Susan Sauve Meyer On Becoming A Better Person With Aristotle

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2:18Welcome 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 actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

3:07Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. One of the

3:19ancient philosophy. People go, oh, you're just a popularizer. And I go, yep, that's what I'm trying to do. So it's not an insult. And I consider myself in very good company, not just with great popularizers of other ideas like a Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not the only one taking philosophical ideas and bringing them to a wide audience. Donald Robertson, who I've had on the podcast, I've raved about. His work before, or Alain de Baton, however that's pronounced, and School of Life has done a spectacular job of popularizing a bunch of philosophical ideas. And actually, my guest today has made Aristotle exciting and interesting, not just to hundreds of thousands of people, but most famously to Shakira, who took her four-week course on Plato during the lockdown phase of the pandemic in early 2020.

4:17My guest today is Professor Susan Sovey-Meyer. She's a BA from the University of Toronto. She has a PhD from Cornell. She's taught at Harvard, and now she teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, she is a specialist in Greek and Roman philosophy, focuses on the ancient ethical tradition, and that makes her look particularly hard at Aristotle and the Stoics. Her book, Ancient Ethics, which came out in 2008, is a systematic treatment of Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurean and Stoic ideas. And it's a fascinating book. But more than 100 ,000 people around the world have taken her open access online courses on ancient philosophy.

5:02And she has a new book as part of the series I have raved about many times here, the Princeton University Press's Ancient Wisdom series. This one is called How to Flourish, an Ancient Guide to Living Well, which is a translation of Aristotle. She translates it, makes the selections, and then tacked on a wonderful little introduction to it. Comes out on June 20th. She and I had a fascinating and super fun conversation, and I think you're really going to enjoy it. So here's to all the popularizers out there. Whatever it is that you do, I think there's something special, something to be proud of.

5:39certainly worst occupations in the world, and taking something you're really passionate about, something that means a lot to you, and bringing it to people and people to it. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning. That's what I'm doing here on this very podcast, hoping to popularize Professor Meyers' excellent work. Enjoy.

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8:08Well, I'm very excited to talk. I thought the book was really interesting, of course. You know what I like about this series? I've read most of the books in the University Press Ancient Wisdom series. Princeton, sorry. But I've read a lot of them. And I've read most of the original texts in the whole book. But this is like, it's like a nice greatest hits album or way to reread the books with a good intro and just get a bunch of stuff that you vaguely remember reading, but then you're getting to see for a second or a third time. Yeah. So that's actually one way that, you know, this series works.

8:50And also, I think it serves as a, I was hoping it could also serve as an entry point for some people who just like hadn't read, had heard about, you know, and on the way in. But yeah, so there's a lot, there are a lot of, you know, barriers to, you know, just picking up a book and plowing through it. So having this sort of public facing series addressed to the general reader, I think is fun. It's also actually really fun to figure out how to, how to produce the text that would serve that that would, you know, speak to, you know, your ordinary intellectual, not someone else like me, who's a scholar writing, you know, scholarly articles about this, right?

9:26We have our own language and it puts everyone else off. Well, I know Aristotle didn't choose the title, but whoever chose the title did not do a good job of titling the text itself. When I read it in college, my professor called it Nicomanchian Ethics. But how do you pronounce it? I pronounce it Nicomachean Ethics. But it's Aristotle's Ethics. I mean, all of Aristotle's work have just very simple descriptive titles. like there's the physics, there's the meteorologica, and then there's the ethics. There just have to be two ethics, two ethical treatises. And by tradition, one of them is called the ethics to Eudemus, so dedicated to Eudemus, and one is dedicated to Nicomachus.

10:12So that just came to be known as the Nicomachean ethics. Yes, but it isn't a great way to sell a book, I think, in these days. Well, your title is spectacular, which was my point, which is I think people tend to see the philosophical works as these books written by people with unpronounceable names, although Aristotle and Plato and Socrates have the three most pronounceable names. But, you know, they're titles you can't pronounce written by names you can't pronounce that don't necessarily give you anything in terms of the promise or the potential of the work. So even ethics, right? A small percentage of the population, unfortunately, is going to sit down and go, you know what I need?

10:59I need to ground myself in ancient ethical thought versus I would very much like to flourish, right? So I think this series, I have felt, has done a great job at titling. There's the Epictetus one, How to Be Free. Oh, that's a fabulous volume, yes. The Seneca one. What is it? There's the one on anger, right? How to Keep Your Cool, I think. Yes, How to Keep Your Cool, yes. That one's great. Even the one on Horace's poetry is good. Just all the titles are doing a great service in that they are saying there is a purpose and a function to this book other than academic philosophizing. Right. Yes. I guess every every work, you know, any work of literature, anything, any written text, it's all it's it's part of some conversation or some project.

11:55And the farther away in time we are from when somebody wrote it, the, you know, the looser the connection we have, if we may have entirely lost it to what actually, what was the conversation? Like, what was this about? Like, it's not like knowing which end you pick up, like when you, which end to look at it. So, yeah, this is, this series, I'm sorry, I keep looking down because I'm looking, I got my own copy of this sitting here, has been, you know, great at, you know, showing which end is up. Like, what is this about? And how, yeah, this is very much ethic in the ethical tradition in the Greek and Roman tradition.

12:28It really is for people who want to live good lives. Like how, you know, I don't want to speak to anybody who isn't interested in living a good life. That's what Aristotle says after he's cleared his throat for, you know, a couple of chapters. He says, you may be too young for this. Well, Epictetus says, you know, every situation has two handles. And I would argue that every work of art has two handles. There's the packaging that will pull people in and bear the weight of the work. And then there's the one that if it doesn't bear weight, it may do worse. It may repel people, right? And there is an art to making these things accessible, especially in a world where, you know, 100 years ago, 500 years ago, 1 ,000 years ago, most people are reading Aristotle not voluntarily, right?

13:23And in today's world, excepting certain people like me who took it in college, the vast majority of us are not being taught in school. We're not learning Latin. We're not having to memorize these sentences. And so if we're going to read Aristotle or Plato or Socrates or the Stoics, it's going going to be voluntarily. And so how do you, how do you make that attractive to people? Right. And that's a continually evolving problem set because every, you know, every generation pretty much needs its new translation, certainly every century, but there are different, you know, idioms and understanding and even what resonates with people, like changes.

14:03I mean, no one would have thought of translating eudaimonia with flourishing, you know, probably 70 years ago in English. That just didn't come up. Well, I want to talk to you about that in a second. But first, I thought the way into this for me was Aristotle taught Alexander and you taught Shakira. So what insights do you have about making philosophy accessible and interesting to powerful, driven, busy people. Yeah, I find that that was just so kind of remarkable in my way that what you need then to appreciate philosophy is a certain amount of leisure, right, intellectual leisure, and a certain amount of intellectual craving.

15:01So there we were at the beginning of the pandemic. Everybody's stuck at home, you know, with their kids and their laptops. That was Shakira. She had this lovely apartment because I could see her watching my lectures on Parmenides with this beautiful backdrop behind her. And she had her kids, right? And so let me do, how do I engage myself? So this is when these open online courses, you know, got a huge jump in enrollment. I went from getting 100 people a week to getting 1 ,000 people a week, right? So then everybody, even a pop star, might be interested in Plato. I think she took the Plato course.

15:35I didn't think she'd stick around for the Aristotle course, or at least she didn't tweet about it if she did. And I thought, well, you know, this is really enduring, amazing material. And I thought I actually found it very gratifying to produce those lectures that gave so many people who weren't college students and weren't university students, didn't have an agenda to take it and to try and give them an entry point to it. So that was and then a lot of people like a lot of people got excited about that. People who really liked Plato got excited about it. I think there was no public television in Athens had a sequence, you know, on, you know, Shakira's talking about Plato.

16:15Like they weren't interested in me and all my friends who work in the scholarly world and our social. Did you see that Shakira is taking your course? I don't speak Greek or Latin and can't read them. But the translator I worked with on the Daily Stoic, Steve Hanselman, pointed out that the word school in English comes from the Greek skole, which means leisure. And I was struck by how far our current definition from school is from that more timeless tradition, which is, what should I do with my excess time? How can I fulfill myself, find meaning, not be idle or wasteful? I'm going to go learn something and why not turn to the ancients?

17:07that's what Shakira was doing, but that is such a timeless embodiment of that idea. Uh-huh. Yes, that's a wonderful, yeah, I'm a language nerd, so I love these facts like what Skoli comes from. And you know, when we talk about schools of thought, so there's our term schools of thought, that's come from the Greek Skoli meaning leisure. When we talk about there's the Aristotelians, there's the Stoics, you know, there's the Christians, you could go all different schools, there's the Marxists, there's the Leninists, but they're all schools of thought. But school there, if you wanted to translate that back into ancient Greek, that is a hyresis, which is a Greek for choice.

17:42So in fact, that's where our term sects comes from, you know, different sectarian, different sects, because that's for the Latin, the Latin version of the Greek, which is selection and choice. Like, so you sort of, you pick a particular standpoint. Yeah. So then, yeah, the way language just picks up, It carries its history. It drops off stuff. It takes on baggage. And if you can trace that history, there's always interesting things that show up. What struck me about the tweet that Shakira put out, I think her then husband or boyfriend, I believe there was a bunch of drama relating to both of them afterwards.

18:22But I remember there was a video of her taking her course and then she tweeted about it and she said something like, I know my hobbies are impractical, but blah, blah, blah. So it was interesting. There was this, I thought it was very representative of the defensiveness or insecurity or stereotype that even someone who was interested in it had about the role that philosophy or Aristotle could or ought play in our lives. Yes, we think of it, it's not like studying accounting or management or chemical engineering. It's something that's got broad application. It's humanistic inquiry and that you need a certain intellectual leisure to do it.

19:09in and the payoff isn't in your paycheck and in any deliverables in your work product, unless you're like me and you write books about Aristotle, right? But for most people, the payoff is that this is reflection on really important questions about human life. And if you're a human and then you're interested in thinking about those questions, then, you know, have a conversation with Aristotle and see what you think about, whether you agree with and what you could take away with from what he's saying. You don't always have to agree with what you read, but just to wrap your mind around it and sort of chew on it for a bit.

19:45That's the really philosophical way to engage with it. It is funny though, to me to think in the case of Shakira, here you have someone who's very famous, very powerful, very wealthy, very busy, besieged with requests, with temptations, with criticism, all of these questions that Aristotle does deal with, right? And I could see she's saying it's impractical, but I could so, if Aristotle's writing about how to flourish as a human being and find happiness and what to say yes to and what to say no to, what the right thing is, what the wrong thing is. Who are these questions more urgent and important to?

20:31I think they're important to all people, but with her privilege and success, these are the critical questions. She's not dealing with how do I find money to eat tonight? She's dealing with, should I go on this extra tour or not? Should I be worried about this bad review or not? She's worried with the kinds of existential philosophical questions I think Aristotle spends quite a lot of his brain power thinking about. Yeah. Yeah. So we all, we all can, you know, learn something from Aristotle. And sometimes it doesn't, you don't learn, you don't get help to answer this question right now. Okay. Do I sign the contract or don't I sign the contract?

21:13But it percolates through and it's when you, how you, when you feel about how it turned out and, you know, the bad review, there's probably an Aristotelian virtue that tells you how to deal with bad reviews and good reviews, how much you should care about it, and how to put things in perspective and think about it in terms of a life as a whole, which is the way I kind of think about a very Aristotelian approach to life, is you take a kind of a whole life perspective on a lot of questions. And I guess that's, Epictetus does that too, as well. You kind of stand back and think of it from the point of view of humanity.

21:49That's sort of a global picture for Epictetus. But for Aristotle, you think of your life as a whole. He's not a cosmopolitan. I think of Aristotle's concept of the mean, particularly in relationship to temperance, probably on a daily basis. It's one of the most practical philosophical things that I've ever learned. It's practical, except that it doesn't tell you whether that that beer is the one you shouldn't is this is the time to stop drinking or that this is not this is this is what to order for the menu this is what not to order right it's not it's not so intensely practical in that way it's not like a little algorithm yes it's both sort of it's a permission to say look at you know bodily temperance it's the virtue about bodily appetites right none of them is bad in and of themselves but there's a right time and a wrong time, there's too much and there's too little.

22:44There's doing it with self-respect, not with self-respect. And that's the way you should think about it. So if you're, especially for resisting sort of the bad advice, it says like you should never, you never eat that, then Aristotle can give you sort of a healthy sort of distance from it. But I think one of the things I think I've heard you say, even thinking about the Stoics is Aristotle emphasizes is that it's your practice and sort of the habits you develop that make a difference for things like temperance and that it's not easy like you decide okay i'm going to cut down on carbs i'm not going to eat processed sugar and so that means no i'm not going to have that glass of juice i'm going to have a glass of water so that's really hard like the first time because this is the day the first start your day you're going to have your glass of juice and no you're not going to do that but once you get you develop the habit to do it you do it it gets easier that's what Aristotle told us.

23:40And then you feel not only is it easier, but you feel better about it and you can appreciate the reasons you had for doing it. No, you're right. But if the philosophers were truly practical, they would say, do this, don't do this. Here's the right amount of this. Here's the right amount of that. These are the things to avoid. These are the things it's okay to do. Instead, Aristotle says something like, the key question is to do the right thing at the right time in the right amount for the right person. And so you have to - And you can say, thank you very much, Aristotle. Right. Like, great. I'll leave it to you to figure it out.

24:10But here's what success looks like. And you're like, oh, okay. Now I have to figure out how to get there. But he does do a good job of giving you the tools and the exercises about how to think about these things. Right. Right. He's always encouraged you. So you are a human being, which means you're a thinking being, which means that in any sort of domain, right, whether it has to do with food or it has to do with anger or it has to do with, you know, frightening stuff, you know, there's, you know, there's doing, you can, you can, there are things you have to, you can, you have to think about, right?

24:46Is this, would this be a disgraceful thing to do? Would this be a decent thing to do? And you can always think about it. Maybe not in the moment. Sometimes you got to decide quickly. that's, you know, courage is that kind of virtue, but most of them you've got, you've got time to reflect. Um, and the idea is that you, you, even if you're responding with your emotions and because emotions are a very important part of human life, your response, your emotions are not sort of, um, pulling you against what you actually think you should be doing, right? So that's, so bringing your, getting your, what you think you should do and, and the way you actually feel about things, getting those things to line up.

25:26That's the truly, and so not to be conflicted, right? That's the sort of peace of mind and the inner harmony that's really the core, both of Plato's and Aristotle's ethics. I was curious to ask you, as you mentioned, you know, your course doing well over a hundred thousand students, how does the scale of that strike you? I think sometimes I think about that. I go, how many Stoics could there have been in the ancient world? And then to be able to, in a YouTube or a podcast, reach maybe more than ever existed cumulatively in history. It's kind of crazy to think about what these tools allow us to do.

26:08The ideas are not necessarily our own, but we have the ability to reach vastly more people than than would have been able to touch these ideas when they were on little rolled up scrolls or whatever. Right. Yeah. And the way you either attend, you attended somebody's lectures, or maybe, or you read, you borrowed books, I mean, you borrowed scrolls. But these are, it's a very small percentage of the population that has a lot of, there are no public libraries, it has their own library. There's a preface of one of Cicero's dialogues, the dramatic part, So I was just over at so-and-so's house. He was away, so I just went in and helped myself to the Aristotle books.

26:50So you have to have access to the books, and you have to be literate. And in a time when literacy was not nearly as common as now, but imagine having YouTube. Actually, I can't imagine Aristotle and YouTube. Plato, I can. But that's because the Aristotle we have isn't the Aristotle that was for public presentation. He wrote treatises that we've all lost. They were for publication, the way Plato's dialogues were for publication. They're very polished. And we know, I think, again, Cicero's our great reporter on most things in the history of philosophy before him. He calls it like the golden flow of words from Aristotle.

27:32And I say, well, it doesn't seem to be my text that I've got, but these are his working drafts. So he, we don't know exactly how he used them, but they were not, you know, they weren't presented with a view of engaging with an audience. Whereas, you know, successful YouTubers are really, they figured out how to do that. And, you know, this is the age of, you know, video communication. We're well beyond the printing press. There'll be people watching this video right now. Yeah. Yeah. That's, yeah, this whole, I'd never, I'd never even like to look at it videos of myself or audio of myself. before I made those lectures.

28:10Now I've got like 75 lectures out there.

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31:32us and everyone else was just too busy trying to make it through the day to contemplate ethics or what the ideal city should look like. Was philosophy for an elite minority or was it a popular discourse? Well, it was, I think, more popular than it is today among sort of the social class that has sort of the means to engage. So if you work for a living, as far as most of us, you're going to be too busy to engage in sort of the business of citizenship, the life and the polis. And that involves, you know, serving on juries, going to the assembly, doing that, but also talking to your fellow citizens.

32:12Of course, it's entirely men, right? Because women, you know, are kept at home. But philosophy wasn't a narrow discipline then that excludes, let's say, theology and biology and chemistry, you know, basically all, everything except for mathematics, pretty much, would have been within the realm of what philosophy is. In fact, it even included rhetoric and their debate, you know, it's not in the fourth century between, let's say, between, it's a very famous debate between Plato and Isocrates over who gets the title philosophy, right, and who gets the stuff, that is a serious reasoning. So it was, it's, so all of the, so you can sort of see philosophy dramatized in the dramatic dialogues of Plato, which is then that's describing as sort of a fourth and early, late fifth, early fourth century audience he's describing there.

33:04So Aristotle's writing a little later than that, but you can figure the same, these are the, it's the young from sort of well-to-do families who expect they've got property, they're going to be managing estates, but they're not spending their days, you know, writing briefs and or you know filling teeth or um laying bricks or anything like that so it was a leisure class it's it it was an activity of the leisured classes um but within the elite it was probably a more widespread activity than um philosophy today um the big divide was and you can see again plato is sort of very much shaping my own picture there's those who are going to engage in politics that is in the business of the city as opposed to that is not running for office but just being active um in civic life as opposed to talking about stuff it's useless even this idea that philosophy is impractical is all intellectual activities kind of impractical you should just go out and do stuff there's still like that divide this between those two ways of thinking about the world, you know, that's as old as Plato and Aristotle are older.

34:16Maybe it's as long as there's been human societies, there's probably been that, those two ways of thinking about it. Yeah. There's this kid's book I read to my kids. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's called Frederick and it's about the mouse and all these little mice are, you know, preparing for winter and, you know, gathering all this stuff and they sort of go, Frederick, what are you doing? And he's like, oh, I'm gathering the colors and I'm gathering the words. And then when they're all starving, you know, they go, Frederick, when are you going to do your part? You've eaten all our food.

34:50And he says, oh, well, let me, let me, he recites them a beautiful poem that warms their souls. And I just think about, you know, that is what poets and philosophers have basically been doing for thousands of years. Sure, I can't lift this heavy thing. Sure, I don't produce food or fight battles or whatever, but let me entertain you with this poem or this work of art. I actually do think that's an important function. Obviously, it's close to my heart as a writer. But yes, there is not only something fundamentally impractical, but there's probably been resentments about how impractical it is for as long as there have been divisions of labor.

35:32Yes, yes. But it's actually true that there are lots of very important things in life that you can only have. It's a luxury to spend time on them. Not if you're hungry and cold and they're tired and you have to fight for your security and worry about basic conditions of survival. So the question is human society is all about stabilizing and managing those risks so that there's time for all the, you know, for religion, for art, for philosophy, for science, for YouTube, right? Like YouTube is a luxury. If we were in the middle of a zombie apocalypse where we were fighting for survival each day, you know, we probably wouldn't be recording this podcast.

36:19Shakira wouldn't be studying Aristotle or Plato or whatever, right? We would be dealing with more urgent concerns. Right. And that's a bad thing. That's a bad state to be in. You want, you know, to get your civilization out of that after a set point, because what's the point of solving all these problems apart from, you know, things doesn't hurt so much? Is there no more in life than just not being hungry and not being afraid? That's not flourishing. Yeah. Well, actually, there's a version of Epicurus. I mean, he says that's actually what it is, but he has a much more robust view of what that not being hungry and not being afraid is.

36:58I think philosophy has got a lot to do with that. Well, I think of the Epicureans as the quintessential example of the Fredericks of the world, where they're basically like, someone else will take care of politics. Someone else will take care of fighting in the wars. Someone else will take care of everything. And we'll tarry here in the garden and think about big ideas. That is philosophy in its most Zen form to me, where it is a rejection of most of... It's not the pure pleasure-seeking hedonism that it's stereotyped as, but it is the least engaged of the philosophical schools with the realities of the world.

37:40Right. I mean, that is one way of interpreting sort of the political commitments of an Epicurean. But if you notice that there were, Epicureanism was massively popular in Rome. And Cicero is always, you know, inveighing against his contemporaries who were so, you know, interested in and devotees of Epicurus. And they were Roman notables and politicians. So it wasn't so there is, I think, is an interesting question of how much a card carrying Epicurean like what would the card carrying Epicurean say about, you know, being involved in the life of the community? Because it sounds like, well, it's not going to promote your immediate pleasure.

38:22But that's not the kind of pleasure that Epicure says to maximize. Pleasure is the pleasure. The highest pleasure is not being afraid and not being worried. and so virtue is to be practiced in order to provide the conditions of not being afraid and not being worried and community is a big part of that so that's why epicureans lived in communities you said the garden like we're we're like we've got that we've walled out the world but we can't wall out the world so there are there are i think decent arguments that people have given that epicureans can be you know consistently you know believe in engaging in politics because that would be, that would be like justice requires it.

39:02So they believed in the virtues and justice is a virtue. They just thought it had to be what it was all for. That's true. And I mean, when you look at the lives of the Stokes also, which I wrote a book about a few years ago, these are people that they got married, they had children, they made works of art, they ran for office. So just as there are Buddhists who serve in the armed forces and start companies. And so there is this, It's almost that like if you are engaged in the world and you are doing these things, you need the philosophical counterbalances to maintain your sanity and clarity and direction.

39:43if you truly did disengage from the world and you just lived in your monastery or your garden or retreated inward, actually a lot of these coping strategies would be less valuable to you because you would be coping with so much less stuff. I need stoicism when I'm putting out a book because I have made myself vulnerable to externals. If I had truly discounted anyone else's opinion, the market, the world, impact, et cetera, I wouldn't publish the book at all. Right, right. One of the main ways of thinking the difference between Epicureans and Stoics, because they're very similar in lots of ways in terms of the life, like having this kind of Zen attitude to life.

40:36is that the Epicureans are very optimistic about how invulnerable you can be to what goes on in the world. The Stoics are perfectly realistic. You cannot securely guard against these kinds of disappointments. All you can do is you can gird up yourself and your own attitudes and expectations so you'll be able to deal with it. right epicurus promises that somehow there there's enough to go around of all the basic stuff that everybody needs and so don't worry about you can get are you kidding um but um whereas the stoics uh said well no you can't guard against it but you can got you can be absolutely secure about getting the only thing that matters which is being virtuous yes yes and i do feel like and maybe there's a little ego in it but i feel like the stoics were like Like somebody has to be the adult, right?

41:33Like somebody has to run these things because if we don't do it, this is particularly as in the later years of the Roman empire, where it's like, if the philosopher doesn't hold office or serve in the army or take this position or all the different roles of the polis, the non-philosopher will hold that role and the state will go in the wrong direction or the world will fall apart or what have you. It's not a savior complex so much as it is, what are we studying these ideas for if not to assume positions of leadership and influence and responsibility? Or even just doing your civic duty, right? It doesn't have to be a leadership thing.

42:22Yes. Yes. Where do you think Aristotle and the Stoics would have found common ground and where do you think they would have argued with each other? Yeah, well, I think the Stoics are very much working within the Aristotelian tradition. I think Aristotle basically gave the framework that all ancient Greek and Roman ethics follows from then on. Right. So, you know, Plato started that he was happiness, questions about living well and about virtue. They're all throughout the dialogues. But what Aristotle did is he figured out the way to organize this set of questions, which is about how to live and what, you know, what is this virtue or what is that virtue?

43:05These questions, what is the goal of life? Like that's how, so happiness, right? We'll all agree that that's what the goal of life is, a eudaimonia. And then, you know, we can have disputes about what that is. So his, so you get, so what Aristotle gives us is this framework that ethics, like this whole practice of thinking about how to live is thinking about what is the human good? What is happiness? What is the best thing in life? And then there are different, How does that relate to something, things like virtue and things and other things like pleasure or wealth or friends or political power?

43:44So how these things fit together. So there's so the Aristotle gives us the telos question. Right. We call it telos is just Greek for goal for goal. I think goal purpose is a little too intentional because your oak tree has a telos and it has no mind at all. um because iris gives us the telos question and he says and he even agrees that you know happiness is the telos and he has a view about what happiness is right it's going to be it's an activity of virtues is living a life that's exercising your powers as a human being you know as excellently as possible and he says but you also to be happy you also need some things besides besides virtue.

44:26You can't just be virtuous. You need a certain amount of wealth and a certain amount of security and a certain, you need friends. So you can't, whereas, and so different, there are all different, virtue is a good thing. You know, it's probably the most important thing. Happiness is not quite the same as virtue, but it's very close to it. But there are, there are goods that are virtues and goods that aren't virtues, right? So you need all to be happy. you need to have a sufficient amount of, you know, life has to be sufficient, right? It's called self-sufficiency. It has, you know, you have everything that's worth desiring for its own sake, or at least in all the general categories.

45:06And some of that's in your control and some of it's not, right? So the big difference with the Stoics, the Stoics think there's only, the Stoics accept the telos question, right? They have an answer to it. What is the goal of life? the goal for the Stoics is to live in agreement with nature, right? And by that, when they mean that, that doesn't mean like going out and, you know, just hiking and, you know, not having showers and, you know. No, they don't really define it, right? It's like we talked about in practice, they're like, the main thing in life is to live in accordance with nature. And then I'll leave you to infer what that means.

45:41Right. Although they have a lot to say, especially the Greek Stoics have a lot to say about it. And that is to live in accordance, basically, with the mind of the universe, sort of God imbues all things. God is perfect reason, perfect rationality. And so to live according to your own reason or your own powers of thinking and to line up with the reason that guides the universe, you know, is perfect consonance between your human life and what God has in mind for the universe. That's what's living in agreement is. And they also claim that that's what living virtuously is, is leading your life by reason.

46:18And so your reason has to now appreciate then the divine reason that governs the universe. So there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of theology in there. The Stoics is very different from what you find in Aristotle. But the idea is that, okay, living in agreement with nature, that's your goal in life. That's exercising virtue, right? And that's the only thing that's good. The only bad thing is being a fool, like not being wise. And so that's a big disagreement sort of between Plato and Aristotle then is whether anything other than being virtuous is in and of itself worthwhile and worth pursuing and is necessary for leading a happy life.

46:57And that's where the big disagreement between Aristotle and the Stoics about the emotions comes from. Because, you know, Aristotle has the doctrine of the mean. As you said, you should get angry not too much or too little. Right. and the Stoics say no anger. And that's because for Aristotle, anger is about bad things that happen to you. And for the Stoics, nothing bad can happen to you. You can be robbed, you can be dispossessed, you can be thrown in prison, you can be tortured, but none of those things is bad. And so to be angry about it or to be upset about it is to respond with your emotions as if it were bad right and so it's because of this basic the theory of value that they differ on like what how you answer the telos question what happiness is that you need there are bad things and good and bad things in life that are other than whether you're a good or bad person and because of that the stoics find there's nothing to get upset about in life because the one or the some issue about whether you can be upset about yourself if you're not a good person as kind of training, as a kind of training wheels you could have.

48:10But if you're a good person, there's nothing, and you're practicing virtue, there should be nothing to be upset about. So that's the basic sort of normative disagreement between Aristotle and the Stoics. Aristotle got to set the question, and the Stoics are agreeing to answer that question, but they have very different views about what the answer is, even though in practice, a stoic, a peripatetic, or an Aristotelian, and a stoic, a practicing stoic, could probably, you know, if they lived in the same community and faced the same circumstances, they would do the same thing. They may have a different, slightly different interior life.

48:49You know, one's going to have more emotion than the other. But it's more how you experience, not what virtue requires you to do, but the experience you as a virtuous person would have. That's a Stoic experience would be different from an Aristotelian experience. Aristotelian is going to be a lot more, it's got a lot more action going on in the emotional side.

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51:21Yeah, I feel like the Stoics, you know, they sort of take it to an extreme. You could be happy as you're being tortured to death. You could be happy in prison. And Aristotle's saying, I don't know if he would necessarily disagree with that, but he's probably saying like, yeah, but it's better not to be those things. Let's not be crazy here. The ideal life, what we're really talking about is something a bit more reasonable than all that. Yeah. So that question, usually, can the wise man be happy on the rack? That's the formulation of the question in the Hellenistic period. So it's post-Aristotelian philosophers.

52:02So Epicureans and Stoics would duke it out over that question. That's a question I think that emerges for Plato and for Aristotle. Can the supremely virtuous person who has the most awful experiential thing happen to them, can that person really be happy? So Aristotle, I think, seems to be committed to saying, no, you couldn't be happy in those circumstances. But the things he says about needing what we call external goods, like pleasure, pain, wealth, like not being tortured, not having your city invaded or your country invaded, those things. He says you need those things. But they seem to be thinking, he says you need them in order to exercise virtue, not because they're sort of bad in and of themselves.

52:48And Plato, there are different parts of Plato where he looks like he might be a Stoic. like I stopped, but he hasn't, it's not, he only had less than a century of thinking about formulating these questions about, you know, what happens if you're virtuous and this happens to him. Aristotle can think of, well, if you're Priam, like Priam in the Iliad. So his city lost the Trojan War. He watched from the ramparts as his son Hector was killed and his body was mutilated. His, you know, his children are either dying or being captive. if his city is completely ruined. Like that, Aristotle says that you're not, that's not, you cannot be happy.

53:29Even though he has in the tradition and he endorses it, Priam is a supremely good, you know, and virtuous person. Right, so it seems to be someone who thinks that is gonna not, is gonna think that the good man on the rack is not, is not doing well, is not. Even though Aristotle does think if you, you shouldn't, it's still the most important part of your happiness is whether you're a good person or whether you make good choices. You should never cheat to avoid getting tortured. So your happiness isn't entirely in your control the way it is for a Stoic. Maybe it's interesting to look at Marcus Aurelius then, right?

54:09Because here you have a Stoic. He's not tortured, but he has debilitating health issues. He buries six or seven children, a terrible plague. He sees awful war and violence. He's betrayed. Perhaps his wife cheats on him. All this, you know, quote unquote, terrible stuff happens to him. You know, the perfect stoic is happy about all that. I don't think that's what Marcus was. And I don't think he was pretending to be happy about it. But it is interesting when you read meditations and you think about his life, he did somehow find a way to soldier on to find beauty in life. He continued to try to be a good person.

54:54He didn't become a nihilist or abandon everything he supposedly believed in. So maybe this kind of goes to what you're saying, which is the Aristotelian and the Stoic are doing the same thing, you know, uh, under the same, uh, hand dealt by fate, but, um, maybe their inner emotional life, how they're the story they are trying to tell themselves about this thing is different, but fundamentally runs into the same human limitations, which is, you can't be like, it's so great that a graveyard is filled with my, with my children. Yeah. I don't think anyone is happy about. Right. Yeah. So then, yeah, that's the, that's the very, um, for one thing about Marcus, like Marcus is somebody who's trying to live by Stoic principles.

55:48He's a very human, imperfect Stoic. And we've got a record of his struggle, like at his day by day account. So that's the power of it. So the problem with Stoicism is actually Aristotelianism can be like this too. It's so, it's, it's focuses on the very perfection doing the best. So the Stoic sage, someone who's mastered all of this is that that's none of us. Like it's not, and the Stoics think just about maybe there was a sage, maybe there wasn't. So all of us are, are, the Stoics will say we're fools because if you're not wise, you're a fool. Of course, you know, their language is very, I think, very off-putting in that way.

56:28Yeah. So that's the, so the, so, and if anyone, even Seneca's a, he's, he wants to be, he's a, he's a card carrying Stoic, but he loses his cool plenty. Like he's, yeah. And so I think with Marcus, I think with Marcus that he got up in the morning and made it through each day is we can throw him a parade just for that. Do you know what I mean? Like put aside, was he happy while tortured on the rack that he didn't quit, that he kept going, that he found reasons to be good and decent and try to do his best. that's about as close to the philosophical ideal as a person is going to be able to get. It's like a Viktor Frankl situation or a James Stockdale situation where we're not expecting them to be this philosophical ideal, but there is something deeply inspiring and moving about the person, any person, man or woman, who has just been pummeled by life and remains unbroken by it.

57:40Yes, yes. And that comes from us having a certain mindset, which is about what is important in life and how important is this challenge you're facing. So one of the things that you've, one stoic strategy, you find this in Epictetus, I find really very, very powerful in though it also might seem inhumane. You talk about having a graveyard full of your children. We live in a, we're fortunate we live in a time and place where just infant mortality isn't just part of every family's life. When we bury our children, it's a tragedy. It was a tragedy for every ancient family that buried their children.

58:20but it happened. It was a part, you have to deal with it because it's part of your life. And Epictetus in effect says like, what, you think no one else's children died? You think human beings die, don't they? Right. It's like, it's like, think about, you know, road, you know, traffic fatalities, people die on the road every day, but you know, you know, we just, it's, and so yes, he had an accident, but it happens all the time. So there's a certain kind of view you take, which is trying to think of how this loss fits into the whole, where it's not, like, are we bemoaning the fact that human beings die?

59:01No, we're not. Are we bemoaning the fact that my, I don't, yeah, but why do my children die, right? That's not what it is. Well, there's a certain perspective on which it fits into the universe, and then acknowledging that, acknowledging that there is some, I mean, a very religious take on it would be to say it fits in with some divine plan or that that's a kind of a very burlesque, you know, of what the stoic part is, but just, it's just part of what nature is. And there's this, and it's not a bad thing of nature that people die, but yeah, it hurts. But that's a, that's the stoic, that's, you're supposed to be able to, when you say that nothing bad has happened when your child has died and you're so, because not because you're a cold and unfeeling parent.

59:48And certainly you've got to be careful how you comfort the bereaved. Well, nothing bad has happened, right? Nonetheless, that's the perspective from which you don't grieve, right? And that's not a perspective an Aristotelian would take. But an Aristotelian would not, you know, still think there's appropriate grief, right? And nonetheless, the thing is that you have, that you still know it would be, for you to have like commit a murder or some great injustice in order, you know, protect your child. Maybe your child died, was lucky enough to grow to maturity, but he died in battle, right? It's not a reason for you to have kept your child from, you know, doing his military service, right?

1:00:36We're seeking revenge or any of the irrational things proceeding or after. Right. So you think, yes, it's a bad thing and it hurts. It's a terrible, it is a loss because you want to, part of what we do when we grieve, we acknowledge the value, not just the value to us, but the value of the loss. It's not like we lost our furniture or even we lost our money. When you lose a person, the person had no value in their own right. And I guess both Aristotle bottle and the Stoics, give us tools to say, what is it about? What is valuable in a person? And what is it that you lose when you die? They're all about, yeah, and that's what they're, you lose life.

1:01:17And they're all about what is a good life? And so what is the standard against we can measure both what we do for ourselves, what we seek for our children, and what we owe to other people in sort of social and political arrangements. Yeah. And I always point to people who think that the Stoics were unfeeling or they're mad at themselves for feeling emotion, having lost someone. Seneca writes three deeply moving consolation essays or letters, reassuring people who have lost someone. In one case, it's his own mother and she's grieving that Seneca himself has been sent into exile. But the idea that the Stoics had no feeling, I think is also belied by the evidence that they were really good at comforting other people who had feelings and were pretty good at expressing their own feelings.

1:02:12I try to make the distinction, to me, the purpose of the philosophy is not to have no emotions, you lose someone and you say, nothing bad happened. I feel nothing. It's to not be, to me, it's the difference between being angry and doing something out of anger, feeling the grief, understanding what you're going through, giving yourself time to go through it, and being utterly wrecked and destroyed by it and having no hope of a future. I think there's a difference between feeling the emotion and being controlled by the emotion. Right. Because the stoic is actually distinguished between just the feeling, especially the initial feeling, like the emotional response.

1:03:03And then when you endorse it, let's say when you ascend to it, because they think of emotions, the kind they want to get rid of, the kind they call pathe, as actual actions, mental actions in their own right. Any action you perform, you ascend because you think it's the right response to the situation. So the way I think of the stoic response to grief or thinking of it is, yes, there's a natural human feeling, sort of a psychic contraction, they would call it, that's this clenching. Every human will have that, and we should acknowledge other people when they have that. But going beyond that to say, oh, woe is me.

1:03:43This is a terrible thing. Life isn't fair. Those are all the thoughts that you have to assent to. Those are involved. That's what you're not supposed to have. So someone who's got raging grief, that's clearly, at least the Stoic view, as I understand it, is that you've assented to it's being a bad thing. And that's what a Stoic can't do, right? So when I give my talks, because right now I'm doing this series on the cardinal virtues. So I've done courage and discipline. I'm just finishing justice and then I'll start wisdom here shortly. When I talk about virtue, especially in a business environment or whatever, I say the word virtue and you just sort of people go, what does this have to do with me?

1:04:28You know, is this going to be a religious, you know, argument or whatever? But when I talk about erite or excellence, you know, they immediately see the connection or the application. And I realized that these are, especially in Aristotle, not quite the same thing, but they are related. So talk to me about virtue versus excellence or virtue versus erite. Okay. Well, so there's just one term in the Greek that we can translate. So arete is a Greek term. It literally just means it's just the abstract noun for goodness, right? So there's good and the superlative is aristos. So the R is in there. So arete is just, you know, goodness.

1:05:12So, and we don't, so we could call it, we could just call it goodness. We could translate it goodness as well. And there, but there is, it used to, it got used before Plato and Aristotle in a very aristocratic manner. In fact, that are in aristocratic is the same thing for arete. Aristocrat, there's the best, like they're people, the best families, right? Right. So and your Homeric heroes, they are exemplars of Arete. And Arete has a very kind of Homeric tint to it, often connected with courage. Right. So that's it. And so then how you then you go through Latin and Arete gets translated Virtus, by which we get virtue.

1:05:54And we're is a man. Right. So it's manly. So some people actually want to translate Arete by courage. that's very kind of old-fashioned um so there's the what arete in ordinary language so in the tradition meant it meant greatness right it's preeminence and there would be like and sort of so you've got sort of hector achilles agamemnon and then you've got nestor and odysseus so you've got the courageous ones and the wise ones and those are the two great um examples not too many you don't know heroes are they're not known for um so for a sunae for temperance yeah okay so that so our taste sort of has before the philosophers get around to try and domesticating it really has its achievement oriented and being the best you can be in this very sort of vigorous public um actually very kind of testosterone induced yeah way um and so the philosophers go around to trying to domesticate it and making it something more psychological right and so it trying to make it's not so you could have arete by or some people might ask you you know plato's mino plato says mino do you know uh mino says uh socrates eventually asked me you know what do you think virtue is i mean it says well it's having a lot of gold and silver right and it's like it's so that sounds crazy to from the point of view if you think of virtue is something to do with like a moral or an ethical quality.

1:07:28But the idea is, what makes you a great and important person, you know, is having power and wealth. So Mino thinks that. So Plato and Aristotle with him try to cultivate and propagate this sort of interior, they interiorize, they psychologize virtues. So you don't need to be, you know, a wealthy person to have a right day. It's a matter of, you know, having your, if it's courage, having your fear and confidence under control. If it's a matter of, you know, temperance, it's having your bodily appetites, you know, under control. So when you get to the, by the end of Aristotle's ethics, he endorses what Solon, the Athenian lawgiver and poet says, you don't need to rule sort of the earth and the sea in order to do, you know basically the right thing or to exercise virtue right you don't have to so there's you don't doesn't have to be this preeminent sort of aristocratic um sort of famous kind of figure in order to have arate so it means so it is it is so almost arate and eudaimonia that are even like hard to prize apart in this earlier context so that's why they end up being so closely connected so for aristotle the virtues arete really it's excellence right he expects he's talking to an audience of young men who want to have arete like and they it's not because they want to they want to enter the seminary or something or they want to like do better and be like they're sort of like some self-help if they're trying to be better people they want to be great.

1:09:07So excellence in that sort of very, the kind that you find in business schools, excellence from that perspective. But Aristotle is now trying to sell them this view. In order to do that, you need to cultivate excellence in this way I'm going to tell you about it, which is that it's a feature of your character. Yeah. It's like, there's like a necessary, but not sufficient element to it where there's sort of, you have to be great to be virtuous, but if there isn't sort of virtue in your greatness, it's kind of an empty thing. Like there's a passage in meditations that I think about where Marcus Aurelius sort of chides himself.

1:09:54He says, you're trying to be a better wrestler, but not a better friend, a better forgiver of faults, a better, a more patient. I sort of took that as you're trying to be more successful in your hobbies, at your work, et cetera, but you're not striving for your true telos, which is to be a good person. Right. Yeah. So that's, as you can see, that's the philosophical movement, how these notions move apart, because we can think of, you can be excellent at chess, at wrestling, at all these things. Whereas Aristotle, Plato, the Stoics, like all along, even, I think you can say this about Epicurus too, virtue is excellence at being a human being.

1:10:37Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's, that's very well said. Like we see all the time, amazing athletes, amazing, like generators of wealth, let's say a hedge fund manager or a brilliant writer or creative, but just an abysmal human being, just a monster of a human being, that's obviously not what Aristotle is describing as erite. It's a form of erite, but an incomplete erite. Maybe excellence at acquisition and at attention gathering. Yeah. So that's why then, so the quotation, you don't have to rule earth and sea in order to practice virtue. So that tells you you don't, pardon? Is that Aristotle who said that?

1:11:27That's Aristotle quoting Solon at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics. I've got it. I've got it in my translation here. Where was it? I love that. Okay. So this is, I think it's on, yeah, on page 271, near the end. He says, self-sufficiency, that means having an adequate life, does not require excess, and action doesn't either. You can perform noble actions, or you might say decent actions, even if you do not rule over earth and sea, and you can practice virtue even with moderate resources. And then he quotes Solon and says, presumably Solon was right to define happy people as those who had moderate resources, perform the finest actions and practice self-control throughout their lives.

1:12:16So you don't have to have tremendous success on the stock market, in being a famous actor, or all the other ways you can win an election to become president of a major country. You don't have to do any of those things in order to be great at being a human being. We all have emotions. We all have desires. We can all think. And just doing that, living up to the standards for being a good human being, everyone can do that, Aristotle thinks. And so I think that's lovely. And to bring us full circle of something you mentioned earlier, that's Aristotle's definition of flourishing or of happiness. But you were saying that's maybe not how it would have been rendered even a generation and a half ago.

1:13:11Right. Well, yes, because that's why there are debates about it. like Mino is characterized as a generation, a couple of generations earlier in the dialogue. I thought he wants, you've got to, you know, be elected general. You've got to win battles. You've got to have, you know, have lots of friends and influence and power, right? And not that, not many people, like that's a, there's a very limited supply of power and influence, right? If you always want to be at the top. Yeah. Yeah. So this, so it's the full, it's, It's the philosophical tradition that prepared the way for conceiving of having this notion of, this very Homeric notion of virtue becoming sort of an every person's notion.

1:13:57It's something you can be, you just change, tweak what you're being excellent at. Sure. Right? You're being excellent as a warrior or an excellence as a human being. Well, and what is, I guess the Stoics would say, you know, if virtue or Arite is doing all of these things, but so much of doing those things is not in our control. So it can't actually be the definition, right? The crowd has to elect you. The wind has to be right to win the battle. The market has to be favorable to what you're trying to do. You know, it seems odd to root arete in stuff that Epictetus would say is fundamentally not up to us.

1:14:42Right, right. So you're absolutely right there. So the sort of traditional notion of arete is success-oriented, success at things that aren't up to you. So when I was described as psychologizing R &T and Virtus. So it's a quality of a person just with whatever materials you have, the stuff that is in your control with enough attention and hard work. Yeah, that that does give you a certain kind of immunity. It doesn't give you doesn't mean you're going to win the battle, but it means you're going to succeed at the thing that mattered, which was being courageous. Right. Making just making the right decisions.

1:15:18decisions right you know that's the very um the the way apetitis would put that is you know the only thing that's up to us is our decisions right in a way that because that's the thing that they are pro-hyrisis right is up that's fully in our control i can like i can decide i'm going to end this call right now i can push the button but if the button doesn't work right that's the only thing that's up to me like even it's like to push the button right maybe even i can decide to push the button and I get paralysis. I can always, wherever you keep drawing back what's in your control, but the decision, that's what's, that's, and your virtue for a certain kind of orthodox stoic really is just, you know, a matter of making the right decisions.

1:16:00Right. Courage is up to us succeeding, not necessarily so. Right. Up to you to be courageous, not to win the battle. that's in the hands of the gods or the god for the universe, right? Well, this has been fascinating and I love the book and I hope there's more in the series from you. Thank you so much for taking the time. Oh, it was a pleasure to talk to you.

1:16:29Thanks 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. I'll see you next episode.

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