A misconception about stoicism is that it's about cultivating an attitude of detachment from things and people. It turns people into doormats. It's a quietest philosophy.
It's about not reacting. It's about not doing things and sort of isolate yourself from the rest of the world. But that's stoicism with the little S, which is not in fact what real stoicism with a capital S, stoism, the philosophy is about.
I am Masimo Piluchi. I am an evolutionary biologist and a philosopher of science. And my latest book is called Beyond Stoicism, co-authored with Greg Lopez and Meredith Kun.
Debunking misconceptions about stoicism. Perhaps predictably, there is a lot of discussion and even a little bit of confusion about what stoicism is and is not. If you read a random writing about stoism or you listen to a random podcast about stoism, you would you would hear things like, "Oh, don't don't go that way because that's not really stoism.
It's the other. " And in fact, to some extent, I've done this as well. I think I have arguments for it.
These arguments, I think, are based on a good understanding of the philosophy as well as on the original texts. Um, but I admit there are different opinions about the nature of stories. This is not surprising.
We see the same thing in other philosophies and religion. There are different opinions about what Christianity is. There are different opinions about what Buddhism is.
And in fact, arguably, there are different Christianities and different Buddhisms, meaning that there are different ways to interpret what the ancient texts say. And also different ways to update those texts and those philosophies to the 21st century. So the same goes for stoicism.
In fact, to some extent, this has happened from the beginning. One of the students of Zeno of Sajium who was the originator of stom was the guy who actually started the store. One of his students is on record disagreeing on some of the things that about some of the things that Zena was saying and starting his own thing.
He went on a on a in a different direction and he started his own school. So this has happened since the beginning. Disagreement is the nature of philosophy and possibly the nature of the human condition.
Nevertheless, one needs to be cautious about what we read and and how we think about things because we need to to make at least a honest concerted effort if we're interested in a particular philosophy or religion to get to the bottom of what the thing is actually about and not what necessarily uh some people claim it is about. Stoicism at the moment is in resurgence. Uh it's very popular for a number of years now.
uh you will easily find new books and new articles and new podcasts and new uh essays on stoism as a practical philosophy. And one might ask reasonably why stoicism all of a sudden? Well, on the one hand, stoicism really never went away.
Uh it is true that all of the elenistic philosophies uh gradually uh disappeared from view and between the 3rd and the 4th century essentially uh contemporaneously with the rise of Christianity and the two things are in fact more or less uh related. But it's also true that a lot of stoic ideas were in fact incorporated into Christianity and they were transmitted by the church the early church fathers into the middle ages. Eventually they reemerged as stoic ideas into the renaissance and later on into the enlightenment.
And so the fact that today we are talking about stoicism and people are practicing stoicism isn't really that surprising. On the other hand, it is certainly the case that the number of uh people who are interested in science has surged dramatically over the last 10 to 15 years. And so it makes sense to ask ourselves, well, why?
Possibly one of the answers is that we live in turbulent times which are essentially the same kinds of times that led to the initial flourishing of stoicism. Stoicism flourished during the elenistic period which was a major period of lasting two or three centuries of political change, social change. In fact, all of the so-called elenistic philosophies, not just stoicism, but also Epicuranism, two different forms of skepticism and a number of others uh were very popular and or or arose at that time precisely because people were looking for answers.
people were looking for ways to navigate a rapidly changing world uh that was difficult to make sense of and it was even more difficult to cope with. Today, arguably since I would say at least the 20th century and then certainly into the 21st century, we live in a similar world. Uh last century, we went through two world wars.
Uh then we developed enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet many times over. Then near the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st, we started be being more aware of yet another major challenge which we refer to as climate change. Not to mention of course more local at a national level or at a regional level, political change, social change.
Uh that keeps happening at at a very high pace. And a lot of people are distraught by this. They don't know how to process this.
They don't know what their place is going to be in a society that looks very different from not only the society of their parents and grandparents but even the society that they experienced as younger uh selves. So it's no surprise that stoicism in particular which is a philosophy after all of resilience and of coping with uh potential challenges and potential uh drawbacks is having a moment of resurgence. I think it's perfectly reasonable and in fact it's perfectly useful.
However, that does bring people to a misunderstanding. A lot of people seem to think that that's what stoism that's all that stoism is. That is that stoism is good only as a uh remedy to toward setbacks and challenges.
For instance, during the recent COVID pandemic, u I personally got a lot of calls from people tell asking me about stoicism and and say, you know, can I use stoicism to deal with the situation? And the answer was of course you can. But you also don't want to forget that we make decisions all the time in life throughout our lives whether it's good times or bad times, whether it's a challenge or an opportunity, it doesn't matter.
We still have to make the best decisions we can. And stoisism in a sense is a philosophy about decision- making about the best way to approach decision- making. So it's just as useful in good times so to speak as it is in bad times.
It's just that people tend to reach for it only when they are in distress and then they become sort of um a little bit um relaxed probably inappropriately relaxed I should say when it comes to the good times. We don't we don't think that if we are going through things that are positive let's say we come into we have a good moment on our career or we come into some money or something that those are problems but in fact they are problems because they also carry the necessity of decision-m. If you came into some money what are you going to do with that money?
How are you going to invest it? How are you going to how is that going to change your life in for for for the better? It may not the answer to those questions may not be that obvious and so good decision making is always useful no matter what the situation positive or negative.
Whenever a philosophy or in fact even a religion becomes popular uh inevitably there are people who are going to use it in a way that essentially is a misunderstanding of the original idea or a significant distortion of the original idea. This is happening not surprisingly also with stoicism. There's a number of people especially certain kinds of young men who are attracted to what they think of as stoicism because it validates their uh notion that a a good person a strong person particularly a strong man is somebody who is silent who controls their emotions and so on and so forth.
But that's stoicism with the little S. It's the stoic attitude, the stiff upper lip, the suppression of emotion, the spock approach to life, which is not in fact what real stoicism with a capital S. Stoism the philosophy is about.
Of course, like any misconception, there's a grain of truth. The stiff upper lip, for instance, comes from the fact that endurance is in fact a stoic value. the the Stoics would say, look, if something is going to happen to you that you cannot do anything about, then your only choice is really your only rational choice is to endure it.
What are you going to do? You're either going to endure it or you're going to endure it and then complain about it. Complaining doesn't really add anything.
It only makes you feel worse. So, just deal with it. Just endure it.
Uh, but that's not the same as a stiff upper lip because it's only a minor component of what Stoic philosophy is about. The notion, the misguided notion that stoicism is about suppressing the emot emotions also comes from a distortion of a real aspect of stoic philosophy. The Stoics make a big deal about the notion of talking to your emotions, modulating your emotions through reason.
Uh for instance, dealing with your anger in a way that it's not anger anymore, but but it becomes something healthy, something positive. uh for instance a a sense of justice that you want to pursue instead of a a destructive sense of of of anger that can also easily be misconstrued as suppressing emotion. There is no such thing as suppressing emotions.
We cannot suppress emotions because emotions are part and parcel of the way our brain works. It would the only way to suppress your emotions is to literally cut off a part of your brain and that will turn you into a psychopath or otherwise somebody who has uh serious uh mental issues. You don't want to do that.
However, there is a danger of what I sometimes refer to as the broification as in bro of stoicism. This this interpretation of stoicism that tends to be on the darker side of things. tends to emphasize masculinity.
It tends to emphasize this this uh view of um mythical view almost of the man who doesn't really react in any external way to things and just takes it and and and then is stronger because of that. One of the arguments that these people make for instance is that stoicism is a type of virtue ethics and that the word the word virtue comes from the Latin ver v I r which in fact means men. So there you go right even the ethmology tells you that it's about being a manly man and that sort of stuff.
But that argument misses an important crucial point which is the word ver itself virtue in Latin is actually a translation of the original. The original was Greek because stoicism ultimately is a Greek philosophy not a Roman one. And the original word in Greek is arete a r te which just means excellence.
It doesn't mean manly anything. It just means do the best that you can and it's genderneutral. It's not a masculine uh you know word at all.
So even at that level we see sort of a superficial understanding even at an ethmological level and certainly at a historical level we see a superficial misunderstanding which turns into what I think is a counterproductive and potentially even dangerous kind of attitude. Stoicism certainly does not condone a manly man approach to things. The ancient Stoics themselves actually were unusual among uh Greor Roman philosophers because they explicitly said in writing that women are rational human beings just like men and they're just as capable of understanding and practicing philosophy.
It's right there in you know black and white. Uh it's in the writings. It doesn't need any interpretation.
And both Epictitus and Senica explicitly say that in multiple points. So to pretend that somehow this is a manly thing and that women need to be treated differently is just not stoicism. Demonstrabably not the case.
Also, if we're talking about virtue, well, the Stoics try to practice multiple virtues. One of these is justice. Injustice is interpreted by the Stoics as treating other people, any other people, regardless of gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, or anything else, any other people with dignity, with respect in the way in which you yourself would want to be treated.
So, it's clearly nothing to do with a manly approach to things, whatever that means. Perhaps not surprisingly, many people approach stoicism in a way that oversimplifies the philosophy. They want immediate results.
Uh they don't care about the historical background. They don't care as much about the complexities and the nuance of the philosophy. They just want something that work.
And I I understand that sort of uh need. At the same time, however, there are there's a danger in oversimplifying things. You may misconrue things and you might act in a way that it's actually not at all in line with the philosophy itself.
There are for instance two ways to common ways to misconstrue stoicism. One is to do stoicism by quotations. So you you you find all over the internet snippets of of stoic quotes.
Sometimes they're misattributed. They're actually not from a stoic, but let's say from an Epicurion. One of the most amusing mistakes that you find on the internet for instance is that often people quote the stoic Epictitus but they accompany the quote with a picture of Epicurus who was most definitely not a stoic and Epictitus would have been seriously disturbed by being uh mistaken for EP for Epicurius.
But this issue of quoting things uh is problematic because these quotation marks the Stoics are eminently quotable. That is that is true. There's a lot of memorable phrases, sentences that that you find in the stoic texts, but when you abstract them completely from the background, they not only begin to make less sense, they actually might let lead people to think in a way that it's contrary to stoic philosophy.
In fact, apparently this was happening already 2,000 years ago because the Stoic Senica who lived in the first century warns one of his friends Lucilius and he says don't fall into the temptation of just quoting bits and pieces of our authors because that will lead you to misunderstanding the philosophy. You have to read the whole thing. You have to read what Zeno was writing or what Chrysipos was writing, not just the bits and pieces because otherwise you're not going to understand what's going on and you are therefore going to act in a way that it's not uh in alignment with the philosophy.
The other way to oversimplify stoicism is to approach it as a series of life hacks as opposed to a coherent philosophy of life. And perhaps one way to understand what I'm getting at here is to make an analogy with another very famous and useful philosophy of life which is Buddhism. Most people associate Buddhism with meditation.
And in fact, Buddhism does come with a series of meditation. There are different kinds of meditations that you can do for different purposes within Buddhist philosophy. However, it turns out that empirically speaking, a lot of Buddhist practitioners do not actually meditate.
And just because you meditate, that doesn't make you a Buddhist. What makes you Buddhist is for instance to accept the four noble truths or to try to follow the eight-fold path to enlightenment. That is the philosophy.
That is what makes you a Buddhist. Whether you meditate or not, it's a different thing. Meditation is supposed to be an aid, a technical aid for doing the the things that the philosophy uh says you should be doing.
But people can achieve the same result without actually meditating. Now that said, meditation is in fact a standalone meditation is in fact useful. I mean we have empirical evidence from modern medicine and modern psychology that meditation does certain things.
It allows you for instance to um deal better with chronic pain. It certainly reduces your anxiety and things like that under certain conditions. But those are not the goals of Buddhism the philosophy.
Buddhism the philosophy is not about anxiety or pain. It's about how to live your life. The same thing goes for stoicism.
Stoic techniques are in fact very useful even when they are abstracted from stoic philosophy. And proof of that is that cognitive behavioral therapy. The most uh popular evidence-based type of psychotherapy that we use in the 21st century did originate from an inspiration from stoicism and it does use still today a number of techniques that are in that are found in in stoic texts but cognitive behavioral therapy is not a philosophy of life.
You can be a very efficient uh practitioner of cognitive behavioral therapy. you can solve your day-to-day problems and still be a psychopath uh or behave very badly toward other people. That would not make you a stoic.
What makes you a stoic is if you try to be to live your life in a reasonbased pro-social fashion. If you try to remind yourself that everybody on earth, every human being on earth is your brother or sister, that is what makes you a stoic. Whether you actually do your evening meditation in the way in which Marcus Aurelius did or not, that's a practical aspect of it.
It's a useful aspect of it, but that isn't what makes you a stoic. One common assumption is that stoicism is the antithesis of pleasure. In fact, often if we're talking about Greor Roman philosophies, stoicism is opposed to epicism.
an Epicure. Most people think of Epicurionism as sex, drugs, and rock and roll of ancient philosophy. Even though that description definitely would have been surprising to any ancient Epicurion, it is true that Epicionism is a hedonistic philosophy.
That is, it's a philosophy that puts pleasure and specifically in fact uh reduction of pain at the center of their philosophizing at the center of their life. And it's true that stoicism is not a hedonistic philosophy. It's a virtue ethics philosophy.
It's based on character. The notion is to improve your character to become a better human being. However, the ancient stoic Senica himself says, "I'm not stupid.
I prefer pleasure to pain. I prefer to be healthy to sick. I prefer even to be wealthy to poor if possible.
" It's just that those are not my priorities. That is my life doesn't depend the worthiness of my life does not depend on being rich. It does not depend on being healthy even and it certainly doesn't depend on feeling pleasure.
If I do have all of those things, sure, I'll welcome them, but those are not crucial. The most important part of life for a stoic is to be a decent human being, a human being that acts reasonably and pro-socially. So, for instance, when I see articles that say such and such billionaire uh got his success by being a stoic, I internally laugh or cringe depending on on the situation because that's not what stoicism is about.
It's not about becoming rich or famous. Wealth, uh reputation, uh you know, even health are what the Stoics call preferred indifference. An indifferent isn't in the stoic parliament something that you don't care about as in the modern English word.
It's something that literally does not make a difference. Does not make a difference to what? To your character, to who you are as a person.
Again, the Stoics are very explicit about it. Epictitus at some point tells uh some of his students, he says he is a nonsequittor. And nonsetor is a uh something that doesn't follow in logic, right?
Here is a nonsequittor. I am rich, therefore I'm a better I'm a richer than you are, therefore I'm a better person than you are. He says that doesn't follow the what follows from the fact that you're richer than I am is that you have more money.
You have more wealth. That's the definition of being richer. It does not follow that you're a better person because being rich or being poor doesn't make you a good person or a bad person.
The two things are completely independent. Yet another misconception about stoicism is that it's about cultivating an attitude of detachment from things and people kind of like Buddhism. Often stoisism is presented as a the western alternative to Buddhism.
But there too things are not quite that that simple for the Stoics. There's nothing wrong with caring about things and caring about people. We're human beings.
That's what we do. It's just that those things do not define who you are, which for a stoic is the most important thing. In other words, they don't actually define your character, your your your the way in which you behave.
The inctoidus puts it very nicely in an analogy that he uses with his students. He says you should try to go through life as if you were visiting an inn or a hotel. While you are in the inn, that's your room.
Uh nobody's going to come in just all of a sudden burgeoning in. It's your room. Um the lamp on the table is your ta is your lamp.
That's your table. That's your bed and so on and so forth. So those things are in a sense yours.
But you don't want to get attached to them, too attached to them because you know that you are only passing through. At some point you will be checking out and moving on to something else. And what when you do that, you want to leave all of those things, the table, the the the bed, the lamp in as good a shape as you found them, if not even better, because somebody else is going to use them next.
The same goes with things and people in life. It's not that they're not yours in that limited sense. Absolutely.
Enjoy your friends, your loved ones, enjoy the material possessions that you have. But the notion of not developing too much of attachment is in that particular sense treat everybody and everything as if you were passing through because you are passing through. Uh absolutely take advantage of what's there but then be ready to let go because at some point you will have to let go and your only two choices are you're going to let go graciously or ungraciously.
Those are your only choices. Eventually things are going to go because you are going to go. One of my favorite metaphors by Epictitus that is related to this concept is the notion of figs in winter.
At some point uh one of his uh students is complaining because a friend of that student has just left. We went overseas and so he's not going to see him possibly for for years maybe maybe ever and he's very sad and all that. And Eida says, "Well, what you're doing now is pining for figs in winter.
You want, in other words, something that is not possible because it's not the right season. " And Aida says, "Not only you should accept that right now it's winter and therefore you're not going to have your fig, but this should be a lesson to you to cultivate the notion that you should be enjoying the figs during the proper season during the summer. " And that's a great lesson because very often we don't pay attention.
We take people and things for granted until they're gone and then we I mean this has happened to me as well you know when my one of the things that triggered my uh midlife crisis that eventually brought me to stoicism was the death of my father and even though I knew that my father was suffering from cancer in fact he was suffering he had been suffering from multiple cancers over a period of years and as a biologist I understand what cancer is. So I had a a knowledge of what was happening and yet it I still went on my my life as if my father was going to be there forever. Uh and then something happened.
He died and I was not there. I was not present. So I regret that.
But I learned this the lesson and so it I've lost other people since and I internalized the figs in winter lesson and I'm making I've been making and I'm still making a concerted effort with relatives and friends to actually be there and to savor that experience to savor those fruits of life so to speak because I know that the summer is going to go eventually it's going to turn into winter and that way I will be happy. I will not be complaining about opportunities missed because I will not have missed them. One baffling misconception for me about stoicism is that it turns people into doormats.
It's a it's a quietest philosophy. It's about not reacting. It's about not doing things.
Just trying to retreat in into yourself and sort of isolate yourself from the rest of the world. I am not sure exactly where that particular misconception uh comes from. If not again as a byproduct of the notion that that stoicism values endurance but it's clearly contradicted by both the letter of the philosophy by what you read from the stoics themselves and more importantly perhaps by the actions that we know those philosophers actually took in their life.
In the discourses, Epictitus gives us se several examples of stoics who as we will put it today uh spoke truth to power. In fact, there was a whole group of stoic philosophers and Roman senators during the reigns of the emperors Nero, Vespasian and Domian who were known as the stoic opposition. These were people who were actually going to object to the dictates of Nero, Domian, and Vispasian because they saw them as tyrants and liberty, freedom, independence, those are actual stoic values and a stoic could not abide by a tyrant.
So these people risk their lives. In fact, some of them lost their lives as a result of a direct opposition to uh tyranny. There are other examples as well.
Uh Senakica talks a lot about a guy named Kato the Younger who was a contemporary of Julius Caesar. Ko opposed Caesar on the floor of the Senate. They were both senators at one point in their political career.
And uh Kato saw Caesar as increasingly developing sort of tyrannical aspects to his way of doing things. And so he opposed him on the Senate floor for many years. Then at some point famously Judas Caesar uh picked up arms and and moved to war against the Roman Republic.
He crossed the Rubicon River famously saying you know the dye is cast. In other words, I I I am now cognizant of the fact that this is uh uh irreversible action. Well, what did Kato do?
He thought, okay, the time of debate is over. I need to pick up arms as well. And so, he organized an army and he led an army against Julius Caesar.
So, both Julius Caesar and Ko the Younger pick up arms. There is a civil war. It's a horrible thing and there's nothing civil about it.
Lots of people die on both sides. Eventually, Julius Caesar prevails because he was a excellent general. Uh, and he defeats the Republican army.
So, now Caesar is after Ko. He wants to capture Ko alive because he wants to use him as a political uh piece. He wants to essentially show his imaginity by saying, "Here is my enemy.
He actually picked up arms against me, but I'm okay with that. I'm going to forgive him. " But Kato was a man of principle and he was not about to let Caesar take advantage of the situation that way.
So Ko decides that the only way to avoid that is to uh take his own life to commit suicide. The Stoics have a whole literature about suicide. They take the issue very very seriously.
Uh they say that it's it ought to be the last resort only under extreme circumstances. But Ko finds himself in a last resort under extreme circumstances. So he very calmly prepares himself.
He sends away u his friends and his loved ones. Picks up a book. Um we know actually which book he read.
He he read one of Plato's dialogues about the nature of the soul. Uh he has his dagger nearby. He picks up the dagger and he stabs himself as the Roman did in his stomach.
However, he had been uh injured in battle and so his his hand in particularly in his hand and his hand was not strong enough. So he falls down, makes noise therefore and so everybody rushes in from the other room and a doctor sees what's happening. He realizes that no vital organ has been punctured.
uh even though there is a mess around the blood all over and uh so the doctor tries to stitch the the the wound to put back things and then and then try to save Ko's life. Ko in the meantime comes back he had he had lost consciousness. He sees what the doctor is trying to do, pushes the doctor away, reaches with his hand inside his own guts, tears them away, and throws them on the floor, thus dying.
It takes a lot of courage and determination to do that sort of thing. I mean, I think that even the first part, the taking your dagger in your hand and and stubbing yourself, that takes courage and determination. But going as far in the second bit as Ko did means that this was a man who had a high sense of honor, a high sense of his own virtue and a high sense of what the meaning of his existence.
Caesar realized what had happened and he was um really upset about it. He he he admitted that Kato had bested him at this and in fact Kato became a hero of the Republican cause for many many years afterwards. So here we have an example of a stoic who actually was fighting and eventually died uh as a result of understanding what the right thing to do was and wanted to do the right thing.
not uh endorsing injustice, not retreating into a passive, you know, inactive situation. So, that should be inspiration to modern stories, not necessarily in the sense that we're going to have to pick up weapons hopefully against anybody, but certainly it is about speaking out. Certainly, it is about defending one's own liberty and other people's liberty.
It's about personal autonomy and the autonomy of other people. And whenever you see as a stoic, as a stoic practitioner, you see those things threatened, you really ought to speak out, it's your duty as a stoic practitioner to do so. Uh, and then face the consequences which may not be pleasant.
Of course, one of the features of Stoicism that I find most attractive is that built into the system, there is an openness to new ideas and to adjust the philosophy internally so that it adapts to whatever it is that we make discover moving forward. In fact, one of the ancient stoics, Senica, writes at one point that look, the people that came before us are not our masters. They're just our teachers.
They knew a lot of things and some of those things were very useful and that's why we adopt them. But that doesn't mean that they discovered everything. That doesn't mean that there are no new things to be discovered.
And if we do find new ways and better ways of doing things, Senica says the only rational thing to do is to adjust our philosophy accordingly and move in a different direction. Stoicism of course is a philosophy that is over 2,000 years old. It started out in the 4th century BC in Athens.
You might expect that some things that we've learned in the meantime might be problematic in that respect. That is the Stoics didn't know everything uh that science and even philosophy have achieved over the intervening almost two and a half millennia. That means that if you're a practitioner of stoicism today in the 21st century, you cannot simply take everything that the ancient Stoics said and go with it.
Pretty much in the same way in which nobody today is a practitioner of say Buddhism or Christianity in exactly the same way in which people were practicing Buddhism or Christianity two millennia or two and a half millennia ago. For instance, the historic concept of providence is both interesting and beautiful on the one hand and yet I think deeply flawed and needs to be rejected on the other. And this is going to have practical consequences.
Let me back up for a second and explain what this is about. The ancient Stoics were pantists. That is they believed that God is the same thing as the universe.
It's coincident with the universe. And therefore they thought of the universe itself as a living organism endowed with reason. Right?
The universe is God. Nature is God. God is thinking.
And therefore everything that happens in the universe is the result of the thinking and doing of God the cosmos or God the universe. Now I find this a very beautiful idea. If only I could believe it.
Um, as a modern biologist and as somebody who does a little bit knows a little bit about physics, I don't think of the cosmos as a living organism. I cannot imagine that sort of connection. Now, you might say, well, so what?
This is just a metaphysical dispute, right? The stoic, the ancient stoics thought um about God and the universe that way. You don't think of it that way.
What difference does that make in practice? Turns out it does make a big practical difference. There are a few passages in the discourses of Epictitus as well as in in his manual where he says something really surprising, really interesting and at the same time disturbing.
He says, "Remember, when you go to sleep, kiss good night to your wife and your child because they're mortal and they might not be alive tomorrow morning. That way, you will not be disturbed. " Now, when I the first time I read that passage, I thought, "What kind of a psychopath is this guy?
" Uh, he's telling me that I should realize that my loved ones are mortals. I'm okay with that. Yes, we are.
We're all mortal and therefore that means that at some someday I or them will die. But to say that I should remind myself of this so that I'm not going to be disturbed. Are you kidding me?
Of course I'm going to be disturbed if my daughter or my wife uh were to die. But then I understood where he was coming from. In fact, Epitus himself clearly makes an analogy, an interesting analogy that shows where he's coming from.
And he says look you are like a foot that is part of an organism. Let's say that the organism that the body has to get home and in order to get home it has to cross a muddy path. It is up to you as the foot to step into the mud.
Now if you think of that only from the point of view of a foot without remembering that you're connected to a body that's disgusting. Why would I want to step into the mud? This is not a not a pleasant thing.
But if you remember that you are connected to a body and then in fact your entire purpose in life is to bring that body whatever it needs to go including stepping into the mud then not only you're going to do it but you're going to do it gladly. You're going to embrace not just accept your fate so to speak but embrace your fate. So what is saying there is not as being psychopathic as far as we can tell.
He's just being realistic in the way he understood the world. He said, "Look, we're all literally bits and pieces of the God universe. " And whatever happens to us, including the unpleasant bits, is actually for the good of the God universe.
So if you understand things that way, not only you're going to accept what happens to you, you're actually going to embrace it. Now, it makes sense when he says, you know, if your loved ones die, uh, you should not be upset. You should not be disturbed because you realize that whatever is happening, even though you may only get a small portion of that picture, but whatever is happening is part of this universal cosmic plan and you should feel good about it, not not distrupt.
It's a beautiful way of looking at life. Unfortunately, I don't think it's the right way to look at life. I wish I could bring myself to being a pantist in the way in which the ancient stoics were.
That would definitely provide me with a lot of comfort u whenever something bad happens to me or to my loved ones. But I don't believe in the cosmic god and therefore I think that whatever happens to us is the result of neutral forces. The universe doesn't care one way or the other.
That means that I cannot avail myself of the stoic concept of providence. So what do I replace it with? Well, acceptance is still part of it, right?
I have to accept the reality of things. I am a biologist. I understand that people die.
In fact, I understand that death is a natural part of the process of being alive or the process of life on Earth. If other people had not died, I would not be here because I would not have been born. And so my death, the death of other people, it's natural.
And as such, it's reasonable to accept it as much as one can at a rational level. But at an emotional level, I am still not going to be happy about it. And I think that's okay not to be happy about it.
So that's one example of something that the ancient stoics thought at a metaphysical level and had consequences in terms of their day-to-day life, their ethics and modern stoics have to modify I think because in the meantime both philosophy and science have progressed to a point that uh makes the original idea untenable. In fact, if you're still not convinced, let me give you one bit uh one more bit of evidence that um uh that things work pretty much in the way I just described it. If one asks, well, what was Epictitus' argument for thinking that the universe is a living God?
He does actually provide us with with an argument. And in fact, several of the Stoics do uh Senica does as well and some of the other earlier Stoics, people like Zeno, who was the founder of the Stoic approach in the in the first place, does the same thing. They all use an argument from design.
They say just like the sword perfectly fits the scabbard and that tells you that somebody designed both of those objects to actually fit together in a functional way, in a way that works. If you look around, you'll see that the universe is built in the same way. And frankly, if I had lived 2,000 years ago, I would probably buy into that argument.
It's a really cogent argument. You you you look around the complexity of the world and you say, "Yeah, that makes sense. " But I don't live 2000 years ago.
I live in the 21st century. which means that I live after two major objections were raised to that way of of looking at things to the design argument specifically. The philosopher David Hume in the 18th century criticized the design argument on philosophical logical basis and showed that it's not really coherent.
And then about a century later, Charles Darwin, a biologist, actually proposed an alternative mechanism. We called it evolution by natural selection for why things seem to be designed in a certain ways. Given that knowledge, I have to reject the argument from design as pretty much every biologist does.
And if I reject that, then I also reject the stoic view of pantism. And if I reject that, I have to revise my notions of ethics and providence. So this is a good example, I think, of how all of these things work together.
scientific advancements will question our philosophical views and it's a good thing if the philosophical views are able to adapt to what comes out of the new science. Of course, science in another century or five centuries or 10 centuries may tell us something different and if there are stoics uh 10 centuries down the road they will themselves face the same problem and have to adapt somehow. I find that very refreshing because unlike other philosophical or religious uh systems who tend to which tend to be much more rigid uh resistant to change, this notion that change is inherent in the way in which we do stoic philosophy is very useful, very reasonable and very refreshing.
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