, he's sort of like an entitled rich kid who has his life turned upside down. He has everything handed to him, no real adversity in his life. And then the hammer comes down and he's trying to find some way to think his way out of it. And he does it through writing. This is a confessional and it's also therapeutic. And it's an act. It represents an act not of pure speculation, but of him trying to come to grips with the fact that here he was happy and now he's miserable and he thinks injustice has been done and he's trying to argue it.

If he argues his way out of that in a way you don't appreciate. I get that because I didn't necessarily align on all points either. But the act itself, I appreciate it because it was inspirational to me. When I'm sitting here telling you guys that I can barely stand to get in here and talk with you anymore because I'm distraught and embarrassed and irrational, that this idea that you can sit and that writing and thinking and addressing your issues head on, like writing your way out of it, that was inspirational in some respect to me. And then I thought back to Augustine and I was like, you know, actually some of the better things we've read have been memoirs or more of confessional style as opposed to abstract works of speculative metaphysics.

So I appreciated it for that. Even if it is just a clever repackaging of something we've all seen a hundred times before. You know, you guys, that the appreciation of the book is in the reader, not in the book itself.

24:55 Wes: Whoa, nice.

24:58 Seth: Clearly I used some other faculty than reason when I was appreciating it.

25:04 Mark: So on that take, it sounds like the consolation is as art that he's doing this thing. Just like I was saying that he condemns at the beginning. It's the muses that are actually visiting him to create this artwork with all this frickin poetry in it. Come on, those can't be first drafts. He must have like written the poems at least a few times to get it all in the right meter. Unless he was just that much of a genius. And he's not, you know, known as a poet otherwise, as far as I'm aware. So we should not be surprised that then he was just as he criticizes the arts is doing, he's sort of self reinforcing, you know, he's not wallowing in his own pity.

He's not wallowing in pain. It's not that kind of use of art. But I don't think that's actually what art generally does anyway. I think if I am depressed and I write a song about being depressed, then that is generally uplifting. It is not like that. I then get so pushed over the edge that I want to kill myself. Like, no, that's actually a therapeutic act and does not. Even if everything about the song itself is depressing, It's a way of writing oneself out of it. That's something that art does. Not that necessarily, philosophy does.

26:24 Wes: So I'm gonna reassert the. I mean, I like that idea as sort of a variation on what's consoling him. But for him, right, he's lost everything. And it can't just be that, oh, I lost everything, and it really is bad. And that depresses me. But writing some poetry helps. It's gotta be. Losing everything isn't actually bad. That's the consolation. Or at least those are two different. And I'm not saying that your version of consolation isn't bad. Maybe part of it, or maybe that's what's really going on, but it's what he thinks he's doing in the Stoic tradition is kind of more radical, right?

It's this idea of no good or evil externalities, that everything is. It's a matter of what's within. And fortune can't take that away from you. And what's so fascinating about it is just. It's such a, you know, like existentialism, like any ethical philosophy, you have to define your relationship to fortune, basically, to fate or chance or determinism or whatever you want to call it. You have to define that relationship. And he goes all in, in the Stoic vein.

27:33 Mark: I was also reading, since we're doing Confucius next time, and I had already started reading that before I was done with this. So when I see something in here like this is page nine in Boethius, the serene man who has ordered his life, stands above menacing fate and unflinchingly faces good and bad fortune. That's a classic. Could be in any. Almost any sage tradition. That could be a Taoist thing. That could be a Confucian thing. It's certainly Stoic.

27:58 Dylan: Well, I guess maybe this is Stoicism with optimism. Towards the end, he says, even though things may seem confused and discordant to you because you cannot discern the order that governs them, nevertheless everything is governed by its own proper order, directing all things toward the good. Now, that doesn't sound stoic to me. That sounds different than Stoicism.

28:17 Wes: No, that's part of the Stoic. Everything is according to nature. That's one of the basics.

28:21 Dylan: Well, but that's different than the good.

28:22 Unknown speaker: Right.

28:23 Wes: Stoic tenets. So the idea of providence is a very strong part of the Stoic tradition.

28:29 Mark: He explicitly considers Stoicism to be part of the truth, but again, he thinks it misses a good chunk of it. And I think Dylan is maybe pointing out something. Yeah, we'd have to look more closely at what else Epictetus has to say about the order of nature, but I certainly don't recall anything like the apologetics.

28:48 Wes: Well, I'm just telling you because I read some books on this, and Seneca has, you know, Epictetus has a much longer treatise that I looked into as well. And then, you know, this question of evil and things being according to Providence, things being according to nature, that's a big part of things. And God is a big part of it as well. So all I'm trying to say is he's not just importing Christianity into this. This is there long before you get to Boethius. It's there in Epictetus. It's there in Seneca.

29:19 Mark: Interesting. Is it in Plato? I mean, I guess he refers to, like, the Timaeus, which I have not read for some of these cosmological things, but at least in the stuff that we read, certainly, like the apology or the crito of just like, ah, I gotta listen to my conscience. Like, there's nothing about, oh, me being killed off. Like, that's ultimately for the good of everything. No, it's just like, because I'm a member of the society, I gotta go with it. It might be unjust, but I'm not gonna be the dick who, you know, tries to have two wrongs make a right.

29:50 Dylan: Well, the part that's in Plato is the part from the Republic that the just man, no matter how much he suffers misfortune, is happier than those who commit the injustices against him.

30:04 Mark: Yeah, I think the Gorgias, too. That's a thing.

30:07 Seth: Yeah.

30:08 Dylan: So that part's there.

30:10 Wes: Yeah. I mean, obviously, too, you know, a lot of the theodicy part of it, the justification of the ways of God to man, that is, I think, something else that is borrowed from St. Augustine. This idea that evil is nothing, that if you look at the larger, the bigger picture, if you were able to do that, then you would see that it is good and that Particular misfortunes aren't really such. So that's a different sort of addition, I think. But it fits of course very well with stoicism in the sense that no externality that we can be aware of is really good or evil.

The only thing has something to do with our own psyche. Right. The only really properties that we could properly call good and evil would have to belong to us. You know, it would depend on whether we are virtuous or not. It can't just be a matter of circumstance, it can't just be a matter of fortune. Good and bad are not something foisted upon us.

31:10 Dylan: Well, yeah, and maybe, you know, I mean things like. So all things are part of a certain order. So that when something moves away from its assigned place, it falls into a new order of things. And since all fortune, whether sweet or bitter, has as its purpose the reward or trial of good men or the correction and punishment of the wicked, it must be good because it is clearly either just or useful. So that's where I end up at the end with him is that good fortune is reward, bad fortune is correction and punishment. And like I said earlier, that right there I just have a deeply strong visceral reaction against. And so that's why I have have to have help with it is not a side note.

31:55 Wes: I just think that you've found the weakest part of the whole account and it's not really even that consistent with the other parts of the account. Right. Because you know, you don't need that if you're a stoic to talk about this sort of providence where bad fortune is a corrective or something like that. Because there really is no such thing as bad fortune or good fortune, properly speaking.

32:17 Mark: So maybe we should consider in the remainder of the first half here books one and two. So those are the stoicism parts where he really just lays down here are my complaints. And then philosophy answers that. No, no, actually things are not that bad. Your kids are doing okay, right? Your father in law is okay. Well, actually he got killed shortly. I know.

32:38 Wes: Reading that it's. I know. I chuckled when I saw that.

32:43 Mark: Still, look on the bright side. And just so he's still kind of laying out before he gets to this providential part and talking about free will and talking about the teleology that's sort of the focus of book three, which I thought was complicated. But books one and two, we're just still talking about should fortune, should luck have power over me? Should I be able. The fact this bad thing has happened apparently Bad thing? Am I somehow justified in saying, well, it's really not bad? Because what matters to the human being is not something that can be taken away. What virtue is is something that is independent of circumstance. So are there quotes in these first two books that seem particularly distinctive or affecting?

33:33 Wes: So on page 16, prose five, this is where I think we get the beginnings of this idea that you're troubles are not really outside you, they're within you and down a little bit. Or if you prefer to think that you've been driven into exile, you yourself have done the driving, since no one else could do it. Or if you can remember your true country, you know that it is not, as Athens once was, ruled by many persons. Rather, it has one ruler and one king who rejoices in the presence of citizens, not in their expulsion. To be governed by his power and subject to his laws is the greatest liberty.

Surely you know the oldest law of your true city, that the citizen who has chosen to establish his home there has a sacred right not to be driven away. What's interesting, the way he begins this, is this sort of metaphor of the self as a city from which you cannot be exiled unless you exile yourself. I thought it was a very clever and beautiful way of transitioning from this idea of his actual physical exile and using that metaphor to explain the self in a way that's reminiscent, by the way, of Plato's Crito, this idea of the relationship of the self to the state and whether you ought to accept exile and what that means for the self and so on.

34:55 Mark: So it's interesting to figure out what does he think he's in exile from? Because it just suggests philosophy is telling him this paragraph. When I first saw you downcast and crying, I knew you were in misery, in exile with. Without your story, I would not have known how desperate your exile is. You have not been driven out of your homeland, you have willfully wandered away, etc.

35:12 Wes: So that's literally he has been driven out of his homeland. It's just lady philosophy saying, figuratively, you haven't literally, he has been exiled and imprisoned. He's. I forget where they sent him.

35:24 Mark: I read it more literally. Like, I even put in my quote here, to be governed by his true power, parentheses gods and subject to his laws is the greatest liberty. I was reading it not as a metaphor about the self, although I like that reading, but as who is the real king here? It's not the king of Rome, it's not the emperor, it's God.

35:44 Wes: It really is a metaphor. There's no way to make sense of that passage. Literally, he's been exiled to Ager Calventianus. And this idea that you have the right not to be exiled and stuff in reality. Right. That's been refuted. It's not the case. But the idea is, spiritually it still is the case. There's the one ruler and one king who rejoices in the presence of citizens, not in their expulsion. That's what's going on internal to the psyche. Because in the real world that's not what's happened.

36:16 Mark: But don't you think it's a little reading? Something that Freudian sounding into it?

36:21 Wes: This isn't a reading. This isn't the only way this passage makes sense. You think you've been driven to exile, you haven't what virtue is.

36:30 Mark: I'm not saying he's taking it literally. I'm saying it's a different metaphor. It's that we really live in the kingdom of God. And God, that's a different way of saying the same thing. That to be at home spiritually, to be in the right place, is to self consciously put yourself in the presence of God. And so if you are feeling bad, if you are feeling forlorn, it's not because God has deserted you. God rejoices in your presence, God welcomes you back. It's because you have turned away. You've forgotten about God, you've forgotten about the true light of truth.

37:03 Wes: I don't see anything about God and the kingdom of God here.

37:07 Dylan: He's saying it right here in this sentence. For if you can remember your true country, you know that it is not, as Athens once said, ruled by many persons. Rather it has one ruler and one king who rejoices in the presence of citizens, not in their expulsions. That one ruler and one king is God, in Mark's interpretation, to be governed by his power and subject to his laws. Yes. Yeah.

37:29 Mark: Not yourself, not your soul, you're not the king. You only have that sort of divinity insofar as you are partaking of God.

37:39 Wes: Okay, Yep, you're right.

37:41 Seth: Yep.

37:43 Mark: They ultimately amount to the same thing.

37:45 Wes: Yes. I mean, they are related, but. Yes. I just. The main thing is it's. Yeah, it's the exile. Yeah.

37:52 Dylan: I completely disagree that they amount to the same thing. I mean, if you want to gloss it, you can. Sure. But I think it's ignoring deeply non trivial differences. The feeling may be the same, but they are not the same thing.

38:07 Wes: In the context of everything that goes on in this text, they are highly Related. This idea that you can't be exiled from yourself, that you, you know, that whatever happens to you by way of fortune, that what's actually good and bad is internal to the self rather than in the external world. I think that's very important. And it, you know, I think it's. It's not the same, but it's definitely related to. To the theological part of it. When reading this, I had none of the Christian baggage that you guys seem to see. I saw none of it.

38:43 Dylan: Well, I mean, I felt the same way when I read the first couple books. I mean, if you look at page 29, when he's basically going on, this is in book two, prose four, where essentially lady philosophy is saying that adversity builds character. She says the very place which you call a land of exile is home to those who live here. Nothing is miserable unless you think it so. And on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it. No one is so completely happy that he would not choose to change his condition if he let himself think about it impatiently. The joy of human happiness is shot through with bitterness, no matter how pleasant it seems to one who has it. Such happiness cannot be kept when one decides to leave.

39:30 Seth: Right.

39:30 Wes: So straightforwardly stoic, right?

39:34 Dylan: Yes, it's straightforward stoicism. Focusing on the fact that fortune itself cannot be the source of happiness. In particular, focusing on the fact that something like good luck is fleeting and that you shouldn't be clinging to that for your happiness. It can't be the source of your happiness. And in that way, the first two books to me read like pretty darn stoic.

40:00 Mark: And it is interesting that he doesn't. You know, there's plenty of room that he could have put the God language much more frequently in here, but he doesn't. That he wants to build up to that.

40:11 Dylan: Yep. And in fact, in the next, you know, couple prose sections, it's really focused on an argument against very specific kinds of worldly focuses of happiness, wealth and jewels and land and different kinds of attachments that we can have, and undercutting them as being a source of happiness.

40:32 Wes: Yes. And here, just further down the page you're reading on, he talks of self possession. Is anything more precious to you than yourself? You will agree that there is nothing. Then if you possess yourself, you have something you will never want to give up and something which fortune cannot take from you. It's little bits and pieces like that. Where I saw this metaphor of exile being used to talk about the inability to be sort of turned out of oneself in the way that you can be turned out of your homeland.

41:06 Mark: And the way to lose yourself is page 19. Now I know another cause of your sickness, and the most important, you have forgotten what you are. So, again, this sounds super existentialist. This sounds Heidegger, that you've forgotten the self, you've drifted from the self. He means something very specific, though. He means your teleology. That's what all book three is going to be about.

41:31 Wes: Yes, and he even uses the word sickness. So such notions are enough not only to cause sickness, but death. So I thought of Nietzsche here as well, and self forgetting and ultimately in psychoanalysis. And I actually thought a lot about Lacan reading this book and the imaginary

41:50 Seth: Boy, talk about reading into it.

41:52 Wes: No, it's just drawing relationships between ideas that actually are related.

41:57 Seth: But if you think about this in its narrative form. Right. The point is, he's complaining that things external to himself, that he had possessions or status or whatever, were lost and that that's the source of his grief. And philosophy is merely pointing to him saying, the source of your grief and your happiness has never been any different than it always was. It's always in the same place. The problem is that you're taking pleasure in the things that you own instead of blah, blah, blah. Again, I mean, we can call that stoic or whatever, but that's the move that this part of the text is for. And I don't know how much more there is that you need to read into it.

42:41 Wes: The question is, what is actually important to the integrity of the self? It seems like all these external things are. But on this argument, it has something to do with virtue, or you could say health or something like that. And so the idea, for instance, that sickness and Lacan involves the imaginary, involves looking to the outside world for a mirror of one's own wholeness that isn't really there, that is intimately related to Stoicism. It's interesting to make those connections.

43:13 Dylan: I myself, I don't object to making links to other texts and stuff like that. I think there are some of those links. I see those links as right now not being consistent with the rest of the text. And so to the extent that there are parts of it that speak to it through that stoical language, to me there's so many other pieces that seem not stoical, particularly in the terms under which that Stoicism is undergirded, that it just seems that the book itself has less in common with it. It gestures in that direction, but doesn't.

43:48 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I just have an overall different impression of the book. And then the parts where there are steps in the argument which don't actually work, that's not really important to me. What's important to me is the picture that's being painted and whether there's some grain of truth there that I can seize upon. And then also why it's true. It's not enough for me to someone to say, well, nothing outside of you is really good or bad or important. And then that's just an assertion. But I think there's actually a deeper truth to it. It's not just wishful thinking on the part of ancient Stoics. There's a deeper psychological truth to that, which is the thing that I am interested in. So that's the way I approach this.

44:30 Mark: I see a deeper psychological falsity to it, that he's very upfront that anything that can be born will die, and nothing that is temporary like that can serve as ultimate happiness, can really be an authentic part of a happy existence. And as we discussed in our Stoicism episodes, I just think that that's terrible. If you really took that seriously, then, yeah, you don't have any romantic relationships and all that stuff. And he says some of those same things here. You know, you have kids, you think you're fortunate to have kids, but you're always going to be worried that the kids are going to turn out to be murderers, that they're going to be dishonest, that they're going to shame you.

45:20 Wes: So we're kind of rehashing objections to Stoicism that we know that Stoicism was developed in an elaborate way that dealt with all these types of objections. Remember the preferable and the non preferable. And it doesn't require that you not live your life or for instance, go into government and get into high positions like Seneca and all those sorts of things. So I don't know. I don't know how seriously to take objections like this.

45:47 Mark: I don't see any evidence that Boethius is aware of these more sophisticated arguments.

45:52 Wes: Of course he's aware of it. He hasn't read the Stoics.

45:54 Mark: He's saying straight up these kind of things.

45:57 Dylan: Wesley straight up says, you know, he talks against being a civil servant. And I understand, and I'm sympathetic with the fact that something like Stoicism in other authors might have something more to say or something different to say, that Stoic doctrine might be able to be interpreted in other ways that are fruitful and very, very interesting. That don't run afoul of the kinds of criticisms that you said we were just rehashing, but I'm taking them seriously.

46:28 Wes: So I see right now it's a gratuitously uncharitable reading of the text so far.

46:34 Mark: Happiness cannot depend on things that are uncertain. What do you think about that? Is that a mature attitude?

46:41 Wes: Again, what I'm looking for is the what is true about that? There is something true about that. It involves how much significance you put in these things. What is it about the externalities, about our attachments to those externalities that can make us miserable? And is it something we can give up? And I think, yes, it is. But it involves the signification. It involves the sense in which those externalities mean something else than they are. So you don't give up in Stoicism, the sense that one thing is preferable to another. And yes, it is a radical theory, this idea that happiness depends strictly upon one's own virtue and sort of the state of one's mind.

But there is a truth to that. Some people are far more susceptible to the sort of swings of fortune and being made miserable by it than others. A lot of people are happy all their lives, and they have all the terrible things that happen to all of us happen to them. They lose loved ones, they see people die, all the terrible things that we all go through. But some people deal with that relatively well and live happy lives. And some people are torn down by it and made miserable.

47:52 Mark: So here's another quote. This is page 29. Still, the man who enjoys fleeting happiness either knows that it is perishable or he doesn't. If he does know it, his condition is unhappy because it rests on blind ignorance. If he knows his happiness is perishable, he must live in fear of losing what he knows can be easily lost. And such constant fears will not let him be happy. So that does not sound like a mature stoic. Who does enjoy when good fate comes, but can release, can say, this is not the end. All the be all. I had a nice family. They've all been killed. I can somehow get past it by not putting my entire self into that. That's not what this passage actually says.

48:36 Wes: Wait, what part of the page is it on?

48:37 Dylan: It's the bottom of page 29, the one we were on. You and I both quoted from.

48:42 Mark: The man who enjoys his fleeting happiness cannot actually be happy because he's in fear of losing what he knows can easily be lost. Which actually, I do see something true about that, in that I've been complaining a lot to my wife about dreams that I keep having of my pets getting killed in various ways or I just had a dream of my wife. Like I just want a little extra space. So even though I'm not moving out of here, I'm going to take my own apartment just so I can keep it clean, like so. I do have these underlying fears expressed in my dreams that my happy situation is going to be busted up.

Does that on the whole make me unable to achieve. I guess it points out, yes, you're right, Boethius. What I'm experiencing now is not perfect happiness because it is marred by this fear, by this bitterness. But I don't see any alternative. I don't see turning to things above, in contrast to my family life, as a viable alternative, or retreating into myself in a radical way and making myself immune to that sort of worry.

49:44 Wes: All he's saying here is that happiness can't be founded on our fortunes because we know that fortune is fickle and if we're aware of that, it taints our happiness. And yes, so it's a very high standard for what it means to be happy. But these are the sorts of standards that people hold, right? As unrealistic as it can be. The idea is that if you. For this very, very high standard of what it means to be happy. And again, the Stoics, they know there are preferable non preferable things and they know there are better and worse situations that you can be in and that we ought to try and be in the better ones.

But from a very strict standpoint, it's just a restatement of the Aristotelian idea that real happiness is about activity in accordance with virtue. Although Aristotle thought fortune had something to do with it as well. But that's where the Stoics depart. So the Stoics want to sever this entirely from fortune and say that happiness is strictly a matter of virtue, strictly a matter of the comportment of one's own mind, strictly a matter of the health of the person, if you want to put it that way. Whatever one's objections, it's the grain of truth that's important to me, not whether it's not entirely true.

50:57 Mark: Well, I find some of the things that are not true to be interesting.

51:01 Dylan: And I appreciate finding the grain of truth that connects up with, with other things that make sense and grow out of it. But it's also a different thing to say that that's Boethius speaking. It may be that there's some grain of truth in what Boethius is saying. But there's also plenty of other stuff that isn't going in that direction and may in fact, undermine that grain of truth in the whole for this book. Right. I mean, that could be true. I mean, that might not be true. It might be utterly consistent. It's not the case that pulling out that grain of truth of what Boethius is saying is what Boethius is saying.

51:36 Mark: Let me read another sentence. This is very close after that. This is on the top of page 30. So he's just talked about, you know, if you were to lose these things, like your family, whatever, if he should lose it, would he regard that as a trivial matter? Whatever can be given up without regret is indeed a thing of little worth. Now, you are a man fully convinced by many proofs that human souls are in no way mortal. It is clear then, that if transitory happiness ends with the death of the body, and if this means an end to all happiness, the whole human race would be plunged into misery by death.

But if we know that many men have sought the enjoyment of happiness, not only in death, but also in the sorrows and pains of life, how can this present life make us happy when its end cannot make us unhappy? Of course, he's jumping right there into explicit Christianity, into the afterlife in a way that, you know, maybe we can't.

52:23 Wes: What are you talking about, dude? The afterlife is a huge part of Plato as well. This is Platonic.

52:30 Mark: Well, if you were to hear somebody saying this now, it would sound religious to you. You do not say, oh, that sounds so Platonic. Like, I'm not trying to give a historical basis. I'm trying to say this is weird in a way that is not obviously Stoic. Let's compare this a little to what. Because I was thinking about what Plato does have to say in the Crito and the Phaedo and stuff. This first sentence there, whatever can be given up without regret is indeed a thing of little worth. Now, the way I interpret a good Stoicism, you know, a seize the day kind of Stoicism, a healthy kind of stoicism that Massimo argued for, is that you do enjoy when things happen, but when they are taken away, maybe, you know, you have the perspective that you can step back and not regret.

You can say, I'm really happy that I had that relationship, for instance, that I had this wife of 30 years who then died. But I can give it up without regret. I don't say, God, I wish I had not let myself get so attached to that person. I instead, you know, take the grief as it comes and work my way

53:33 Dylan: through it, but not be laid low by it.

53:35 Mark: But according to the literal words, that was a thing of little worth. If I could give it up with no regret, it was of little worth. And in fact, all of life then seems to be of little worth because it's not the perfect. It's not compared to the perfect happiness, the thing which we all move toward, which we'll get into in book three. Everything else is really just a very pale imitation of that. And that's all the stuff that Nietzsche didn't like about Platonic or Christian religion.

54:01 Wes: Well, I can tell this is going to be a long one, the slice and dice.

54:06 Mark: Luckily, it's a short text, so it's

54:08 Seth: not going to be.

54:08 Mark: We could slice and dice almost everything,

54:10 Wes: the find the things to ridicule approach.

54:14 Mark: I mean, come on, you don't think that's interesting? I have to just be defending everything. I'm not. I don't think that was terribly unsympathetic. Seth, do you have any last words of hope, words of consolation, before we wrap up this first half and then get to book three?

54:29 Seth: No, I've been silenced by my fear of Dylan.

54:32 Dylan: I'm sorry, I don't.

54:35 Seth: And since Wes and Dylan had something good going, I had nothing additional to add there.

54:39 Mark: All right, well, let's take a little break and renew and refresh ourselves and come back with a spirit of compromise where Wes is willing to point out some of the flaws and Dylan and I are more willing to look for the grains of truth. And it'll be very consoling. This is the time for relaxing, taking a break and relaxing. Only Pel citizens get to hear this song. You are such a lucky bastards. So the funny thing, we just had this rancorous back and forth about whether he was being a good stoic or not. And some of the things that were the same problems we had with Epictetus that we then got over when we talked to Massimo about Seneca.

Whereas Dylan and I were the ones who were kind of the most down on the book. Both said that we actually didn't have a great problem with the stoicism part. Like, the stoicism part was all familiar and for the most part, predictable. And even if we don't ultimately agree with it, we're not hostile about it so much. It's these following parts that we're going to talk about. Books three through five, book three, which is mostly about teleology, and then book four and five are about the whole theodicy part. Right. The world is basically good when it looks like good things happen to bad people.

It's not really the case. You're not God, so you can't see the big picture. And that Dylan took that so far as to be describing that as supporting authoritarianism. Well, let's get into book three. Does somebody want to sum up what that was about? Seth, you have lots of notes. Why don't you sum up what book three was about?