Ep. 201: Marcus Aurelius’s Stoicism with Ryan Holiday (Part Two)

0:00 Ryan: I'm actually even surprised at the question. I realize it's a little morbid, but of course it's helpful. First off, because the vast majority of people are so incredibly uncomfortable and afraid of that thought, which is a real thing that happens on a regular basis. Right. People die. They don't wake up. It happens. But people are uncomfortable and afraid of that thought, so they actively don't think about it, or they actively tell themselves it won't happen to them. And then they are completely caught off guard when it does happen. So they're wrecked emotionally. They live in a fantasy world world. And the problem with living in a fantasy world is you take your fantasy for granted. So people, look, I tuck my son in at night instead of, say, having a nanny tuck my son at night, because life is unpredictable, because who knows what's going to happen? I want to experience life.

0:52 Wes: It's also because it can change your comportment towards the child. Right. It can change your whole relationship. If you want to live in a sort of denial and imagine that they are not susceptible to harm, that they are essentially immortal, you're going to relate to them in a different way than you are if you keep in mind the possibility of loss. So, for example, take someone who's a helicopter parent, or take someone who's overbearing or over intrusive with their child or wants to control them. It's possible that some of that is related to the anxiety of losing them.

This is one of the prime Ways in which people fuck up their children is their anxiety of separation means they don't let the child separate and their enormous developmental consequences to that. So anything you can do to quell the anxiety of possible separation will change your relationship to your child. I think in a good way.

1:45 Seth: Before I say anything, let me just set Ryan at ease and let him know that this is not personal. And my issues with stoicism are long and deep and well documented and have nothing to do with him or any of the fine books that he's authored. But this example of the child. So I have a 7 month old and I'm a 50 year old first time parent. So when you talk about putting the baby to sleep and worrying about whether in the morning they'll wake up, oh my God, are there too many loose sheets around that they could turn and smother themselves with? I mean, every trauma and panic, especially when you've taken seven years trying to get a child, believe me, the trauma is real.

But as a 50 year old parent, I could have that experience every time I come to the stairwell trying to carry the child up or down the stairs, that I might trip and kill both of us, not just her, but both of us. It puts me in mind of possible world semantics, right? Like one of the things that I always used to have an issue with, they'd be like, imagine a world where X was different. And I would always say like, well, imagine a world where everything was the same, except that this one blade of grass in my front yard was a degree to the right. Okay, now there's another possible world where everything is identical, except that that same blade of grass is only 2 degrees to the right.

And then you get into this thing where there's this perpetuation of possibilities which is traumatizing, it's paralyzing. And to me, the appropriate response to the possibility of loss is not. Well, there's a million things that could go wrong that will make my day tomorrow tragic and unhappy. And so I've just better gird myself to the possibility. The appropriate response or a more productive response is to say, everything could go to shit tomorrow. So let me be grateful for what I've already experienced and what I have today. And I believe that gratitude is a much more productive response to the possibility of tragedy and loss than detachment.

3:36 Wes: Aren't those two things compatible, though? There is a lot about gratitude in

3:40 Ryan: our reading tonight, I think that is the interesting part. Marcus Aurelius, of all the Stoics, probably speaks about gratitude most. I think the beauty and the elegance of Stoicism is the way that each possible extreme interpretation, like, hey, isn't it morbid or dark or traumatizing to think about loss in this way is balanced out by Marcus Aurelius also telling himself not to think about everything that could possibly happen and to winnow his thoughts and to be in control and not to be crippled by anxiety or worry or fear. And so I just think these things are a bit more practical than perhaps we're used to in philosophy, and that's why we over interpret them.

I don't think he's saying, look, every time you go up and down the stairs, think about how terribly wrong this could go. I think that's probably going to have the effect of making it more likely that you fall down the stairs. He's saying, look, once a day, perhaps at this particularly poignant time in the evening, you take a second and you drink this all in and you're grateful for it and you appreciate it and you don't let it escape you how ephemeral life can be. I think that's what you do. Not to change the subject, I think there's two interesting connections to real world stoicism in this discussion we're having.

So one, in the Emily Wilson biography of Seneca, she speculates that because he speaks about a child, a young child, that one point, and then he never speaks about it again, she speculates over whether Seneca himself lost a child. He didn't have any heirs, but he may have lost a child. And then the interesting part is that Marcus Aurelius specifically, not to be too morbid, but the world probably would have been a better place had Commodus gone to bed one night and not woken up like most of his siblings in some way. What's so interesting is there's this sort of darkness to what Marcus Aurelius is talking about.

Was he too uncaring? And then he ends up blinded by his fatherly love for his child, and he's incapable of seeing that his son is probably a sociopath or a psychopath and can't take the agency that he had in the situation and choose a different heir. History suffers for it. That's the other interesting thing about Stoicism, is that there is always a divergence between the theory and the practice with these very human people who are talking about it.

5:54 Wes: And if listeners don't know what we're talking about, they should watch Gladiator, which is surprisingly realistic.

5:59 Ryan: Commodus is killed in real life by a gladiator.

6:02 Mark: Marcus does talk a lot about gratitude. But I think the way he talks about it is not in the way that we would be glad that the good thing happened, because ultimately, Marcus needs to deny that tragedy exists. And this is very similar to the Boethius that we read, the Consolation of Philosophy very centrally focused on the problem of evil and denying that ultimately evil exists. We've seen this in Augustine and many other philosophers. So that for Marcus, you need to feel gratitude, not just that things are going well for you. It's when anything happens to you, the moral goal is that you feel gratitude for it happening, that you want to put yourself in line with nature, which means in line with what actually does happen.

And the way that you put that, Ryan, is the obstacle is the way, right, that no matter what bad thing happens to you, you can pivot, you can treat it as a formative. So you're not going to be happy with the tragedy happening at the time, but maybe a year later, you look back and you know, I'm a better person for this. It helped form my character. You can spin it in some positive way.

7:10 Dylan: It's hard to stomach the idea that in every situation of misfortune, you're going to come to the conclusion, I'm better for having had this happen. I can imagine that you could come away better in spite of it, but I can guarantee you I can come up with a situation in which you're just not going to say that that was good for you.

7:27 Mark: Am I wrong? It seems like Marcus is insisting, though, that at least the goal is you should have gratitude for that terrible thing that happened, just like you should have gratitude for everything else.

7:36 Ryan: No, Marcus says, convince yourself that everything is a gift of the gods, that things are good and always will be. And then I like he says, let us accept it as we accept what the doctor prescribes. It may not always be pleasant, but we embrace it because we want to get well. So I think he saw gratitude exactly as you're saying, which is that it's gratitude because you are almost insolently refusing to accept that you've been punished or that things have gone poorly. So if we were trying to connect these, he almost is grateful in spite of how negative things are. I think there's a certain amount of strength and dignity in that.

8:11 Dylan: Yeah, I can see the strength and dignity in it. I think that there's also, in the end, criticism. It's just such a deep denial of the ways in which we're dependent in our physical being and in our lives on things, and that that misfortune can be genuine misfortune. And getting beyond that doesn't necessarily require that you understand that that was good for you.

8:33 Mark: I wanted to actually read a quote from Ryan from his book. The thing about the doctor is chapter 5, verse 8 in the Meditations. Imagine that whatever it is that happened to you that seems bad was something prescribed in order to aid someone's healing. So Ryan says it's part of his interpretation here. On the other hand, when it comes to external events, we fight like hell if anything happens contrary to our plans. But what if, Marcus asks, a doctor had prescribed this exact thing as part of our treatment? What if this was as good for us as medicine?

Well, what if it's one of the few places in the book where you actually just pose it as a question for thought, Whereas most of the time you're like, you can handle this. It's not a question. It's an uplifting, motivating thing. It's just like, well, you might want to consider this. Even if Marcus is saying this, you're not claiming the tragedy is actually good for you, but maybe it wouldn't help. Help for you to try to think of it this way.

9:22 Ryan: One of the exercises I try to do in my own life is I try to think about everything bad that's happened to me. Things that went to shit, relationships that fell apart, big mistakes that I made, things that I was very upset about at the time, that I thought were terrible, that I thought were unfair. I try to think about how intensely I felt about those things then. And then I try to think about how I think about them now. I also try to think about, if I was given a choice, would I undo them, knowing that it would have changed the direction of my life in some way.

And it's amazing how at peace we are with things, with the passage of time. And I think what Marcus is talking about and the idea in stoicism there is, if inevitably you're going to be okay with this, or you might even have come to see it as a positive in a year's time or 10 years time or a half a lifetime later, why not give yourself that gift now? If you're eventually going to pay off the house, why not feel like you own it now?

10:18 Dylan: I really think that there's something very powerful about that. The thing that I come back to is that I guarantee you that it can be way, way worse than all of the examples that you gave. There are really, really awful things that people have suffered through and done or had done to them that are Way, way worse than any breakup that you had. This is where it just falls apart, where you can make your peace with the past and you can move Bey. But to make the step to say I am better for having gone through that, I think it's just actually not true. I think that people's souls and psyche get wounded, that they never repair from that they get beyond, but they're transformed in a way that they are not the full flourishing self they would have been without it. They are genuinely stunted, genuinely wounded and harmed.

11:10 Mark: This is what I'm worried about with self help approaches is that you tell yourself, yes, I'm a better person for it. And in fact that denial of what's really going on doesn't make you better. That there's something more subtle about the psyche than just telling yourself something over and over and over again.

11:27 Ryan: I'm very sensitive to that. You know, I mean, one of the reasons I wrote it the way that I did in the book is that I'm aware of the fact that my existence has been rather privileged, that the traumas that I've gone through in my own life probably pale in comparison to not only the traumas of other people, but just who knows how many narrow misses that I'm not even aware of. Butterfly effects of how much worse things could have been in a given scenario. So I, I think about it as mostly as a thought exercise that still is worth exploring. I mean, one of the most powerful parts of Man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl and why these books, whether it's about the Holocaust or about terrible traumas or things that people have survived, is that you see people having to wrestle with that idea, not just theoretically, but practically.

And Viktor Frankl is there talking about how do you find meaning in the worst thing that maybe ever happened? He's trying to test his idea there. I don't think the Stoics would say that it was good that a terrible thing happened per se. And so perhaps our interpretation of the word gratitude is again to flip. And I think they would be sensitive to that. I think what they are saying is that transformation that you talked about, probably the right word for it, that we are transformed by the things that happen to us and the experiences that we have and that all we can do as humans is try to find meaning in that and to not be made bitter by that and to not be ruined by it.

So if we can just blunt the blows of fortune ever so slightly, then the philosophy has been worthwhile and made us better. And I think that's what it is.

13:00 Wes: This really is a very crucial, fascinating question. And by the way, Marcus Aurelius does, at 5:15, say we are actually better off for external misfortunes. We're better off by being deprived of those things that we fear losing. And that's in line with the Stoic idea that there are no external goods. All that really matters is whether I can act the right way, whether I can be virtuous, whether I am virtuous. And in lots of different places, he basically says, nothing that happens outside of me can prevent me from doing that. Nothing can prevent me from living as nature requires. But what you guys have raised is the question of trauma, which is, well, there are things externally that can happen to us that do undermine our ability to live virtuous lives. And that virtue ethics sense.

13:47 Dylan: It's a sense of excellence.

13:48 Wes: Yeah. But even a psychoanalyst might speak of the same thing in terms of just health, psychological health, and maturity, and things like that, like a trauma might undermine that and therefore prevent us from being happy. So that's a real problem for the

14:00 Dylan: Stoic, I think the interpretation that you present, Ryan, I think, is a way out. But at least in Aurelius, and I think it's an Epictetus, too, this notion that the universe has a place in single harmony. So if I look in book five, section eight, he's speaking about the events in our lives. We say that these things fit us. We're talking like the Masons when they say that squared blocks fit in walls or pyramids because they fit with one another in a particular structural arrangement. Now, there is a single harmony that embraces all things. And just as all bodies combine together to make up the single great body, the universe, so likewise, all individual causes combine together to make up one single great cause known as destiny.

And then in the same section, nothing happens to anyone that he is not fitted by nature to bear. And in 19, things as such have not the slightest hold on our soul, nor do they have access to the soul, nor can they alter it or move it. But the soul alone alters and moves itself. I think there are ways to revise it. But the picture of the universe and what our fates are and that.

15:08 Ryan: But what do you think the alternative is? Right, what's the alternative?

15:11 Dylan: I'm willing to go with you on the alternative, but I'm saying that this is what the Stoics say. This is their point of view.

15:16 Ryan: Right, but what I mean is. So when Marcus says, look, we're blocks fitted for this larger thing that happens. And everything that happens, we're sort of made for. I guess my question is, what's the alternative interpretation, not of the Stoics, but of reality? What's a better explanation for how life works?

15:35 Dylan: Well, we're all individual actors in a context of constraint. So not that we all fit in exactly in our place where we are doing and bound to do that thing. So some of us are emperors, some of us are slaves, Some of us are raped. Some of us have a million dollars. That's what that picture is, right? That picture is of a radically deterministic physical universe in which each part, each atom, is in its own place, bound to where it is. And each thing suffers that thing for which it is in its location. For that is far from the only interpretation of the roles of actors and individuals in context in the universe.

16:13 Ryan: I'm referring more to the traumas, the events of what happens in life, the things that happen to us. In some sense, he's talking about our hierarchical roles of society. But when he says, you were made for whatever happens for you, I think he's also referring to the idea of your brother being murdered or your fortune being stolen by Bernie Madoff or your prospects of being a major league pitcher being cruelly taken from you by a freak injury. What other interpretation do we have of life that moves us forward, that allows us to cope and survive and thrive on this planet? Other than saying, I can survive this. I was made for this. I have no choice. I'm gonna make this positive.

16:49 Dylan: And all I'm saying is I think that that works in a lot of situations. But I think not admitting the fact that people can undergo irreparable harm, that you are not able to go to become the flourishing person. There are equivalent harms to your soul that are equivalent to getting a brain injury and becoming a vegetable.

17:09 Ryan: I don't know if I agree with that, but I do get what you're saying, and I'm not trying to be flip about it. And I would never dismiss someone's interpretation saying that as the individual.

17:18 Dylan: I think you need to meet some more people who've been traumatized. I mean, genuinely traumatized.

17:23 Mark: Ryan keeps saying, as an individual, or what will push me forward. I think I want to really distinguish between the first person therapeutic benefit of thinking a certain thing and the cosmological picture. And I really do want to emphasize this is kind of what I was getting at the beginning, is that for Marcus, and I think for Epictetus, too, there really is no distinction between those. That this is, is the Big disconnect I see between modern therapeutic stoicism, which can be evaluated on its own merits. And maybe, as Wes was saying, maybe you could still fool yourself.

It could still be the problems with all self help kind of things we've been talking about, but also just that is separable from the underlying metaphysical issues. And the metaphysical issues. He is a theist. He is like Boethius. He believes there is a grand plan, that stuff that appears to be chance to us is in fact not chance. So the alternative to that cosmological picture, you could admit that we all come from the same source or that there's a teleology driving each of us. But as Darwin, the whole Darwinian picture is that the teleology of one group and the teleology of another group or one individual.

This is like the big evolution in virtue ethics. When you get to Nietzsche, it's not the case that being a wonderful human being is the same as being a wonderful citizen. It's not the case that what is bad for the hive is always bad for the bee. Or the way that Marcus puts it, like, once you get rid of the theological underpinning, then, well, Ryan, you have a way. You bring this up in a couple places in your book where like, you don't have to believe in God, but you can still get the therapeutic benefit of this. And you talk about it in terms of the 12 step program.

One of the steps is there's a higher power. And you might say, well, I'm an atheist, I don't believe in higher power, so I can't get the benefit of this. But actually, no, you still just have to believe I'm not with my will, capable of handling this problem myself. I need some sort of assistance. That doesn't mean there's a grand plan. That doesn't mean there's a God. That doesn't mean anything. So it seems like as a practical benefit, just like as you're saying, Ryan, when you're faced by something like this, it's probably better. Again, I'm still willing to debate this, but it's probably better that you do your best to bounce back from it and you don't just say, I've been irreparably harmed.

19:30 Seth: Right.

19:31 Mark: But at the same time, Marcus gives you this picture, like, why you should not be judgy about other people. Like, even if they're just rude, there's a whole causal story of what's going on with them that you don't know about. And so I think you could deal with other people and acknowledge their trauma and not just say, hey, come on, use your freedom of choice and get over yourself. There's no room in stoicism for that kind of sanctimonious, moralistic, thou shalt bullshit based on a stoic virtue ethic.

20:00 Ryan: That's completely right and totally my position. What the stoic would say is, of course there's irreparable harm and irreparable trau for everyone else. But for me, I'm going to, as an individual, that being the only thing that I'm going to control. I'm going to decide that whatever I just went through is not irreparable and there's some way that I can move forward because of it. And Marcus talks so much about being forgiving to other people, being accepting. I have the quote in the book and I forget who it's from, but the idea of one of the best ways to be at peace with the world is to pretend that nobody else has free will if you except for yourself.

So everyone else is being driven unfairly by forces or experiences or traumas that they've gone through, and that's why they're acting the way that they are. But in your specific case, you have to hold yourself to a higher standard. And so I hope it doesn't come across that I'm being flip about other people's experiences. It's on the contrary.

20:51 Dylan: No, no, not at all, Ryan. I guess the way the argument I think works is that at any point you are where you are. And so what's going to happen is that your context and your experience and the things that happen to in your life are going to affect the various modes of flourishing that you have available to you. And what I'm trying to formulate is that some kinds of constraints that people have enliven or transform their flourishing in ways that are not very different from the way they would be most flourishing in general. But there are other contexts and constraints and traumas and things that happen in people's lives that transform the mode of their flourishing.

So it is frankly, significantly less flourishing than it would have been otherwise. It's not that they can't move on to some kind of flourishing from where they are, but the fact is, is that they have been transformed away from the flourishing that they would have been capable of without that context and those things happening to them. And that's the difference.

21:58 Ryan: I totally agree. I think there's the emotional equivalent of having your arm cut off or being paralyzed. There are experiences in PTSD and experiences that we recognize now just weren't acknowledged 2,000 years ago. I would hope that if a Stoic was alive today, this understanding would be updated, but I'm not sure it's in conflict with the idea. Maybe a Stoic would say something like, you don't get to choose your type of flourishing. You just try to flourish the best you can given your circumstances. And you might accept the fact that in some cases it's profoundly limited.

But I think, Mark, your point is an interesting one. And maybe it's worth talking about. The idea of is just being a good person, which is what sort of Marcus seems to hold over and over again, the best way to serve the common good, which he also talks about over and over again. And I think we talked about Commodus a little bit. Marcus clearly felt he had some duty, some obligation, but he did not have the agency to say, my son is not qualified to be the Emperor of Rome. And although it worked with his personal philosophy, it jived with his personal sense of duty.

He made a decision that irreparably harmed many, many citizens of the country that he claimed to serve. And was that the right thing to do or not? I think that's a clear failing in Stoicism, or that's a problem that has to be navigated. Doing the right thing for you is not always the right thing for the common good.

23:18 Seth: It's funny, we're all calling him Marcus like we're on first name cases.

23:22 Ryan: He has the most normal name of all the ancients.

23:24 Seth: I think there's a sense in which you recognize that you're a rational being and a special kind of rational being, a rational being that has a connection to the logos, that if you're doing all the things you should be doing, as far as what the Stoics are asking for, you will connect to the idea that you have a relationship with other rational beings, and you'll make decisions that are in accordance with the Logos and that the Logos is something which binds us all together. The Logos is discoverable by reason. Reason. And you have reason. And a big part of his project is to again shift people from the emotional, the appetitive, the passions, to focus on reason, which will allow you to grasp the Logos, which is this underlying structure.

It's through reason that you'll be able to connect with that and understand others that act out of ignorance. Right. Which is the ancient way, the Hellenistic and the Greek way, of saying ignorance of the truth or ignorance of the good or what have you, as opposed to a Buddhistic or modern psychological way of saying desire right or suffering, but it also allows you to make a connection so that you can share and be empathetic.

24:38 Ryan: There is a tension in Stoicism that I struggle with, that I think about a lot. Obviously, Marcus uses the idea of the cosmopolitan, that he's a citizen of the world. He also wages war against the Germans. The barbarians, as they call them, is somewhat flippant about death and killing, as if war is this thing that he is simply obligated to do. Seneca to me is the most interesting of the Stoics in this way, in that he has all these high minded ideals. He talks about them, he talks about one's obligations to the state. And yet he was the Stoic who conspired with Nero instead of against Nero.

James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, supposedly carries Marcus Aurelius with him everywhere he goes. He has this idea that the Secretary of Defense doesn't choose the president that he serves and that his obligation is to the idea of the institution or the profession, not the larger political concern. But the result of that, however dignified and courageous it is, in some sense it's also complicit in a horrific thing. Horrific is probably too strong, but it's complicit in something that I think is philosophically unjustifiable. And so that's the tension of Stoicism.

There is this element of resignation to it, individual courage that can sometimes come at the expense of doing the right thing at a larger level. And I'm just fascinated by, by that.

25:57 Mark: I would categorize the make your own Stoicism. The modern. Ryan recommended Stoicism as sort of an existentialist Stoicism, just in terms of the updated view of teleology, that for Marcus, there really is something that nature intends you to do. Whereas it's very explicit that, yes, that you should be single minded about your task, but you choose your task. There is nothing that nature perhaps intends you to do. You might figure out it's not just a free choice, you could just choose anything. You kind of have to understand your own nature. There's a quote from Epictetus that says different people have different natures.

You shouldn't expect the same thing out of all of them. I tend to think that might be more like the determinism that we've been talking about, that, yeah, someone who has a lot of vices, you should just expect that from them. But it's not a matter of as a first person thing, you have to go on a voyage of self discovery. No, there really is. Your duty is more or less just given to you. It's simple. It's simple to know the truth and to know what you're supposed to do do. Maybe not in every single circumstances, but in general, virtue is basically the same for every human being.

And so we all have pretty similar psychology. So it's a matter of buckling down and devoting yourself to virtue. Whereas I'm more sympathetic to the idea that this tension between being a good citizen and being a good person, the kind of thing that Nietzsche points out to is somebody like Mozart or something, you would say this is an admirable person, but it's probably not a good rule.

27:19 Ryan: I don't know how much I'm updating it because I think your point is totally true. But I think even the Stoics 2000 years ago wrestle with this. Seneca himself is clearly torn about what he should do or not do. He waffles Seneca does not serve Nero and then is executed by Nero with a sort of single minded sense that of course that was what I had to do, I had no choice. He writes about it both ways. He performs his suicide in this sort of dramatic gesture of defiance, even in his own time. There were other Stoics who were clear that that was the wrong thing and they attempted to criticize him, they attempted to convince him otherwise.

They did conspire against Nero, he was ultimately implicated in that. And then Marcus never mentions Seneca, somewhat conspicuously does not mention Seneca. And I've got to take that as an indictment of his choice over what role he had in the world. His individual interests versus obligation to the larger interests of his country. And Seneca also talks about we have obligations to ourselves, we have obligations to our family, we have obligations to our country, and then we have obligations to all of mankind. It's hard to argue that Seneca served all of those interests properly or that there wasn't complicated moral choices about how to serve each one.

28:36 Mark: But is it just a matter of our epistemological ignorance, our position that we don't know the grand plan, so we don't really know what we're supposed to do, as opposed to Nietzsche's idea that to flourish and to be of most service to your fellow man are probably not the same thing. Thing we probably want to go with Aristotle and Marcus following him, that we are social creatures, but that doesn't mean that every single thing you should do should be of the maximal service to other people. Like that sounds like you're neglecting, as you just put it, the duties you have to yourself?

29:06 Ryan: Yes, I think it's a tension. I don't have a clear pat answer, but I think it's interesting to me that we spend a lot of time debating, you know, where the Stoics, depressing or not, or these mundane issues and then the larger issues like we're talking about here. To me, these are the most vexing and fascinating and not just morally fraught, but have the most impact on the world around us. Do you have an obligation to advance your own career, or is your obligation to society at large, Is it just serving your family? Should you work for Big Tobacco? Should you protest Big Tobacco? That, to me, are the kinds of stoic questions that I think we could use more. Wrestling with the person who writes the New York Times op ed about being a resistance member inside the president's cap. To me, that's the real world that Stoicism was built for.

29:51 Seth: So this is one of those. Where you had me at. Should we. I agree. And it's one of the things that's the virtue of Stoicism, the Nussbaum thing. Was that just a side note for us?

30:04 Dylan: That was a side note for us, Ryan. One of the books that you pointed out at the back of your daily Stoic was Therapy of Desire by Martha Nussbaum, which I got very enthusiastic about. Even though she doesn't talk about Aurelius at all.

30:18 Seth: No, but she's such an amazing writer. Anyway, I didn't read the book. I read the last chapter. But she highlights a number of things. She's talking about the skeptics, the Epicureans and the Stoics, all of them, their willingness to grapple with real human experience, with real human problems. It's not an abstract or theoretical exercise with them because it's pedagogic. That one of the things that differentiates Marcus Aurelius, the idea that these were all schools, there was a pedagogic aspect to all of them where they were trying to reform and change the behavior.

And so their engagement was around the particular, not the abstract, not the theoretical. It's not Platonic or Aristotelian, more Platonic, maybe, about abstract concepts of good or justice or whatever. It's very specific, concrete. Marcus, this text is just rife with references to specific people and specific circumstances. And it's this idea that there are principles, but the principles are empty without their practical application. And to the extent that, as you mentioned, Ryan, that you have to actually grapple with real world questions and make a decision about, do I go to work for this person or don't I?

Do I stand up? Do I go out and protest? Or do. There's a virtue in that. The thing that I find challenging. And I don't know if this is just our modern reflection on the Stoics, but just reflecting on the conversation we've had so far and every other conversation I've ever had about Stoicism in any context, whether it's on this podcast or not, it's always about how do we deal with the trauma. It's this sense of like, life is going to throw you a shit curveball or a shit sandwich. Like, how are you going to deal with. Deal with it? And then we're like, okay, well, is this really just a coping strategy around X, or is it a psychological stance where we're trying to, like, inure ourselves to the slings and arrows of misfortune?

And that's the part I'm like, where's the positive building? Where's the. I'm not reacting to the negative in my experience, but I'm actively seeking to create. That's the thing that I struggle with frequently, constantly, the dealing with Stoic philosophy.

32:34 Ryan: I think that's a great point. And what I love about the philosophy is that as much as it can feel a bit depressive or reactive, the truth was we can see the actions, we can see the monuments that these people left behind. Cato dies trying to keep the Roman Republic together. Obviously, Seneca loses his life in making the wrong and then the right and then the wrong decisions. With Nero, Marcus Aurelius tries to do the right thing as emperor, succeeds in some ways, fails in others. The founding fathers of America are very much inspired by Stoic philosophy.

In a lot of ways, it sort of gets them through the American Revolution. Some of its ideas, I think, are at the very core of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Just the idea that this is ultimately a philosophy for people who do things. On the one hand, we're all the same in that we have children or we get married or things go well, or we face misfortunes, fortune. It's a philosophy for the personal, but it's also a philosophy for the professional in the sense that we have talents and duties and things we're trying to do in this world, and I think, ideally, trying to make it a better place.

Stoic philosophy, or at least the example of the Stoic philosophers, is there as a sort of form of guidance for how to make those decisions. And to me, that's the most interesting part. And it's what I Try to write about quite often a bit. I'm not sure the Stoics always got it right. An uncharitable interpretation is that they have a rather disappointing record in some ways. I tend to focus more on the successes that they had.

34:08 Mark: I was trying to think about this in connection with the little Chinese philosophy that we've read. It's a common cocktail for Chinese to be Confucian in public life and Taoist in private life. And both of those things have connections, have parallels to what we see in Stoics. Stoicism, the emphasis on always being oriented toward the right, which is in line with what society demands from you, is very much what we were just seeing out of Marcus Aurelius. That's very Confucian. The idea that's really. In both Confucianism they put forth the sage.

Actually, both Confucianism and in Taoism, like Stoicism, have the idea of, you know, if you could actually really accord with all these rules or be somehow enlightened, be really in touch with the truth, truth, then actually it would be the easiest thing. You wouldn't even have to think about it. You wouldn't be constantly self correcting. That is what Marcus talks about like, oh, it's just easy to be in line with your nature. But of course then at other times it's obviously not easy to be in line with your nature. Because he's thinking optimistically, if I were to attain this, then I would slide, you know, I'd be able to flow like the river.

Right now I'm having to exert my indomitable iron will or try to cultivate such a will, will, because it's not so easy to float along. But one of the things in Daoism, which I thought I saw in more in Epictetus and his admiration for the Cynics, their simplicity, and even in Seneca, is to avoid too much ambition, is that these are the false idols of the society. You talk a lot in your book about riches and fame and like that's not ultimately going to make you happy. And Daoism explicitly takes that on and says, do less and less every day until you're doing nothing at all.

35:45 Ryan: All.

35:45 Mark: There's a verse in here where he considers somebody else saying something like that. I think it's from Democritus or I forget what it was. You know, you should simplify things maybe don't get involved in quite so many things. I tend to think that that advice is very much more in line with the Stoic sense of peace. It would be a very rare individual that could try to conquer the world as a corporate CEO or become president of the United States or something and still retain peace of mind. There's too much striving. You need to really completely put your heart into it in a way that is ultimately destructive to the human being to pursue those kinds of ambitions. You seem to be pitching this so that there's an openness, so that, well, okay, maybe that's true for some people, but for some other people, ambition is totally compatible with stoicism.

36:33 Ryan: Maybe I'm trying to have my cake and eat it too, a little bit. I think about it in my own life. It's like I have the ambition. It's a part of me, me. You want to use it productively, and then also you want to tamp down on the ambition as much as possible as well. I think someone like Marcus is certainly an example of that. He's emperor. He didn't say no to being the emperor. He didn't give it over to his brother. He has clearly the ambition to be a good emperor. He has the ambition to not let the country fail on his watch. And then at the same time, he's also talking to himself in a somewhat Taoist way, saying, look, nobody's going to remember you think of the most famous emperors that have ever lived, how unfamiliar their names are to us.

Even a generation or so later, you'll be dead. Even if you are appreciated, so what will it matter? So again, I think it's the tension of, sometimes you need the ambition, you need the cause. He's telling yourself, turn your obstacles into fuel. If it's humanly possible, you can do it. Do what you can for the common good. And then he's also telling himself, don't try to change the world. You can't change the world. You're just one person. You will be forgotten. It's a yin and Yang kind of approach. Sometimes we need to hear one, sometimes we need to hear the other.

And clearly, Marcus is an example of that, because if he's not, he's just hopelessly contradicting himself from one page to another. In the book, I don't think that's what it is. I think it's. In some situations he needed one, and in other situations he needed to be reminded of the other.

37:59 Mark: And the world doesn't fundamentally change. Not only can you not change the world, but same shit, you know, same as it ever was. Why you shouldn't be so worried that you're not going to live another 10, 1530 years. Well, because it's just going to be more the same. You've pretty much seen it all.

38:14 Ryan: Yes, yes. It's paradoxically a philosophy of profound empowerment and profound resignation. And I don't think that's a contradiction. I think in the Whitman sense. Who is a fan of Epictetus? You know, we're complicated. We contain multitudes. That's why it works as a set of meditation. You know, Marcus didn't go, here is Stoic philosophy. Let me give it to you. From start to finish, he said, here are a bunch of thoughts influenced by Stoic philosophy. They're not even for you. They're for my private use. We have them, and we've been trying to make sense of them ever since.

38:51 Wes: He did tweet some of these, though.

38:53 Ryan: I think they are perfectly tweetable, as I can tell you.

38:56 Seth: Oh, God. Yeah. This is a tweet factory.

39:01 Ryan: Tweet factory.

39:03 Mark: So I have another sort of practical question. I think there still are questions about if you lose the theism, say, is there some incoherence introduced? And that's something that people, modern Stoics, are working out. As a practical matter, I don't know that I have that much more to say about that. But in terms of it working on its own merits, mentioned the sage. Marcus doesn't hammer that too much, but he definitely does. Like, in chapter three, he kind of goes on and on about what the perfect person would be like. Maybe he doesn't use the word perfect person or sage, but definitely that very demanding ethic that I was outlining at first.

You know, to always be on the ball, to always be doing everything in accordance with what is socially desirable. So it's setting up. Hadot, I think, describes it as a transcendent norm. In other words, everybody fails this. We're all imperfect. But they think that having this model of goodness out there is psychologically helpful. I see this in your book. So I was looking at the Obstacle is the Way, and you talk about Ulysses S. Grant. He's having a photo taken of him, and suddenly, like, you know, one of the big lights, like, smashes down right next to him, and he's just not even perturbed.

He doesn't even, like, look. It's supposed to give me a model of, like, what actually being unperturbable is. I think, on balance, it's probably negative as far as I'm concerned. This is maybe a question for Wes or for everybody that just has an idea about psychology, but having impossible ideals to follow seems to me a Recipe for self flagellation. For the kind of thing that we were commenting in the beginning that see in Marcus that it seems like he's hectoring himself. It's kind of maybe more stressful than it's worth. Again, this is another one of those kind of things.

You can just say, well, sometimes you need a model. Sometimes you need to just be told, oh, just be you, or something like. And it just depends on the individual. And do we have to be that wishy washy in an answer? Ryan, you clearly think that having the models is a good idea.

40:55 Ryan: I don't see how having the models is negative. You know, Seneca talks about how you need a ruler to make yourself straight, to measure yourself against, to make yourself straight. I don't think there's anything in Stoicism that says you should whip yourself for not falling short of these models. You know, to me, Stoicism is also, as a philosophy, has this sort of rich history of storytelling and that the stories are how we remember the ideals or how we embody the ideals. Who knows why Ulysses S. Grant didn't jump when the glass fell around him?

I would imagine it's partly because he was drunk. I imagine it's because he is so used to the horrors of war that there was probably a deadening inside of him that allowed him to do that. I'm not sure it's totally positive that he was able to do that personally. But the image of, okay, I'm not going to be perturbed by this. I'm not going to freak out. I don't need to be scared by every noise and thunder and whatever that happens around me. Personally, I know that having an image like that allows me to calm myself because I am not naturally that way.

It allows me to sort of borrow someone else's strength. I think that's what it is. And I think that's very much in line with the history and the tradition of how Stoic philosophy is taught and explained. Seneca likes to use Alexander the Great as an example, both positively and negatively. So I think that's again part of the Stoic tradition of just sort of drawing on figures that leaders are familiar with, who they recognize, perhaps they respect or perhaps they loathe and using the sort of events of their life as a way to illustrate deeper ideas.

42:35 Mark: I use that example in particular because that's one that I don't know what to do with. If I'm the kind of guy that's going to jump when there's a noise, hearing that there's another guy that doesn't jump when there's a noise that's just in no way helpful. It doesn't help me be more of that kind of thing. The most likely thing it's going to do is if I'm a young and impressionable person and you tell me this story, is I'm to going to just act like that. And there's a certain, you know this, what would Jesus do? Imitate Jesus. There's a certain like, well, if you just act like it, then you kind of feel more like that.

You know, if you pretend to be something, make it to make it, that actually helps you to make that a reality. Like to some extent that's true, but mostly not. Mostly you're bullshitting yourself you're living some kind of weird thing that's ultimately foreign to yourself. If you try to imitate others that way.

43:17 Ryan: One of the examples I talk in the book is about John Glenn. You know John Glenn, and as he orbited the earth, his heart rate never goes above 100. I love that example. An image. Here's this guy doing this terrifying thing that no human has really ever done before. And he's so at peace, both from the training that he's done, from the mental discipline and physical discipline that he has over himself. When I start to get upset, when I start to freak out, when I start to feel my heart rate going up, that's something I think about. And I say to myself, not just, hey, some guy better than you didn't do this.

You should magically be better. I go, look, it's possible here for you not to be as freaked out. You can train yourself to not be this way. You can catch yourself here. You don't have to perpetuate this pattern. It's going to be okay. I think it's about a sort of a self talk. The story is not to say, oh, you've read this now, you're magically going to be better. The story is to talk to you about the importance of nerve and the importance of training and what that training allows you to do so that hopefully the reader goes off and undergoes some of that training in their own life and then is able to act accordingly in the future after the training has been done.

And I don't think anything in stoic philosophy is designed to be. You hear it once and then magically your whole life is transformed and now you're a different person. I think they're supposed to inspire you to do the training, to do the exercises, the spiritual exercises as Hadot talks about, about and that that's supposed to make you better.

44:45 Mark: Yeah. So ultimately, I guess this is getting back to that psychological question of what the exercises are. I mean, I do believe people are changeable. That if you wanted to make yourself less likely to jump at startling things, that is something that you can train yourself for. But simply telling yourself, I'm not going to jump at startling things, like no, you need more life hacking than that. I think in another interview you brought up, you were quoting somebody else, somebody saying stoicism is the ideal operating system for the human. And I find that analogy just offensive because the idea that we are basically a blank slate, that you could just reformat yourself and you would be running on this different operating system.

Whereas I feel like the organism is so complex and pretty idiosyncratic in its deep psychology that to tinker with it is really an art, you know, and just like bad teaching. I think this is a Frithjof Bergmann analogy that he talks about. When kids are growing up, it's like they're juggling plates. What are you going to do? I'm going to just shove my agenda on them. All the plates are going to go crashing to the ground. I'll give them new plates. That is exactly the wrong way. That it's a much more delicate. How can I feed them one extra plate?

I really have to understand the organism right now. And I don't see any of that in especially a very self helpy. I think this is something that Hegel's point that Nietzsche follows with, that we're very fundamentally ignorant of ourselves. So having somebody else help with that, this doing all this on your own, meditating by yourself and like improving yourself, that there might be something about the therapeutic condition. There's just something that is truly being left out of that picture. I think it's much too easy to delude yourself. And at the very least, if there's such a thing as a hack, it can't be a matter of I'm going to reformat my mind.

Like that shouldn't even be your goal. That is, I have no respect for myself. And you even say this at some points in your book. You know, you might want to go with your gut, but think about how your gut has led you in the past. No, actually the gut is a very sensitive Nietzsche. Talk about the wisdom of the body. And this is something that we should have a great deal of reverence for and to just overwrite that with stoic principles as handed down. And I should always be happy about what life deals up for me. And I should always comport my behavior to what it will socially benefit.

I just think that's a disgusting oversimplification of human psychology. And again, this is more not so much as objection to stoicism as a comment about how you might want to do stoicism.

47:12 Seth: That's fair.

47:12 Ryan: I don't love the operating system analogy for the reason you said, which is that it sounds like it's a disk that you plug in or a file that you download and you're magically transformed. I think there can be a sort of epiphany the first time you hear stoicism. To me, it's a philosophy, right? The problem is we have this aversion today to what philosophy is, or we have this misunderstanding of what it is. The idea that it's this set of beliefs that you train to understand that you're trying to sort of fuse into your DNA over a lifetime of training and meditation.

Not in the Eastern sense, but in the Western sense and discussion and exploration. And it's not something I take lightly. So I don't think the idea that you should read my book once and you will magically be better is not. It's been wonderful to hear from people that the book has changed their life in that way. But these are ideas that I wrestle with on a daily basis that I fall short of at an embarrassing level on a daily basis that I've sort of tried to dedicate my life to exploring and hopefully getting iteratively closer to. And I think nothing embodies that struggle more to me than Marcus Aurelius work, which is looking at this man who has studied this philosophy his whole life, and still he's writing at the tail end of his life, and he's continuously falling short and trying to get a little bit better every day.

To me, that's what this is about.

48:36 Mark: But there's a faith involved here, right? If I'm not able to meet the ideal, then I have fallen and short. I need to work harder. I need to meditate more and incorporate these things in my life. Not a fundamental questioning of is this actually a good idea to try to fuck up my head to accord with this external standard that's been handed down to me? This is why I just, you know, I like the idea of choose your own stoicism, of, okay, some of this stuff is useful. In fact, I like the Serenity prayer. I want to have the wisdom to see the difference between what is in my control and what is out of my control.

I like that better than stoicism. Actually telling you the answer. What's in your control is your rational decision making capability. Everything else is outside of your control. Well, no, of course, as you point out in your book, other people's opinions of you are partly in your control. Partly out of your control. I think we really need to add to that. Your own emotions are partly in your control. Partly out of your control. If you've been traumatized by something getting hold of over depression, the worst thing you can tell somebody is just stop being depressed.

Or why don't you train yourself to not be depressed? Why don't you do these little mental games to make yourself not? There might be something to that. Again, I will defer to people who are more knowledgeable about different kinds of therapy. But I think that there needs to be in the self questioning not just am I measuring up to the standard? But is the standard in its details right for me?

49:56 Ryan: Yep, I totally agree.

49:58 Seth: Sounds like it's time for closings.

50:01 Mark: Mark had a rant, he wants to start. Anybody else have a rant that they've been storing up?

50:07 Seth: I think I've given mine.

50:08 Dylan: I just wanted to close with my own sort of tension. I know I had a couple of strong things to say about it, but the thing that I like most about stoicism is the thing that maybe it's just the part that I feel like comes also from virtue ethics and the idea that there is work and training and practice to be done on yourself. And to the extent that there are things that you can control, there are a lot of them. And so if there's a lot of what we talked about tonight that was emphasizing things that we don't control and that maybe there's something in this ancient stoicism that oversteps those bounds, but there's a lot of it that rings well for me.

50:47 Ryan: I like that. And look, if someone shows me something better, I'll gladly take it. I love the idea of raiding from every school that has something that shows us how to live. And to me there's nothing in control consistent with the philosophy. And look, they're all dead. So I don't really give a shit what they think. You know what I mean?

51:03 Seth: Marcus doesn't care what you think about him anyway.

51:06 Ryan: That's exactly right.

51:07 Mark: He explicitly tells us that. That's very nice of him.

51:10 Ryan: Yeah, so that's how I rationalize any revisionism.

51:15 Mark: Any other closing west from you?

51:17 Wes: No, I just. Thanks, Ryan for coming on.

51:19 Ryan: Yeah, thanks for having me.

51:20 Wes: This was a lot of fun and maybe I'm the most sympathetic to stoicism here, I don't know ironically, but I do. Psychoanalysis is obviously something that's important to me, and I do see that as sort of a direct extension of the tradition of virtue ethics by way of Nietzsche, incidentally. And I think that what's interesting is when I read the Stoics, there's a therapeutic effect for me. It's actually quite calming, and it makes me wish I were reading it on a more regular basis or maybe trying out some sort of practice. I think there's a place for it from a matter of firsthand experience.

I don't think I do enough of to be able to say its effectiveness. The closest thing you might say to evaluations of that are evaluations of cognitive behavioral therapy. And of course, there are lots of studies out there doing that and evaluating other modalities. Those studies in and of themselves are controversial sometimes or questionable. But my intuition is that it's a very important piece of the piece puzzle.

52:21 Mark: I should say, temperamentally, I'm very much allied to stoicism. You know, as a musician, you record stuff, you screw up. I remember I was an engineer for another guy. Every time we screw up, he'd like, ah, shit. You know, I was halfway through the song and I met. And for me, like, no, the mistakes come with it. Like, that's part of the process. You just start again. You don't. You're slowing things down by making a fuss about it. And like, that's exactly the kind of stoic thing. And I feel like I do that throughout. I really like this idea of pretending that you're already dead in a way. And in fact, that's kind of a way that I dealt with some kind of severe depression, you know, in my late adolescence was, okay, well, I could kill myself, or I could just say, let's pretend I already did. So what am I going to do now? Now I've got a bonus life. Like, well, what the hell?

53:06 Wes: I'm invisible to everyone. I could do what I want.

53:11 Mark: That not being the point, but, you know, the idea of just letting the pressure fall off you, like that's what I've always needed, is that I feel, feel. You know, the thing that I've been reacting to here is like, I need to be ever conscientious. Like that, for me, is not psychologically healthy. That just makes me stressed. I need to feel like I don't have that much responsibility.

53:29 Dylan: Nothing's at stake.

53:30 Mark: I could actually function, you know, effectively. Yes. So assuming that I'm already going to fail at this, you know, this sort of negative visualization. There's a lot of stuff that I already do and I'm very sympathetic to. And again, I really, I, I've really enjoyed did read the whole Daily Stoic. Obviously not at the recommended speed. It was quite a bit faster than that. And, and I like the idea of a moving target that, as we've said, just to kind of recap what I said at the beginning, like when Nietzsche criticizes Christianity, the proper response to that, if you're a Christian, is not to say, screw you, Nietzsche, but it's to like, well, what am I doing Christianity wrong?

Am I doing Christianity as a despiser of life? So the same thing could be said about stoicism. Like, am I doing stoicism as self tyranny? Am I doing it as despiser of life? There's a lot of places where Marcus really sounds like he despises life. Man, people want me dead. I shouldn't be so upset about dying because so many people want me dead. You know, it would be one thing if I were in a world with other virtuous people, but they all fall so short. You know, Marcus himself, I feel like in some significant ways was doing things wrong. But I feel like the kind of pick and choose approach that Ryan has taken, it's certainly very much a salvageable project as far as I'm concerned.

So thanks so much for sharing your wisdom through the book and here and so much of your time. I really appreciate it.

54:47 Ryan: Thanks for having me.

54:48 Dylan: Thanks for joining Ryan. Good luck to you.

54:50 Seth: Yes, thank you.

54:52 Mark: Next time we're going to read some Julia Kristeva, some psychoanalysis. The book is called Powers of Horror. We're going to have a guest on. It's going to be damn cool. It's going to be some feminism. It's going to be some why we are horrified by bodily juices. It's going to be green. There will be a follow up discussion with Seth and I going into more about Marcus Aurelius that will be posted for partially examined Life Citizens and $5 Patreon members before episode 202 comes out. Our closing song today is going to be Any Way the Wind Blows. I interviewed singer, songwriter Asif Ilyas on Nakedly Examined Music Episode 33.

This is by his band Mir from their okay 2 Go album. You can hear about that band and his subsequent solo work in that interview. Check it out@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Folks, should let us know what you thought of this discussion. By commenting on our blog at partiallyexaminedlife.com or go to our Facebook group or our Facebook page, or lying on Twitter or sending us an email@peltiallyexaminedlife.com all right, good night, everybody.

55:58 Wes: Good night.

55:59 Unknown speaker: Build a wall and break it? Cut the grass and red it? Set your sail and go with the flow? Go any way the wind blows. You thought that you were in style? But beneath your fancy textile? You're naked as the day you were born? So go oh. Anyway the wind blows, yeah, and you feel, and you feel like you've lost control? No, no, no, no, no, no? When you feel? When you feel like just letting go? Well, you don't? Well, you don't, don't? I tried so hard to fit in and took it on the tail fin? So I decided some time ago to go any way the wind blows? Yeah, and you feel, and you feel like you've lost control?

No, no, no, no, no, no? When you feel? When you feel like just letting go? Well, you don't? No, you don't, don't, don't? So tell me where the road goes? Cause life is what you make it? All you know is you'll never know? So go anywhere the wind blows? Yeah, and you feel that you feel like you've lost control? No, no, no, no, no, no, no? When you feel? When you feel like just letting go? While you don't? While you don't? Don't you give up on me.

58:28 Ryan: We sail it all the same se?

58:33 Unknown speaker: We'll make it through and make it back home? I think I'm going need you? I know I'm going to need you? So come on, let's go. Any way the wind blows.