#141 Stoicism: Everything You Need to (Actually) Know - John Sellars

19:35John Sellars:all humans are animals, all animals are mortals, so all humans are mortal, right? All A's are B, all B's are C. So all A's are C, right? Chrysippus was interested in different kinds of arguments. So something along the lines of, if it's raining, I'll take my umbrella. It's raining, so I'll take my umbrella. If P, then Q, P, therefore Q, right? A very different type of argument. As it happens, that stoic type of argumentation is the sort that was kind of resurrected much later by Frege and has much more in common with modern formal logic. So he was kind of very much ahead of his time.

20:16Alex O'Connor:Yeah, like the Aristotelian logical system kind of dominated in medieval philosophy, but the modern sort of celebrated logic of the mathematicalization is more indebted to the Stoics. And just to be clear, because of what you just said, people might be listening and go like, they sound kind of similar. When you say, when you've given Aristotelian syllogism, and a syllogism is just an argument of like premise, premise, conclusion, right? Something like, all A's are B, you know um b is c therefore or rather all a's a b a is c therefore all b's of c or whatever you're using terms like all or you might say like you know no dogs have three legs johnny has three legs therefore johnny is not a dog um or some or all and you're talking about terms so that the a and the b there in the argument it'll be like all a's are b all cats are animals so the things you're inserting are terms like cat, animal.

21:17Alex O'Connor:Whereas the Stoics, the things that they're inserting with those letters or representing with those letters are not terms, but entire propositions. If P, then Q. If it is raining, then I will take my umbrella. So in Aristotelian logic, the thing that we're dealing with are things like cat, dog, human. In Stoic logic, we're dealing with things like it is raining, the sky is blue, I will get wet, that kind of stuff. which sounds like, yeah, those things are different. But people might say, what's the important difference between thinking logically in terms of propositions versus terms as Aristotle did?

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22:54John Sellars:I mean, I don't think we need to see them as being in competition with one another. I mean, obviously, they're both useful systems to have. I mean in the Middle Ages we have Aristotelian logic dominates and there's a sense of this okay this is just what logic looks like whereas what Chrysippus has already done although for the most part it was largely forgotten had said well actually there are other ways of thinking about how arguments function there's more to rationality than just all and some there are other ways we can we can think about consequences of certain claims so So he could see that there was more work to be done in developing logic.

23:41John Sellars:And that kind of propositional logic, as I say, had been very fruitful. Some of his logical ideas we see taken up in the Middle Ages by very famous philosopher and magician Peter Abelard. And it's not entirely clear whether he had access to some text that gave him some hint about what stoic logic was all about, or whether he simply had kind of managed to develop it again himself, because he was such an able logician himself. And then we see it taken up more recently by Frege. So it's become a really important part of the kind of logical tradition, but it has its origins with the Stoics.

24:21Alex O'Connor:Yeah. And I guess you could also think of this Aristotelian logic as not just in terms of the things that are replaced by the letters, but Aristotelian logic will have this language of all or some or you know every or no like no dogs have three legs whereas the language of stoic logic is more like if then it's like conditional claims it's like uh showing what sort of follows from other things in in the but putting that into like the premises right so it's just like two different ways of of thinking about the world but this is like the foundational starting point philosophy, right? We've got this sort of logical system.

24:59Alex O'Connor:We're thinking in terms of propositions and how they follow from each other. Like, okay, but the Stoics have that, but what do they build

25:09John Sellars:on top of that? Let me roll back a bit. So the Stoics divide philosophy into three broad areas, logic, physics, and ethics. And we see all sorts, we hear accounts of the way in which different Stoics proposed teaching those three parts in different orders. They didn't quite make up their mind if one was foundational or not. So, you know, some of them would have started teaching physics first and then logic later. So I think it would be a mistake to think that logic is the foundational bit. I think we've got this really complex interdependent system where ultimately you need all three bits and what order you learn them in is kind of an aside.

25:52Alex O'Connor:But is it broadly agreed that the ethics comes last, even if we don't know what comes first? Or do some people maybe even start with the ethics?

25:58John Sellars:No, I think that at least one of the Stoics put physics last, and the highest bit of physics would have been theology. So that would have been the grand finale in terms of someone's education. So that would be the first thing to say. So logic isn't necessarily the ultimate foundation, but it's a central piece for sure. And the other thing would be to say is that when they're talking about logic, they mean something much broader than just the kind of formal logical argumentation that we've just been talking about. So logic includes everything to do with logos. And the Greek word logos means reason, argument, it means word, so language more broadly.

26:47John Sellars:And I suppose, and within logic broadly conceived, they would include epistemology, So theories of knowledge where we get our ideas from. And the Stoics are empiricists. So the kind of the foundational claim, I suppose, in Stoic logic is that we're empiricists. So we gain knowledge through the senses. We gain information through our senses. We receive that in our minds. The Stoics think that we then kind of translate that into propositions, right? So you see a cat sitting on the mat, your mind is presented with this proposition, the cat is on the mat. And then you decide whether to assent to that proposition or not.

27:28John Sellars:You either say yes or no, I believe it or I don't believe it. And if you say yes, I believe that, then that creates the belief in your mind that the cat is on the mat. And of course, if that belief is true, then you have knowledge. And then the formal logic that we were just talking about, that's kind of constructed out of all these propositions that are in your head. Right. So knowledge through the senses first, you assent or reject to the information you receive that creates these beliefs in the form of propositions. And then you start constructing your logical arguments off the back of it. And so that's the kind of what logic is concerned about.

28:04John Sellars:And if your senses are reliable and you assent correctly and you don't make mistakes, and then your arguments are valid, you're going to end up with knowledge out the other end of this kind of process. Right.

28:15Alex O'Connor:So the Stoics believe in empiricism. They think that all knowledge ultimately comes from the input that we get from the world through our senses, our eyes and our ears and things like that, which sounds sensible. And people will say, well, I've heard of that view of empiricism. Someone like David Hume might come to mind. And some people, if I'm not mistaken, think that the Stoics kind of anticipate this Humean picture of the world. People have probably heard of David Hume and some of his ways of looking at the world, and the Stoics weren't too dissimilar, at least in their epistemology here, right?

28:48John Sellars:Yes, that's true. I mean, the other famous early modern empiricist is John Locke. And in John Locke's famous essay, he described the mind at birth as like a blank sheet of paper on which experience writes our beliefs. And we have information that the Stoics also had already said that at birth the mind is like a blank sheet of paper on which impressions stamp themselves. So that core modern empiricist idea is already in Stoicism, absolutely, 100%. um one one sort of corollary of this is that if all of our knowledge comes through the senses and the mind is a blank sheet of paper then there are no innate ideas um there there's no there's no pre-existing information that we have already and that's obviously a challenge to kind of platonic idea that we kind of have some kind of you know innate knowledge that we um simply recollect and bring back to our minds through experience.

30:02Alex O'Connor:Yes. And the Stoics sort of position themselves against Plato's views in some important ways, right? So one of the things that Plato is most famous for is his sort of dealing with universals. So I'm sat on a chair and you're sat on a chair. These are not the same chair, right? Yours is over there, mine's over here, they're in different positions, they're made out of different physical material, and yet they're both chairs. So there's something that they've got in common that they share, and yet they're totally separate things. And so Plato is like, well, that's because there's this form of chairness in which they both participate.

30:41Alex O'Connor:And the physical world is just a sort of imperfect reflection of this perfect realm of forms where there's the form of a chair and the form of the good and the form of justice and all this kind of stuff. And so this is a way of saying that individual chairs participate in this universal thing called chairness. The Stoics, and for Plato, that means that there is this realm of forms. And when you interact with the world, you're kind of drawing upon that other realm. And for Plato, weirdly, it's also, yeah, it's got this memory thing. It's like you're bringing it back from your pre-mortal memory of the realm of forms or whatever.

31:17Alex O'Connor:The Stoics don't agree with Plato, as we've just said. But then the Stoics are confronted with the same question. As a chair here, as a chair there, they seem to have something in common. But if all we have are our empirical observations of something over there and something over here, how do the Stoics deal with this problem of universal chair-ness?

31:36John Sellars:Yeah. So just like modern empiricists, they're going to argue that that concept of chair that we have is something that we've constructed on the basis of experiencing lots of things that have certain similarities. But the concept is simply something we've constructed after the event, after experience. It's not something that's come beforehand. Plato is effectively saying, well, you wouldn't even be able to recognize these two things as chairs unless you already had the concept of chair in some sense in your head. And so that's the view that the Stoics would want to challenge. No, no, no. We develop these concepts as we go.

32:17John Sellars:and so they're ultimately the product of convention.

32:20Alex O'Connor:And so we just sort of take objects in the world that are material things arranged in different ways and we kind of put labels on them, call that a table and then a chair. There's no like real category called tables and chairs. That's just something that I've invented. Now I've talked about it in the context of meriology and called that meriological nihilism but another good word of this is nominalism. It's to say that that is a table in name only. There's not a real category of table. It's just a name that I've given it. And in the modern world, yeah, we call that nominalism. And do you think it's therefore fair to say that the Stoics are one of our earliest schools of nominalism?

33:01John Sellars:Yeah, I think that is fair to say. I mean, I'd perhaps add that a couple of figures just before them, interestingly, Diogenes the Cynic, right, the guy who is supposedly only interested in flamboyant ethics, also challenged Plato on some of these issues and sort of said, well, you know, you talk about tablehood. Where the hell is this? I've never seen this. I can see tables, I can't see the idea of table. And so you get the sense that perhaps the cynics were kind of in this space as well, also challenging Plato and some of these ideas. And so maybe that's also part of the cynic inheritance that Stoicism takes up.

33:41John Sellars:But Stoicism, so far as the evidence we have, really develops and runs with it and makes it into part of a much more consistent and fully developed theory.

33:52Alex O'Connor:Yeah, and another person who... disagreed with Plato about forms and the existence of universals is Aristotle. People are probably more familiar with the idea of Plato follows Socrates and Aristotle comes after Plato and they sort of disagree with and improve upon each other. And so Aristotle also disagrees with the existence of forms and the way that Plato had them, but in a different kind of way to the Stoics, They sort of deal with the problem differently?

34:23John Sellars:Yes. So Aristotle does think that there are things as forms which, I mean, I think it's the sort of thing that modern philosophers would call natural kinds, something like that. So, you know, there are, I mean, we were talking about chairs and tables, right, which is just artificial. But if we're talking about, say, different species of animals, which is very much what Aristotle was interested in, then it's like, OK, there are birds over here. There are horses over here. This isn't just us arbitrarily coming up with labels and making distinctions. The distinction between these different types of creatures is a fact of nature.

35:03John Sellars:So in that sense, there's a form of horse. And you can go and look at individual horses and point at them and you can see the form of horse. It's right there. it doesn't exist independently of those individual horses but there's clearly a shared set of properties that all these horses have which is beyond just what we have we're choosing to think about it um and and that's like you know that's that seems like a really good sensible thing for aristotle to say right he's a really smart guy i'm a huge fan of aristotle too um but the stoics don't don't go down that route so much they don't want to talk about uh forms in precisely that sense although they do talk about objects in the natural world having certain qualities so and this is where it gets really quite quite complex and difficult to sort of piece it all together and so they kind of acknowledge that there are kind of qualities that that the objects will have but they'll they'll resist talking about forms having any existence beyond the particulars so there's yeah there's a certain amount of certain amount of common ground with aristotle there in that we're interested in particular things existing.

36:13John Sellars:And of course, also like Aristotle, they're empiricists, as we've said. So in that sense, both Aristotle and the Stoics can seem surprisingly modern compared to the kind of the popular view of Plato, for instance, which looks quite different.

36:27Alex O'Connor:Yeah. And so we've talked about how knowledge comes into our minds, like according to the stoics we've got this kind of empiricism and we've talked a little bit about sort of logic what they do with the resulting information but let's talk about the actual nature of the world let's talk about their metaphysics and i think this is where we move from talking about logic or logos which as you say encompasses more than just propositional logic the epistemology stuff as well um but on top of that we might want to build a picture of what the world actually looks like. So I guess we can start by just saying that the Stoics are materialists about the world.

37:07Alex O'Connor:They don't believe in anything except for sort of physical matter, right? And how would they cash out what that means?

37:15John Sellars:Yes. So famously, they say only bodies exist, right? So physical things in the world. And connecting up with what we're just saying about nominalism, they also say only particulars exist, right? No universals, no platonic forms. So particular individual physical objects, that's the architecture of the world. That's what's real.

37:39John Sellars:And so in that sense, we would naturally describe them as materialists. So that's the kind of the basic foundational idea. But they overcomplicate things. Well, I say overcomplicate things. So just as Aristotle had talked about physical objects being a mixture of what he called matter and form, right? So there's the horse, it has the form of a horse, it has the shape, the structure, and there's the matter that it's made out of. And so the horse is a combination of matter and form. This is his hylomorphism, right? The Stoics also think that everything in the world is a combination of two things, one of which they will call matter.

38:17John Sellars:and the other which and this is where it gets really difficult um they call pneuma which is breath or spirit as it becomes later in later tradition um and i mean let's call it breath right so they think everything is a combination of matter and breath um they say that matter is the passive element and breath is the active element and every physical object in the world is a combination of these two things. Now, superficially, that might sound a bit like what Aristotle's saying, right? There's the form that gives something its structure and its kind of identity, and then there's the matter that's just the stuff that it's made out of.

39:01John Sellars:The Stoics are kind of saying the same thing, but with one really important difference, which is the pneumeral breath, they think, is another material component. So these are both material principles that in some way are mixed together, a kind of passive matter, but with some kind of material active principle permeating it, which is giving it its structure, or in the case of living beings, is making them to be alive, right? So in the case of a human being, we are a body made out of matter, but our entire body is permeated with this breath, which they identify with our soul, which is the thing that makes us alive.

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40:24Alex O'Connor:but do they also view chairs and tables in that way as having this this breath and if so you know it might make sense because again we've got to be careful with our terms here because we're translating but also when you say like breath or potentially spirit as it came to be known, people might think, oh, I don't believe in spirits and breath and stuff, but the Stoics are materialists. So they're talking about a physical thing in the world. Okay. So maybe in us, it's the thing that gives us like life, but what is it in a table? What is this breath component to the table?

40:58John Sellars:Yeah. So it's going to be in the table for sure in all inanimate objects. And it's going to be the thing that gives the table its structure, its hardness, its quality. So it's the thing that holds it together, right? So we're not just looking at a pile of dust, right? And so the Stoics will say that this breath always has a degree of tension, and that the higher the degree of tension the breath has the more complex the object so the most basic level of tension gives cohesion to the table or the chair a next higher level of tension will give

41:48John Sellars:the plants their kind of principle of life and then in animals it will give the principle of kind of perception and movement and then in human beings it will give rationality and in each case what we're seeing is an increase in tension so i mean this is often referred to as the scale of nature right so there's no radical difference in kind between any of these different things there's no difference in kind between the human rational mind and an animal mind or even what's going on in a plant um as one scholar has put it quite what we're really thinking about here is different levels of complexity.

42:27John Sellars:So the breath is what is giving objects the complex organization that makes them what they are.

42:33Alex O'Connor:Yeah. I mean, this is really interesting for so many reasons. One is that, again, this doesn't sound too far detached from Aristotle and his view of the soul. So Aristotle, many people will know, some people will not, that he believed that all living things had souls, but that there were kind of different levels of souls or different sort of kinds of souls. And again, it sort of starts to sound a bit wishy-washy, oh, I don't believe in that stuff. But again, for Aristotle, a soul is not some magical thing that sort of exists inside of you. A soul is like a sort of physical arrangement, essentially.

43:11Alex O'Connor:It's like a form of matter. And he believed that plants had the lowest level of soul, which gave them their sort of qualities they have they can take things in follow the sun and stuff animals had that plus a bit they've got like locomotion they can move around and then humans have that plus a bit which is rationality again the stoics seem to be saying something kind of similar but just like cashing it out in different terms and also saying that it's not just a continuum between plants and up to humans but from humans all the way down to like physical objects including artifacts like like tables and chairs, right?

43:52Alex O'Connor:Do you think that that is a fair comparison to draw, in other words, as a touchpoint for people who are familiar with Aristotle?

44:00John Sellars:Yeah, absolutely. I think you can see there's a similar structure in the way that they're thinking. I mean, as I say, they're both empiricists, Stoics and Aristotelians. They're both interested in developing a scientific understanding of the world. They're both broadly materialist. There's quite a lot of common ground in the theoretical philosophy, even if there are also some important differences. And the way in which they're using terms, like the word psuche that we translate as soul, I mean, they have the same understanding of this word because it's just common philosophical currency. And, you know, again, I mean, a word like soul can sort of raise all sorts of red flags for some people, right?

44:42John Sellars:They might have a problem with this. I mean, it's not really complicated or difficult. You've got a living human being and you've got a corpse, right? what's the difference between the two one of them has soul and one of them doesn't soul is simply the thing that explains why it is that this thing's alive and that and that thing's dead

44:58Alex O'Connor:even if that's like a material thing that's just something in the brain or the heart or whatever whatever that thing is is just what's being called a soul but weirdly i suppose here if you had a corpse and a living human being aristotle would look at those two things and aristotle would say the living being's got a soul, the corpse does not. Whereas the Stoics would say that both of them have breath. It's just that the living being has a lot more tension in the sort of organization of the breath than the corpse does. And that's what gives it this extra sort of stuff.

45:30John Sellars:Right? Is that fair? Yeah, I think that's exactly what they're going to have to say. There's a sense in which the corpse has lost some of its complexity or tension.

45:41Alex O'Connor:And I want to ask, how is this related to specifically the fact that the height of the soul for Aristotle is like the rational human being? It's like this ability to use reason. And Stoics will also look at humans and this extra special thing they have. And yeah, they've got this quality of rationality allows us to do logic and stuff. and if they've got this sort of continuum that goes down to the basis do they intend for us to take that sort of quality of rationality consciousness that kind of thing and sort of extend it all the way down to the baseline of reality or is there a point at which we're no longer really talking about the same kind of thing anymore because in other words i mean like we do a lot of philosophy of mind on this show and we talk about competing views of materialism and idealism and panpsychism and stuff.

46:29Alex O'Connor:And some of the stuff that Stoics say about this continuum of stuff, it's just more complexly arranged when it comes to a plant than an animal than a human, ties in quite nicely with some of these views of consciousness, which say that it's present foundationally in the universe. It's just really rudimentary. And it's when you put it together complexly that you get human brains. Is there a parallel to draw here with Stoic thought, do you think?

46:53John Sellars:Yes, I think so. And this active principle that permeates and animates the world and organizes the world, as I said, they use this word breath, but they also will use the word logos to describe this active principle. So it's reason that's permeating everything. So there's a sense in which reason goes all the way down, right? There's a rationality to the way in which the inanimate world operates as well, we might say. There's a structure. So in that sense, they certainly would want to stress that continuum. And of course, all of these things, all of these particular physical things that exist, whether it be human beings, plants, tables, chairs, are all parts of the totality of nature.

47:43John Sellars:And as well as saying that only individual particular bodies exist. They also want to stress the fact that we are all parts of a single entity called nature, like with a capital N. And there's a kind of an order and a logic and a reason to the way in which nature as a whole works, which is this logical principle sort of at work.

48:09Alex O'Connor:When we say that someone is a materialist, that everything's just made out of matter, there are kind of two ways i think that we can picture what's happening here to be a materialist you either take the sort of high-flying stuff that typically is thought to be kind of a bit out there and immaterial things like you know consciousness justice universals and you grab them and you just drag them down to the to the level of like atoms and physics and stuff like that or you take the sort of the the arena of physics and atoms and stuff and you kind of elevate them into this sort of higher plane of like reason and logos.

48:45Alex O'Connor:And it kind of sounds to me like the Stoics are doing something more like the latter in that like the modern materialist, who's like a reductionist, who thinks everything is, you know, you could drag it down to this level is not actually quite doing the same thing as the Stoic, which sounds from what I'm hearing, like a bit more like elevating almost.

49:02John Sellars:Yes, that's a good way of putting it. And I mean, in at the time when the Stoics are active in Athens, the kind of famous other competing school of philosophy are the Epicureans, who are kind of reductive atomists in many respects. And so the world is simply the product of this dead, inert bits of matter that just randomly bump into one another. And things like consciousness are going to have to be emergent properties that in some way come out of the interaction of these lifeless atoms. And so the big kind of philosophy of mind question is, well, how on earth does that happen, right? You stick enough bits of dead matter together and suddenly consciousness appears?

49:46John Sellars:How does that work? No one has an answer to that question. So that would be the challenge to that version of materialism. And that was a challenge that the Stoics in antiquity were already raising. so um i mean for instance one of the arguments that they'll give will be that um if human beings have consciousness then consciousness must be a property of nature as a whole i mean slightly anachronistic to use the word consciousness but you kind of you know what i mean right um to be rational and animate well you're talking about sort of logos really yeah

50:26Alex O'Connor:this sort of so reasonableness i guess yeah so so they'll explicitly say that this can't be an

50:34John Sellars:emergent property it must already be in nature if we have it and so they'll yeah very explicitly want to challenge that version of reductive materialism so and and that that's that's that

50:45Alex O'Connor:that jumped out at me because i sometimes get accused on on this show of sort of i i get really interested in in like an idea like like idealism or panpsychism or something and i get accused of sort of bringing people on and just like just just talking about how wonderful that is but i was preparing to speak with you and i was reading about the stoic view of like reason permeating the world and this kind of and i was like damn we're gonna we're gonna have to do the the consciousness thing again because it really does sound like they're getting at a similar thing and i was just surprised i had no idea that the stoics even thought about this stuff let alone like had this interpretation of you know reason as an animating principle of the entire universe i think it's fascinating.

51:25Alex O'Connor:But okay, like when I talk about idealism or panpsychism, the question is, okay, if you kind of believe that there's this, that the universe itself then must have some kind of consciousness or that everything's made up of some breath, and that kind of sounds a little bit religious. It kind of sounds like maybe we're describing the universe as a kind of god in the way that Spinoza does, where when we say materialism and nature, we're talking about a very elevated form of the natural world, which some people think it might be sensible to call God. So the question is, and I know this is something of a trick question, but you're probably the person to ask, did the Stoics believe in God?

52:08John Sellars:Yes, they did. And exactly along the lines that Spinoza would do much, much later, they identify God with nature. Or to be more precise, They identify God with this active principle that animates nature. So God is Zeus, is Logos, is divine breath, is divine fire. They have endless names for this same thing again and again, right? So yeah, God is the active principle within nature that unifies and unites the whole thing. So God is the soul of the world, we might say. Just as the active animate breath within us is our soul and makes us alive, God is the active animate breath that animates all of nature as a whole.

52:57John Sellars:And one of the consequences of that is that our individual souls are fragments of this divine soul that animates the whole show. So they definitely believe in God. They're definitely pantheists. God is imminent. and because we're talking about we're still talking about the natural world we're still safely within the claim that it's only physical bodies that exist yeah well that's the interesting

53:21Alex O'Connor:thing isn't it that it sounds kind of jarring almost to talk about you know us being sort of fractured souls that participate in one great big soul that the universe is made out of and but they're materialists it's like do you think our sort of modern conception of materialism is a bit of an anachronism. When we're talking about the Stoics, to use materialism today, it seems to mean that kind of reductionist, like everything is emergent of small particles kind of thing. Do you think that's still an accurate term to describe the Stoics?

53:55John Sellars:That's a really good question. And I mean, you're absolutely right. That kind of sort of reductive atomism was the kind of dominant version of materialism in the early modern period when And all of these categories really started to solidify. And you could ask similar questions about Aristotle too, I think. Right. So they're both naturalist philosophies, right? It's only things within the natural world that exist. But in both cases, they're going to want to argue, well, there's kind of dead, inert matter, but there's also something else you need in order to really understand what's going on. just thinking that there's in a matter isn't enough on its own and so the Stoics will have this divine reason that animates things Aristotle will have his you know will say that form is really important yeah so yeah I mean as long as you as long as you've got that idea in the back of your mind that materialism comes in a variety in a variety of forms then yeah I think we're probably safe maybe but the word naturalism is right feels broader and more encompassing.

55:03John Sellars:So maybe that's the better term to use.

55:05Alex O'Connor:And I think people take issue with the word materialism today as well. And the preferred term in some contexts is physicalism, because materialism is a bit of a nebulous term. They say, well, what we're really talking about is physicalism, the view that everything is essentially reducible to like physical interactions. And so maybe you could see materialism as like the category in which you have these competing views of what you might call physicalism, which is the reductive thing and like naturalism which is like everything is is nature but there's maybe a little bit more more room for this kind of stuff um interestingly the stoics also have a bit of a weird view about like literally the nature of of the world right like we say everything that exists is the natural world there are a lot of debates in antiquity as there still are today about whether the the world or the universe we might say today is whether it had a beginning whether it's infinite, whether it's finite, whether it's got edges.

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57:34John Sellars:Yeah, this is where it starts to get slightly weird, right? This is the stuff that the modern fans of Stoicism will kind of have no interest in whatsoever. But it's part of the theory.

57:44Alex O'Connor:Notice how miles away we are from the sort of like, if you lose your possessions, then you can control your own emotions. I hope it's becoming clear to people that Stoicism is a lot more than just that. Yeah.

57:58John Sellars:So, yeah, we've got nature identified with God, a living being. So nature is alive, right? And like any other living being, nature will have its life cycle. and so this is where it starts to get crazy so the stoic view is that the natural world is in effect born at a certain moment um and it has its life cycle and at the end of this life cycle it is then destroyed and the moment of birth and the moment of destruction um is characterized as all of the passive matter being consumed by the active principle, identified with reason, identified with God, identified with breath, but also identified with fire.

58:45John Sellars:This is an idea that they take from the earlier Greek philosopher Heraclitus. And they suggest that the entire world is consumed in fire. It's kind of a moment of singularity. Everything becomes pure active principle. So everything becomes pure God. right um and then and then it's reborn kind of like a phoenix sort of and then god has another life cycle right so um as i say some of these ideas may have come from from heraclitus uh um the idea that the idea that there's there's logos animating nature the idea that fire is a kind of principle um and so god has this life cycle um and and each cycle they say is identical right so again the idea of eternal return eternal recurrence that is often associated with nature um the stoics never use that phrase but they effectively have that theory right um if the world is organized ration rationally by um by this divine principle then what he's going to produce is going to be perfect.

59:56John Sellars:So why would he change it second time round? So you're going to get exactly the same cycle, second time, third time, and so on. So you have cyclical time and you have endless repetition of exactly the same events. And again, the Stoics are interested in the logical puzzles, right? So is Socrates in cycle one the same as Socrates in cycle two, right? And the same in Socrates in cycle three, right? If it's exactly the same life that it's going through, can you even distinguish between individual cycles if they're identical? All those sorts of philosophical problems then are kind of discussed in the literature yeah yeah so that's

1:00:29Alex O'Connor:some quite like specific and and kind of kind of weird views that are thoroughly i mean they're really beginning to sound quite like theological this is this is extremely although materialists and empiricists have quite fanciful sort of views on cosmology i mean there's a whole subsection in your book on stoicism i'm talking about the sort of academic one the rootlage one um is it rootledge or routledge how do you say that i've never i've never known for sure routledge i tend to routledge let's go with that i won't claim to be um yeah well you've got a whole subsection i mean you you follow this this course of uh like logic physics ethics um but within physics you have a whole subsection on cosmology because they have these these views and they also have a view about like sort of the size of the universe and it's like edges yeah so sits in a sits in a void so so so

1:01:25John Sellars:And so this single unified nature identified with God is spherical in shape. I think they probably thought that the earth was at the center of this, just as Aristotle did. Now, when it's all consumed by fire, I think they think it gets bigger. I honestly can't remember off the top of my head whether I think it gets bigger or smaller. Check the book afterwards, folks. But I think he thinks that it gets slightly bigger, right? And so as a consequence, it needs space to expand into. And so as a consequence, they think that there must be void outside of nature in order for it to expand and contract in this moment of conflagration.

1:02:17John Sellars:By contrast, I mean, Aristotle also thought the world was spherical, but he thought there was nothing beyond its limits. Yeah. So again, that's them in dialogue with Aristotle. Yeah. Offering a slightly different theory and saying, no, no, no. Logically, we're going to have to say that there's void beyond the limits of the natural world.

1:02:32Alex O'Connor:And don't they use this argument? I don't know if the Stoics use this per se, or if this was just floating around at the time. But when debating, you know, the edge of the universe, is there something beyond it, or like a void? Or is that just where everything ends? There's this thought experiment. Well, if you put a person at the edge of the universe, and you told them to like lift up their arm to like sort of push it out of the universe, one of two things would happen. Either their arm would sort of go through the wall, in which case there's something outside that the arm's going into, or the arm would like be prevented.

1:03:02Alex O'Connor:It would sort of hit up against the edge. But if it hits up against the edge, there must be something beyond the edge to stop the arm. So given that those are the only two options, either way, there must be something outside of the universe. And that's one of the arguments given for why this void outside must exist.

1:03:19John Sellars:Yeah, exactly. So that was a famous objection raised by an ancient philosopher called Archytus that he raised against Aristotle. When Aristotle says there's nothing beyond the limit, he comes up with that brilliant objection. It's clever, right? It always makes me think of the Truman Show, the movie, where the guy gets to the end and then he's kind of knocking against the edge of the world. So yes, surely there's got to be something beyond um um and so yeah the sort of the part of the stoic claim that there must be

1:03:46Alex O'Connor:void is a way of avoiding that objection also okay so one thing i think we have to mention then is we'll have to rewind ever so slightly here and that we were talking about materialism before so as you put it the stoics believe that only bodies exist so anything which exists is like you know of physically embodied like tables and chairs and stuff but we've just said that there is a void outside of the earth which presumably the void kind of has nothing in it there's no physical matter there and there are other things that the stoics believe in like the existence of time like the existence of meaning that we ascribe to propositions earlier um and these are things which the Stoics think exist.

1:04:31Alex O'Connor:They think the void's there. They think time's there. Yet these things aren't made out of matter, are they? No. So what's going on?

1:04:40John Sellars:Yeah. So they call these things incorporeals. So they're not corporeal. They're not physical. One of the defining characteristics of bodies that we've said exist is that they can act and be acted upon. So they causally interact with one another. And so that's one of the reasons why they say, look, the soul must be physical in some sense because it has causal power and it makes things happen. But these things don't. Void doesn't make anything happen. So it can be incorporeal. That's fine. And again, the same with something like time or, as you said, the meaning of our propositions is something that's kind of non-physical.

1:05:21John Sellars:We can tell that epistemological story about information arriving from the in the world into our sense organs being processed in our brains. And we can describe that in purely physical terms, but the actual sense or meaning of what we're thinking is the non-physical bit. So that's also one of these incorporeals. So they do have those kind of exceptions. Now, I mean, critics would challenge the Stoics on this, right? And they would say, well, what on earth has linguistic meaning and void and time got to do with each other? This seems like a slightly random ragbag collection of things that don't neatly fit into your materialist theory.

1:06:09John Sellars:And so you've just kind of sort of thrown them together and said, okay, we'll say they're incorporeal too. So some people will say maybe this is a weak point in stoicism. They've had to kind of acknowledge these things exist.

1:06:21Alex O'Connor:The other one is place, right because there are four there are four of these incorporeal things that there's that the stoics believe in there's time there's place so like where the physical object goes that's not like made out of stuff because it's where the stuff goes yeah but it's like it's there and there's the void and then there's this lector right or the meaning of propositions because they think that propositions are physical they think that vibrations in the air and then you know the air sort of hits the eardrum and and whatnot but in theory i could say all of that in french and it's the same physical stuff you know the words are being said but if you don't speak french you won't get the meaning so there's like this extra thing which is incorporeal so they accept the existence of those and yeah it's a little bit weird if their metaphysics is true it's like the universe is made out of this stuff except for these random little bits um but also it makes me think you know when we said earlier well yeah the stoics are materialists and they think only bodies exist doesn't this just kind of make that like untrue well they would say that

1:07:18John Sellars:these incorporeal things don't exist, but they are in some sense real. So they'll want to draw a kind of metaphysical distinction between those two types. Between existence and realness.

1:07:30Alex O'Connor:So there can be something that's real, but doesn't exist. It's similar to how some important medieval religious thinkers believed that things could exist in the intellect. And they're essentially talking about imagination here. So you can imagine a unicorn and the unicorn doesn't exist. It's not in the world, but it's real in the sense that I can imagine it in a way that I can't imagine a four-sided triangle. That definitely isn't real and doesn't exist. The unicorn, even though it's not in the world, it's still got something more than the four-sided triangle because there's a sense in which that has more existence than the four-sided triangle, but it's still not in the real world.

1:08:12Alex O'Connor:So maybe thinking in those terms will be helpful to understanding why you might say something is like real, it's really there, but it doesn't exist. But then maybe again, the Stoics just need to sort of adapt their terminology. I mean, that's quite a convenient thing to do, isn't it? To just say of all of these things that challenge your view of what exists, you say, well, yeah, no, I'm still right that they don't exist, but they're still real. And they say they subsist.

1:08:40John Sellars:Yeah. I mean, these are all kind of imperfect English translations for the kind of technical terms that they're using. But yeah, subsist is often how it's translated. I mean, just to flesh out their metaphysical picture a bit more, I mean, they suggest that the highest category, the highest metaphysical category is designated by the Greek word ti, which means something, right? So in other words, the highest category is particularity right so again this is part of the nominalism right and the rejection of platonic forms um the the broadest category is something and then under that category there are two lower categories there are bodies so always particular physical bodies and then there are these incorporeals and so these incorporeals are always specific things so we're talking about the meaning of individual propositions or if we're talking about void it's like you know the void is right here outside the edge of the universe.

1:09:45John Sellars:These don't become kind of universals sort of through the back door. So particularity is the top category and then we have reality and existence. Or maybe a better way of putting it is to say that the highest category of something, this is the level of reality and under that top category, we then got bodies that exist and then these incorporeous subsist. That's probably a better way of putting it.

1:10:12Alex O'Connor:Yeah. And it's worth pointing out, this is a worldview that had its critics. And if you're listening to this and going, well, that just sounds ridiculous. Maybe it is. Maybe this is just a shortcoming of Soicism, but we're trying today to work out at least what it was that they believed. And the sources for this kind of stuff, it's quite specific. And we've already said that a lot of the early Stoic literature, at least, is lost. So are these things that we're picking up through fragments? Are these things that we've learned from later Stoic writers? Where is this sort of confident information coming from?

1:10:44John Sellars:Yeah, that's a really good question. So most of it is coming from, or a lot of it is coming from hostile sources. So there's a little bit in Seneca, in a couple of Seneca's letters, where he touches on some of these metaphysical ideas. Which again is quite interesting because it challenges the thought that all he's interested in is kind of practical ethics. So he does engage with these ideas in passing. Much later, towards the end of antiquity, we have a whole series of Neoplatonists who are writing commentaries on Aristotle. And they give us a lot of information about Stoic metaphysics and a lot of these details.

1:11:24John Sellars:But they're writing from a polemical point of view. So they're often presenting these ideas in contrast to Aristotle and saying why the Stoics have got things wrong. So that's a problem. Some of the other stuff we were talking about earlier in terms of God permeating the natural world and all of those sorts of questions, we have material in Cicero. So Cicero writes a book called On the Nature of the Gods where he talks about Stoic theology. And so there we get a slightly fuller account, which goes into a bit more detail. But yes, in all of this, we are piecing together scraps of information, doing our best to make sense of it.

1:12:07John Sellars:And at some points we might just say, you know what, this makes no sense or this is just unconvincing. But then we always have to remind ourselves, well, we don't actually have the books where this was set out in full. Exactly.

1:12:18Alex O'Connor:Yeah, it's like if you, again, like if you were only ever reading the God delusion, you might think Christianity is pretty implausible. Well, many people read the Bible and think it's implausible too, but you get what I'm saying. Yeah. But of course, I think it's time. I think it's time to do it. It's the ethics. Of course, a lot of this stuff is from, you know, like hostile sources and whatnot. But like you said, the majority of the texts which we still have today are from this so-called later Stoic or Roman Stoic, which has come to be associated with ethics. And maybe that is just a historical contingency.

1:12:53Alex O'Connor:Maybe they wrote and read all about physics and logic and it just didn't survive. But nonetheless, today, popularly, Stoicism is kind of understood as an ethical philosophy. So I want to ask you then, what is the ethical worldview of the Stoics? And more specifically, now we can probably ask the question of like, why? Like, how do we get from this view of the world and the universe and the eternal fire recreation stuff to quite particular ethical doctrines? What's that story?

1:13:21John Sellars:Yes. So, I mean, I think it's also worth saying that if you just read the works of the Roman Stoics, you'll get a certain ethical worldview, but you won't get the kind of fundamental underpinning principles. and so if you really want to understand Stoic ethics, you've also got to go back to our Athenians. And in this case, we've got a fairly full account of early Stoic ethics that Cicero preserves for us and although Cicero wasn't a Stoic, he's reasonably sympathetic towards Stoic ethics so he gives a fairly full and fairly friendly account, we might say. And so we talked a bit earlier about Socrates and the idea that it's virtue or character that's the most important thing for living a good life in order to understand how the stoics get to that when you want your spring break to feel like and your kids pool day to feel like and your hotel bed to feel like oh and room service to feel like because at hilton hospitality feels like your cabana's ready

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1:14:49John Sellars:the treat you deserve pepsi wild cherry and cream treat yourself i mean i'll just sort of set out the basic principles, right? So the starting point is the very simple idea, the very simple observation that all animals, including humans, have a basic instinct to self-preservation, right? So we're all just trying to survive and we will pursue things that we think will help us survive and we will avoid things that we think will harm us, right? So food and water, good, big, scary animal bad right simple as that and that's how we ascribe value to things the stoics think right so again a completely naturalistic way of thinking about value right you don't need a platonic ideal form of the good right food and water good that that that protects me scary animal bad so we have a naturalistic account of values so that kind of fits with what we've already been saying about the metaphysics and and the um and the logic um but the stories think that as we develop as as human beings we reach a certain point where we come to see ourselves not merely as animals fighting for survival um we see ourselves as rational agents and we have certain sets of values and we start to value things like being decent towards other people and having integrity or being rationally consistent in our beliefs.

1:16:23John Sellars:And we start to identify ourselves as that type of person, right? I'm the sort of person who's rationally consistent, who acts with integrity, who behaves well towards other people around me. And if I start to identify myself with those sorts of characteristics, if I start to identify myself with that kind of character, I'll come to realize it's the preservation of that character that is what my self-preservation actually looks like, right? And my survival is not on whether I can feed this physical body, right? Although that's kind of obviously still a precondition. My survival as a rational agent is on me preserving all of those character traits that make me who I am and make me a kind of a human being.

1:17:19John Sellars:And so that leads the Stoics to this thought that it's our character that is the single most important thing for living a good life. That's the thing that we want to preserve. of. And then they'll say that all of the other things that we initially valued, like food and shelter and so on, we initially called those good. But now we're going to say it's our virtuous character that's the only thing that's really good. That's the thing that enables us to live a good life. That's the thing that guarantees our preservation as a rational human being. And all those other things are things that we still naturally pursue, but we're not going to call those good anymore, right?

1:18:03John Sellars:We're going to call those preferred or dispreferred. So food, shelter, money, health, these are all preferred things. Of course, we all want them. We have this natural instinct to pursue them. And their opposites are going to be dispreferred. But they're not so essential for us to living a good life or even to surviving. um what really matters is developing this rational character and that that in particular

1:18:29Alex O'Connor:was a bit of a controversy in early stoicism right because you you've kind of got this realization that the thing that really makes you you like you yourself is your like character and that your sort of physical self is secondary to that that the most important thing about you is who you are as a person and virtue will get you there so all of this other stuff like food and shelter, although we kind of want to say it's good, it's not really good. And so the early sort of Stoic position on this is that they are so-called indifference, not indifference with a C, with a TS, like they are indifferent things, things you should be indifferent to.

1:19:06Alex O'Connor:And yet some Stoics were like, okay, yeah, they don't really matter. We're not going to call them good, but I do prefer food to starvation. And although, as you've told us, we inherit this sort of view of Stoicism that there are preferred and dispreferred indifference. But there's sort of another way this could have gone because there were some people who thought that there shouldn't be this concept of preferred and dispreferred, right?

1:19:29John Sellars:Yes. So, I mean, we mentioned much earlier that Zeno spent time studying with the Cynics. And so he inherits this Socratic idea from the Cynics. It's all about virtuous character. And as we said then, Diogenes and Crates and the other Cynics take this idea of an attitude of indifference towards the external world to a kind of extreme view where you don't care about anything whatsoever. And so the introduction of this distinction between preferred and dispreferred, this looks like it's a key distinctive Stoic idea in particular that Zeno introduces that differentiates Stoic ethics from Cynic ethics.

1:20:11John Sellars:Right. Right. So the cynics will say everything external is just a matter of indifference. And Xenia will say, no, we're still going to have choices and make preferences. And as you say, there are some early figures at that time who want to push back against that and say, no, no, no, we prefer the more cynic view. and I mean what's interesting if you sort of track through the Stoic tradition which is lasting over 500 years you'll find different people place different emphasis on this idea so a famous writer a bit later called Panitius who was in the sort of second first century BC at the time when these ideas were taking up in Rome he really stresses the importance of things being preferred and sort of moves away from the more sort of cynic side of things, we might say.

1:21:09John Sellars:A little later, someone like Epictetus, a very famous Stoic that lots of people read today, he barely mentions this distinction at all. I mean, quite strikingly. I mean, I've just said that this is the defining idea in Stoic ethics that distinguish it from the cynics. Epictetus rarely appears in Epictetus. Repetitus, it's virtue, virtue all the way, just focus on virtue. That's all that matters. You don't need to worry about whether things are preferred or dispreferred. So there's almost as if there's a range of views within what's quite a broad church of Stoic ethical thinking.

1:21:41Alex O'Connor:But there's also maybe this thought that, okay, so the Stoics want to say that none of this physical stuff really matters. What matters is your, I shouldn't say physical, none of this like external stuff none of this non-character related stuff really matters and then they go i am a bit hungry but no no no no that's not good that's just um it's just preferred like can't someone listening to that sort of go like but you're still seeking food you're still seeking shelter and okay you don't want to call them good because that conflicts with your philosophy but maybe you just should maybe you're just calling them good by other names if you're allowing this indifferent things.

1:22:22Alex O'Connor:So Aristotle thought that virtue was the most important thing, but he also did think that these external things were good. They were useful and worthwhile in achieving virtue and getting to eudaimonia, the ultimate state of happiness for the ancient Greeks. And if I'm not mistaken, some early critics of Stoicism, like Carnades and somebody else, a few other people were like criticizing the Stoics for saying, you're kind of just saying the same thing as Aristotle, you know? So is that fair? Because it sounds to me a little bit like, I'm all on board with these Stoic ideas, but when they say, you know, food isn't good, but it is preferable, I'm like, what's the difference?

1:23:07John Sellars:Yeah. And you're absolutely right. So people did raise that objection in antiquity. And And again, Cicero, in one of his books, On Ends, he kind of outlines all of this and raises precisely these sorts of objections, right? Are you just kind of playing with words? Are you just varying terminology? But is the basic idea identical? And there's one line of argument there which suggests that the Stoics and the Aristides are basically saying the same thing just using different vocabulary. um but the key issue is this right let's okay let's say that it is preferred or good for you to be in excellent health right so and let's say that you're you're you're struck down with some horrible illness now stoic is going to say that if you still got the right frame of mind and the right character, you can still live a good, happy human life.

1:24:03John Sellars:And an Aristotelian is going to say, well, you're not, right? Your life could be better if your health were restored, right? And so that feels like a big kind of philosophical difference, right? If someone's struck down by disability, their life is worse, an Aristotelian would have to say. It could be better. Whereas the stoics can say no you're you can still live as good a human life as anyone else if your character so long as your character remains yeah your life might be worse but not because of the disability well i mean your life could be worse if you become bitter and resentful about the fact that this thing has happened right but um so long as you don't let that happen yeah so there's a there's a sentiment there's something quite positive about what the stoics are saying yeah right that that no matter what life throws at you, no matter what happens to you, so long as you don't let that adversity affect your frame of mind, you can still live a full, rich human life and you don't have to let those feel that those things have in some way damaged or destroyed what's most important.

1:25:09Alex O'Connor:Yes. And now it feels like we're finally approximating what people know stoicism to be. I mean, the modern, if you look in a dictionary for the word stoic, be like, oh, you know, this person's being very stoic about it it means that kind of thing whether they're saying like you know i'm not going to allow this to to upset me or change my mood or change my happiness but hopefully this can clear up maybe what might be a misconception and a subtle one is that the stoics aren't kind of offering you like self-help in the sense of saying like yeah i know it sucks when you know this happens to you but here's a way to feel better like here's a way to sort of deal with the fact that this stuff's really bad and here's how to sort of get over it they're not just doing that because oh you know it just feels better if we can just like ignore that stuff or get over it they're saying literally it does not affect what's good and bad not that like oh you should treat it that way because it'll make you feel better but like it like literally like almost as a sort of metaphysical principle like if you're like allowing uh illness to make you have a less happy life it's not just that that's like bad advice it's that you're actually mistaken about the nature of the world.

1:26:19Alex O'Connor:And so, yeah, I think that the sort of modern popular understanding of stoicism that comes up in the sort of self-help context, nothing wrong with it. If you want to borrow some stoic ideas and use it to apply to running a business or motivating yourself to be healthy and get in the gym and stuff like that, then great. But you should probably be aware that that's not what stoicism is. And in fact, by applying these stoic ideas to those worldly things, you're kind of running counter to the foundation of what stoicism is about, like at its most fundamental level.

1:26:53John Sellars:Yeah. I mean, that's a really interesting issue and you can kind of feel it coming up quite a lot at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. If you think that you're going to take stoic ideas about kind of resilience and fortitude in order to make you more successful and earn more money, then you've missed the point. Yeah. Right. Because part of what they're saying is precisely that that money has no inherent value. Yeah. Right. It's so in that sense, yes, people could miss the point. And again, you're absolutely right. They're not saying these things simply because they think it might make you feel better. They're saying it because they think it reflects facts about the world.

1:27:33John Sellars:Yeah. So the person who might find themselves disabled or chronically ill, if they start saying this is terrible and my life has been ruined the stoke will come along and say well well no you're making a mistake you fail to understand where real value resides and it doesn't reside in physical health it resides in your mental state not only have you made a mistake you've not understood our value theory but also you are actively damaging yourself by creating emotional turmoil in your head which is which is damaging your rationality and damaging your character so you're destroying the most important thing there is the thing that does

1:28:18Alex O'Connor:where genuine goodness does reside yeah and this is why it's important to to understand the the physics and the logic and these kinds of views of the stoics and why i think it's good to start with them is because like you know if you just hear about these ethical ideas you know stuff that happens external to you you know shouldn't affect your mood or your character you might sort of go in isolation you might go like yeah that sounds that sounds pretty good yeah i reckon if i if i adopted that view that would like that would be good for me because you sort of presuppose that you've got this thing that you think is good in the world you know you want to be happy and content and you want to live a nice life.

1:28:55Alex O'Connor:And that seems like a useful thing to plug into my worldview. And again, that's fine, but the Stoics are being much stronger than that. And when you understand their metaphysical view, the ethics kind of falls out of that. They haven't just chosen it because it seems nicer to them. It's sort of a natural corollary of these beliefs about the nature of the world um having said that i mean you know the stoics believe that the universe abides by a sort of foundational rational principle they kind of they believe in god they believe that there is this um eternally recurring sort of universe which implies it's sort of the best of all possible worlds because it can't be improved upon and that's why it keeps occurring in the same way and yet you know zeno gets shipwrecked and yet people are struck down with disability and yet there's all kinds of suffering that we have to deal with in the world so the stoics whilst wanting to psychologically detach themselves from the sufferings of the world given their metaphysics about god and the rational principle have to account for that classical problem for religious people of the problem of evil that's also a problem for stoics right and i wonder if who can give us an indication of if and how they might have dealt with that?

1:30:12John Sellars:Yes. So, yeah, we do find Stoics touch on that problem in particular. And again, it's the thought that, well, nature is doing what nature does for nature's best interest. It's concerned with what benefits nature as a whole, not with what is good or bad for the individual parts, right? So there's a sense in which there is a reason for anything that happens, There's a reason for Zeno shipwreck, but it's got nothing to do with Zeno. It's to do with the order of whatever weather patterns were active at that moment. Here's perhaps another interesting thought to put on the table. Again, it shows us the interconnectedness of the Stoic system.

1:31:00John Sellars:In order to answer this question, which feels like a very ethical question, we're going to have to go back to the physics. So this animating principle within nature, God, reason, however you want to call it, the Stoics will identify this with providence, which makes it sound as if we're in the kind of best of all possible worlds territory that you were mentioning. they also identify it with fate um and again not fate in the sense of this is your destiny but fate simply in the sense of cause and effect so there's a there's a there's a logic and a reason to the way the world works and you could describe that in terms of the divine will of zeus but equally you could describe that in terms of look there's just a logical cause and system of cause and effect that this is just the way the world works it couldn't happen any other way right um you were bound to get struck down with this horrible disease because of your genetic predisposition and the environment you live in so it was destined to happen right that's just nature working itself out right yeah and there's nothing you can do about that spring is here and there's

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1:32:57Alex O'Connor:i think that so long as the stoic must believe in this like almost like perfect rationality of the universe that it can't be improved upon i think this is one of becomes one of the strongest critiques of stoicism in the same way that the problem of evil is like the biggest atheist argument that exists for most religious traditions. It's very difficult to account for what seemed to be trivial forms of suffering. I mean, you could say, well, that shipwreck had to happen because of the conditions of the wind. And then you want to say, but why were the conditions of the wind like that? Well, maybe because if that hadn't happened to Zeno, then he never would have founded stoicism.

1:33:34Alex O'Connor:Okay, but what about all the people who have a shipwreck and then die you know what about them and these questions are really difficult to answer and i just wanted to note they are they're present for stoicism but they tend to sort of answer them in similar ish ways to how someone who believes in the existence of the tri-omni god who created the universe they sort of answer in the same way as to as to how he would be compatible with with evil as well it's a sort of similar similar conversation that happens um in some texts yes

1:34:03John Sellars:that's certainly true. I suppose it depends how much we want to describe this very strange, weird Stoic God in kind of personless terms. If we think of this Stoic God as some kind of conscious agent, then we fall into that kind of territory where it looks very much like the sorts of debates we get in monotheistic religion. But if we think of this Stoic God as simply this rational principle that organizes matter, which is simply identified with cause and effect, that doesn't sound as if it's something that is making decisions in quite the same way. And here's the really infuriating, frustrating bit.

1:34:48John Sellars:In our sources, we will find the Stoic God described in both of those ways in different places. And it's incredibly difficult to kind of really pin down, okay, precisely what did they mean by this? Or are we bringing a kind of a modern set of categories and imposing them on this? I mean, again, just as an aside, we tend to think of sort of rational science and then religion and think of those two things as very distinct. This is a kind of enlightenment inheritance. When people talk about, say, Chinese philosophy, for instance, and they talk about, I don't you know, Taoism, and they say, okay, what's going on here?

1:35:26John Sellars:Is this a kind of natural philosophy? Is this religion? How do we, you know, do these categories that we're operating with really work? And some commentators will say, well, maybe these Western categories don't really fit with this Eastern way of thinking. There's a sense in which you could almost say the same about ancient Greek thinking. These post-enlightenment categories, is that the right way to think about what these ancient Greeks are thinking about. How can this be theological and materialistic at the same time? So there are those sorts of challenges as well. I mean, just to come back to the problem of evil, though, a couple of other thoughts would be, well, one, in these situations when we're talking about evil happening, strictly speaking, the Stoics can say, there is no evil happening.

1:36:10John Sellars:Right. Right? Nothing bad's happened, right? Someone cuts your leg off. Zeno's in his shipwreck. These are just dispreferred. They're not bad. Yeah. So there is no evil. So there is no problem with evil. Yeah. The only genuinely evil thing would be if your virtuous character was corrupted.

1:36:28Alex O'Connor:But, you know, easy for us to say, right? And in fact, I can't remember who it is. You quote them in your book. It's one of these early writers on Stoicism, I think, who's... Or maybe it's not. Who is it? You said who's the Roman that writes about Stoicism but isn't a Stoic? Cicero. Maybe it's Cicero where he's sort of saying... It's someone who says, when I've seen you expertly console other people because they've lost their children, and I think, wow, that's compelling, the things you're saying. But I'd believe you more if you were saying it about your own child. It's easy to say this kind of stuff, but the real way to prove the truth and efficacy of stoicism is to apply it to your own life.

1:37:11Alex O'Connor:And I sort of imagine if my leg got cut off and you were sat there going like, you know, Alex, justice preferred, nothing bad has happened. I'd be there like, I'm not sure I'm convinced by that, you know?

1:37:23John Sellars:So interestingly, it was Seneca who said that. So it was a committed stoic who said that, who's kind of saying, look, you know, I know the theory, but actually walking the walk, actually putting this into practice and really following through, this is hard. So he's kind of acknowledging how challenging some of these views are. I mean, but, you know, the cut off the leg example, I mean, you can think of people who, you know, you may even know people who have had, you know, debilitating accidents. You know, someone who's been in a terrible car accident and has lost the use of a leg. And it, you know, it really, you know, it really hits them hard and it really destroys them.

1:38:04John Sellars:and then you see other people often ex-soldiers who lose a leg who are off in the para olympics doing absolutely incredible things and no doubt it was a horrific traumatic experience to go through but it's not slowing them down it's not dampen their spirits and they're just getting on with things right so we can see a way in which different people might respond differently to the

1:38:27Alex O'Connor:to the same experience you know there's a sense in which both of those reactions are perfectly understandable. Of course, I can't imagine what such a thing would be like. However, when we look at those two reactions, we kind of want to say of the latter one, we want to say something like, that takes real strength. Or I suppose you'd be more envious of that person than you would be of the other person. You'd be envious of that. And you describe it as a form of strength. But if you think about what that means, to be strong means to carry a load that you need to sort of carry and there's this sort of implicit understanding that there is something kind of better and not better like morally not like we should judge them oh they've done a better job but just like that is a more preferable thing to be and like not in the sense of you know preferred indifference but like a genuinely just like better way to exist like if i gave you the option after you lose a leg you can take a pill and that pill is either going to make you super like depressed about it or you can take a different pill that will make you really motivated and get on with your life and still be happy, you take the second pill.

1:39:31Alex O'Connor:And I guess the Stoics are saying, not only is that available to you as an option, that is just the truth. And if you can only recognize that that's the truth, you'll be living a more flourishing life regardless of your number of limbs.

1:39:45John Sellars:Yeah, absolutely. That's a choice that we make, how we react to the things that happen to us. And that's where the power of the Stoic view comes along. But the point that Seneca's making, of course, is that neither of us know how we are going to react to that extreme situation until it happens to us. Only when it actually happens to us will our kind of strength of character truly be revealed. And that's a kind of really terrifying, sobering thought, but it's also the truth, right? It really is the truth. So yeah, there's a very real sense. you learn from experience. You're put through trials and tests, and along the way, you kind of learn what kind of character you really have.

1:40:31Alex O'Connor:And was it Seneca who then went on to say that you don't judge the architect by his ability to come and deliver a really interesting lecture about architecture? You don't judge the musician by his ability to stand and explain music theory to you. You judge the architect by him building a building. You judge the musician by the performance of a piece. And similarly, you can't judge the philosopher by their ability to speak wonderfully about the virtuous life, but rather to live the virtuous life and to demonstrate it when those things do happen to them. Was that also Seneca or was that someone else?

1:41:10John Sellars:It probably appears in Seneca somewhere. He writes a lot. Epictetus certainly talks about that. And another Roman Stoic who was around at this time, he was a contemporary of Seneca. He taught Epictetus, a chap called Musonius Rufus. He's kind of less well known, but well worth reading. And so I'd encourage people to kind of have a look at Musonius Rufus. and in one passage he says if you had a choice between being treated by a doctor who was very good at giving lectures on medical theory or someone who had kind of experience in the field of actually you know stitching people back up which would you pick to to treat you you know which one you'd pick you'd pick the one who was expert in practice yeah not the one who even if

1:41:57Alex O'Connor:they were like bad at the theory even if like because it's it's not just that it's like imagine a doctor who's really good at theoretical explanation but has a track record of really bad practice and patients dying versus someone who who sounds completely confused about medicine when they try to talk to you but has this perfect track record you obviously pick the track record and with philosophy perhaps it should be the same thing and what's annoying is that this is such a beautiful wonderful place to to wrap up and end but i feel like i have to ask just briefly which is so much like less satisfying a conclusion but you mentioned earlier about how you know these things are in our control.

1:42:31Alex O'Connor:We can choose how to react to the world. But just before that, you were talking about fate and you were talking about the fact that the Stoics believe in this material series of cause and effect and how the universe eternally recurs and occurs in the same way every time. There's always that shipwreck. If that's the case, how can I say that I can choose my outcome if everything's determined? Doesn't that remove the ability for human free will, which is kind of a requirement of the Stoic response to the world?

1:42:58John Sellars:Yeah, really good question. Really good, big, kind of meaty philosophical problem. So I suppose the way in which the Stoics would describe, it's very, very difficult, isn't it? So, strictly speaking, given their determinants, the Stoics can't believe in free will in the sense that we have the ability to choose otherwise, right? Nevertheless, they're going to argue that we still nevertheless make our own choices, right? So what we choose to do right now is a choice that we make based on the current circumstances we find ourselves in and who we are. And there's a sense in which the nexus of fate will work itself out and there will be one outcome from that.

1:43:57John Sellars:and there's a sense in which that is kind of predetermined, but of course we don't know. But the important point is that we are involved in the process. So one of our sources describes this as saying that fate doesn't kind of do things to us, fate works through us. We are kind of one of the parties involved. I mean, to give an example, I mean, let's say... I don't know. Let's say you encountered someone attacking an animal or something like that. Now, you might be the sort of person who will go over and intervene and say, what on earth are you doing? You might be someone who will shy away because you want to avoid the confrontation.

1:44:50John Sellars:There's a sense in which which of those things you do, what you finally do, is going to be determined by the sort of person that you are and the past experiences that you've had and the very specific details of that context, right? How big is the perpetrator? All of these things will kind of be involved in you making that decision. And there's a sense in which if we had all the relevant bits of information, we could kind of predict what you would do, right? If we know you're a fervent paid up member of the RSPCA, we can be highly confident you're going to intervene because we know who you are.

1:45:23John Sellars:Yeah. And to the point that we would say, well, there's no question that he would just walk away and turn a blind eye. That's just not who he is. He couldn't do that. Yeah. Right. So in that sense, we could say that, yeah, it's going to be determined in some sense. Yeah. It sounds like a kind of compatibilism, essentially. That's precisely the word that the kind of academics will use to describe their view. Yes.

1:45:48Alex O'Connor:Right. Interesting. Yeah. Cause that's certainly how it sounds. And I do, I'm not a huge fan of compatibilism, but I do find it interesting how on this free will question, like I give the example of, you know, a firefighter running into a burning building and everyone afterwards saying like, oh, you're such a hero. Like, why did you do that? Why'd you put yourself at risk? And they say something like, I had to, I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. I just, it's like, I didn't even think I just ran in there. And on one hand, when we're doing philosophy, we want to say there's this problem if if people don't act freely then how can they act morally like they seem to be in conflict and yet in a circumstance like that when someone says i didn't even think i just had to i just went in there in practice we see that as like more virtuous we're like more impressed by that i think wow what an incredibly moral person and i suppose this puts the virtue in virtue ethics right it's not you take each individual decision and figure out what's going to maximize utility and it's just like if you are just a virtuous person you just will behave in particular ways and how we behave will either be more in line with nature and the truth about the world or more out of line with nature and thereby just false so it's just like true or false behaviors stemming necessarily from your true or false understanding of the nature of the

1:47:01John Sellars:world yeah which brings us right back to character yeah and and that is important so yeah we're we're

1:47:07Alex O'Connor:very much in the realm of virtue ethics yeah that wasn't too bad actually is it as because i thought it was it was such a nice ending before but that that actually works quite well too so john sellers you've got lots of books and i'll link them all down in the description um i i do particularly like that sort of more academic introduction to stoicism because it's very short and manages to sort of pack everything you need in a history of the thinkers an overview of the logic physics the ethics as well as the sort of um the inheritance of of stoicism the forget the word you use the reception reception yeah reputation whatever uh which we didn't really touch on quite so much.

1:47:40Alex O'Connor:So I'll make sure that's down below, but thank you very much for your time.

1:48:09Alex O'Connor:No. www.sweetgreen.com. Available at participating locations only.

1:48:40Alex O'Connor:Online personal styling for everyone. Take your style quiz today at stitchfix.com.

1:48:45John Sellars:Pleasure. Thank you.