Stoicism and After: Philosophy and Life, with Professor A. C. Grayling

good evening and welcome to this second lawyers group event of 2021 uh i can see from the icon at the bottom of my screen that uh many people who have signed up are not yet here but the numbers attending are growing up uh are going up every few seconds so i will start my introduction now and hopefully by the time i've finished uh everyone who wants to be here will be here my name is rupert jackson and i'm chairman of the lawyers group of classics for all as explained last time these events are provided for members of the lawyers group of classics for all as a thank you for the generous contributions and subscriptions which they pay to help fund the teaching of classics in state schools but apart from the lawyers group members i also welcome all the other guests who are here tonight they have kindly made donations to attend others evening one of the benefits of zoom is that we can invite so many members of the public to join our events this is not only the second lawyers group event of 2021 it is also the second lecture by professor grayling his first lecture was on the 11th of march under the title what the stoics can teach us about living through the covid19 crisis that lecture was so popular that people called for a sequel well tonight's lecture is that sequel the ground rules are the same as usual there is a a question and answer box the professor's lecture will last for about 40 minutes you can put any questions which you have in the q a box at the end of the lecture we will have a q a session i will sift through your questions and ask as many of them as time allows so uh please feel free to put your your questions in i remember that last time we had a flood of extremely good questions i'm sure the same will happen tonight you can use the chat function to raise any technical issues cfa classics for all staff members are on hand to offer support tonight speaker professor ac grayling is a distinguished philosopher a prolific author and lecturer his excellent history of philosophy which i hold up now is one of his more recent publications uh and it is indeed a very excellent work uh i gather that he has another book which is going to be published next week and he will be talking about that uh shortly on an intelligent squared event professor grayling is the founder and principal of the new college of the humanities he is also a fellow of saint anne's college oxford i have been furnished with a long list of his achievements and prestigious positions but i will not read that out tonight professor grayling will return to the topic of stoicism and discuss how it influenced later generations including renaissance scholars so uh i will now hand over to our speaker professor grayley and sir rupert thank you very much indeed and it's a great pleasure to be back and to um respond to some requests received to talk a bit about the later influence of stoicism in the renaissance and the enlightenment and i'm very pleased to do that not least because stoicism has become um something of a thing as we say these days in our contemporary world and that's an interesting phenomenon because it is a philosophical outlook which is very well adapted to an age um which is much more secular where there is uh much less loyalty at least in um what had been the areas of christendom if you like to some particular version of a religion but in order to explain this i need to take a step or two back historically in order to situate stoicism and the doctrines of stoicism a little bit more uh clearly a little bit like uh taking a run-up for for a high jump so i have to remind you i know you know this that socrates who died in 399 so at the very very beginning of the fourth century bce had left a legacy um which was very multiple in its effects not just of course uh plato and then plato's pupil aristotle and the lineage of philosophical thinking that flows from those two great fountains of of debate but but also in the thought in the minds and indeed in the commitments of a number of other individuals one in particular who was a pupil of socrates a man called antisthenes took a something from from socrates teaching rather different from what plato took from it and this was the blind that led to stoicism in the century that followed antisthene's own time and therefore gave an impetus to the whole story of stoicism so that little bit of history i think is is important and i want to tell you about that first as follows plato was was a young man he was in his late twenties when um socrates died he wasn't close to socrates in the sense of being an intimate friend he was one among a number of people who had listened to socrates discourses and who had of course picked up a great deal both of the approach to thinking about things that socrates took but also of course a very vital interest of socrates you may remember that socrates said of himself when young that he had gone to the schools of the philosophers the so-called pre-socratic philosophers those who had come before him um who were interested in the nature of the universe the origins and nature of existence and what the universe is made of what the principle of it is and he comes into the view that the really important question since those debates seem to go round and round in circles was the question how should one live what sort of person should one be what values should shape our lives and and guide our actions and he was he was intensely interested in this and wanted to find out from his contemporaries what they thought about these matters and indeed he wanted to find out whether they had given sufficient thought to these matters given that they were making very free use of terms like virtue courage nobility generosity and the like and he wanted to know if they really had a good grasp of the meaning of these terms and whether that deep grasp of the meaning would influence the way that they lived and so he challenged his fellow athenians to the point of making a terrific nuisance of himself as you know he was even described himself as a gadfly stinging people into thinking about these things because of course he very quickly found out that they hadn't really thought about them very deeply and didn't really know whether or not they were living in accordance with the true grasp of these ideas now in that period of thought and this great classical um period is remarkable for the fact that it wasn't enough to ask the question how should one live and what are the values that one should live by but it felt necessary to ask why those would be the values what is it about the world and what is it about human beings that those should be the values that they live by and therefore ethics which is the discussion about the nature of one's character one's ethos needs to sit on a firmer basis of metaphysics of understanding of the nature of reality of what the world really is like and socrates engaged in some discussion to that effect but it was mainly of course plato who took that aspect of things very much further it was plato who realized that if you were going to have an ethical ethical stroke political view because like his own pupil aristotle he thought of the ethical and the political as being continuous the good life of the individual must be contextualized in the good society and therefore questions about value range across both individual and collective considerations hence the ethical life the character and the nature of the polis of the political community um they were very very closely related to one another but they both needed to rest on this investigation really into the nature of humankind and the world that they occupied and this is why plato went into very great detail i mean really fine technical detail into questions of the nature of reality and of the possibility of knowledge of that reality in order to provide a basis for thinking about ethical questions and this is something you find repeated again and again in many of the major figures of this philosophical tradition that the aim ultimately was to be able to identify what the good ultimately is but recognizing that that had to be predicated on a good understanding of what the world is and what we are in the world so that was uh something very central to plato's endeavor and to aristotles because aristotle also you may remember you were doubtless reading the commentary and ethics again recently you remember that he said there what identifies the good for us the nature of the good life what what picks out for us the virtues by which we live is something that has to do with what is very distinctive about us as uh beings and that is that we possess reason we share in common with the rest of the world to the fact that we need to um each we need to reproduce ourselves we move as the other animals do but unlike the rest of nature we have this very distinguishing feature which is reason and therefore the application of reason and living the prudential life a life of thoughtfulness and consideration about what choices we make and what actions we take will be what it is to live a good and flourishing life a huge harmonic life so that was the way that that uh uh aristotle developed these ideas but in doing so he was picking up on a very socratic theme socrates had argued in his discourses and in his encounters with with uh others that virtue that the good life the good and virtuous life is a life of knowledge of knowing what the right thing is knowing what the good thing is he took the view that evil or ill or doing the wrong thing acting badly is a function of ignorance it's because you don't know what the right thing is and if you do know what the right thing is how can you possibly do the wrong thing he said if you know the good how can you do the the bad well aristotle was a little bit less idealistic on that point you recognize that uh you know you're on a diet and you see a great big piece of chocolate cake and you eat it knowing that that's the wrong thing to do because he recognized this phenomenon that i'm afraid we all suffer from which is weakness of will a crazier and this is a feature of our existence of our moral lives that has to be taken into account and indeed is an important feature therefore of the application of reason to life that we are able to overcome those impulses which will lead us away from our recognition of the good to actions which don't realize the good so it was a much more realistic and uh psychologically more accurate uh account but it did it did turn on this idea that the use of reason the reasoned life the considered life because you remember socrates great point was that the good the best kind of life is the considered life the chosen life and this is a theme that aristotle develops while at the same time recognizing as i say these psychological uh considerations also so this idea of reason of the application of reason is one major strand that comes out of socrates through aristotle and it does feed into stoicism we'll see in a moment the other strand that came out of socrates and which was picked up by his pupil antisthenes was socrates attitude towards the conventions towards the fact that most people aspired to wealth to honor to fame to a life of comfort or luxury and he disdained all these things socrates was rather famous for being very hardy so he was able for example to bear cold and hardship and he had a military career in which he displayed these characteristics of being as people later came to call it very stoical able to endure um excessive heat excessive cold hunger um first and and the like and also famously he used sometimes to stand for hours deep in thought uh quite quite indifferent to um how he felt whether he was hungry or or whether it was raining and so on and this indifference to the external this hardiness was something which really struck antisthenes because it was predicated on a disdain as i say for all the conventionalities and all the normal things that people wanted to surround themselves with and the kind of life that they wanted to have now antis was the founder of cynicism which is the hippie philosophy the philosophy that you reject all those conventional things you turn your nose up at the idea of wanting to live uh the soft life and have you know lovely furnishings and carpets and so on uh for example um diogenes his pupil the famous diogenes the cynic who lived in a barrel and who really quite alarmed the citizens of athens by his behavior in you know not quite in a way that i would describe in a moment but for a reason i will describe in a moment but he once famously went into plato's house and stamped on the carpet in plato's drawing room saying i stamp on your pride thus and plato responded as it happens this is an anecdote told i think by dow jones lashes he responded by saying in doing so diogenes you display a different kind of pride which may be true but at any rate anticipation though genius completely spurned the conventions and and these normal aims of life that people had and they wanted to live as close as possible as they put it to nature they wanted to first follow nature that was a slogan which the stoics themselves adopted later but the idea of the concept comes from the cynics to the extent that uh diogenes uh lived um naked he slept in this barrel he performed all his natural functions uh in public to the dismay and sometimes discussed of his fellow athenians and i think i reported the anecdote about him last time that the the one and only um a pertinence he carried about with him was a cup so that he could scoop up water and drink until one day he saw a child scooping up water in his cupped hands and the arginis tore the cup off from the string around his neck and threw it away and said um even a child teaches me wisdom so this was this was a very very dramatic espousal of the life of a dog so to speak to it to be as close to nature as possible hence the idea of the cynics now a person who admired what antisthenes and alchemies we're seeking to do in repudiating um all the effectiveness of civilization and of being as close and as true to nature as possible was a man called kratis rather famous for um having uh himself was a had been a very wealthy individual and given up all his wealth to become a cynic uh to follow in the footsteps of uh antisthenes and diogenes and his wife hepatia who had also come from a rather wealthy and comfortable family who also rejected everything much to her family's dismay to join kratis in this life the life of the cynic they became much beloved by the athenian community they they were tremendously uh admired by the athenians and they were welcome everywhere and that very often were treated as marriage guidance counsellors and as you know advisers to offspring and so on they were apparently a a rather remarkable couple in that way but they uh that they in their ability to relate to the community around them so in other words their rejection of it wasn't like diogenes a sort of smearing rejection of it but but instead was an attempt to live the the cynic life so the sort of hippie um [Music] life as close as possible to the simplicities um as they could get that was something which really struck a visitor to athens from cyprus and this was a man called zena came from kittium in in cyprus uh there's a story about how he had been shipwrecked and he said this is the best thing that ever happened to him because it it resulted in in his having to go to athens and while he was there uh he decided that he would study philosophy he asked a bookseller um who he should go to to take instruction and it just happened that kratos was walking past the bookshop at the time so the story goes and the bookseller said well there's a philosophy you could follow him and um zeno did so became a disciple of uh of uh kratis and adopted from him a set of views not not entirely taking the cynic outlook to heart not wanting to go all the way to repudiating everything in society but recognizing that you could internalize the cynic virtues of simplicity and of closeness to nature and following nature as as much as possible but at the same time to have a relationship with the community in which you live and carry out your responsibilities to it which in effect is what uh kratis and uh hippaki had been doing but xeno saw that this was something that you could you could elaborate so you could have a what looked like a perfectly normal life so you could earn a living and you could take your part in the government of the of the polis you could you know do all your civic responsibilities and duties which the cynics had rejected and wouldn't do as it were they didn't want to pay taxes to their society but cena saw that you could do it and at the same time nevertheless live a life of genuine virtue a life of simplicity a life that would be as conformable as it could be to the order of nature and there is the key idea the order of nature the fact that the world has a rational structure that there is a an unfolding regularity a pattern of order in the universe and that conformability to that order was what it was to live well now this order in the universe was described by zeno as its logos now this is a word which has a very very wide range of meanings but basically i mean the basic meaning of it is word as it happens but uh its meaning in the philosophical context was reason or order or pattern or sort of rationality the logos of the universe is the the rational order of it and it is living in conformity with the logos with the rational order of things that lay at the very very heart of zeno's view and it is what underlay the ethics the ethics of stoicism which you'll remember from our discussion last time is that with respect to those things that you cannot influence or control things outside you aging earthquakes and and the rest you must face them with courage you must be you must accept the fact that these things happen if you rail against them well if you feel angry or despairing this is a function of your attitude a very important principle for the stoics is rather beautifully um articulated by antoronto santi zuberi the author of the little prince you know who said the meaning of things lies not in things themselves but in our attitudes to them and that was really key to the stoic view our attitudes to things outside us uh give them their meaning and if there's nothing that we can do about them then we must be instead of of feeling the passions of despair and anger and misery and the rest we must be a pathetic that is a pathos not have feelings about them so apathetia in greek doesn't quite mean what apathy means nowadays but it means treating them on their merits that is something that you can't do anything about therefore you face them with courage and what you can control or master your own feelings your own desires your own appetites and fears there you must try to achieve some degree of self-mastery courage to the outer self-mastery to vienna this was key and for xeno this came from the idea that the universe has a logic that the universe has an order and that if you if you conform yourself to this order one of the things that you recognize is that the universe's order a very great deal of it is not under your control it just it is just what it is you have to accept that fact but that you do have this degree of reason that you can impose on your attitudes to things and by imposing a control of reason on your feelings about things you can recognize what is really good and worthwhile and you can also discriminate between those things which it's nice to have like for example you know having a wealth or having a nice home having a good relationships and so on but which are not absolutely essential to the ultimate the final good which is living in conformity with the world in such a way that you achieve inner stability and tranquility these other things by the way wealth and and the rest which it's you prefer to have but you don't have to have in order to live with ataraxia were described as the things that are indifferent could have them it's okay they're nice to have but you need them you could dispense with them you don't have to have them and that is the as it were the the structure that xeno erected on this idea of the nature of the world and the logos in the world a metaphysical view well um xeno had uh uh um some followers uh clianthis and chrysippus who are major figures in the development of early stoicism because they were very interested in logic xeno himself had been a pupil of uh um stillpo who was a mergarian logician he had also attended lectures at the academy plato's academy and and had had debates with the the skeptics as they were called the philosophers of the academy about the nature of knowledge and truth and like and so in that early period of stoicism there was a lot of deep thought about reality about knowledge about reason and logic and about the way that they underlay this idea of how one should view the world and how one should master oneself now all this was happening in the fourth and third centuries bce around about 300 bce is when um zeno um began to to study philosophy in athens and to set up his own school shortly thereafter and his followers clan thieves and chrisipus therefore lived in the third century and it's very important to to not to collapse antiquity into you know a little squash box so that when we think of the early stoics like xenon is his immediate followers uh and then we think of seneca and epictetus and marcus aurelius later we sort of pushed them together because in fact a number of centuries elapsed between them after all seneca and epikeetus both lived in the first century a.d and um uh well epiphany to straddle the first and second centuries um and marcus williams lived in the second century a.d so several hundred years after zeno and during that time stoicism underwent a change it went to change in the following sense first that all the metaphysics and logic that attended the earlier thinking in stoicism dropped out and when um stoicism was introduced to the roman world by a man called panitius of rhodes in the uh in the in the first second century a.d and was picked up by people like cicero and cicero wrote about uh stoicism he himself was influenced by the stoics he liked some aspects of steric ethics although he himself was mainly a follower of the platonic academy when it came to things like metaphysics and the theory of knowledge but the ethics he quite liked and in fact there's a work by cicero called the stoic paradoxes and by paradoxes he meant principles in fact and the reason why he called them paradoxes was because he was defending them against criticisms by some of his contemporaries so cicero of course is a a figure of the very end of the republic in the beginning of the uh you know the period that led to the empire during the great time of the civil wars so we're thinking of cicero as being somebody who would have been a historical figure even for seneca and epictetus in the first century a.d and by that time this second significant change had happened not only has the logical metaphysical part of stoicism disappeared but also the idea of the logos of the principle of reason the principle of order in the universe had started to be personified as a deity seneca describes this principle as providence providencia as something which is as well intelligent or conscious so when he writes about things like consolation and constancy and how to manage your emotions your anger and the like and there are many marvelous essays by seneca on these topics the moral essays they fill four or five volumes of the lord library he there invokes this idea of of providence and if you conform to the stoic principles of courage and of self-mastery if you apply reason and to recognize those things that are indifferent that don't ultimately affect you even if you they might be useful to have and so on and keep focused on those things that really do matter courage and justice truth if you if you do that then providence is going to look after you it's not that you yourself personally have have achieved atroxia by these means as xeno and cliamthies and chrysippus would have said but instead that it is as if that's almost in a way hearkening back to the figurative use of the idea of the eu diamond the good the good demon or the good angel looking after you in parasiti aristotle's ethics aristotle didn't mean it literally but the idea of eudaimonia was the idea of you know having a kind of providential life and this had become something uh sufficiently personalized for the christians later several centuries later to find in seneca what they regarded as pre-figurings of a very congenial ethical outlook for themselves and this is something which was picked up by epic teachers he also talks as if the logos is something which is intelligent and conscious and purposive in the universe and so to marcus zubelius now to talk a little bit about the uh the later effects of all this the effects that marcus aurelius has had was really on the late renaissance and the enlightenment for a reason that i will explain in a moment but just to mention straight away that of course his writings were his own personal private diary and he was writing to himself he was not writing for publication he had been bred up in the stoic tradition he had had stoic tutors they had learned the um the late uh stoic outlook from these discussions i mean not not only uh from seneca and epictetus but from uh hebrew jesus's teacher musonius rufus who was a very very famous figure in the rome of his day stoicism therefore was something it recommended itself tremendously especially to educated people both in the hellenic and in the roman periods indeed and very very many of the patrician offspring had stoic tutors as a result because it conformed so very well with the roman character and those of you who know a bit about you know roman history and and roman legend if you think about horace's on the bridge and mucia scavola and you know all these great characters to exemplify the uh the the roman virtues those roman virtues are very very much stoic virtues well in the uh fourth century a.d when um christianity was uh made the official religion of the of the empire the late fourth century you may remember constantine had decriminalized christianity in the early part of that century and then theodosius the first by the edict of thessalonica i think it was in 380 a.d said that christianity is the religion of the empire all other um uh religions are uh you know now as it were banned at that time which again nearly 400 years into the story of of christianity and christianity for a long time been you know minority advocation in various parts of the empire had at times been persecuted because it didn't conform with the roman view of religion just to remind you of the etymology of the term religion it comes from religio religuere which means to bind we get our word ligature from the same root and in the roman conception of public religion this for a very very diverse and enormous empire with so many different languages ethnicities traditions customs and so on and religion was a way of binding together or bringing together the the empire in great public festivals worshipping the emperor or or jupiter and so forth because the christians wouldn't take part in that and they wouldn't worship the pagan gods or a living god the emperor they were regarded as subversive and for that reason they were from time to time persecuted quite severely on occasion but when they finally uh after constantine and in the fourth century christianity became uh something very acceptable to um the more educated classes of romans and they also at that time too apologetical literature and made it possible for the educated classes to accept christianity and just to give you one little example um the educated classes tended also to be the wealthy classes but it says in scripture that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for which person to get into heaven so it's a bit bit problematic also the roman empire was an enormous and powerful military empire and yet the scriptures tell us about turning the other cheek and blessing of the peacemakers and so these things needed to be um dealt with a bit of spin needed to be put on these principles and fortunately um in that same period of the day fourth century early fifth century augustine who was a great interpreter and said things like for example well if the rich give their arms to the poor the souls of the poor will conduct them into heaven and this reconciled the rich with the idea of a scriptural religion of christianity's kind which in its origins in in its fundamental principles seem much closer to the to cynicism of of the fourth century bce than they did to the rome of the second and third centuries a.d but it was also the case however that by the fourth century ad the teachings of the of the scriptures had come to seem to to pose other difficulties as well if you go to the the scriptures the gospels and you put to them the question how should i live what should i do in order to attain the kingdom the answer that you get will be of you get two kinds of answers one kind of answer is very familiar to all moral systems you know treats look after the widows and orphans and treat your fellow men as your neighbors and so on this goes way back you can go to the china of the second third centuries uh bce to moses uh love your fellow men as your brothers you know be kind to the widows and orphans this is a very common and obviously a very good principle that many moral outlooks shared not just christianity what was distinctive about christianity was the instruction in the scriptures to give away everything that you have take no thought for the morrow think of the lilies of the field they neither spin nor weave so paul says don't marry unless you're going to burn now all this is because early christianity really sincerely believed that the parousia the second coming was imminent messiah was coming back this week next week next month very soon so you don't need money you don't make plans you don't start a family and these teachings of of the scriptures and how to achieve the kingdom led many people over the next couple of centuries to repudiate everything to give everything up i mean really to live in in a lifestyle more cynical than the cynics off into the deserts the hezikas the desert fathers live up on the top of the pillar like simon style hygies and the rest in order to renounce the world and all its works and the devil and just to wait for the messiah to come and making no plans and having no possessions etc well by the fourth century when this was a religion that was becoming attractive to a wider range of people and the church fathers of course in jerome and various others had been watching apologetics which were making the case for um the credibility of the miracle stories and so on a more livable kind of ethics needed and it was borrowed more or less wholesale from historicism from stoicism mainly but also to some extent from the aristotelian tradition in aristotle and in the comic in ethics aristotle had very much valorized the idea of the person who strove to to live with some nobility strove to live a life of of reason of thought and of self-command i mean not that different in a way from from stoicism but without that inner kind of austerity that the stoics had sought for the early stories and this idea of the what aristotle called the megalopsychos this is the great magna anima the great soul the great souled individual became a very central idea in christianity what in the english tradition of describing it sometimes called the christian gentleman or the christian gentle woman the great souled person the generous person supposed generosa so generous uh his cognate with magna anima so that was one one element but the the element of stoicism that that is having having faith that providence will as the name suggest provide so that treating the world as uh a testing ground there will be disasters pain struggles illness uh aging death to deal with and these are things you must confront with courage but you must try to achieve the life of virtue the the christian life by submitting yourself to the teachings by exercising that internalized control these are very much features of stoicism that were borrowed and adapted and they were borrowed and adapted at about the same time that some of the metaphysics and epistemology of neo-platonism were brought into christianity because of course it was you know early christianity had been very judaic in in its uh um outlook some paul for example thought when people died they would be buried and then when the messiah returned the graves would open and the dead would rise uh from the graves and the belief became very widespread that those who had died as believers as martyrs and saints would not not rot in the grave their bodies would be preserved well when in the fourth century fourth and fifth centuries the um christianity was the official region of the empire and many uh churches being built and temples were being converted saints and martyrs were being exhumed so that their relics could be in these places in the hope of performing miracles and they were found in fact to have rotted in the grave there was nothing left but about bones a new account of this was needed now plato had devised the idea of the immortal soul which encounters the forms in the realm of being uh in which knowledge of which is true knowledge you may remember and when the soul is uh incorporated at conception or birth whenever that happens it forgets everything may remember plato's theory of unforgetting that to learn something is not to learn something new but to be reminded of something you knew before you were born because your immortal soul had pre-existed your birth this idea uh was uh a component of neo-platonism so the later platonic view nearly a thousand years now after plato's own time 900 years and it was adopted into christian thinking the idea of the immortal soul which goes to purgatory uh to be shrieked of its sins and so on so at that time christianity was borrowing very heavily from the greek philosophical schools from neoprenationism from stoicism from aspects of uh the perchagic ethics of aristotle and that meant that those views persisted through the great uh length of time which has followed since then up to our own day aspects of the moral theology of christianity contain elements of stoic thinking so that is one way in in which this happened the other way in which it happened was that uh the writings of marcus sebelius which are a particularly beautiful expression of late stoicism of the stoicism where if you really want to see it worked out in in detail you read seneca and you read the enchiridion and the discourses of epithetus but to see how a fine thoughtful mind took these stoic teachings and tried to apply them to himself in circumstances where stoicism was at a premium i mean in the sense that if you were living as marcus aurelius was on the danube frontier at the time when the empire was very sorely pressed from without uh having to to live a hearty military life and from that position and camped on the banks of the danube to run an enormous uh empire he in his self-instruction using these stoic tienets articulated a a way of doing it a way of living as a stoic which is as i say a particularly beautiful version of that view and aurelius's diary which was called i mean the title that he gave it was to himself because he was writing to himself when it was published in english in the 17th century a.d so very very long time afterwards in a translation by a man called merrick casorben it was given the title meditations by the way it's of you know interest to um sort of the people who like the highways and byways of these things as i rather do that merrick kasoban was the son of isaac kasoban a very great scholar a very great scholar of the ancient languages a great classicist one of the greatest it was he who identified the so-called hermetic literature which had been claimed for some centuries beforehand to be a very very very ancient provenance to have come perhaps from before the time of moses or perhaps even earlier than that and as conveying the teachings of somebody who had lived moved so close to the origin of things that they had the very purest view of the nature of the world and the nature of god and this individual was uh hermes tris maguistus tris and that that figure of hermes as you know hermes was among other things the um uh patron deity of of writing of learning but he was also a psychopomp a psychopomp is a is a supernatural agent who conducts the souls of the dead uh to the place of the dead to hades and greek mythology in um egyptian egyptian mythology the godfath thoth which is a bit difficult to say when you when you've been to the pub in the evening um thoth was also the god of of the scribes and the learned and he was also a psychopomp also took the souls into the afterlife and therefore hermes and thoth were regarded as um the same individual and the identification of them returns on the fact that her niece was called trismegistus thrice great because thoth in egyptian mythology was always referred to as thoth the great the great the great thrice great so the identification was made on that basis but isaac has urban and the name casualbon of course was used by george eliot for a very different kind of character later alas in in the middle march but isaac azuban studied the greek uh in which the hermetic literature was written and recognized it as second century greek second century a.d greek and not you know um the greek of the pre-mycenaean times so it was a wonderful discovery and a very important one at that late period of the renaissance early enlightenment anyway his son mary kazuwan translated the the um writings of aurelius published it as the meditations and it instantly became a bestseller now that it was published in in the 17th century so about a third of the way through um 17th century became a great bestseller many many people read it and it became very influential in the enlightenment the enlightenment of course of the 17th but especially 18th century was predicated on the rejection of um hegemonic control over people by absolute monarchs and overthought by a totalizing religion the rejection of authority over the person so the person has individual rights and over the mind so the mind can think freely of doctrine and dogma to inquire to conduct research to do science i mean the scientific revolution of the 17th century followed on the reformation not because the protestant parts of europe were friendlier to science than the catholic parts i mean in the catholic parts right up until nearly the middle of the 17th century they were still persecuting people like giordano bruno and galileo and the rest but because in the protestant parts of you of europe the churches didn't have enough power to to shut people up they couldn't that they couldn't exert enough control and it was therefore in those parts that the uh the the rise of science uh was most marked in the uh late 16th and the 17th centuries but this idea of of removal of these authorities meant that people could start to think again about the about ethics and about the principles of ethics because for all those many many centuries before the question how should i live and what is good was answered the church had the answer it told you how to live and it told you what the aim of life is and it told you what is good and what is bad and therefore the the uh discussions that uh antiquity the classical and hellenic and roman antiquity those discussions that people had had then about the principles of the good life how one should live and those different schools the aristotelian their peculiar and the cynic the stoic schools giving their different answers to this question all that had stopped the the stoic ideas have been incorporated in christianity as i say but debates about the foundations of of ethics had ceased and this is why it is so remarkable because actually the 18th century 18th century enlightenment and in particular uh the scottish enlightenment david hume um and thomas reed and adam smith also in england with shaftery and hutchinson this was a revival of thinking about ethics and one of their most um significant inputs into thinking about ethics was of course stoicism there is an essay by david hume on stoicism in which and he's very critical about all the different schools very critical about their procurements for example and this is natural because you're not going to agree with absolutely everything that some previous writer had said or some school of thought had taught you're going to be critical you're going to look at some aspects of what they say and disagree with them but on the whole hume found the basic idea of stoicism very very attractive and he therefore made an effort to incorporate that kind of thinking into a view he held very important for him view which was an odds of historicism the stoics has said that you apply reason to your emotions to govern them human those of you who read remember he said that reason is the handmaid of the emotions that in the end the things the thing that really guides us and motivates us all our actions the springs of our actions come from how we feel about things from our emotions and that reason is subordinate to them the hand made of the passions as you put it whereas of course stoicism taught that reason is the ruler of our passions but nevertheless he believed that the insights of of stoicism were of sufficient value that their idea about treating the indifference about seeking to identify the things that really mattered so that one could live with the kind of ataraxia the kind of stability self-mastery self-control that would navigate one through all the difficulties and two months of life that he thought was um something worth celebrating and so like cesaro before him and hume was a great admirer of caesarea he did what cicero did cesaro was an academic skeptic when it came to metaphysics and epistemology but was very very attracted by the stoic outlook and that applies also to hume and that hume um view is something which now today in our present world is proving itself very attractive to a large number of people hume had dropped that aspect of late statisticism which had turned the logos the idea of the order of things into a deity into her into a providence so contemporary stoicism in its association with contemporary humanism is a view which says that by the application of reason by thinking about how we're to live by living what and this is the ultimate source of stoicism in that aspect of socrates living the considered life we can live a life which is good now i see i've gone on far too long and i'm very sorry about that so um so rupert we better turn our attention to some questions and comments thank you professor braling for a fascinating lecture no one i imagine thought you were going on too long i could have listened for much longer however we do have a number of questions the first one is from lacred miners how if at all was marcus aurelius influenced by his tutor fronto in his articulation of stoicism well i think very much i i mean that this was uh um if you like really well the standard feature of the education of the uh educated and welfare upper classes uh and uh it it was you know in the air that people breathed this kind of outlook and as i said it conformed so well with the idea of the the roman republican virtues because even though the republic has ceased to be and we're well into the empire now indeed as gibbon remarked about the antonines and about the period of aurelius's um imperium and this was you know one of the great high points of of roman history but but even so some of those much earlier republican virtues that were always celebrated and which was so conformable with stoicism really formed the the the atmosphere the medium in which um people thought about their their ethical lives and so uh or aurelius would have been just brought up to think very naturally to find attractive these kinds of views thank you very much the second question is one i was going to ask but i'm pleased to see that anthony bainbridge has asked it given that zeno introduced the word logos and gave it the meaning uh in his usage which of his meanings reads through to saint john who begins uh his gospel with the famous words in the beginning was the logos oh i i don't think that zeno introduced the the term logos it's certainly present in the philosophical tradition already well before his time indeed when you look more deeply into the metaphysics and logic of the early stoics so of xeno himself clanty's precipice you see that they're influenced by for example heraclitus by the mergarian magicians the concept of the logos was a quite widely applied concept in philosophical discussions and had been so for some time so he didn't introduce the notion but but he but he applied it he made important use of it and indeed uh um this is very uh opposite uh question by you because the st john thing in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god that that use of it is if tremendously a a reflection of the way that um thinking about the logos the principle of the universe the the really key element of it had become identified with the idea of providence have become regarded as divine very often indeed in pre-christian writing you see the phrase the divine logos and providencia in seneca very very much that idea of the divine logos and so when saint john says in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god this is a bit of quite sophisticated theology because the johanna and gospel of course is the latest of the four gospels and already by that time it has already elaborated uh um you know quite a bit of interesting theology and there you see the presence as indeed you also do in sin paul in various places of the influence of greek thought it is as you say the the the latest of the four gospels would you think that perhaps and john had actually read red zeno or you know view on that um um you know uh um simple tarsus yeah in tarsus there were four schools of greek philosophy present in tarsus and there is no question but that simple was very well versed that and knew them very well there's no question of that but you can see all sorts of of indications of it in his various writings and i'm sure that uh somebody of the sophistication of mind of john the or whoever wrote the johanna in gospel um was very familiar with with the greek philosophical tradition i mean if you do a comparison if you think now any educated person now anybody who'd read any of the humanities history or anything like that would have picked up a great deal of uh you know of of this kind of discussion or a cognate discussion generated in our contemporary world and would have been influenced by them so they would have you know everybody knows descartes i drink therefore i am and then my that's a joke and so so you know it's that kind of thing at the very least but i'm sure in the case of of the author of the johannes gospel that person knew much more and was being very deliberate in that uh you know in the beginning was the word thank you oh ken logos i remember right well you're you're right yes yes yeah uh then we have a question from christopher clark if you set aside belief in the christian trinity and resurrection and indeed machinery of the catholic church by the time of the renaissance how far apart do you consider stoicism and christianity to be well uh sufficiently not far apart for it to be something that people like erasmus and uh quite actually quite a number of the renaissance humanists um to to find uh congenial and it certainly was certainly congenial to erasmus uh to melancholy um and it was again it you know if you become uh part of that part of the element in which the humanists of the 15th and 16th centuries swam so to speak because you know among the the um uh rediscovered texts and the tremendous explosion of of publication of texts that followed gutenberg the huge admiration that people had for cicero you may remember that uh he was regarded as a you know the the master of style people wanted to write as cicero did and that very often some of the scholars of the nationals refused to use any vocabulary that was earlier or related in caesarea so purists were there about it and of course caesarea's philosophical writings but because caesarea sevens of the task when his political career more or less come to an end of of trying to get into the latin conversation um many of the ideas of the greek schools which she had studied as a man indeed he'd been to athens he studied these things and he was a very good uh and rather discerning um perceptive uh commentator on them and wanted to parlay them parlay these debates into the latin conversation and and and therefore of course since people were reading cicero extensively and they and they were admiring him and they were picking up on his attitudes and and ideas the degree to which stoicism had uh impressed cicero himself especially in the ethical aspect of his thinking naturally dispersed into the renaissance mind thank you very much uh the the fourth question in the list is an interesting one are there any modern day public figures who you think could be described as stoics or who live by stoic principles um i don't know myself of anybody who would lay claim to the label but i do know uh quite a few people of whom it could justifiably be said that they had internalized some of the key aspects of the the stoic outlook and and lived accordingly uh well one of my own um uh teachers in fact now i had i had uh various teachers who were anything but very good uh for example one of the most uh attractive of them was freddie air aj air who i was his very last pupil and one of the producers and became rather friendly with him actually after after i'd ceased to be as his pupil up till the time that he died and he wouldn't be a stay but i i had a a teacher called timothy spring gls sprigg who was an idealist philosopher from the metaphysical point of view that that is he thought that he had a kind of pansys view about the ultimate nature of reality and in that sense he was a real standout um because that kind of idealism or indeed any kind of idealism that had ceased to to persuade uh a long time ago but but he uh rather sort of manfully you might say stoically adhered to to the views that bradley and spinoza and others have put forward and argued on their behalf but it was in the practice of his life it was how he he lived it one of the very very few people who had principles and adhered to them and enacted them and they they were principles of directness and simplicity and have always tried to live according to the truth by his best lights by what he took to to understand about the nature of the universe and in that sense i think he could be very well described as a stoke thank you very much well you have answered all the questions i think or all the questions in the list now um one other uh which is a short question from an anonymous attendee any favorite hysterical quote oh dear me um no i i can't think of of of any i i should say by the way that uh if if you want little um if you want neat quotations embodying stoic principles the place to look is seneca especially in the latin because he is a marvelously um you know aphoristic writer and his essays are as there were strings of aphorisms of of a stoic or kind so if you're seeking one then i direct you to seneca thank you well i'm sure that will answer the uh uh the point raised by our question well i'm afraid that the time is now up professor grayling thank you very much indeed for delivering a second hugely stimulating lecture i have learned a massive amount from it and i'm sure that everyone else has two can i just say a couple of words about classics for all first of all anyone with an affiliation to the legal world is very welcome to join the lawyers group within classics for all uh we welcome all new members subscriptions are 150 pounds a year and in return for your subscription you come to interesting events such as this but of course classics for all is much more than the lawyers group it's a very large uh uh organization uh and a very worthwhile charity it has a large number of supporters and some of those supporters attend our lawyers group meetings and they're most welcome to do so anybody who wishes to make a donation to classics for all which funds the teaching of classics in state schools especially uh in areas of social deprivation is invited to do so to make their contribution using the classics for all website now our next meeting is our next lawyers group meeting is going to be uh on the i'm embarrassed to say i have lost the date our next lawyers group meeting is going to be in june on the 8th of june our speaker will be professor michael scott familiar to many of you from his numerous television appearances his uh title will be remembering and forgetting the past athens in 403 bc that was a time when athens had just reestablished a democracy after its period of oligarchy under the rule of the 30 tyrants this was a a very dramatic period coming as it did at the end of the peloponnesian war and also of course coming in the closing years of socrates's life because our speaker this evening has reminded us that socrates died in three night orders was executed in 399 at bc or some would say bce so that's our next meeting it's going to be an online event like this one all members of the lawyers group will be very welcome to attend it at no cost and anyone else who would like to attend in return for payment of a modest ticket price uh will be very welcome and i hope there will be a large attendance michael scott is a trustee of classics for all as indeed am i uh and uh michael scott is an excellent commentator on matters uh concerning the ancient world as you would have seen from his television programs uh finally uh we are going to close this evening's meeting with a film about the work of classics for all in the blackpool area so i will say good night and thank you to all and thank you very much professor grayling i will now switch off my camera and sound and we will all watch the film about the work of classics for all in blackpool [Music] a [Music] my name is peter wright i teach at the blackpool 61 college where i lead the classical civilization and the ancient history course so you think of blackpool and you think of a very successful seaside entertainment town but underneath the surface there's a lot of social and economic problems we want to get latin into into the schools because first of all is the the key aim of driving and improving aspiration within our with our local students in terms of university and in terms of employment opportunities and and even just something simple as travel and experience and appreciation of the local environment that they've got as well here we have you know 50 of children of people premium children so it's really really important that we give those children alongside the other children in blackpool the same experiences and the same enriched curriculum so with support from classics for all we've managed to get latin and classics into all of these schools by training up non-specialist teachers so we've had over 15 teachers now trained to deliver either latin or classics and literature and history through the training that we've been able to put on through classics for all the training from blackpool 61 was excellent pete came in and really invigorated the teachers made it really easy for them to deliver and that's why it's been so successful there's also the huge benefits about improving their vocabulary their grammar their their whole english literacy um and also um in terms of a springboard to get them to appreciate and to be and to engage with modern foreign languages as well chris says well with the latin it's brought them alive they love the latin lessons they can't wait to try and work out the meanings of words so learning latin has had a huge impact on the children they love the classical context they love that other languages derive from this they like the history the myths about the romans and how it all started and they're asking more questions becoming more inquisitive about other subjects we started out as a club but they've started fighting over who can go to this club so it's changed now that we want to add it to the curriculum and enable all the children to access this exciting opportunity it's it's really awakened something in them and i think latin is the language of the future all right but apart from the sanitation the medicine education wine public order irrigation grow the freshwater system and public health what has the romans ever done for us well i love latin how it can help you with your vocabulary and i love how it can help you get a future job like if you were a lawyer or a doctor and it's great how we're one of the few schools who are actually learning latin you can learn words from it and know what they mean and especially you can help you in everyday life i like latin because if you do gcses on plants later and most of plants names are latin so it'll help you with it and i also like the myths and legends in the books i used to be a pilot when i grew up and if i go to like a different country and i don't know what they're going to be seeing i will know because of my lessons inside latin i study classics because i've loved the study of the ancient world ever since i was a child i'd always read books on well more egypt and doing classics like the sixth film was just an amazing opportunity for me and now i'm going on to cambridge university at sydney civics college to study archaeology and egyptology which is fantastic classics is still relevant today because the politics we have nowadays is very similar to the way it was before i think it's relevant because it teaches to question the accuracy of sources and it transfers the skills over so that you don't believe everything i love latin because the english is derived from latin and it's our teacher let's guess the answers rather than just telling us i love the stories because they said in latin we can also learn it and it's fun and when i grow up i would love to be a doctor and most of the doctor's terminologies are in latin if it wasn't for classics for all we would not have nine schools delivering latin or classics we wouldn't have 13 teachers trained up to deliver those things and we wouldn't have over 500 students every single week engaging in latin or classics [Music] you

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Length: 71min 48sec (4308 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021