Idler | How Daoism, Socrates and Jesus Christ changed the world by doing nothing | Tom Hodgkinson

[Music] then welcome to the multi moral library my name is Tom Hodgkinson I'm editor of the idler magazine it's a magazine I started in 1993 with a friend of mine called gaff and the reason for me sourcing it was that I had a job at the Sunday Mirror magazine in Fleet Street and which I got kind of by chance and I really hated this job and I've had a wonderful time at school had a wonderful time at university I'd really enjoyed the sort of freedom and time we had to do projects that we wanted to do me and my friends for their own sake voluntarily you know not to make money playing in bands it wasn't table ukulele there but you know running magazines putting on nightclub nights whatever it might be those are having a KERS of later time to sit in the cafe and read and listen to music and talk to my friends and you know the academic life also I love because you could work in your own time and my time was my own in the sense that I could control when I worked it wasn't I wasn't doing it doing any work and I'd really enjoyed that but so I didn't London I was it so 23 24 and I'd had a job actually for a year working at a skateboarding shop and a record shop called Rough Trade records which had been a great big great fun even though it was like a full-time job I enjoyed meeting the customers and made lots of new friends in the skateboarding music world so here I was stuck actually just around the corner from here in joven square when when the Daily Mirror was still in Fleet Street and hating my job and I mistake I came across a collection of writings by dr. Johnson so dr. Johnson again he lived around the corner from here he wrote the first English dictionary in the 1760s I think and he was a wonderful writer we wrote plays and poems an early novel he wrote loads of says for the new grub Street the emerging breed of new magazines that were that were starting then you know the spectator the Tattler had started earlier earlier in the 18th century and he wrote for a magazine called the gentleman's magazine which is actually just around the corner from here and sing psalms gate and he he also wrote diaries and these little sort of resolutions that he had right to himself on important occasions like his birthday or Easter how I'm going to improve my life next year next year I'm going to get up early he said because I often lie in bed until 12:00 or even - I'm gonna resolve to get up at 8:00 and even if I only get up at 10:00 that's still two hours earlier than I often line lists and bit because offered lie in bed till Tuesday and then when it when it's friends you know the young rates of London town like Boswell when he was older went to visit him he would never be working he would rather be in bed reading or dozing or sort of meditating or whatever or he'd been engaged in chemistry experiments because we're still distracting himself from his work well I had one day at home in my flat in Portobello Road wellas work at the Sunday Mirror and that was the day when I was like okay I'm gonna get him with my own work but it didn't tend to go that well I would be unable to get out of bed there was no one to make me get out of bed and once out of bed I'd have a boss and be find a great difficulty that's the boss and then have lunch probably have a nap and then I had a gameboy remember the tetris game boys and then I'll still have quick-quick five minutes on this before I get down to some work and then two and a half hours later I sort of throw it aside and it colors for the fit of self-recrimination and so you dr. Johnson's self-recrimination that really appealed to me and also the fact that he worked very very quickly so how did he get his work done well he did it very very fast on the deadline so the printers boy would run up to his room waiting for his column you know he's writing columns for the weekly newspapers and take each sheet of manuscripts from under his pen as he was finishing it he didn't even have time to read over it or correct it and the boy would run down with his one mashite give it to the typesetters he started laying out the type and then run back for his second sheet and then run back and the everything would be done just in time and then thought the jobs would sort of collapse and then go to the tavern I thought that's a nice way of working now so it's much better than getting up early in the morning and doing a sort of a 9 to 5 or a 10 to 6 for a group of people who I really hate and I feel sort of vaguely humiliated by and probably a bit big-headed you know sort of 24 25 and I felt I was sort of superior to these people who loved me who tell me what to do it was actually quite good experience journalistically when I later saw stat magazine so the IED alert came from me reading dr. Johnson's essays called the idler which was published for about two years in the gentlemen's magazine and talks about his own idleness and he said things like every man is or hopes to be an idler because just as peace is the purpose of war you know you're hoping for peace at the end of the war in the battle idleness is what you're looking for at the end of your toil and work and he also talked about his way of working which was a bit like the principle of momentum so that the you know the longer you're pushing a heavy ball up the hill the quicker it falls down the other side so he knew that this time that he spent lying in bed staring at the ceiling apparently you know doing nothing was actually the time when he was most deeply plunged into his work it's just that he wasn't actually putting it pen to paper so this made me realize you know idleness is you know it's a good thing we've all been brought up to work very hard and this work ethic as it's called comes from all sides we don't even know where it comes from because it's so ingrained but it is actually natural is it actually natural to work hard well my argument and I'm going to lay out this short piece lecture now it's that no it's not at all it's not it's all natural and I'm gonna prove that by showing that societies in the past have actually praised idleness is a very important part of life and different sizes at different times apply the praised idleness more or less and other others have praised work and in fact the to the idea of the contributive life the life of idling where you give yourself lots of leisure time and space first is the active life where you work very hard and you work long hours and you make things happen you know Elon Musk so if you know no one changed the world on the forty hours a week well I'm going to show prove to you that Elon Musk is completely wrong and a very bad role model as well for other people just because he's completely insane doesn't mean he's you know kind of impose this his insecurities on the rest of this on the rest of us and today is with interesting time to be talking about this because some of you may have read and and we're in the right kind of left the environment you might have read that john macdonald his um the Labour Party he's clearly influenced by Marx and as his call been well there are in my view anyway you know I suppose I love George Orwell George Orwell rightly pointed out the dangers of totalitarianism in 1984 and Animal Farm but there's something on the Left which is to be praised because a promotion of leisure and John McDonald today he's actually said you know we'll be working towards the thirty two hour a week ie a four-day week or something like that and he said you know we we work to live we don't live to work and ladies a very important part of the Labor Party's manifesto this is wonderful to hear because they haven't been talking like this for many many years in fact in my lifetime both political parties have been extremely Pro hard work Cameron had to phrase hard-working families so there's this idea that there's a the entire family has to be working hard granny has to be sort of you know shoveling the snow and little babies inside doing the washing-up if you don't work hard then you don't get the benefits of society that's that's what that's because that's a Tory line and when Tories hear about things like for day week or other ideas like the sisters income which is you know the idea where you get a certain sum each each week as a replacement for the Universal Credit System or whatever it's called you know like a kind of automatic doll whatever it might be 20 quid 50 quid a week and they failed that's a terrible idea because everyone will go sit at home watching daytime TV and drinking or one that one Tory MP called Nick Bowles said that's a terrible idea because everyone gets it around writing poetry and tennis and tending their garden like they're supposed to be bad things so the idea was conceived as a way of as a magazine which would promote idleness and defend leisure for all the good things about it and attack the Puritan the process and work ethic and try and discover where all these things come from so over the last 25 years or so I continued to produce the magazine more or less regularly and I've written a book called how to be idle and how to be free which looked into these issues more recently I've been studying and reading the ancient philosophers and so I'm now preparing to sort of construct a history of idling from about 500 BC to the present day and tonight we're going to start in around 500 BC and we're going to look at these men mainly men not old men the philosophers the people who invented the idea of philosophy and what their ideas were and the influence they had in other people it's also a way of thinking about our own lives and as you'll see I my stoic a mine at the Kurian and my cynic am i a skeptic yeah what'swhat's Mike what's my attitude to life and how do I want to live well these are the questions that the ancient philosophers ask themselves and I'm also going to talk a little bit about the Daoists because this is an amazing movement as well there was a roughly the same time in ancient Athens and also in ancient China the the idea of philosophies that have grew up said the Daoists and the Confucian mists whatever you call them the people lit by Confucius had very different attitudes to the world and if you still see these attitudes reflected in what me shine them very briefly because we're going to focus mainly on the ancient Greeks the the Confucius was trying to construct a system of harmony whereby people behaved very well to each other it would be praised to the polite you work out hours it was called you know you would do your duty for the state and work for the state and you know be the prefect and someone would so forth and you know live what we would consider to be sort of a sort of conventional life it's the conventions that keep society together the Taoist had two completely opposite idea that all this convention is load of nonsense the Taoist tend to be sort of men who'd perhaps got past the stage of family life whether the children now left home and they became sort of wild and free in India today is called going sati so your children have left home and you give all your money away to go wandering around being crazy from town to town with the begging bowl and these people are very much venerated the Daoists that the famous one was called loud suno knows whether this was a real person or just a name of a conglomeration of people and he said things like in a go-with-the-flow there was the story of the Taoist butcher and the Taoist butcher could carve up the meat with virtually no effort because instead of just carving through it and using muscle power he would he would detect the path of least resistance in the meat there were little bits Burroughs actually easier to cut and so by doing that he would cut it much more easily but of course to be of Taoist butcher a lazy butcher you need to practice before so you can't suddenly be a Dallas butcher on day one but they're very Pro laziness and they would write poetry you know I sit by my cottage in the Union foothills by this stream all day long I do nothing that's not the exact poem but that's the kind of poem there dry and then go and have a long rest and and there was silver Gillis of wispy pages sage you know he would tell people don't rush around things will happen there's a plan this is the point about downwards it means the way there's some sort of way that's been predestined for you a bit like a river so the the metaphor of the river was a real favorite with the dam it's um you know the spring going down to the sea so there's a spring in the mountains and this water has to get dance to see and in doing that it takes the path of least resistance the easiest path through the rocks it doesn't get machines and plow a straight line down to the sea it takes the path of least resistance and in doing that creates the most beautiful and unique curve so that could be some kind of a metaphor for you know one's own life don't do the thing that's unnatural to use as a find the thing that find your own flow I mean leave the familiar words now from you know hippies and even them in Silicon Valley people use the word flow as a sort of a trick where you can sort of concentrate and make more money and I thought what it was meant for originally you know it was like this is my life this is just flow I'm gonna get some sort of connection with something outside of me that's a phrase that a brief description of Taoism versus Confucianism what's amazing is around the same time in so outwardly more sophisticated perhaps society ancient Athens something new was being invented and it was called philosophy now we sort of think the philosophy has been around forever it wasn't it was a neologism at the time and people think it was invented by Socrates it means obviously Phil love and so forth meaning wisdom now the real point about this and I'm going to encourage this a little bit more deeply in a in a future session we're gonna talk about one book for the whole evening which is Plato's symposium and that's really where philosophy was invented so I'll just give a brief summary now the symposium which we're trying to kind of recreate here although this is a little bit more steer than the symposium of Plato in the suppression of Plato a bunch of blokes lie on couches it's in the middle of a literary festival one of them just won the first prize for the great of a great poem Aristophanes the famous comic playwright has also put his playing for the festival these festivals have like twenty thirty forty thousand people watching you know the rap scene massive so this is a group of sort of bohemian but sort of quite posh Athenians and they all love Socrates and Socrates at this symposium tells the story about love they all have to give it give a speech about love and so in Socrates this one he talks about how philosophy for him he said love is a sort of a lack it's something that you don't have you easily move towards it now he said so for him philosophy is a statement of me not knowing anything and this is his famous thing about Socrates as I know nothing he's a wonder round ancient Athens and he compared himself to the Sophists he was a philosopher he's moving towards with them he doesn't have wisdom but enjoyed the journey towards it he's a philosopher and he has a longest scraggly beard he wears simple clothes he's an anti-consumerist he goes into the marketplace and he says who knew how many things there were that I didn't need he lives almost without money this isn't to say that he's not in the world he's married possibly twice so first to mirto and then to Zam Tippi mirto I think dies we scholars argue about these points but this seems to be a rough consensus oh he had two children with mer so and then married to a much younger wife called Xanthippe II he was well known for being a bit of a pain and being naggy and shrewish and because probably cuz he didn't earn any money it might be a bit of William Blake you know there's a play catch a fish that meant William Blake would come home for dinner and you know he was a very money orientation here so it's why I could put an empty plate in front of him and some people was a bit like that and the other point to remember is that the the all these Athenian men they were very there's a there was a strong core a homosexual element to the whole thing they even call it a homosexual now because in those days it's much more sort of continuum it was really very common for men too fancy younger boys and in this case socrates was massively in love with repeatedly in love with certainly massively fancy Alcibiades who was the sort of young David Beckham of the time incredibly handsome he was like I saw the playboy politician and Socrates and Alcibiades had fought together in one of the wars the Peloponnesian War in fact Socrates would say to de life so they had a very close bond so these men would be lying around on couches the dancing girls would come in and leave and the flute players and then the wine would come in and and their drink and often that in the supposing they hung over from the night before but they still ended up drinking in fact Socrates drinks all night he doesn't appear to be drunk and he goes about his business the next day so this was like the point of time it is it was a fun environment for philosophy it wasn't a lazy grayling ping puritanical and sort of I I know everything so this was cooked and the floor turf was compared themselves to the Sophists now the Sophists charged for their teaching and they said we have the wisdom I mean so produces good friends with some of these office they would come into Athens and they were bit like Jordan Peterson in that they would be saying to young men give me money and I'll teach you how to have a successful life I'll teach you how to sort of behave what the sort of tricks off your young lawyer and you're like in your twenties or you're a teenager so he would gather all these people around him the the Sophists I'm Charlie for their teaching and they became very rich so they were the surface came to fooled the philosophers now it was the idea of Sufism it's a completely forgotten their philosophy is sort of a love of wisdom and moving towards wisdom and it Springs from Socrates you probably know that when Socrates was about seventy he was put on trial by the Athenian state and the Athenian state was quite small one hundred thousand people sometimes it democracy sometimes an oligarchy but more or less you know a people the whole city felt involved in the government of it even the slaves and the women who weren't he weren't given a vote it was it was like being in this sort of Florence if he could imagine that you know sort of medieval city state where you're sort of part of it all so she was put on trial for corrupting the mores of the youth and for worshipping false gods and was put to death and he drank two hemlock and which paralyzed him from the feet up was and died his friends tried to rescue him they could have rescued him but he said no I'd rather I'd rather just die and he said you know everyone knew that he was a really annoying person to be around he's constantly asking questions he was called the gadfly and they said well do you have anything to say in your defense he said well he shouldn't kill me I've given so much to Athens the state as a gadfly puncturing people's superstitions and the silly things they think you should be giving me a pension to live on and that made them even angrier the luxurious put to death so there's Socrates in the middle of what the key elements of his philosophy well he's constantly asking questions he says he knows nothing he said anti-consumerist he's anti mummy he doesn't think that hard work and money and glory will will lead to happiness he's trying to investigate what is meant by the good life how do you live and ladies a really important part of this now as far as idling goes Socrates in his life does certainly in the second half of his life does preach much nothing he doesn't even bother to write anything down he doesn't really work but he's not charging for his teaching he just literally wanders around chatting that's what he does and somehow he becomes one of the most famous people who you know who ever lived he wore very simple clothes and had a big beard he was ugly and people said he was ugly on the outside and beautiful on the inside he had a sort of pug nose there was even some suggestion that he had hyperthyroidism which is a condition associated with excessive sexual activity and which makes your eyes bulge we've haven't heard of this so some scholars are now thinking that he was actually quite sort of Randi shagger and whether it was with boys or with women and what we don't exactly know in his early life as I mentioned he'd been there quite a distinguished soldier been the second half of his life he basically did nothing so this is the one of the first sort of real idlers of history that I mentioned also allowed to he may not even have written his the book that has his name in it but somehow these people have this enormous influence not only on the people who they meet in the everyday we're all blown away by them little what the the symposium at Plato's in prison they want to sit next to Socrates you know it's not fair you're sitting next to Socrates he was really eccentric he had this strange habit of going into a trance and is standing in one place sort of just thinking about something and he could do this for hours he painted on the battlefield for hours and hours when he was invited to go to a dinner party people would meet and say are you off to Agathon's yes a lot of Agathon's okay let's go together and then he turned around and he disappeared because he was sort of gazing at something all gone into one of his trances and apparently he'd had this kind of trance thing from when he was a child and he had voices that spoke to him so this was the person who invented philosophy and not only invented philosophy but invented at least six schools of philosophy quite soon after he died now he taught Plato Plato started something called the Academy we come as a philosophical school where you could retreat from Athens just on the edge of Athens like this and go and talk about ideas in a group women and slaves also enters as well as the Athenian systems Plato taught Aristotle he started another school called the Lyceum and Socrates also gave birth to a whole host of other philosophical movements ideas of what are called schools so this was school by the way we talk about the philosophical school and that was the Greek word scollay and the Greek word scollay turned into Latin words call us you know meaning and in which men at school and obviously our word for school but to us school is something that you go to you know you're sort of forced to it's not voluntary but in fact the word means leisure so this is why it's so important for the history of Weidling the Greek philosophers were saying you know take time out leisure is the most important part of life in fact Socrates said this you know leisure is the greatest gift so people get themselves in a fuss and take away their own later by by stressing themselves out about money earning or getting glory you know in part in in politics the greatest gift to the most wonderful possessions actually free time and leisure and that's what we should be working to create Aristotle said you know we can't all be like Socrates and you know sort of wandered around in rags and bare first and live on nothing and he was a special person but we could all work to create the later time but it's in the leisure time that we really become ourselves we give ourselves that time to think and to become philosophers and to be creative and to be artists and so on and so forth now let's look at some of these schools that came out of Socrates and we'll start with the Stoics so the Stoics were influenced by Socrates but they went up in a slightly different direction and they were kind of like pre Christians remember this is a pagan society there's no there were lots of different beliefs this is something that people forget about you know in the past and there are lots of different competing beliefs there were atheists there are people who believed in one God there are people who believed in many gods there people who believed in all the kind of superstitions at the time in there were these strange things called homes in houses which were like a sort of a statue of a man and then a big blank thing and then it sort of erect phallus which people thought was a good idea I don't they really know why to have around in your house later people knocked off the faces and the palaces in some kind of anti religious uprising there were these other strange priestesses who lived at live to their temple and was supposed to inhale strange vapors that made them talk in riddles these riddles were called the Oracles and they would say things like no one is wiser than socrates and some of these women with sort of semi prostitutes or something like that in a way that scholars didn't quite understand I don't think so it's a quite a strange society with all this stuff going on rituals but also very sophisticated you know when you read the plays and the Plato's dialogues which are really quite readable actually because there's basically little plays and they're quite short you know there's very it's fun it's a fun Society and very very sophisticated no one you know there were astronomers and astrologers say the Stoics their idea was we well we all know what stoic means on a kind of surface level it's something like you know putting up with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that sort of you know stiff-upper-lip but it's often interpreters like you know keeping your emotions inside you and and maybe that was something that was wrongly feels thought to stoic there's a little bit more to it than that I mean there's also lot of truth in that and today it's turned into something called cognitive behavioral therapy so the Stoics is all about the famous books for things like the manual by a picture TISS who is a free Roman slave who came a bit later and Marcus Aurelius the Roman Emperor was also a great stoic philosopher and these books you can read them now and in translations and they're really really they really are nice to have by the bed it's quite a harsh philosophy it's it's its essence I suppose is um you know look around you why you anxious the floor suppose we're trying to rid people of the anxiety they had in ancient Athens just as we're anxious now about the political situation whatever it might be what's the source of this anxiety and how can we help people to overcome it and to become basically happy when to live the good life and the good life or happiness was translated as you day or we translate their word into the good life and their reach the word for happiness or good luck with eudaimonia eudaimonia and that's something like all that one with your demon you know your sort of spirit now it's what the stoicism was all about so they said look at the things around you and people waste a lot of energy trying to change other people's actions and worrying about things they can't change possibly ever and don't do anything like enough changing themselves because the one thing that they can change so this was just some essence of stoic philosophy but there's a little bit more to it than that so you know stoic philosophers that walk down the street if we're new in in the small relative useful ancient Athens knew they were stoic philosophers so the little boys would like throw stones at them to try and make them go you know swear or lose their composure and the circle would turn around and say you know thank you for giving me the chance to test my stoicism young boy and so they were slightly annoying in the way but why were they stoic well today you know CBT so if you know you well you can change your reactions this is the whole idea so you start with a small thing that annoys you and you know you train your inner core to not react you know to sort of take it without calamity and you can build up to bigger things and asterick say you know my wife died my leg was cut off I'm ill in a my son died and IIIi don't let it affect me but why so there's something else going on under it which is actually quite sort of religious and always Christian and they had the phrase go-with-the-flow that's a stoic phrase go with the flow and again a bit like the taoist there's a flow out there there's some kind of predetermined path for you and you need to look into it when something goes wrong but if that's meant to be you know so you're learning a lesson from that and we all know that to be true you know we have terrible things going wrong in our lives but somehow we emerge and then you learn something and you look back and you think well that's why I went through that that actually taught me something so from the small to the big this is the stoic attitude so there's a reason why they maintain a stiff upper lip because they know underneath everything that there's some kind of flow and the word logoff is associated with them which is the first word what the first words in the Bible in the beginning was logos and logos you know we say in the beginning was the word I'm not sure why it's translated as word it's just really weird translation they would translate it's a Greek words you know another another translation would be the way or the path or something like that some people even translate it is the joke you know it's like if some kind of cosmic joke so there's this thing there's a logo surpass and this is what the Stoics before christianity were kind of talking about and they started stoic centers a bit like Plato's Academy and Mark Vernon who writes for the idler and has taught me a lot of this stuff so if that's Plato's Academy and some of the other schools that sprang out of this amazing movement in 400 500 BC Athens only closed at about 500 400 AD when the first monasteries opened so they were like Monastery of these places and they certainly would have influenced the the early Christians you know who then sailed around the world starting monasteries by the way we'll come back to this if we've got time but the early Christians were really not interested at all in work that sort of came later in fact it was seen as sort of almost long-term to work to work silly to work hard the main point of life of the early Christians was you know to pray certainly you had to live but you created these wonderful retreats where people could come and pray and that was the most important thing and and later people the month it was frowned upon for monks to work in the very early early days later they did work they did really good work beer brewing and bread making and so monks still today obviously a famous for their beer because it was felt that that was something creative you know and it brought people together and it was good so God's work was creative and and so he works do some work it should be something creative like making bread or making beer there were a few wet while we're in the car marks moral library I'll just mention quickly well it occurs to me Karl Marx's son-in-law was called Paul the fog and he wrote an essay called the right to be lazy the doís Allah Paris after Marx in the late in the 1890s I think and there's a satirical pamphlet but he's definite why does that one hurl themselves at the factory gates when there's when jobs are mentioned you know what is this thing that's been telling us to work in the old days it was work was seen as something based only slaves did and we still be aiming much higher towards a level where we don't work and this was sort of reforms much less you know it's far less industrious scholar than Marx himself so and the Ford makes this sort of quite good joke God gives the best example to us all because he works for six days and then rests for the whole of eternity so that's that's the kind of like just a little burst of work and then you know many many lifetimes off that should be what we're aiming towards so that's a stoic so they go with the flow the next best-known probably is the Epicureans the Epicureans was another school that sprang out of there some love for Socrates name these are all different interpretations of what Socrates have said and the epic Europe for the Epicure which was started by a guy called Epicurus life was about life is about friendship and if you wanted to take away that anxiety of living in the city then he should move out of the city anxiety was also caused by sort of competition with other people so you should live in a sort of a hippie commune and this is what Epicurious did so he founded his movement he bought a house for something like ten thousand silver coins which kids I don't know how he got those but he did again outside the center of Athens and he called it the garden and over the entrance of the garden was inscribed a legend along the lines of here the highest good is pleasure so Epicurus said you're anxious because you believe all this nonsense the superstitious nonsense you make sacrifices you pray to these gods look there's nothing really there you don't have to worry about elves in the woodland and so on and and you know there are rational explanations for lightning and so it's not a curse you know and his central belief was in atomism that the world is made of atoms and he'd got this from another philosopher called Democritus so he was essentially a materialist there were in the Marx library Marx was hugely inspired by Epicurus you name all this stuff about God is not he was almost atheist Epicurus but not quite cuz he didn't believe in some kind of higher power and Marx loved Epicurus and Democritus the world is just a meaningless kind of collision of atoms they swerve into each other they bang around we got to make her own life in this world in this material world we're looking at the opium of the people we're looking at the opening of the people could have almost been said by Epicurus it's the kind of thing that he said he's also said death is nothing to us he was very practical about money because he said you don't actually need that much to be comfortable the sort of bare necessities if you like of life or sort of actually reasonably easy to get from those people not everybody but for most P poor people work hard to get the things to unnecessary I mean you could think about personalized number plates for example I mean what a pointless vain trifle and people work really really hard so they can get a personalized number plate so what or even cards you know you can get a Vauxhall for a thousand pounds or you can work incredibly hard and stress yourself out sack people be really brutal be kind of brutal nit neoliberal make loads of money and buy self a Rolls Royce for a hundred thousand pounds what's the difference barely anything so he said anxiety when you know that you don't need that much anxiety sort of is less endure this is one of his sort of four points the Greeks fear death you know as Christians did later he said death is nothing to us we just kind of crumble into ashes and he said the most important part of life is your friends and cultivate your friendship Philly and that so that's what he did in his epicurean commune in the epicurean commune slaves women courtesans all lived there together courtesans were a big feature of Athenian society sort of semi prostitutes but everyone was welcome in this in the garden and they ate together they drank together they kept their cost low by growing their own vegetables and this sort of thing so it was like I sort of it was a communist like it was like a Gandhi type setup and again these this movement the garden movement lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years Gardens sprung up all across the Mediterranean and the influence on of Epicurus on and is still today is massive I mean we get epicurean slightly wrong because we think it means luxury loving and that's because he was he really was a pleasure lover but it was a little more subtle that it wasn't about self-indulgent say you know sex drugs and rock'n'roll okay fine but you know you can't keep doing that it's gonna affect your health and so I think the example is lamb for some reason that that lamp used lamb as example is very rich food I might like to eat all this lamb now but like she's going to make me feel sick and kind of like indigestion later and he said I'm actually perfectly happy with a Bali cake and a glass of water so they were quite frugal the Epicureans and he said they didn't they didn't say when they said we're pleasure-loving it was about the avoidance of pain it wasn't about sort of luxury loving however they said if luxury comes along great in embracing you know like have a great meal then which don't be so - ascetic about it if you if you know how to live on small amounts of money that makes you feel raised secure because you're not afraid of poverty so that was one of his ideas to sort of take away the fear of poverty the anxiety of you know being poor which is clearly something that motivates us to perhaps work or you know at least over work to clothe we will look at the cynics and the skeptics and briefly the parapet ethics now the skeptics they took Socrates idea I don't know anything and the fact that he asked people lots of questions to create a philosophy around asking questions and that's what skeptic means you know I don't know anything climate change skeptic you know I'm going to ask questions maybe that's not a good example but you know I'm going to ask questions about climate change it's also I see the skeptical spirit and something like Qi the TV show because everything's endlessly interesting and you know you're always asking questions even if it's about something apparently quite boring like Beijing steak but you go into the world with this kind of spirit of curiosity not smugness I know everything but the skeptics I think Pierrot with the famous skeptic they got themselves in slight models because he would say you know what's the skeptic it means I know it means I don't know anything how can you know that you don't know anything and so that this this would like tie them up into these little sort of philosophical knots for that reason or sort of retreated from it slightly but this Plato's Academy would often be run by sceptical philosopher after Plato died various others you know took over and and they would argue about all these sorts of ideas probably the most sort of sexy in a way those kind of outrageous of the Greek philosophers who were quite outrageous in the first place because they were saying you know don't run around that scurry around overworking and you know get yourself in fretting about money and stuff and Socrates had as I said went mountain in rags almost the the the monks gob is clearly influenced by these ancient Greek philosophers just a very simple kind of sack with a piece of string around your waist in order to demonstrate that you have no need for vain things and you know riches and the the trifles and so on and but the cynics took a bit of Socrates and took it to an extreme the most well-known with Diogenes Diogenes famously lived in a barrel well it was a sort of upturned wine cost like a sort of huge wine cost like that with the hole in the middle and he put this on in the shadow of the temple and climbed inside it and he said that's all I need to live in I mean I don't know why you're also rushing around with his ridiculous houses and dogs would come and lie around him he he was unshaven dirty filthy a bit like a his clothes were ripped and torn he would go get crash parties piss on the floor steal the wine and have sex in public masturbate in public he would basically overturn convention wherever he found it his father was some kind of coin minted coins and the the cynical sort of Maxim with something like defaced the coinage we're going to deface the clinic and that there was a pun it's in ancient Greek it also meant something like subvert custom so he went around saying all this custom is nonsense Plato's Academy all talking crap you know Plato's Academy said what is man man is a featherless bipeds and yes man is a featherless biped that's a good one let's write that down and then Dodge's would like run in half-naked and throw a chicken into the middle and say he was your man and he was against book reading or study or anything you know get out in nature a bit like the Daoists then sort of trouble your brain with this kind of academic philosophizing it's all silly he went he there were loads of anecdotes about him he was going for a walk in the woods with his one-possession which was a kind of a sort of a rudely carved wooden ball which he used for his sort of food and drink and he saw a peasant boy walking down to the stream and the feather board kneeled down by the stream and cupped his hands and drank some water from the stream like this whereupon dogs knees look to his wooden bowl and said what an absurd encumbrance and threw it into the forest so he saw had nothing so that the antique consumers part of Socrates which was taken to a real extreme the asceticism the the total rejection of any sort of custom there were other cynics the famous cynic couple where he Park here and craw tease critic rotties was a cynic philosopher he said wandered around shouting at people you know David they knew here the rich people where they would spit at them and they were very very punkish so the the nineteen seventies you know the really rottens that the punks in Kings raised they dressed not for work he wouldn't be employed dressed like that they would drink all day gate crash parties steal booze spit at the rich people and so on these are all classic behaviors of the cynical philosopher by the way what the cynical mean in Greek well silicosis meant dog because they were nicknamed the dog philosophers because they live like dogs so we get the word canine I guess from that so cynical it doesn't really mean what we what it means to us now which is you know sort of negative it literally means dog like living like a dog because the dogs have no clothes they have sex in public they had their possessions you imagine by John Lennon is another classic cynical it's not a classic statement of cynical philosophy imagine no posessions it making no heaven is epicurean philosophy so these ideas keep coming back again and again into the culture Crotty zanja Park you were a lovely example because qualities with this sort of quite cross the old man he Park he was a beautiful young girl who was probably sort of sixteen or eighteen from an aristocratic family her parents naturally enough wanted her to get married to her sort of handsome young rich man actually a plenty of suitors they would come round but she rejected them all because he was in love with fraught ease with this of and their parents were absolutely appalled so parties went ran to her house and he also tried to dissuade her and he took all his clothes officers Here I am this is all I have and he said that's all I want and they got married and and he said you're gonna have to live like live like this so you said I do I do want to live like a like a cynical philosopher and they were still go out to evening party dinner parties symposiums usually the cost of what that women weren't allowed to go to the symposium so they didn't certainly didn't normally go and Hipparchus said that's all nonsense I'm going to go out together with hip haka to the dinner party so he was kind of subverting custom and he became a very well-known philosopher herself and she's also written about him dodging these lashes not the cynical philosopher druggies and not a later writer wrote a book about all these philosophers and she's among those so the cynical philosophers a you know and then later there this Renaissance paintings of cynical philosophers again they're unshaven they have ripped clothes these audios were picked up by the situation of philosophers in the 1950s in Paris and they school things like new travail a jar may never ever work that's one of their graffitis and they then implements Malcolm McLaren and Punk so this kind of anti work of course the cynical philosophers didn't do any sort of work but they became very famous and loved for doing this not they belong to become a cynical philosopher it's good to have them there to keep reminding you of the vanity of human wishes and desires and riches and so on and Alexander the Great dodging these his fame spread Alexander great thought he was the main thing Alexander great came to visit him in his upturned wine cask where he's kind of sitting there with dressed in rags in the shadow of the temple with dogs sitting around and he goes up to him says you know great George needs wonderful philosopher I've come to see you is there anything I can do for you and dojin he said yes we came understanding out of my life so he wouldn't sort of kowtow to anybody even Alexander the Great most philosophers the sort of hang around at the gates of rich men because they didn't have money Socrates apparently had a couple of properties so he rented them out and that's how he could sort of just about keep going this is all the guesswork but generally philosophers were hanging around trying to get money from from the richest men but though he was like no I'm not going to do that so it's life itself demonstrated the fact that perhaps be to put too much store in these material things like I've wind up with the parapet ethics now Aristotle became probably the best-known floss for certainly in the medieval period and he peripatetic smees he wandered around but he was very reasonable he wrote lots of books and he said to you know we had to work but we needed some later need to earn some money but you know you're not too much and needs to be sort of courageous but not foolhardy it was all about moderation so that's a little snapshot of the this really wonderful period of only 100 years in ancient Greece the sorts of Socrates and goes on to give birth to all these philosophical schools and possibly has an influence on our final idle of this session and next session we're going to talk about the last thousand years but if we go up to the figure of Christ you know he's very much a bit he's very much Socrates like character me he said he lit obviously left Earth Day Socrates is supposed to be like fun-loving he drinks all night he's intersex and so on but there are lots of elements Christ's behavior and the things he says that there in common with the with these crazy Greek philosophers his simple dress for example the family he doesn't have a job he doesn't work he's not interested in working he's diverse convention he turns over the tables of the moneychangers he's saying it's easiest for a rich man to get into the eye of a heaven and all these sorts of ideas these are all very much kind of cynical stoic kind of ancient Greek philosophical notions which have been put into it into a new context which comes out of you know the old ways and I gotta finish you know its Christ is saying you know don't worry about money is one of his main sort of one of his main messages and he says you know consider the lilies of the field they toil not neither do they spin yet I say to you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these so that's a classic kind of like rotation or dog in these type thing to say and he also goes on to say in the Sermon on the Mount which is a lovely Pro idling text you know do the birds worry about their raiment and you know where they're going to get no no they said God will provide sort of thing there's something sort of flow there if you just take the time to discover it thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Idler

Views: 2,501

Keywords: philosophy, christianity, daoism, socrates

Id: Bc12u68LB6M

Length: 52min 33sec (3153 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020