Stoic In Action: Dr John Sellars

[Music] there's lots we could talk about we could talk about emotions we could talk about dealing with adversity there's all sorts of things i want to focus on the fundamental philosophical ideas that underpin the whole thing namely their account of value right what has value what really matters and what doesn't and how do we think about some things having value some things not having value what's worth pursuing what's um not worth pursuing those sorts of issues that's what i want to talk about in the first half and i'll conclude that first half by talking in particular about the virtues so on justin's wonderful graphics we've got wisdom justice temperance and courage um i want to say something a bit about those towards the end then i'll just have a break for five minutes just so you don't have to listen to me for a short while and if there are any questions we'll take those and then the second half i'll talk explicitly about marcus aurelius i'll talk about the meditations i'll talk a bit about what this book is what's it what it's for um why does it take the form that it does what he's trying to do what we can learn from it and what the central themes are within it as well and there we'll see some slightly different themes emerge from what i'll talk about in the first half to kind of widen our image of what stoicism is okay so this is me my day job i teach philosophy at raw holloway at the university of london i teach mainly ancient stuff stoicism is one amongst many things taught this material with students last year it's great to see a couple of them come back for a bit more we'll hear from one of them a little later on um and i write books on stoicism amongst other things one other thing i should say about myself is that as well as joining justin this year to start the aurelius foundation i've also been involved in something else for slightly longer time which is a modern statism so tim who'll be speaking um after me has also been one of the founder members of modern statism and christopher gill who'll hopefully be joining us for the round table at the end also one of the founder members and we're the group of guys who set up stoic week back in 2012 that you may well have come across and we've been doing that what's great about the foundation i think apartment having some money behind it right modern statism is very much you know on the back of an envelope scrabbling around for loose change kind of an event there's a limit to what we can do but the other great thing about the aurelius foundation is that he's going to introduce us into a very different audience to the one that i think we've been connecting with so far and i think that's going to be a really valuable thing okay so let me get going um stoicism i imagine we've got a real mix of people in the room some of you might know quite a bit about stoicism there are lots of familiar faces that i recognize from previous events but some of you might know very very little so i'll start with some basics so the history of stoicism basically divides into two halves there's an early bit that happens in athens and there's a later bit that happens in rome right that's horribly simplistic but roughly we can think of it in those terms in this first half of what i'm going to say i'll focus on the kind of foundational ideas that were set up in athens so here are two um athenian stoics xeno so zeno's the founder he's the first guy who comes originally from cyprus to athens studies philosophy with a number of the existing philosophical schools decides none of them are quite right for what he wants so he sets up on his own he's followed by a guy called claenthes who is followed in turned by chrysippus chrysippus is the third head of the stower and he's really the important guy he wrote 705 books all of which are lost right all gone apart from a few quotations and scraps bits and bobs a few fragments that were dug up out of the library at herculaneum that was buried when um vesuvius erupted and buried pompeii but basically it's all gone right but chrysippus was the guy who brought together all of the key ideas and synthesized them and produced the stoic philosophy that we're all familiar with today and where were they they were here so as justin said earlier this all takes place in athens we had the opportunity to go to athens in the autumn um uh on the edge of that the the agora on the northern side we had this painted colonnade the stower the stoics were just the people that used to gather at the stower that's all the name means at the minute it's now just a pile of rubble overlooked by a railway line but you can go there you can do the pilgrimage and in fact that image is from the board that looks out over the pile of rubble if you go there hence the bilingual title across the top so they're gathering in athens in the marketplace right i think that's quite an interesting thought this wasn't a philosophy in a closed-off private community like say the epicureans in their garden or plato in his academy this was a group of intellectuals and thinkers right in the center of the city engaging with passersby not cut off in an isolated academic community okay so that by way of broad historical background let's get stuck into the content so values where do our values come from right so i'll read this to you quickly and then we'll we'll talk a bit about it so one of our key sources that outlines steric ethics says this it says an animal's first impulse is to preserve itself because nature made it congenial to itself from the beginning as precipice says in book one of on goals stating that for every animal its first congeniality is to its own constitution and the reflective awareness of this for it's not likely that nature would make an animal alienated from itself not having made the animal to make it neither congenial nor uh um more alienated from itself from this way it repels injurious influences and pursues what's congenial to it and then our source adds he says the stoics reject the idea that our first instinct is to pursue pleasure instead our first instinct is in fact for self-preservation pleasure is merely the byproduct that we experience if we get those things that we need for our self-preservation right so a thoroughly naturalistic account of why it is we value some things and not others right we value the things that will support our self-preservation and we dislike the things that will challenge it right and that's just an inborn natural instinct that we all have that all animals have so that gives us our basic values right what's good is what's congenial to my nature what's going to preserve it what's going to keep myself safe and healthy so food shelter warmth we all instinctively pursue these things and what's bad instinctually is anything that might damage our self-preservation hunger illness extreme cold this is how we decide what we want what's worth pursuing and what isn't right against the epicureans the other school of ancient plotters are active at this time who thought that really what we want to do is pursue pleasure and avoid pain and i think many people are kind of implicit hedonists like that right you think what you're really doing is pursuing pleasure the services say no no no that's not what you're after you're after self-preservation and when people are put in extreme circumstances you'll see them put themselves through huge amounts of pain and suffering in order to ensure that their survival right it's self-preservation that's actually the real motivating force but we experience pleasure when we get those things that instinctively we know that we need so pleasure's not the motivating force here is merely the byproduct the stoics are going to insist now as obviously as i've said there are other schools of philosophy out there who will argue against this but that's their big foundational claim okay now as i said on the previous slide our source says an animal's first impulse right so this is something that the stoic thinks applies to animals we are of course animals but we're not just animals we're not just animals fighting for survival right so a passage from another source to flesh this out a bit further man's sense of congeniality is what is according to nature but as soon as he gets an understanding right as soon as he becomes rational and sees the ordering and i might say concorde of things which are to be done then he values that more highly than all those things which he loved at the beginning and he comes to a conclusion by intelligence and reasoning with the result he decides that this is what the highest good for man consists in okay so the highest good for a human being is the concorde of things which are to be done cicero tells us this is cicero writing in the first century bc giving a summary of stoic ethics and what does that mean it means to act rationally and to act consistently or to put in another way it involves wanting to preserve oneself as a rational consistent agent right so the wild animal yeah or the small child who doesn't yet have those full rational capacities developed just wants self-preservation the things that are good for it physically but once we become adults we realize there's a bit more to life than that and what we want is a rational consistent character that becomes the thing that's most important and that's the thing that we then pursue to preserve okay quick interlude on socrates right socrates is one of the key role models for the stoics they see themselves as socratic philosophers and we'll see later stoics present socrates as the archetypal role model so very famous line from a later stoic epictetus i'll say a bit about him later on he says if you are not already a socrates you ought to try to become a socrates so he's the kind of gold standard that's where we all want to get but of course none of us are going to now here's a famous 18th century painting of the execution of socrates so for those of you who don't know the story socrates is tried by the athenians in 399 bc accused and convicted of corrupting the youth and forced to drink hemlock this is him drinking the hemlock [Music] on the orders of the athenian court now socrates by this point is 80 years old he's an old man it might be 399 bc but the athenians aren't barbaric they don't take much pleasure from executing pensioners that's not a good thing to be doing even then right so there are plenty of opportunities for socrates to escape he could easily have escaped from prison his friends tried to encourage him to escape from prison look guy we've got a boat in the harbour just come with us we'll take you off to a nice island somewhere it'll all be good and he refuses he says no i've agreed to live by the laws of the athenian state i've benefited from those laws i've benefited from the protection that they've given me it would be inconsistent for me now to flee athenian justice having committed myself to live by its laws i would rather die right he would rather accept the punishment of the state than compromise his principles and survive biologically so what's socrates doing he's prioritizing the preservation of his rational consistent character over the preservation of his physical body because he now as a rational adult identifies himself with that rational character not merely with his physical being as an animal so socrates could escape from prison that would preserve his physical existence but it would compromise his principles it would compromise to the point that it would destroy him as a virtuous character therefore he can't escape prison and a similar example of a stoic in a roman context would be cato the younger who's pictured here so famously cato was an opponent of julius caesar in the first century bc and rather than submit to the authority of julius caesar and give up his commitment to the roman republic he commits suicide instead because to submit to the authority of julius caesar would be to compromise all of the values that he so deeply held to the point of destroying his integrity and who would want to continue living like that so he sacrifices his physical existence in order to preserve his character okay so quick health warning suicide's bad don't do it if you ever think it might be a plausible response to the situation you find yourself in go and seek professional medical help right a couple of reasons why well first the only context in which suicide might be an appropriate response the stoics say is if you're virtuous and your virtue might be under threat good news is none of us are virtuous right so by definition we're not going to face that kind of that kind of situation and also it's highly unlikely we would ever find ourselves in a situation where there were no other options right so we don't need to worry about suicide but more prosaically in sort of everyday life you might think about the more real world context in which a similar sort of framework of thinking might apply imagine in a work context you might be asked to do certain things as part of your job that you feel deeply uncomfortable about you might think that they cross a line in some way you might feel deeply uncomfortable about doing those certain things there's no way in which you can avoid it and you might make what for most people is a very serious decision which would be to quit their job rather than continue doing that job if it meant compromising some deeply held values and principles so that's a context in which this kind of thinking might be more relevant okay so we've got this idea then that your character your your your inner rational virtuous character is the most valuable thing why why might you believe that well again let's continue with socrates so there's some more socratic background here um plato has socrates argue in one of the early dialogues and these are ideas that the stoics explicitly take over that external things that we might pursue things like wealth reputation status health all of these things these things only benefit us when we use them in some way but in order for them to benefit us we've got to use them in the right way we need to use them wisely if we don't use them well in fact they could end up harming us and if that's the case then it's not these external things that actually have any inherent value it's the knowledge or the wisdom with which we use them that confers the value so for instance money isn't something inherently good because an idiot can generate a great deal of harm if they use it unwisely right but of course someone who's wise and knowledgeable and well-intentioned can do a great deal of good with money and if that's the case the money itself is in a sense value neutral the goodness or the harm comes from the mind of the person that's putting it to work not the money so it's the wisdom the character the virtue of the individual that's where the value resides the money ironically is worthless from a moral point of view okay so what are these inner values that the stoics following socrates are going to argue that the only things that are really good well they give us an account of three things some things are good some things are bad and some things are neither of these things it's the virtues that they say are good i'll come back a bit later on and say a bit more about precisely what the virtues are but the virtues are good and the opposites of these are bad genuinely bad right everything else all that external stuff health wealth social standing success fame glory all of that stuff is neither inherently good it doesn't always benefit us neither inherently bad it doesn't always harm us so it's what the sterics call and indifferent so they give us an argument for this right i think it's worth stressing that we're dealing with philosophy here so you can find context in which you know you'll see a book of lots of stoic ideas and people will pick it up and read it and say ah i found my belief system this is great and treat it almost like a kind of a religion right but i think it's worth stressing we're dealing with a philosophy here so we're getting rational arguments to support all of the claims that the stoics make and here's one of those arguments just as heating is the peculiar characteristic of what is hot so benefiting is the peculiar characteristic of what's good but wealth and health no more to benefit than harm therefore wealth and health are not inherently good right if something's really good it always benefits you anything that can be used well or badly is not good but things like wealth again can be used well can be used badly so it's not inherently good and not only that the stoics will claim that it's possible to live a good happy life even if you don't have those things okay so this leads us to a distinction a distinction between virtue something that's inherently valuable and then what we might call indifference all that external stuff so as i've been saying virtue is the highest good because it always benefits us this is identified with wisdom knowledge consistency and it includes these traditional stoic virtues of wisdom justice temperance and um courage this is something internal as we've seen right an internal mental state a character and as it's something internal it can't be controlled by anyone else no one can interfere with your virtue the stoics will insist and most importantly of all they suggest that this is both necessary and sufficient for us to live a good happy life right it's necessary it's the thing you need but it's also sufficient on its own you don't need anything else by contrast there's indifference all the external stuff these things that as we've seen they're not inherently good on their own because you can use them in either good or bad ways not only that that's all the stuff that's not in our control that's all the stuff that we can't fully guarantee that we'll ever get and as a consequence of that because it's not fully in our control our desire for those sorts of external things can only ever lead to frustration and disappointment because inevitably some of the time we're not going to get them because we're finite human beings with a limited amount of power a limited amount of influence so if we attach our sense of happiness on a get on gaining these external things then inevitably we're going to be unhappy for much of the time now inevitably we are going to pursue some of these external things right we are going to pursue um wealth and success and health and social standing and all of these things we are going to pursue them right and we're going to pursue them because of the theory that i outlined at the at the beginning that we still have this natural instinct to pursue them right i said we're not merely animals fighting for self-preservation we're more than that as rational beings but we're nevertheless still embodied biological creatures that will want to pursue all of those things that will secure our self-preservation of course right so we all would much rather be rich than poor we would all much rather be healthy than sick we would all prefer it if everyone liked us rather than everyone hating us and so on and so forth fourth of course we would right and that comes from that basic sense of wanting to secure our self preservation so we'll pursue these indifference even though they're not the highest good they're not essential for us to live a good happy life but they're part of a human life nevertheless right so how do the stoics square that circle well they do that by i'll come to it and i'll come to that in a moment first i want to qualify what i've just said there about indifference i've said that these things will pursue of course we'll pursue some of them but not all of them right so all this external stuff we can divide into two categories right there's the stuff that's preferred the stuff that we naturally pursue for our own self-preservation health wealth strength all these sorts of things and then there'll be all sorts of stuff that we'll naturally avoid because it will damage us in some way illness poverty and so on and so forth all things inevitably none of us are going to want now the stoic claim is that we can draw a distinction between some of these things having value and others not having value but that's different from the distinction between things being inherently good or bad so we've got these two different levels of value so just to map that all out for you we've got things that are genuinely inherently good our excellent character rationality because we're rational beings consistency closely connected to rationality and the virtues that i'll come to in a bit then we've got things that aren't good but nevertheless have positive value and they do so because they contribute to our self-preservation so this isn't some arbitrary list right there's a biological foundation for why these things have positive value things like health wealth strength anything that will ensure us ensure our survival then at the other end you've got things that are genuinely bad that will always harm us a poor character like being in a mess mentally being inconsistent being irrational and having a whole series of vices and again i'll mention some examples of those a little later on and then there's stuff in the middle that's genuinely uninteresting genuinely neutral right epictetus has an example he says whether the number of hairs on your head is odd or even is something that we're generally indifferent about right okay so that's the kind of position that the stoics want to outline here right a way in which having a virtuous character is the most important thing and shapes the quality of our life but at the same time it's still natural and normal for us to pursue an active successful life in which things like money and reputation and good health are things that we would want as part of a successful life even if they're not essential and even when those things are taken away from us as they may well be at certain points in our life even then we can still live a good life if our head is together and we're in the right place so just to bring that thought out a bit more i'd like to contrast that stoic position with two other schools of ancient philosophy that were active at the time just to get a sense of how this works so i'll start with the two extremes at one extreme there are a group of philosophers called the cynics cynic from the greek word for dog right dog-like the most famous of these is a guy called diogenes the cynic who famously lived in a barrel right he had no possessions he threw them all away he was indifferent to anyone thought about him owned absolutely nothing lived an ascetic lifestyle very much as a follower of socrates picking up some of those ideas that we saw earlier on and diogenes and the other cynics insisted as we've just seen that virtue is the only good everything else is um just an indifferent and ought to be a matter of complete indifference just pursue virtue just pursue character forget all the other stuff altogether right that's the cynic view at the other extreme you've got the aristotelians right the very well-heeled wealthy leisurely aristotelians aristotle famously thinks that you probably need to be an aristocrat with a certain amount of private income in order to be a philosopher because philosophy is a leisure pursuit that takes time and you need to have the money to be able to have the time to sit around and think all day right um so aristotle also in the wake of socrates thinks that virtue is the highest good but he doesn't think that's enough on its own to live a good happy life you need some of the window dressing as well you need some money behind you you need good social standing you need the respect and honor within your community to play traditional value those things contribute to a good life and if those things are taken away then your life genuinely is impoverished in some way you're missing something that you need and by extension the virtuous person who's broke isn't living as good a life as the virtuous person who's wealthy would be the aristotelian view something's been lost right obviously these are kind of very broad caricatures but that's the kind to paint the picture right the stoics want to occupy the middle ground between those two more extreme positions right so again virtue is the highest good we don't want the extreme asceticism of the cynics we want to naturally pursue all of that external stuff as well without claiming that we need that in order to flourish and live a good life so even in adversity we can still live as well as we would when times are good and as a kind of response to that aristotelian view about you need to be wealthy in order to do philosophy um i mentioned earlier our early greek sin our early greek stoics i mentioned we saw zeno and chrysippus and i said that's the first and the third there's a guy in the middle called clanthes clanthes was a boxer and for a while he was also a gardener and he would work nights so that he could spend all day studying philosophy with xeno so he was often presented as a kind of counter example that you don't need private income you just need to roll your sleeves up and do some work and you can find the time for yourself then to do philosophy as well okay so that's the middle ground that the stoics are trying to occupy um drawing on this account of virtue character being the anything that's inherently good but also this fairly subtle position about the the status of external things that we think have value as well right so i've talked a bit about virtue right what's virtue now when i first encountered all this stuff i was deeply cynical about virtue right i was a typical cynical teenager who then became a philosophy student philosophy students are trained to be skeptical about everything so i was cynical and skeptical about everything right particularly morality right you know this is just your parents telling you what to do or slightly more sophisticated is the church and the state telling everyone what to do i wasn't interested in any of that right i was far too grown up age 22 to believe in any of that rubbish right but then i became more and more interested in stoicism and there was all this stuff about virtues and i felt a bit uncomfortable about all of that that didn't quite fit with my worldview where i was at that point in my life so how did i square that how did i get around that well it was easy right the word that's usually translated as virtue from greek arity is often translated as excellence right so for instance if you were an athlete in the ancient olympic games and you won your race you would be said to have arate you would be said to be excellent right you wouldn't obviously have moral virtues in the way in which we might think about virtues today but you would have virtue in that much wider sense you'd be excellent right so i could say to myself okay these stoic guys they're not really talking about moral virtues they're talking about excellence and excellence in the context of being a human being as we've seen in previous slides involving rational and consistent i can get behind that right to be in excellent mental state to be rational consistent that's fine i'll bracket all this virtue stuff that's not so important right then justin prints some nice posters that say wisdom justice temperance and courage and say okay i'm gonna have to talk about particular virtues so it was only much later that i kind of connected with those four traditional virtues that the stoics talk about and the thing that really brought them home to me was a passage from the philosopher epictetus so epictetus was one of the later roman stoics writing in the first century a.d he'd been a slave in rome he was released and eventually founded his own school of philosophy on the western coast of greece his name epictetus simply means acquired because he was a slave so we don't know his name he was originally from somewhere in asia minor and dragged off to rome there were no portraits or statues of him he wasn't that important so we don't know his real name we don't know what he looks like we don't know anything about him he also wrote nothing right but one of his students a famous historian a guy called aryan wrote lecture notes and the text that we have that you can now read that come down to us under epictetus name are notes from the lectures that he gave as a teacher in his later life and there's a passage in epictetus where he's confronting a man who's come to visit him at his school there are lots of these strange encounters that we see in epictetus discourses where various important dignitaries come and visit who's this guy i've heard about him what's he got to say and he has these back and forth with them and there's one in particular where he challenges one of his visitors over the virtues and he does it like this he says who do you most admire who would you want to be do you want to be the sort of person who cheats their friends no would any of us want to be the sort of person who cheats their friends would we admire someone that behaves in that way no we'd admire the person who deals fairly with other people right we deny them we'd respect them and we think yeah that's the sort of person i want to be in other words we'd want to be just no one admires someone who acts unjustly do you admire people that are constantly in debt and can't manage their money do you admire the person that goes out with you one um in the evening to the pub or the nightclub and doesn't know quite when to stop and has that one extra drink that tips them over the edge and then makes a fool of themselves would you ever admire that person would you want to be that person or if you are sometimes that person do you regret it in the morning no instead we admire someone who's in control of their affairs someone who can manage these things effectively in other words we'd admire the virtue of temperance or moderation or self-control or different translations of the same term again would we admire someone who always backs down no matter what the situation would we want to be the sort of person that always backs down in every situation and never takes a stand or instead would we admire someone who stands up when they're tested again i think that's fairly clear-cut we wouldn't want to be the sort of person who always backs down and never is prepared to stand up for what they think is important or valuable so we all implicitly admire the virtue of courage and finally i'm sure we all know someone who's like this the person who always screws up the person who always makes the wrong decision the person who keeps making the same wrong decision again and again right we all know someone you know who's just not very good at learning lessons from experience who doesn't quite learn how it is to make good decisions in their life that's someone who lacks wisdom or prudence we're not going to admire that person we certainly don't want to be that person we like to think that we're going to learn from our experiences and work out how to judge situations well and act well in them that's the sort of person we want to be so in this dialogue in epictetus we see him challenge this guy and we say well look you don't admire people that are unjust you don't admire people that are immoderate you don't admire people that are cowardly and you don't admire people that lack wisdom you wouldn't want to be that kind of person implicitly we all want wisdom justice moderation or temperance and courage even if we might not fully articulated that to ourselves so that's a kind of um that kind of gives us a sense of what it might mean to embody those virtues in practice

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Length: 42min 50sec (2570 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020