#316： An Introduction to Stoicism
Episode Stats
Summary
Stoicism has experienced a renaissance in recent years, yet despite the increasing popularity of this ancient philosophy, misconceptions still abound about it. For example, many people assume that to be a Stoic means to not feel or express any emotion, including happiness, and that stoicism requires one to live a bland and spartan lifestyle. My guest on the show today debunks these myths and shows that Stoicism can actually enrich our lives and allow us to experience real happiness.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast well interest
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in stoicism has experienced a renaissance in recent years yet despite the increasing
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popularity of this ancient philosophy misconceptions still abound about it for example many people
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assume that to be stoic means to not feel or express any emotion including happiness and that
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stoicism requires one to live a bland and spartan lifestyle my guest on the show today debunks these
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myths and shows that stoicism can actually enrich our lives and allow us to experience real happiness
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his name is bill irvine and he's a professor of philosophy and the author of a guide to the good
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life the ancient art of stoic joy and in our discussion bill shares the origins of stoicism
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and how the romans modified greek stoicism to fit their culture we then get into the specific stoic
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practices you can implement today to start improving your life for example bill shares
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the power of negative visualization how to approach things you have some but not complete control over
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and how to purposely inject discomfort in your life to increase your grit bill then explains the stoic
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duty of socializing and how to maintain your stoic serenity even with the most difficult of people
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we then discuss what the stoics would have thought about political correctness and microaggressions and
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some of the critiques against stoicism if you've been wanting to understand stoicism more but haven't
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known how to get started this podcast is a great introduction and it is packed with not just
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background information but actionable advice make sure to check out the show notes at aom.is
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slash stoic where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic
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all right bill irvin welcome to the show it's a pleasure to be here thank you for asking me to be
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a guest so i'm a big fan of your work you've written a book about insults and how to handle them which i
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i enjoyed quite a bit and it segues nicely with this book that we're going to talk about today it's
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the stoic art of joy and what i love about the book it's such a it's such a great introductory
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book to the topic of stoicism you get into the history of it and also just details about stoic
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specific stoic practices but let's talk about your history with stoicism before we get into stoicism
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you're a philosopher you teach philosophy but you came to stoicism later in life before you
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discovered stoicism what sort of philosophy did you focus on in your career well i got into philosophy
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because i in high school late high school i developed an interest in henry david thoreau
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and he was referred to as a philosopher so i thought that by taking philosophy courses in college
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i could go deeper into what he was doing and what other like-minded people have been doing
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only to discover that modern philosophy at least in the united states has pretty much lost its interest
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in coming up with stuff that's applicable to life as we live it the exception to that would be the
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branch known as ethics which is trying to tell you what's morally obligatory and what's morally forbidden
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but most of the choices and some of the most significant choices we make in daily living
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aren't ethical choices but there there's uh just questions about what should i be trying to accomplish
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right now and what's the best means for me to accomplish it and what do i need to do in order
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to have what on balance will be a good life and i found the classes i was taking were oblivious to such
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questions i stuck on with it though and and knew that if i wanted to get a job teaching philosophy i had to
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had to master that portion of the philosophical discussion so i did but then it was much later
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that it dawned on me that that i was becoming an old man and still hadn't found a philosophy by by
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which to live and wasn't that a a sad state of affairs and then i kind of did the next step so i i had
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fiddled with buddhism for a while i decided i was going to write a book in which i explored buddhism
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and so as an aging uh human being i decided i needed to adopt a philosophy for living and the one that
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attracted me initially was buddhism i decided that what i would do is do research for a book on buddhism
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and i had two goals and doing that number one is it would count as a publication which would be good
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for my career and number two i thought that by doing the research into buddhism i could convert
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myself into a functioning practicing buddhist so i would get a double return on this investment of
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research time but a funny thing happened uh along the way and that is that in order to be complete in
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my research i had to have a section on the philosophical views in the ancient world at least
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to philosophy for living and started looking into stoicism very quickly realized i had a
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misconception about who the stoics were and what they were after and before i knew it i was practicing
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stoicism in a low-grade experimental kind of way and i was surprised by the impact it was having on my
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life so by the time the book was done i no longer had an interest in being a buddhist i decided i was
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going to be a practicing stoic so what were those misconceptions you had about stoicism that made you
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to you know write it off for so long well it was the standard misconception that stoics the capital s
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stoics uppercase s stoics were also lowercase s stoical and that is that their goal was to suppress
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all emotions and simply bottle themselves up so they became oblivious to the kinds of disasters that
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that the world would present and what i discovered is that they weren't anti-emotion they can better be
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described as anti-negative emotion so they drew the conclusion from their observation of humanity that
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we human beings experience all sorts of negative emotions and it's it's our own fault that we do so
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negative emotions like like anger like grief like envy and you can fill out that that list
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considerably those are things that disrupt our days and disrupt our lives and yet it dawned on
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the stoics that to a considerable extent if we're experiencing those emotions it's self-inflicted
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it's because of certain values we've adopted it's because of certain strategies for living that we've
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chosen to use and so we have it in our power to change our goal in living and to change the strategies
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we use and we can thereby make those negative emotions they never disappear from your life but you can
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diminish their impact on you at the same time the stoics had no no problem at all with uh
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experiencing positive emotions for instance one of my favorite positive emotions is the feeling of
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delight and as a stoic you're delighted by any number of things that normal people will take utterly for
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granted and then you have perhaps the ultimate positive emotion and that is a feeling of joy this
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disembodied feeling of of just gratitude that you get to be part of this universe populated by these
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people so it's a wonderful thing to have wonderful thing to experience and the stoics said there's
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nothing wrong with that so for me that worked wonderfully well now before i go any further if there are
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practicing buddhists in your audience there they shouldn't take this as a put down of buddhism i'd be
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the first to say that what works for some people might not work for other people and given my own uh
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intellectual frame of mind stoicism just works a lot better for me than buddhism does so let's talk
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about the history of stoicism it's often associated with the romans seneca and cato and marcus aurelius but
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it got its start in greece what what is stoicism's pedigree did it have any connection to the other
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schools of philosophy that were in ancient greece like the academy or you know plato's school yes
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back then a school of philosophy would literally be a school you know now we say school of philosophy
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it's it's just kind of a system of thinking or something like that but it would be literally
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a school if you wanted to make your living doing philosophy you started a school now if you had
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a school that taught purely theoretical things probably who wouldn't get very many students
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because the people of that time this would be 400 bc you know in greece and other things on their mind
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you know they had things that they needed to worry about but if you had a school that promised them
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or that offered them advice on how to have a good life and maybe brought in other kinds of theoretical
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material at the same time then you could get students and so what they had at that time
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was multiple a competing schools you know and the analogy i use in the book is it's like schools of
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martial arts today you know if you tell me that you want to want to develop your ability to do street
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fighting you know then i'd say well take a look at go online and you'll find there's any number of rival
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schools and some will tell you how to fight with your hands and some will say no you need to bring
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in your feet as well and and then the question is which of those is going to work best for you
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same when true was true in the ancient world with respect to schools of philosophy you would have had
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many different schools to choose from the schools would have offered different advice on what your
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goal should be in living and the schools also would have given you different strategies for
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attaining whatever they took to be the thing of value so you had some schools that said party hard
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you had other schools that said and this would be the stoics if you want to have a good life what
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you need to do is first realize that the thing of greatest value in life is tranquility and then
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secondly they said and if what you seek is tranquility here's the way to attain it so it's an
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interestingly different approach to philosophy than what you find in modern colleges for instance
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another thing to realize is that with respect to ancient stoicism it started out with the greeks
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and the problem is most of their writings have been lost so we have only but by report we know of most
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the things they had to say and then the second thing is when the romans acquired stoicism when
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they decided they were going to start their own stoic schools they put a different spin on it
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and the whole notion about tranquility as the goal is really more closely associated with the romans
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than with the greeks right so i mean i think in the a lot of people don't realize i think when people
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hear stoicism they think about the ethics part right these sort of stoic practices to maintain
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tranquility i think that's because of the greeks but a lot of people don't realize that the stoics
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also thought about sort of the theoretical they had schools of logic and ideas about physics how
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did though their idea of physics and logic influence their ethics i guess is the question i'm trying to
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get at um the physics it's harder to see why that would would tie in and you know if you were a
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a parent choosing a school of philosophy for your for your kid you want your kid to come out a
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well-rounded person and so you want him to acquire ability at reasoning for instance you want him to
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acquire at some level of knowledge of the world you want to him to acquire if he was going to be a lawyer
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or a politician the ability to put together a cogent argument which required logical skills and also
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the ability to spot the mistakes in the arguments of others and claim if you really cared about your
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kid one of the principal takeaways from uh education would be an understanding of what what in life was
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most important and how to get the thing that was most important and of course uh colleges you know in the
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world today will teach a career but they have very very little interest in in saying to you well and
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here's what's worth having and here's the strategy for getting the thing worth having so if you go to
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college now to become a lawyer you're you're going to get a lot of uh advice on how to be a lawyer but
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you know unless you win out of your way the advice on how to live is is very much in the background
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why do you think we're so tepid to teach students about you know acquiring a philosophy of life
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that's like i mean you make the case in the book that's probably the most important thing you can
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have because it will guide all other decisions you make in life i think it's because we aren't
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confident that we possess such a a philosophy and and as you've heard me already suggest uh i i don't
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claim to have the answer but i have an answer that works really well for a lot of people and an answer
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that works better by far than what the default answer would be i mean so most people what do they
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do if you ask them what is it you want in life they will now maybe not in the direct way i'm going to
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state it but they will suggest that what they're pursuing in life is wealth and fame that if you're really
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famous and you have a ton of money that means you've had a good life and there are any number
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of counter examples to that claim but that seems to be what people are working on that's the kind of
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the default so first thing you can do with a philosophy of life is to try to talk people out of that default
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setting that they're on and then increase their chances of coming up with a better answer so one
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thing modern colleges could do is expose students to a wide range of philosophies of life and then
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let the students choose and they if nothing else by doing that what they could accomplish is to show
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people that it's possible to live in a thoughtful manner in pursuit of some ultimate goal rather than
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just following the crowd and assuming that every other person around you has done their homework on this
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issue because most of them haven't they they've simply gotten into default mode where what they're
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interested in is fame and fortune so let's dig into some of these specific stoic practices you highlight
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in the book the first one is negative visualization so this is basically thinking about you know the worst
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possible outcome how can thinking about what could everything that could go wrong how how can that actually
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lead to more happiness okay well if the advice were to dwell on negative outcomes then it would be
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terrible advice because you're going to be become a quickly a horribly depressed individual and you're
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just going to go around moping about how sad everything is but that isn't their advice their advice is
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that you should allow yourself to have flickering thoughts so a flickering thought is the key phrase
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about how things could be worse and it is amazing number one whatever life you are living things
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could be worse things could be very dramatically worse than they are i mean if you're telling me
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about how bad your life is hey guess what you've got the ability to speak there are people who don't
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you know there are these interesting cases of people who not only lose the ability to speak but lose the
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ability to communicate in any way you know they have what's called locked in syndrome and they might
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be able to blink one eye well if you can tell me how miserable you are you're not in that situation
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and so guess what things could be worse and people have that thought and then they realize you know
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it's true things could be worse so yeah you don't dwell on that because that'll just turn you into
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a neurotic worry wart what do you do like i mean if i mean i think this would work well for folks who
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okay they're living a comfortable life and you're like okay i i my car is totaled it could be worse
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i still i could take care of this like what if like i mean you're destitute uh does this is this
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still effective i mean i mean you're like hey uh at least you're still alive it's like i'm alive but
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things are terrible do you think that the negative visualization works even if like your life is actually really
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really it's like rock bottom you know we have the stories of ancient hardships so there was
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musonius rufus who was exiled to the greek island of hieros and it was a desolate rock now there were
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some fishermen who lived there but otherwise it was nothing so from the the roman's point of view
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well we aren't going to kill him we're going to let him live but we're going to put him on this rock
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and then the interesting thing was that he was able to find things to be thankful about even under
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those circumstances you know what if if you have that ability in you you are pretty much bulletproof
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to an incredible extent so life can can really abuse you in a number of ways which is unfortunate but
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the key thing is you don't become a broken human being as the result of it now seneca the roman stoic
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was at the other end of the spectrum and he got in trouble with emperor nero and was eventually
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sentenced not just to death but to death by suicide and the accounts are that despite that particular
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fate he remained uh an upbeat complete human being until the last uh moment which is startling to
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think about okay so another stoic practice you talk about in the book is the stoic trichotomy of
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control this is actually you modified an original stoic idea what was the original stoic idea and how did
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you modify it um the original idea might be called the dichotomy of control so it's a dichotomy it's
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either one or the other so when it comes to the issues in your life the stoic said there are those
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that you can control and those that you can't control and you're foolish to spend your time
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thinking and worrying about things you can't control because after all you have no control over them and
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i kind of tampered with that a little bit i think i clarified it because if you think about it carefully
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there's actually three different possibilities there's things you have absolute control over
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and that might in in include your your beliefs it might include your desires although maybe that's
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arguable there are things you have absolutely no control over such as whether the sun's going to rise
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tomorrow you obviously shouldn't concern yourself with those things but and the stoics didn't make this
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clear it seems like there's this middle class of things where you have some but not absolute
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control for instance how people treat you and how they relate to you if you treat everybody terribly
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they're going to be mean to you probably and if you're nice to everybody there's a good chance but
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it's not a sure thing that they're going to be nice back to you so but again the stoic advice would be
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you should really concern yourself with things you have complete control over one of them would be
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your character you should work very hard to develop your character since you have complete control
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over that you should care very much about it you should not allow yourself to think for even a
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microsecond about things you have no control over because you don't have control over them and then
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there's an intermediate amount of thought to those things that you're going to have some but not
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complete control over you know and then there's all sorts of qualifications that come in although
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you you may have zero control over whether an event happens or doesn't happen you might have
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considerable control over how the event affects you so you can take preventative measures you can take
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measures to make things not as bad as the other wise might be and the stoics were absolutely fine
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with that but if you look at the people around you and maybe even think about yourself and you realize
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there's a whole bunch of just time wasted thinking worrying dreading things that you don't have any
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control over and you know life is precious and to spend it on that is a pity and then also not to spend
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the time the investment of time on things you do have control over like your personality that's also
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tragic because that can have a huge influence on your life and you do have complete control
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and so if you're ignoring it shame on you so where do emotions play in this trichotomy because i think
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there's a perception out there that stoics believe like you have complete control over your emotions did
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they think that or was it something different now uh stoics realize that emotions are a real
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issue for human beings and so when it came to emotions first thing they did is they
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distinguished between negative emotions and positive emotions so negative emotions include anger they
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include envy envy is a really terrible negative emotion underrated in the damage that it does positive
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negative emotions are feelings of joy are feelings of delight and the stoics had nothing against the
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positive emotions in fact they thought we should live our life in a way that would increase the number
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of positive emotions we experienced but they also thought we should go out of our way to reduce the
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number of negative emotions we experience they also realized that it was impossible for us ever to get
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the number down to zero but we could reduce the number dramatically for for instance in their
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discussion of of grief they said that if someone you know and love dies suddenly that that grief is is the
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natural emotion and so you you will feel it and and in some sense you should feel it but you should you
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should keep it within its proper confines and he describes people who you know the a decade after the death of a
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spouse we're still mourning the death of a spouse well that's just that's just too much so they
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acknowledge the existence of emotions they welcome some emotions and they thought we needed to to work
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on techniques for limiting the damage that the negative emotions could do to us and they have
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some ideas on how how we could do that yeah i guess one of them was i guess sineka was like you know
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imagine your son's already dead was one of them you should not imagine that he's dead but you
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should have a flickering thought that the realization and acknowledgement of the fact that he he will
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die and first when people hear that actually that was epictetus who kind of most famously said that but
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when people first hear that they think well what a terrible terrible thing to to think but the stoics
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would say just the opposite i will just allow myself to have the flickering thought that this might be the
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last time i see that friend it really is remarkable because then the next time i see them it's it's
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this delightful event you know because it didn't have to be that way so it's curious you know they were
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they were some of the preeminent psychologists of their time and they have these insights that to our
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modern ears sound just crazy but if you you know like the idea that by thinking about people dying
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we can actually improve our relationships with them but i encourage your listeners to to give it a try
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again don't dwell on the deaths of other people that's that's a recipe for a miserable miserable
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existence but this whole notion of a fleeting thought that you allow yourself to have about bad
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things that can happen it's wonderfully easy to do and it's wonderfully effective at least that's that's
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what i found in my own life so with this part of the trichotomy where there's things you have
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control over but not complete control over what's the stoic approach to those things so that you you put
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some effort into it but you don't vex yourself too much how should you go about those items yeah the
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example i give of that in in uh my book i did the good life is i talk about tennis match so it's in that
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middle ground there's some things you can control some things you can't control so how do you prepare
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for a tennis match well you do the best you can to prepare for it and that might mean getting coaching
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that might mean practice that might mean you know how much you sleep the night before that that'll mean
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a whole variety of things so that's the part you can control so you exercise the control you can but
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here's the thing suppose that despite that that you lose the match then a stoic approach would be
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well so what i did the best i could and if that wasn't good enough that means the other person is
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is simply a better player than i am and i'm i can live with that but that whole notion of in life
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you know pick your challenges and then do the best you can on those challenges and then win lose or draw
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you know that's it uh you you uh you aren't don't allow yourself to get upset over it because
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that is the best you can do and to ask yourself or to blame yourself for not doing better than the
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best you could do again that would be another recipe for a miserable life now there there are people who
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do that and they do seem to have miserable lives and it's avoidable and isn't that tragic right that
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sounds awful awful lot like uh warren buffett's inner scorecard he has this idea of he keeps an
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inner scorecard doesn't really worry about the externals just as long as i'm doing what i know
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to be doing everything's fine sure and i'm a competitive rower and so you know i'm out there
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racing against other boats i don't win very often i do come in last place some of the time but
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internally what am i actually doing i'm racing against myself i'm causing myself a degree of needless
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discomfort how come to build character so what counts as success in a race with doing the best
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i could well what if i'm last place well the question is did i do the best i could and did i
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get the value out of the training that i hope to get out of the training you know it teaches you
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other things one of them that teaches you is self-discipline it's a chance to practice a kind of
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courage a very valuable thing it's a chance to practice the strategy of uh when things look
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hopeless just keep trying and you know there are a lot of people that when things look not
00:27:45.460
not even hopeless but just they don't look like sure things they stop trying and that's a that's a bad
00:27:51.060
thing because there's so much of life where you know really just a bit more effort on your part
00:27:56.260
can make a huge difference in the outcome so let's talk about fate fate's a big part of the stoic
00:28:01.300
philosophy it's because fate is a part of nature and you have to just accept fate but being a fatalist
00:28:06.500
seems very passive and you're just like well you can't do anything about it because that's what
00:28:10.820
fate had in store for you so how did the stoics approach fate where they accepted it but still
00:28:16.180
try to be active in their life stoics again would do a kind of division here they would say
00:28:23.700
you should be fatalistic with regard to things that have happened in the past and you should be
00:28:30.340
fatalistic with regard to whatever is happening to you at this very instant because you can't change
00:28:36.900
those things so you can either accept them the way they are or or you can make yourself miserable
00:28:43.060
but they weren't fatalist about fatalistic about the future so you can have an impact on what happens
00:28:49.220
in the future so we're kind of back to the dichotomy of control so it makes yours it makes it sensible
00:28:55.380
for you to invest time energy intellectual processes into trying to shape the future but then when that
00:29:03.300
future arrives you can't change it it's there so what do you do you make the best of it and then you
00:29:09.940
you go on to whatever is going to happen the next day you look forward to tomorrow but there are people who
00:29:17.220
who it's a strange thing but they're perpetually hoping for a better future and they're perpetually
00:29:24.820
disturbed disgusted dismayed by whatever life they happen to be experiencing at at that very moment
00:29:33.060
downside is that means they get to spend their entire life dismayed disturbed disgusted so you know what
00:29:42.340
embrace the life you find yourself living while simultaneously trying to improve that life
00:29:50.580
in in various sorts of of measures i mean when you're stoic and you look around at at how people
00:29:57.380
are living and you know the same is probably true of other philosophies of life if you're a buddhist and
00:30:02.420
you look around at how people are living and you're struck by how needlessly miserable so many people
00:30:09.140
are it's the choices they've made and it's the kind of techniques they use for dealing with life
00:30:16.020
that seem like they should work but there's just massive amounts of evidence that they they simply
00:30:22.420
don't work and and that's that's too bad that's just too bad right you also mentioned throughout the
00:30:28.740
book different practices stoics did to toughen themselves not only psychologically but physically do you
00:30:37.220
have any favorites from the stoics of these sort of daily practices to toughen the mental hide well
00:30:42.420
i call it uh exercises in voluntary discomfort right where you're going out of your way to do
00:30:49.540
something that you know is going to be difficult and uncomfortable to do and so i give some examples one
00:30:55.220
is underdressing slightly for for winter weather you know what uh underdress too much and you can get
00:31:01.780
frostbite and that's no fun at all but to kind of go around thinking you know what uh i'm gonna allow
00:31:08.900
myself to get a little bit cooler than i normally would or in summer i'm not going to turn on the air
00:31:14.740
conditioning quite as much as i normally would what happens is you expand what what you might refer to as
00:31:20.980
your comfort zone so there will be people that you encounter who have obsessed over keeping the
00:31:26.900
temperature to within two degrees you know fahrenheit and their goal and it's one of these
00:31:31.780
paradoxes their goal is is personal comfort but because they've got it so narrow the range which
00:31:38.580
they they can operate they're inevitably going to experience discomfort because they'll move around
00:31:45.300
things will change they'll go places and it won't be their ideal temperature whereas if you're used to a
00:31:51.300
wide range of temperature you'll be comfortable in a huge range of of temperatures and it's it's really
00:31:57.780
interesting because you know in uh in rowing i'm rowing in short sleeves and in shorts you know well into the
00:32:05.700
fall early in the spring there are days that are exceptions and i'm out there when it's hot as well so as a result i i come
00:32:14.820
away with very wide range of comfortable temperatures i accomplished that you know similar thing about
00:32:22.180
food if you're a gourmet you're probably going to get less pleasure out of food than if you simply take
00:32:29.060
whatever food has been placed in front of you and you try to extract the maximal amount of delight from
00:32:35.780
that food you got it made if you can experience delight over a glass of water ordinary water too you
00:32:44.180
know not bottled stuff that you paid extra money for but if you can be happy drinking a glass of
00:32:50.020
water you're you're uh you're in a in great situation as far as being able to be pleased by
00:32:57.140
what life has to offer you so this is interesting too i uh you highlight in the book is you know most
00:33:04.180
most of our vexations i feel like in life are caused by other human beings family members just an
00:33:10.020
annoying co-worker but instead of i thought was interesting about the stoics instead of becoming
00:33:14.500
hermits and avoiding these people in order to maintain stoic serenity the stoics felt duty-bound
00:33:20.420
to be out there and interact with other people why did the stoics feel like they had a duty to interact
00:33:25.620
with these these people that causes most of our problems in life what was going on there okay the
00:33:32.820
stoics thought we have a social duty you know to to be with and to try to help and relate to our
00:33:38.740
fellow human beings but that didn't go as far as saying we had to go out of our way to find the
00:33:44.180
most miserable company that we could and for one thing it's going to be a very depressing time for
00:33:50.900
us for another there's a good chance that we won't be able to help those people you know there are
00:33:56.260
people whose idea of a relationship is simply to stand there and complain about everything and that
00:34:02.660
person's what that person needs is major change in kind of their approach to life so what what do you
00:34:10.580
do you you try to be helpful to other people and you know i i never go around preaching stoicism because
00:34:17.460
i found it's it's a great way to to lose people's attention but you know what you can throw these little
00:34:24.260
bits of stoic advice and you don't even necessarily attribute them to stoics and you can thereby make a
00:34:30.260
difference in people's lives so somebody's worried about something and you know just to throw out uh
00:34:36.180
you know a suggestion like well is there anything that you can do to change this we'll know okay then
00:34:43.300
don't worry and you know it's interesting how that can have a profound impact how somebody can
00:34:50.500
sort of realize you know what he's he's got a point there well one other thing about adults is they have
00:34:56.820
to be ready for for whatever advice comes along like you know another thing is you can lead
00:35:04.500
by example in in a way if people can sense that in your own life you're you're thriving then they
00:35:12.020
get curious and they wonder well what what's he doing that i'm not doing and if you're miserable
00:35:17.300
people learn from that too same kind of same kind of thing the opposite lesson what's he doing
00:35:23.220
that i should avoid doing yeah but it's it's a strangely paradoxical philosophy and goes against
00:35:31.700
what most people think is common sense but then again lots of people are pretty miserable right so
00:35:38.180
maybe we shouldn't maybe we shouldn't pay attention to what most people go by so there's a lot of talk
00:35:43.060
these days about like trigger warnings and microaggressions and insults and slights and political correctness
00:35:48.900
what would the stoics say about these ideas um stoics thought that we should become insult pacifists
00:35:56.580
that we should simply refuse to play the insult game that when insulted we should simply carry on
00:36:02.820
as if nothing had happened and they can take criticism i mean as a stoic i'm i'm always on the
00:36:11.380
lookout for people who can teach me something important about something i don't know so i'm perfectly open
00:36:17.380
to that and seek that out and so i i grant people what i i think of internally as mentor status so i i
00:36:26.900
don't go around telling people they've been granted this but there'll be somebody i realize knows a whole
00:36:31.780
lot about something and then the plan is uh what you do is you you listen very carefully you take mental
00:36:39.220
notes uh and if that person says something critical about what you're doing then you you take that
00:36:44.980
seriously that's what you're looking for you're looking for feedback so that isn't that isn't an
00:36:50.660
insult that's a useful suggestion now there are other people though who being usual people are used
00:36:58.660
to playing the insult game and so there'll be all these put downs and everything else and then
00:37:04.420
so stoics point of view is you shrug it off because look at the source look at the source do you get
00:37:09.620
angry when dogs bark at you hope not right and if you do uh that's silly because dogs you know don't
00:37:18.660
bark for good reasons i don't know i'm not a dog maybe they do but dogs bark because that's just kind
00:37:25.540
of their reflexive way of responding and that's how how humans are and then the other deeper stoic
00:37:31.620
insight with insults is that if you ignore insults it's deeply disturbing to the person who insulted you
00:37:38.180
because he's out to hit you he's out to hurt you and he realizes he hasn't accomplished his goal
00:37:46.180
so we've talked a lot about some of these stoic practices and i and i think it's fantastic but
00:37:49.940
you know stoicism has gotten a lot of criticism by in the world of philosophy i know bernard russell
00:37:57.540
20th century philosopher said that there's an element of sour grapes in stoicism because you know it's
00:38:03.860
like well i can't get that thing so i just don't care i'm indifferent to it how would you respond to
00:38:09.620
that that criticism towards stoicism a lot of philosophers professional philosophers who have
00:38:15.940
an interest in stoicism have an academic interest in in stoicism and so to play the academic game well
00:38:23.540
and i have played the game because it's what you want to do it's what you have to do if you want to have
00:38:28.260
a career in philosophy what you do is you uh you look at ancient texts that have been already looked
00:38:35.540
at thousands of times you write a paper about what the text says so some other academic somewhere else
00:38:41.220
can write another paper that challenges your paper and back and forth so there are academics who don't
00:38:49.700
understand what stoicism is for them it's just an intellectual game that they play as as part of
00:38:57.300
making their living and those same individuals would reject the idea of a philosophy of life so it's a
00:39:06.580
curious thing because that's precisely what the ancient stoics intended it to be they said it isn't
00:39:12.820
something you should just think about or write about it's a way of living and so i would suggest
00:39:18.820
that the person you just described doesn't really comprehend what stoicism is about they've picked
00:39:25.940
one aspect of stoicism and then focused their attention on that and said that's that's not an
00:39:32.100
appropriate thing another thing to keep in mind about the ancient stoics is there's a great divide
00:39:37.780
first came the greek stoics and then came the roman stoics and with the roman stoics there seems to have
00:39:43.700
been a real change in the focus of stoicism and that's where this whole notion of tranquility
00:39:51.380
comes in the greeks took took a different line that was all about virtue and so you can actually
00:39:58.260
say in the ancient world there are probably like two stoicisms not not a single document but again if you
00:40:05.620
look at the roman stoics they didn't have the reputation as being these these soured individuals
00:40:12.580
in fact they had a reputation for being friendly and in many cases they did have friends they did
00:40:21.140
take delight in life so it's a kind of a criticism that rings hollow if you actually look at the ancient
00:40:28.420
stoics well bill this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about your book and the rest
00:40:33.940
of your work well they can take a look at the guide to the good life the ancient art of stoic joy which
00:40:39.220
was published about 10 years ago by oxford university press and has gone on to have an incredible life
00:40:48.820
in terms of uh you know sales longevity however else you wanna you wanna measure it and i'm absolutely
00:40:56.100
flabbergasted that it has because when i wrote it i wrote it with the assumption that probably nobody in
00:41:02.740
the world is ever going to read this book but i have a social duty to write it so that that that says
00:41:08.900
it as well as as i can say the sorts of things i've we've been talking about and also it's not a book
00:41:16.420
written for academics it's a book written for uh for ordinary people who feel that their lives aren't
00:41:22.100
going as well as could be the case and who who want to straighten their lives out in some sense and
00:41:29.700
also the advice it offers it isn't like buddhism where you might have to practice it for several
00:41:36.420
decades before it starts working for you you will know within a matter of days whether you're cut out to
00:41:44.020
be a stoic or not and since i wrote that book there's been a a number of other stoic books that
00:41:50.900
have come out and you know you can look on amazon to to um to find out some of the other titles i've
00:41:57.940
also written a book on insults that is highly stoic dependent and so people who had a particular
00:42:04.100
interest in that that book's also published by oxford university press so that's where you can find out
00:42:12.100
more i also had a for a while there i had a stoic a stoic blog going the title of of it was 21st
00:42:19.700
century stoic dot org and the postings are still out there i've i've gotten busy doing other things
00:42:26.740
so that's actually a way you can you can get on top of stoicism at least as seen by me without
00:42:32.740
having even to invest in a book fantastic well bill irvine thank you so much for your time it's been
00:42:37.460
an absolute pleasure oh thank you for having me as uh as a guest my guest today was bill irvine
00:42:43.300
he's the author of the book a guide to the good life the ancient art of stoic joy it's available
00:42:46.820
on amazon.com and really go out there and get it it's a great book a really easy read and a great
00:42:51.540
introduction to stoicism plus i just love how bill makes everything very actionable and helps you try
00:42:56.420
to implement this stuff in your life today also check out your show it's at awim.is
00:43:00.180
slash stoic where you find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic
00:43:15.300
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:43:19.380
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you enjoy this
00:43:23.380
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