Donald Robertson on the Life of Socrates and His Impact on Stoicism

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1:22Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

2:07Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So long ago, a man brings wisdom down from the heavens. His name is Socrates. He's the hero of Marcus Aurelius, of Seneca, of Epictetus. He's the greatest philosopher who ever lived, they thought. Epictetus says he's the greatest athlete who ever lives. If you define an athlete as someone who catches the ball and throws it back, catches the ball, throws it back, which is to say responds well to the situations and the circumstances of life. I think Socrates is a fascinating philosopher, a fascinating human being, and certainly a complicated one.

2:52And it's why I was excited when my agent Steve said, hey, I'm putting this book in the mail for you. You're going to want to check it out. And he throws Donald Robertson's new book in the mail. Now, I am a huge fan of Donald Robertson's work. I read some of his early stuff when I was working on Obstacle is the Way. That's how long now I've been a fan of his stuff. I really enjoyed his book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, which is about Marcus Aurelius. I loved his biography of Marcus Aurelius called The Stoic Emperor. I've had him on the podcast a couple of times. We always get really into, I think, important stoic topics.

3:27I've been thinking about this thing that he said last time we talked. I'll bring it to you real fast because it was really important. Hi, I was reading Hierocles and the translator was making this note that when the Stoics started, they started with a kind of, they were very much descended from the cynics, right? There's this sort of rejection of earthly things. There was kind of this, it's hyper individualistic, you know, like focus on your own self-improvement, forget everything else. And that as Stoicism evolves, she's sort of noting that it softens. right? That it softens into the notion of justice.

4:06Even though Zeno talks about courage, temperance, justice, wisdom, she's saying that justice was undervalued as a virtue. But by the time it gets to Marcus Aurelius, this idea of being community-minded, of participating, of giving a shit about other people, this becomes the primary stoic virtue, which Marcus Aurelius says a number of times in meditations. What do you think about that evolution? I think it's true. I mean, maybe in some ways they just conceptualized justice and social responsibility a little bit differently in classical Greece than they did in Roman society. But for sure, the cynics were less concerned with our social bonds and responsibility, and they do seem a bit harsh at times.

4:52and the stoics definitely but marcus aurelius puts so much emphasis on justice he actually literally says at one point that it's the most important victory he mentions justice or natural affection or cosmopolitanism or something something along those lines that's something that has to do with our interpersonal relationships and our relationship with society and almost every page of the meditations like it's the main theme really of the the book but that's not so much And obviously Diogenes the cynic, and if he is concerned about society, it's in a more rudimentary way. Yeah, and I've just been interested in that evolution now because it does seem that there is a hyper-individualistic, I don't want to say right-wing because it puts too much of a modern political in, but there does seem to be a misunderstanding today of stoicism that skips out on the inconvenience of having to care about other people.

5:53And perhaps the confusion is in the dichotomy of control, we don't really control other people. So maybe people are confused as to why they're supposed to care about their well-being. But Marcus Aurelius doesn't seem to have any confusion in this regard. I think so. I mean, I think it's also linguistically because we use the word stoic, like all of these terms for a Greek philosophy, their meanings became caricature over the centuries, right? Sure. So what we mean by Epicurean today, you know, generally is just somebody that enjoys, you know, fancy food and fine dining and stuff like that, right?

6:30Yeah. And what we mean by cynic with a small c is just somebody that kind of sneers at things and, you know, as a negative, that's true towards other people. And sophist, skeptic, Like these other words, academic, have all kind of become a little bit simplified or caricatured in their meaning over time. So stoic comes to mean just being like a robot or, you know, being unemotional. And that's actually how we use the term in psychology as a research construct. Like in research on lowercase stoicism consistently shows that it's problematic, it's toxic. It leads to increased psychological or emotional vulnerability.

7:15So, you know, we often have to explain to psychologists that what we mean by Stoic philosophy is much more nuanced and complex than just kind of suppressing your feelings. It's like when people hear the word sexy, it doesn't have anything to do with sex anymore. It means beautiful or attractive or well-designed or sleek or awesome. When you hear Stoic, 99 % of the time, it's not remotely connected to Stoic philosophy. And that confused. Weirdly, even people that read Marcus Aurelius or other books in Stoicism still kind of are viewing it through that lens in many cases. And so I've met people who read the Meditations, and I've talked to them about this.

7:57And they say that they hadn't even noticed that Marcus is talking about justice and society and natural affection. And I think, how is it possible? Like, it's kind of the me, he goes on and on and on about it. It reminds me of this quote from William Blake that says, we both read the Bible day and night, but you read black where I read white. I kind of think, how could you have not noticed all of the references, you know, to not being alienated from your fellow man and, you know, having love? One point at the beginning, Marcus says that he's describing the ideal stoic. He's talking about Sextus of Carinaea, Plutarch's nephew, who was one of his stoic teachers.

8:41And he describes him as being free from passions. And he mentions anger. So free from passions such as anger, and yet full of philistorgia, full of love. Yeah, that's one of my favorite passages. Full of love. Yes. And a brotherly love he's talking about. Philistorgia is what we translate as natural affection. but it means the love of a parent for their children. It's kind of like paternal love. We might say platonic love, brotherly love. He thinks that's the pinnacle of stoicism. And yet people think, have this kind of atomistic, individualistic view of it that's just about, it's almost more like nihilism, the way that people interpret stoicism in many cases.

9:26And I really think if Marcus Aurelius was around, And he would think this is more or less the opposite of what I thought the human ideal was. You guys are completely alienated from other people around you and the rest of society. And Stoics want to reverse that. They want this. But in a sense, I think Stoic virtue, particularly in Zeno and in the early Greek Stoics, it's tied up with their pantheism. and I think one of the starting points is this idea that they want us to be more of one with the rest of the universe they want us to realize our our oneness with the cosmos as a whole um and with uh with our fellow men like with with other human beings um it's extraordinary by the way just as a slight aside to that Marcus mentions Rome being a Roman citizen a couple of times and the meditations.

10:24But other than that, when he talks about overcoming anger, feeling love, overcoming alienation, he's talking about people in general, not just Roman subjects or citizens. And the people that he's dealing with as he's writing that are often what the Romans would have called barbarian envoys. Like, you know, it's strange to think that, again, we lose sight of that unless we imagine him writing the meditations in the evening after he's had a meeting with a bunch of foreign envoys in the morning. And also he'd been surrounded by foreigners, all the auxiliary units would have been Germanic tribesmen and people from other parts of the empire.

11:06Well, he's not just talking about his fellow, well-educated, rich Roman senators who went to the same schools and had the same understanding. He's not talking about our brotherly connection as he spent time with a couple hundred people exactly like him in a beautiful marble palace. It's in the mud of a quincum, right? Like it's far away and he's surrounded by salt of the earth, regular ass people. He says at one point, actually in Meditations 2.1, he says, I'm not talking about a bond of seed, i.e. like family or blood, i.e. race. he specifically says like and it's odd that he would say that because it really highlights the fact that he's talking about brotherly love towards the people he's at war with yeah which is a you know i don't i think becomes highlighted more if we really try and visualize the historical context in which he's he's writing this if we are to believe um lucian the market and the the chronology of this annoyingly is is there's some debate among scholars but it one interpretation is that 20 ,000 Roman soldiers were killed in a single day at the beginning of the Marcomannic War at Carnuntum, where Marcus then stations himself, right?

12:27That would have been one of the biggest defeats in Roman military history. And then Marcus goes there and stations, which must have been incredibly risky. So knowing that he's in this place where loads of women have been slaughtered by the Germanic tribesmen, he's telling himself, nevertheless, I have to view these people as my brothers and sisters. Yeah, he's being tested at the realist level because the preservation of the empire is at stake. Public opinion is at stake. He's just witnessed a horrible atrocity. And he's trying to go back to his philosophical first principles and go, not what do I emotionally think in this moment, not what is politically convenient to think in this moment, not what will rile the troops up in this moment, but like what at my bedrock values as a human being do I want to believe in this moment?

13:25And that reminds me of something that I wanted to mention, actually. And we kind of came close to earlier when we were talking about how often he'd been bereaved and lost all of those children, but also many other friends and family members that he'd lost. it only as i was working on the graphic novel and again like trying to really visualize marcus's life did it really dawn on me i just i remember just kind of setting up one day and thinking it really hit me for the first time suddenly that marcus aurelius during the plague surrounded by people who at one point increasingly were probably plotting to assassinate him also many people assumed that Marcus Aurelius was going to die because he looked very frail, stationing himself at the frontier where he was risking his life.

14:15All of these things combined, when I really started to picture it, I suddenly realized he really must have woken up each morning and kind of pinched himself and thought, I'm actually still alive. He was living on borrowed time he really must have felt that and and even beyond the like the all the like i get the impression all these people around him were gossiping about they thought he's not going to last much longer and he had that going on for at least a decade i think like people speculating about his impending death what must it be like to kind of know that that's the gossip and that some people in the wings are just waiting for you to die like he's constantly his sense of his own mortality I really think must have been much more pervasive and intense than it would be for most of us.

15:06You can see, first off, Donald has a delightful accent, but he's a really deep thinker about philosophy and stoicism. And look, there's been some people in the stoic world that have not always appreciated my writing or the success of my writing. It's probably more the latter than the former. I'm sure if I was selling zero copies, they'd all be a lot friendlier. But Donald's always been cool to me. Even if he wasn't, I'd be a fan of his stuff because he's great. I always enjoy talking to him. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about Socrates and how to think like Socrates. So this is a continuation of how to think like a Roman emperor.

15:41It's sort of a sequel or stylistically similar book, but it's just a great book. And we had a really fascinating conversation. Donald is a writer, a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist and a trainer, and he's a fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health. And he specializes in teaching evidence-based psychological skills. And he's really excited about the relationship between modern psychotherapy, CBT, and classical Greek and Roman philosophy. You can check out Mark's Realist, the Stoic Emperor, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, and his new book, How to Think Like Socrates, in The Painted Porch.

16:13He's got a great sub stack. I'll link to that. You can follow him on Instagram at Donald J. Robertson.

16:25Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Basko County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation. station getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

17:11We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you.

17:50Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

18:33My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

19:10Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

19:30so i was reading um emily wilson's uh book the case against socrates which i thought was interesting because she famously has this biography of seneca and they're both pretty negative like i feel like she both dislikes seneca and socrates which in a way was refreshing like i think it's always good to see the critical side of of a person but socrates especially is so beloved and celebrated historically it was interesting to read like kind of a a steel man case against socrates which is what i kind of felt like she was doing there's if stone's book the trial of socrates or something like that it's called where he deliberately sets out to kind of portray him as guilty yeah to convict him yeah yeah but it's kind of got an obvious agenda right It's biased.

20:21I don't think it's a balanced Portreola Socrates. Hers? I haven't read hers, actually. But his is definitely kind of self-consciously biased. Well, it's interesting. What I sort of took from it is like, for all of Socrates' brilliance, there was a lack of social intelligence, perhaps. Like what I thought was so interesting that you have theoretically the wisest man in the world, and he's kind of surprised by this whole thing. Well, I'm going to say the thing that I find with Socrates is he's just riddled with paradoxes, right? Because at the same time that you say that, Epictetus, like 400 years later or whatever, says to his students something really weird about Socrates.

21:04He says the main thing that you guys could learn from Socrates is how to engage in philosophical debates without it degenerating into a quarrel. So he thinks Socrates exemplifies some kind of social skills. Except it does end in a quarrel and they kill it. getting executed yeah but and he got beaten up in that sometimes we're told he got beaten up in the street and things like that yeah like and people and also they tried to execute him several times like the the oligarchs tried to execute him as well yeah like i mean we don't even know how many times they tried like possibly like three or four times there was this trial where the mob called for him to be executed as well like so i'm counting like maybe three four times like the athenians tried to kill him well there's that andy warhol line about how art is getting away with it.

21:50Have you heard that? Socrates doesn't get away with it. Spot on. You know, like there's something about, I'm not saying he's wrong about any of the things, but there's at some level, he manages to be right and upset everyone in being right. And there's something wrong about that. That's a paradox. He sort of gets away with it until he doesn't. He gets away with it until he's like 71 or 72 though, which is not bad. That's true. Yeah. And I mean, he makes it through the 30 tyrants. Yeah. But you're right. He is paradoxical because Diogenes, the cynic, just basically rejects society completely. And then you might have Seneca, who is a philosopher, but very much inside the system.

22:35Seneca says like, a philosopher should be different on the inside, but on the outside, be exactly like everyone else and be able to operate in, not just in public life, but at the height of public life. And Socrates is kind of somewhere in the middle in that he's transgressive, but you're right, not so transgressive that they have to nip it in the bud. And yet in the end, it does catch up with him. I'm going to try and avoid saying the word paradox every two minutes, right? But everything about him is paradoxical. The Greek word that they use, Plato used for him is atopos, which is hard to translate, but it kind of means out of place, like kind of weird, like a misfit.

23:15But at the same time, he's the quintessential Athenian philosopher. In a sense, he couldn't be more Athenian, but he's also kind of out of place and they see him as a misfit. He's kind of apolitical, but he's also besties with Alcibiades, who he's kind of seemingly grooming to become the ruler of Athens, almost like a proto-Alexander the Great. Like he has this vision about uniting all of Greece and maybe even invading Persia. So he almost is a bit like Seneca advising Nero in terms of his relation with Alcibiades. And he had other powerful political figures that were associated with him as well.

23:56But he also hung out with prostitutes and slaves and you name it. And slept outside and was just, yeah, it's a fascinating sort of series of contradictions. and yeah I think what I was most struck by is that the vehemence of the backlash seems to catch him by surprise like for someone who's so wise and such a good reader of people he seems to be surprised like he calls himself the gadfly but what do people do with flies yeah they swat them yeah so there's argument he's clearly asking for it and Plato portrays him at some points as kenneth like in the gorgias he's portrayed as kind of anticipating the fact that he's going to run into yes a problem like this actually also in the first also by these like which is set much earlier he kind of says something that foreshadows plato has him kind of foreshadowing the fact that he's going to run into some danger because of the athenian state but then in xenophon you get him saying stuff like he implies that socrates thought he was getting he was becoming elderly yeah and he was at risk of losing his faculties and he didn't want to become a burden to his friends and family so that was he kind of rationalizes it a bit and says he wasn't afraid of dying because he felt he'd kind of in greek society he'd reached this age where he saw his life is is approaching its natural end anyway yeah he essentially leaves his family to fend for themselves yeah do you know what i mean there's something kind of unsympathetic about yeah the the way in which he makes himself It's like he makes himself a martyr, right?

25:35In a way that is not aggrandizing, but it's like he was insisting on the martyrdom and at every step they were willing to let him off the hook in some way. Yeah, it's definitely possible that it's kind of by design. And he saw this as an opportunity to grandstand. There is, I think it's in Xenophon. there's a Greek word that refers to his, that means big talk, right? It's a little bit ambiguous. And he says that he upset the jury because of his big talk. I mean, for somebody who says his philosophical method is meant to be a kind of therapy for alleviating people of intellectual conceit or arrogance, this is kind of a big part of what Socrates claims to be doing.

26:21In court, he came across to them as being incredibly arrogant. And that upset them. Yeah, for someone who had been so artful for so long and had gotten away with it for so long, there is kind of a boneheadedness to his approach. So for people who haven't read the book or don't know about Socrates, you know Socrates gets sentenced to death. But I think when you dig into the details, there's this— Spoiler alert. Yeah, he does. He dies in the end. There is this kind of revealing little detail, which is a certain percentage of the Athenians, but by no means a large majority vote to convict him. And then Socrates has to give a speech where he gets to explain, he gets to plea for leniency or propose a punishment.

27:08And his speech goes over so poorly that more jurors vote to sentence him to death than to convict. So there are, but what that means is that there were people who thought he was innocent and wanted to found the speech so obnoxious and repulsive that they deserve. They believe that the speech deserved the death penalty, not the actions themselves. Which is because we're not told that much about what offended them about that. He says his punishment as an alternative to the death penalty. So normally he would have suggested exile or, you know, some heavy fine or something like that. but he suggested he should be given free meals for life basically like a an olympian's pension yeah yeah and that some reason that really upset them it's almost like it was impious you know like he he committed the crime he's one of the crimes is sort of in piety to the gods he basically commits it in front of the jury yeah yeah think about it there are many odd things about i mean like so So throughout that trial, Plato portrays him as saying men of Athens to them.

28:19And so it may be that he's also offending them by not saying men of the jury. Like he's not really. And he implies, Plato has him kind of implying that he doesn't really recognize their authority as his judges. And he goes on this whole thing about puncturing intellectual conceit and questioning the wise and finding out they weren't really wise and finding out that no one really possessed moral wisdom. And all that time, the subtext is he's standing in front of the jury that are about to judge him. So he's kind of implying that none of you guys understand the nature of justice, right, by the way.

28:52So that probably aggravated them as well. Well, that's the paradox, right? Socrates is the man who knows that he knows nothing. And yet, like, we read the dialogues today and they're brilliant and interesting. But it struck me thinking about in the moment, if you actually were on the other side, he would come off as a complete know-it-all. He's doing this thing that's incredibly obnoxious, like when you're in a discussion with someone and they're like, I don't know. But here, let me tell you all the problems with your thing. And then you go, but I don't know. He's clearly criticizing other people without necessarily owning that criticism.

29:29And I suspect that would have been extremely aggravating. One of the strange things about him, I'll try to avoid saying paradox again, is that the sophists set themselves up to be experts or wise men. So knowingly, they would say, I am wise. I am an expert. You guys should all come and listen to me. I'll give an amazing speech. Go away and memorize it. And Socrates, rather than assuming the role of an amazing teacher, kind of casts himself more in the role of a really artful and skilled student. So rather than giving lectures, typically, he's the one asking questions. But that also means it would be like your attendant, and often he's at the lectures or sophists and asking them these questions.

30:10So it does potentially make us think of being at a lecture and then there's some guy sitting at the back, just heckling and asking loads of really provocative questions. And it could be the rest of the students all turn around and think, this guy's more interesting than they did giving the lecture. But it's also quite disruptive. Yes. Well, and it was interesting. I read your book, and then I read this biography of Ben Franklin. And what I thought was so interesting is here you have another guy who brings wisdom down from the heavens, like literally brings lightning, like discovers electricity effectively, right?

30:44He's brilliant. He's wise. He's philosophical. But he also has this sort of social acuity that allowed him—he too kind of was disruptive and transgressive, but he managed to do it. he would write these letters from a pseudonym. He kind of assumed this character. It was just fascinating to watch this other guy who has a long life in public service at the highest level and effectively has no enemies. And it was just like, oh, okay, Socrates was this brilliant person who we can learn so much from. And then he also kind of has this other thing, which a lot of intellectuals and very brilliant people struggle with, which is how do you engage with other people?

31:28How do you get people to change their minds? And how do you do it without alienating unnecessarily wide swaths of the population? I mean, today, most people don't think philosophy is for them. We have a different version of that problem. But it just struck me as that sort of the tragic flaw of Socrates, even though we see him as this kind of humble figure, was a kind of arrogance, but then also indifference to other people's feelings. Yeah. But at the same time, I mean, we said he survived the plague of Athens. He survived the whole Peloponnesian War, even though he fought in it. And loads of Athenians were killed in the war.

32:12Lots of hoplites were lost. And, you know, he took all these risks. Like he lived quite a dangerous life involved with politics and so on alcibiades got assassinated like socrates survived a bit longer so in some ways also i think we can see evidence in the dialogue and so we have to qualify everything by saying the sources that we have yes are semi-fictional not completely reliable contradictory ambiguous blah blah but in the literary account of socrates that we have he does exhibit in some ways quite a lot of social skills right i think there are some situations where he's able to question people quite provocatively but he also compliments them at the same time right and he also still mans their arguments sometimes right and then there's other times where he's portrayed saying things that do seem quite tactless yeah like he says something that seems quite insulting towards critias the guy that becomes the head of the 30 tyrants.

33:08So he upset the wrong guy there. And then it sounds like Critias had a kind of vendetta against him after that. Sure. Yeah, it's fascinating. It's like none of this knowledge, wisdom, whatever, doesn't exist in a vacuum. We perceive Socrates only on the page now and whether he was right or wrong. But being right or wrong also exists within a social context and a political context. And just that, I think that's to me what's so fascinating about the Stoics is how as it makes its way from Greece to Rome, they have to navigate that. It's a philosophy not for the classroom or the garden, but a philosophy for life.

33:48And life is filled with complicated, petty, addictive, angry, powerful people.

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34:36Look, I mean, when I was writing the book, that was kind of one of the things that excited me about it. I think it's often the case that classicists and historians can see there's a really amazing story. Yeah. It's become maybe that used to be well known. Yeah. Perhaps in the ancient world and then becomes kind of inaccessible somehow over time. Yeah. Like most people today would say they knew Socrates drank hemlock and maybe that's about all they know. Maybe they've read a bit of the Republic. They know the method. Yeah. They don't really know that much. I mean, many people are surprised to know that he served in the military.

35:05Yes. There's a lot of stuff they don't know about him. And to some extent, I think that's because in the dialogues, again, on the one hand, he's portrayed almost like in a play, interacting with famous historical figures. There are references to historical events. But despite that, he still comes across overall as if he's in a kind of bubble and he's wandering around in pleasant groves or in gymnasia chatting about abstract stuff while the world is kind of falling apart around him in a sense they're in the middle of this epic war that he's involved in and he's dealing with these key political figures in it so our impression of socrates is somewhat abstracted from his historical context but marcus aurelius would have had a much stronger sense for example even you know many centuries later that socrates was this flesh and blood rounded figure that fought in the military that knew key political figures that lived through a plague and you know everyone that studies the classics knows that but i just kind of felt it's not even like the story of some historical figures lives is kind of boring in a way but socrates's life is really colorful and dynamic he knew these amazing people and did amazing things and we're kind of sleeping on this in a way you know people don't know about it it would make a good in some ways it would almost make a good movie and so i kind of wanted to find a way to bring it to life almost like a movie or a graphic novel or something i mean really like a lot of books i'm sure many authors do this maybe you do this as well that when i'm writing i kind of think what's the book that i would have wanted to if i could go back in time and give my like 17 year old self a book about greek philosophy what would it look like and i think it would be like an adventure story that really brings the history to life and weaves the philosophy into it and like you say makes it more connected to real life you know socrates was said to be the first philosopher who brought philosophy down from the heavens and applied it to daily life and you know he doesn't even do that consistently sometimes he talks about pretty abstract things but the thing that caught my eye also coming from a background in therapy as cognitive behavioral therapist there are more so also in Xenophon so we have Plato's dialogues but we also a lot of people perhaps don't know that we also have a load of like 30 or 40 dialogues from Xenophon, one of Socrates' other students and there were many many other dialogues that circulated in the ancient world that are lost today.

37:40In Xenophon who perhaps influenced the Stoics as much or even more than Plato the dialogues tend to be shorter and some of them look remarkably probably like cognitive therapy there are a couple in particular that i don't have any hesitation saying look a lot like someone doing relationships counseling there's one i'll tell you what they are like just so because we need concrete examples because most people have read the republic or things like that maybe maybe they've looked at the apology and you see fragments of this kind of therapeutic socrates yeah and those but in xenophon there's one where he's talking to Lamprocles, who's his eldest son.

38:24And Lamprocles says, I just can't put up with my mum nagging me. He's like probably 15. And so it's this teenager complaining about his nagging mom. To his dad. Yeah. And he's really angry about this. And so Socrates does something that resembles relationships counseling or cognitive therapy with him. And so he's not talking about metaphysics. What does he tell him? The first thing he does, interestingly, is something that he seems to be known for doing. He does in other dialogues as well. His opening gambit is to say, do other people feel the same way about your mum that you do? Yeah. Right? And so he gets a bit of pushback against this.

39:06But this is a key move in cognitive therapy as well, right? because the cardinal problem in my view in psychotherapy is we have beliefs thoughts opinions judgments about the world and we look at the world through those like we're looking through a colored lens so something happens that psychologists tend nowadays to call cognitive fusion right so i think my mom's unbearable right now i just see her as being unbearable i don't make a distinction between my judgment that she's unbearable and the external person. The Stokes would say that your opinion is that she's unbearable. She is not objectively unbearable because there's an interplay between the two of you.

39:51The two things just become fused together normally though. And so we have to start therapy by prizing them apart and getting me to realize, no, the unbearableness comes from your opinion, your judgment about your mom that's your impression of her it may or may not be accurate it might not be the whole story and one way to prise these two things apart and make me aware that the judgment comes from me yeah like is to start saying do other people all see her in the same way he does the same thing with two of his best friends there's a guy called called Chirophon who is Socrates's lifelong friend and also seems to maybe be a philosopher as well like he's he's kind of almost his constant companion but we don't hear that much more about him but he's a really eccentric character as well he's described as the bat and he's kind of manic and he's described as being very gaunt yeah right so he's a colorful character and chirofon is the one that goes to delphi and asks is any man wiser than socrates right yeah so he's a very intriguing figure his little brother Chirocrates falls out with him and refuses to speak to him because of some squabble over inheritance right and Socrates is with them and he thinks I need to do something about this so he starts talking to Chirocrates and he says what's up and he says my brother's just a royal pain in the butt you know and he's just absolutely unbearable he's really mad with him you can tell from the way he's talking and again there's a lot of pushback he's like you you don't understand, the guy's an idiot, and da-da-da-da.

41:26And Socrates says, but does everybody view him in the same way? And he gets pushed back against this, but he's just beginning to prise apart the value judgment of the opinion from the external person. Other emotions are available. There might be other ways that you could view and interpret your brother's behavior. And this is how cognitive therapy usually begins as well. This is what we sometimes call cognitive diffusion or cognitive distancing. It's creating this distinction between our opinions and the things to which they refer that then becomes integral to Epictetus' stoicism. The handles, which handle you're going to grab here.

42:03Which handle you use. There's more than one handle, buddy. So Epictetus says people aren't upset by events, but rather by their opinions about them. And no one ever quotes the next sentence of the same passage where he says, for instance, and he goes straight for the jugular like he says death isn't inherently terrifying because if it was socrates would also have been terrified of it and socrates provides a famous role model of somebody who exhibits equanimity yeah in the face of his death so that there's another perspective on death that's available right it's not the only way of viewing it's not intrinsically terrifying like some people aren't terrified of it your mom isn't intrinsically annoying yeah like yeah you You can say a lot of things about Socrates.

42:49He was obnoxious. He was annoying. He could have been more socially adept, but you can't say he wasn't brave, you know, and you can't say that he didn't stick to what he thought was true. He saved the life of at least one officer, possibly two. And I think he probably had a reputation for being a brave infantryman, a hoplite. Let's throw in some trivia, right? like some geeky stuff i think so the way socrates is exhibited so xenophon who was a famous athenian general has a bunch of dialogues where socrates shows pretty intricate knowledge of training and tactics and strategy so some people think that must just be xenophon putting these words in socrates's mouth however it's not necessarily so because blato also shows socrates talking to two generals, Lackey's and Nicias, about military training.

43:45And so it may be that Socrates wasn't an ordinary hoplite. He may have been more like a centurion or a sergeant major. He's a guy that's comfortable liaising with senior officers and seems to actually have had training. He's had some kind of education in military strategy and tactics. It's interesting. I wonder how much of our understanding of Socrates is a projection of our understanding of philosophers now. So we think of philosophy and philosophers as somewhat superfluous, somewhat abstract, somewhat pedantic. We think of them as removed from everyday life. We have this idea that they're not athletic.

44:32We have our understanding of philosophers today, if you were to tell someone to imagine a philosopher, I think we project, we just dress that up in a toga and put it in Athens when in reality, his biography makes it clear that this guy's physically fit, this guy's hardy and tough, this guy's engaged in public life. He's good at helping people solve practical problem. People want to be, he is annoying in some ways, but young people clearly want to be like him. He's interesting and impressive and inspiring. All the things that philosophers are not today. The Greek word they use for him is, he has a megalosuchia, I believe is the Greek word, which means like a big soul.

45:23And this is a term that the ancient Greeks used to refer to somebody who had, I'm not sure what the English equivalent would be, like someone who just has a really striking character, who stands out head and shoulders above other individuals of their time. And they said that of Alcibiades and Socrates. So that makes it even more interesting that the two were associated. So Athenians would be like, these are two of the most outstanding figures of our lifetime. And they were perceived as being, I guess you could say in completely different ways, incredibly charismatic or striking or memorable people.

46:00Yeah. It's interesting how far we are from that today. You couldn't pick a series of words to be further from your person's average conception of a philosopher today. Yeah. They're esconced in an ivory tower, whereas Socrates was doing philosophy on the street with prostitutes and slaves and also famous politicians. he was in the agora like you know and that's which is like a shopping mall like i mean nobody who does philosophy in a shopping mall thanks so much for listening if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on itunes that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show we appreciate it and i'll see you next episode

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