Welcome back to the New Thinkery. I'm David Barr and before we start this episode, there's an unsung hero behind the hosts of the New Thinkery, Jake Gannon, who's my colleague at the Claremont Institute. Jake is our producer and we usually think him at the end of the episode, but we always call him Jake the Cannon Gannon and that some listeners are confused like he's a wrestler, he's a adult entertainer, I don't know. But he's our producer and we want to say thank you because without Jake none of this is possible.
So thank you, Jake. Thank you, Jake. Yeah. And Greg, how are you?
I'm great, man. Good to see you. It's been too long. It's been too long.
That's right. Your beard is still there, so I know you're alive. Yeah. Yeah.
And who's the man who's here, you stole next to you? Alex Brieu, that's the man who's here. I still have you to write him much in. Doing all right.
I've got good news, guys. I get, I mean, now that I get emails from Chartable. Chartable is a company, I guess, that tracks. Sponsor of the show?
Sponsor of the show? Yeah, maybe we can get them sponsored. But they track the rankings of podcasts and we made it to education, the top of education podcasts in Italy. Now, not the top.
We're number 136. And if you if you had told me there are 136 education podcasts in Italy, that'd have been news enough for me. But I guess we've arrived. Right.
Well, in a way, last week, our last week's show ranked higher than the partially examined life show, those are really cool. And then New York recalled us asking if we'd like to hack their tote bags, except Cionelé. What are we doing today? What's this tote bag stuff?
I don't know. I hung up on it. We have one more. We have one more order of business before we get into the substance.
We received a complaint from a certain doc. Oh, yes. Thank you, Alex. Yeah, let's talk about that.
So I'm an m. Yeah, Greg's friend. Yeah, Greg's friend. He was an MD.
He said, hey, Greg, you know, the fifth Greg's old joke was, you know, for too many. He said something else also, but I didn't take him seriously because he was a doctor. He's a kidney doctor. Yeah.
And he went to college with me. So maybe your old insults are getting a little too. He's a good coach. Sounds like he went to med school with my monadies.
Yeah. And he's textbooks were like Harvey on the motion of blood and animals. Is that kidney doctor? Is he specialized mostly in leeches or in bloodletting?
Yeah, I don't know. I don't have kidney issues yet. Dan is a good man. Oh, is he?
I don't know about that. No, no, no, no. I like that. Yeah.
My freshman roommate in college, first thing he said to me was, Dan is mad, spilled backwards. Those are the ties that bind, Greg. Those are the guys are the guys that were getting advice from about the podcast. Yeah, thanks for passing that on, Greg.
Greg texts us. Hey, guys, I have a pretty serious friend who's a doctor and he wants to advise us on the podcast. Anyways, so that is sad. Should we jump into the substance of today's episode?
Epictetus? Yeah. So the book is called the handbook. It's a translation of incoridium, which is Greek for little thing in your hand.
I don't know why they call it handbook, but it's a short word. And you're in German. They call a cell phone a handy. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. Because the damn thing they say. I don't want to talk about what they call you, Greg. But it's about it.
It's short. It's a series of aphorisms. It's maybe 18 pages. I think in the translation, the hack of translation, which is fine.
It's not great, but it's good. And it's wonderful because it is a kind of condensed and it's accessible to undergrad. But it is a condensed sort of meditation on how to live when there's lots of calamities that could happen or do happen. I think I'm not quick to introduce a philosopher's biography as a way to explain their thought with Epictetus.
It seems really hard to avoid. He was born a slave and he lived much of his life. Almost all of his life as a slave. He also was crippled at one point.
I mean, his life was not easy. I mean, he was working in the sense that he was educated. He got to meet all sorts of people, but including Roman emperors and stuff like that. But he was a real- How do you educate himself?
I think he's a master letter. I was reading a little bit of his biography. You know, you never know. So it is like a dread Scott thing?
I mean, not. Jesus. He's a Frederick Douglas. He's a Frederick Douglas.
He's a teacher. He's a teacher. No, no, no, no. It's not.
It was in spite of his masters, I think. But it was, it was, it was, okay. Okay. Yeah.
A lot of teaching, I think. So, you know, when you, so you have this teaching, I should guess I should say just really quick about the substance of the teaching. It's about controlling your desires, your expectations about the world to such a degree that you can endure anything happening to you, the loss of the child, the loss of the parent, the most horrible things happen to you. You can actually endure and you look on it with the same, not indifference.
It's hard to put it into words, not in difference, but the same sort of endurance as you would, the loss of something quite small, right? Understanding, for instance, that it's the nature of children sometimes to die before their parents should give one a sense of openness to the possibility that this might happen in a willingness to do that. So controlling your desires, controlling your expectations about the world will make it so that when misery or bad things do happen, you endure them as just part of the natural course of things, right? Now, the reason I bring up this biography is because it's just very hard to read something like this and not think, yeah, this is the kind of way of thinking you develop when you've had to live a tough life, right?
Be physically named, be physically enslaved to another. That said, I do think it had, it did have broader appeal among Romans and continues to have broader appeal today. And I think it's worthy of being read and studied from that angle as a way of thinking, a kind of moral theory that hasn't appealed given certain political or social conditions, Greg, you're going to- I see. Oh, sorry.
Go on, Greg. Just a small point. Have you said Stoicism yet? No, I didn't.
Okay. Can you, what's Stoicism? It's sort of what is that? Yeah.
Okay. That's what we're talking about, right? So Epictetus is one of the, maybe the two most famous Stoic philosophers. Yeah.
I mean, it's Hannah Marcus Aurelius, I guess. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
No problem. I do see the broad appeal, Alex. It's funny. I was listening, so my wife is concerned because I got some blood tests back.
And I'm not doing well. And so he's like, you need to eat green things and you know, I don't run around the block. Okay. So I started listening to these, what are these, these like Navy, you know, these podcasts are really popular right now with these Navy SEAL types.
There's one guy named Jocko, J-O-C-K-O. He's a well-known Navy SEAL. And I was listening to his podcast to get hyped up to go run around the block. And it's all this Stoic stuff.
He's like, get to the top of the hill. You know, there's somebody stay, you got a prom staring you down. Good. You look at the prom and you respond good.
And I I got, I became enchanted. I was like, oh, yeah, like good. Great. And it's this thing with Epictetus, but it's sub-philosophic.
Like there's not a system behind it. Yeah. So one way I like to, oh, great. I was going to jump in.
You already said that's, yeah, you already insulted me. No, the half the, I just thought you're so much smarter than the rest of us. I just like to bring us back down to earth and because, you know, the listeners at home, they may not know. That's all.
Well, we could give an example of, you know, I tried to drop parallel to kind of this advice that a lot of these Navy SEAL types give you about enduring the vicissitudes of life and enduring pain. A lot of what they talk about is how to endure pain, how to stay on the right path with eating or whatever. But it's, it's, they're not kicking Plato your way, right? I feel like, I feel like David, you encounter a problem.
It's like, you've got a whole package of double stuff areas, but you just already ate a package of double stuff, or yours and yourself good. What do I say? I'm in bursting at the seams and I'm in actual pain. But if I don't eat that second package, I'll feel overcome with shame.
So one way I like to think about this to situate it relative to to history of thought, because it has an influence on early modernity. You see stoic echoes in Descartes, for example. But I like to start with Aristotle's ethics, book one, chapter 10. He has an argument there about chance.
And one of the things he's concerned with is, okay, what is the good? The good seems to involve certain external goods, right? That includes family, friends, etc., right? Wealth.
He says, well, chance can take those away from you. So that can't be happiness. It doesn't have any kind. So he goes in where he says, what we really want is something like a virtue of character or kind of activity that can help you endure calamities and come out on top on the end.
Now, one way to think about what Stowe's system is doing is taking that observation and pushing it to the extreme. Okay, chance can take away from you all the things that you want in the world. But that's just the way the world is. And so if you want to live in accordance with the nature of things, and this is a kind of stoic mantra to live in accordance with the nature of things, you need to be prepared for these sorts of events.
Now, Aristotle just kind of accepts this and says, yeah, life could go really badly. And then people, some people are just fundamentally unhappy, fundamentally miserable. That's just the way things are. You lose your family.
If you're pream and you have all this wealth, your king of the city, and it gets destroyed to 50 cents a dollar skills, you lose all your wealth, your rest of your family's in slavery, you can't just say good. You can't just accept that. Aristotle's fine with that conclusion. Abictetus, however, wants to find some room for a good life.
I think it's valuable in that sense as a kind of heuristic as a way to try to find out how far we're willing to walk with him in this direction. But it's also, I think, therefore, unhelpful because it doesn't actually teach you how to flourish or to enjoy those good things. It's really concerned with the negatives in life. As much as he wants you to actually pursue those things, there's always this lingering negativity in the background.
At least that's how I read it. I just have a few things to say. I'll try to defend this a little bit. I think that stoicism is really popular, perhaps precisely because of how open we are to the vicissitudes of chance or how bad things might happen to us.
There was a famous book by Thomas Wolf in the 90s called Man in Full, where the lead character is arrested. There are two lead characters as opposed. One gets arrested, the world is opposed to him, the other is this really successful real estate developer. They both turn to stoicism in their own way.
It's a popular presentation. There was also this, you guys remember Admiral Stockdale? He was Ross Droze, vice presidential roommate. He was a famous stoic.
You're right about it being something that people who have undergone hardship turn to. I think there's hardship out there in the world. This seems to be a fairly popular philosophy, something that people can actually use or turn to. You probably even see popular self-help books that put a lot of this into action.
There's a pretty popular prayer called the Serenity Prayer, which is pretty common for Christians to pray. It strikes me as the spirit of that prayer is very much stoic. Something like God grant me the courage to change the things I can't, the wisdom to tell the difference. I could go to the third one as the prudence to another difference or something like this.
It's recognizing what's in your control and trying to let go of things that are not in your control. That seems to me like a pretty interesting one. What's the great innovation there? I don't understand.
This is the problem is that the core idea is absolutely reasonable, as Greg laid it out. It can help in situations like Stockdale, who we should probably explain for the folks at home. He was in a Vietnamese prison camp. He was in the military.
I think he was in Korea. I was in Korea. Then he came back. He studied philosophy.
He got thrown into a camp. As a result, he had to exercise. This fictional character is in a prison. I think that's all fair and well.
He does have certain comments. I really like this number 17 of this. He says, remember that you are an actor in a play, which is as the playwright wants it to be. Short if he wants it short, long if he wants it long.
If he wants you to play a beggar, play even this part skillfully or a cripple or a public official or private citizen. What is yours is the play the assigned part well, but to choose it belongs to someone else. I think there, it actually does apply to a large range, not just being in a camp, but whatever job it is you find yourself, destitute or flourishing. You put out that first core insight, don't have expectations under control.
I think it also comes and goes at different times depending on the political environment. Which to me signifies that it's very heavy on the suffering and very light on the flourishing. There's not much positive guidance as to what the ideal ends per se is, but about how to endure the worst in life. He's running under as a slave in an empire.
Then I see students who are especially students who are very demanding majors like mine. They might appeal to them because well, they've got a long course of study, a lot to do, and they have a job ahead of them. Our lives are largely out of our control nowadays with the way things are. It's a very appealing philosophy, I think, in this time, because it's not so dissimilar in many ways.
We don't have control. There seems like there's these large, we talked about this in the Churchill episode, these large mass processes determining our lives. In light of that, the best you might be able to do is a kind of philosophy of endurance or something like that. But I do think he pushes it to an extreme that is challenging.
I find this really helpful. I'll just read one quote that I find interesting here. This is in section three. He says, in the case of everything attractive or useful, or that you are fond of, remember to say just what sort of a thing it is, beginning with the least little things.
If you are fond of a jug, say, I am fond of a jug. For them when it is broken, you will not be upset. I'm fond of you, Alex. I'm fond of you too.
And if you were broken, I will not be upset. If you kiss your child to your wife, say that you were kissing a human being. For when it dies, you will not be upset. This is, so you start with that core insight the way it graduated out.
That's very reasonable. But then you really apply it universally. And at least a certain consequence is that I think are very shocking, not to say false, but definitely shocking. But I think helpful as a kind of thought expert.
Yeah, but it's weird because it seems to involve a kind of self-abnegation that's impossible for a human being to live by. Even the hardest men and women, you have to deny too much of humanity, I think, to stick to his letter of the law. So as the case, and if he understood this, I wonder what he's up to rhetorically. So that's leading me to something I would like to have maybe mentioned from the start, is that Epictetus didn't write this.
I don't know if the same is also true for his other writings, but that these are writings of his student area. Because the first question to my mind was the same question you had, David. So why is he writing if it's this sort of self-help? There seems to be some concern for the world that animate someone who's going to write.
And it seems like if you were truly stoic, you'd be free from that sort of care. Yeah, I totally think that's right. But here's where I think it's actually a little tricky because he doesn't say, he doesn't want you to enjoy your life and to live your life, giving your situation, play the part well. He just doesn't want you to think that your child is any different than any other material thing.
It's going to pass, right? And be prepared for that. The problem I just maybe put a variation on that point is it's one thing to endure a lot of suffering and get used to it and develop this mindset. It's quite another to be living the life of Prion for your whole life.
And then everything falls apart and say, yes, everything in my life is just a jug. And I think there might be certain parts of human happiness that are necessarily dependent on external things. Friendship, right? Philosophy, if you're going to read books like Epitese, it better be available to you.
Family might be something. You can list goes on. Well, it's not clear how Epictetus would have come to this. I mean, maybe you know you said he read his biography.
Did he sort of intuit this and then how it confirmed in his later education? Or, I mean, one could... It was just a school prior to that. But Stockdale, you said, sort of came to this on his own, right?
I mean, people can... This seems like something one could come to in a way on one's own. Or that you're born with... I mean, Scottsdale endured horrific torture, right?
It's not something that... I mean, you just learn Stockdale. Sorry, you just... It's not like you take a master's degree in stoicism, which I think he did.
But he was also a military man at that time. He'd already seen battle. So, I mean, it's not like he was... You know, he just came to this while being some defeat philosophy undergrad, right?
He was... He was already disciplined, right? And already had that mentality. I just...
I wonder about that. That being said, I do think that when you do start thinking like this, it does help you at least wean yourself off of petty pleasures, right? I wish I think it's very, very helpful, right? Understanding that it doesn't hurt if you...
Yeah, that was correct. No, no, no, no. Sorry, go on, go on. Go on.
Maybe that's why he wrote it. Maybe that's why he kept it so short. It's just something that, you know, almost like a coffee table book for the Romans. You dip in and out of it.
It's really... These are just gentle reminders for your everyday life. You can't oversaturate somebody with stoic philosophy. It kind of leaves you numb.
You glaze over. But just to have it around and remind yourself that, you know, like the transitory nature of life and... Yeah, and it's written in an instructive style. I was though you were talking to somebody for the first time about this.
Yeah. Can I just read the... I just want to read a few passages from the start. I do think...
I do think there's a sort of way in which this makes obvious sense. But the claims almost immediately get amped up to a level that make it hard to accept. So, some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. That's how he opens the handbook, which seems totally commonsensical, if ultimately problematic.
But at least initially, it seems like commonsense. So, basically, you should live your life and only worry about the things that are up to you and don't worry about the things that aren't up to you. But then still in section one, he says, but if you think that only what is yours is yours and that what is not your own is just as it is, not your own, then no one will ever coerce you. No one will hinder you.
You will blame no one. You will not accuse anyone. You will not do a single thing unwillingly. You will have no enemies and no one will harm you because you will not be harmed at all.
I mean, this sounds pretty incredible to me. Yeah, the way that it gets to something that I think is very counterintuitive, but I think very true of stoicism is that it seems so negative and pessimistic, right? But it is one of the most optimistic and it's more optimistic as regards to theory, right? I mean, you skipped a lot, but after he says something's up to us and some are not, so he says, our opinions are up to us, our impulses, desires of versions of short, whatever he's our own doing.
I agree on the fundamental, I agree, but it's way easier said than done, right? I mean, I actually would take issue with the ones, even the ones you just read, but here's one I take really a serious issue with, this is beginning on section nine, illness interferes with the body, right? Okay, for now, not with one's faculty of choice. Okay, so the implicit argument here, I suppose, is that an illness cannot interfere with your faculty of choice, but we all know that that's false, right?
There are illnesses that can make your minds, you can lose your sanity in these kinds of things. And so I mean, deaf interferes with my faculty of choice, I can't choose anymore if I cease to be. And so it seems like he's overstating the case for the things that are up to us. Now, even my opinions, to what I said are my opinions up to me, aerosol, you already mentioned aerosol in the ethics.
I mean, he implies heavily that our opinions ultimately are, I guess not ultimately, initially are profoundly shaped by how we're raised. And so it's not clear that our opinions are even fully up to us in the way that Epictetus is here leading us to think. Absolutely. And I think, I think, and I think on a fundamental level, I mean, this is maybe getting, so there's kind of two figures that loom later in this work, Socrates and God that I think are anticipated by this.
So the one hand, there is a kind of socratic observation, I think, here, that well, you can examine your opinions, your love of the good can be a light by which to judge whether your opinions are true or false or somewhere in between, right? That's kind of socratic observation. But also in light of that, to think that therefore, I can change my opinions and everything to such an extent that I'm no longer dependent on external things for my good, and therefore I cannot be harmed, that seems to imply, especially when we talk about things like death and all that, a kind of theology. So just a return to the one I mentioned before, remember that you were an actor in a play, which is as the player who wants it to be, who's the play right there, but God, right?
Or he says in 15, remember, you must behave as you do it at banquet, something has passed around and comes to you, reach out your hand politely and take some, who's serving the food in this metaphor, right? It seems to be a kind of God. So there's a kind of agent organizing everything, or, and this is somehow the natural order of things. And you're somehow by controlling your desires and not expecting more of the world, you're bringing yourself into accordance with whatever is this God's wish or will.
So it's a socratic process leading up to something like integration into what looks like a kind of divinely guided or at least divinely governed in some way whole. I mean, maybe I'm jumping into God. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, when you can jump if you want, but he says this in section 31, right? So then in 32, so this is beginning section 31, the most important aspect of piety toward the gods is certainly both have threats, beliefs and to obey them, so beliefs and actions.
So piety is central, I would say, for him. And that whole section 31 talks a lot about the gods. But then section 32, I thought was even more telling, our translation says when you make use of fortune telling, remember that you do not know what will turn out. And if gone to the fortune teller to find out, I'll read the rest of one moment, but I would translate that as divination or prophecy, in fact, and not fortune telling.
So fortune telling sounds sort of silly and superstitious, but prophecy, I think we wouldn't sort of push aside like that. So I do think you're right, Alex, that there is a deep piety at the heart of at least Epictetus' version of Stoicism, no question. Yeah, the fun is this seems to be this faith that whatever suffering you suffered here on earth will be somehow compensated for if you live a decent life. Yeah, and even the last section says, he gives you a couple of quotes to keep in mind.
On every occasion, you must have these thoughts ready. And the first one is lead me Zeus and you to destiny, wherever I am assigned by you. I follow and not hesitate. But even if I do not wish to, because I'm bad, I'll follow anyway.
So even if I resist the faith of the gods, I got to go anyways. And then again, he has these comments from Socrates, right? And it's a melidas can kill me, but they can't harm me. So it is a kind of synthesis of trust in the god, maybe.
I'm not sure trust the right word, but there is a kind of theological element and a philosophical element brought into unity. Yeah, I would say trust faith, Pestus, whatever you want. Absolutely. Bard, does this help you get through life?
No, no, we should have done Epicureanism for bar. Yes. Yes, we will get there. I don't think we have that much more to say about this book.
I got at least two or three things left. All right. I know that Alex wanted to talk about point four on the right show, but I want to talk about the Socrates business. If you want to skip to Socrates or you want to just talk about the coldness?
Yeah, well, I think we've touched on that. I mean, the whole question is great. Who's the one that has the background on Epic to use? Is it this is not fragmentary, right?
This is this book is complete. As far as we know. Yeah. And is this all he wrote?
No, no, just just horses. Yeah, those are again, put together by student area, but you're gonna tell them selectors and stuff. Yeah, so it's a longer or shorter? Yeah, it's a longer.
Yes. Okay. Oh, really? Okay.
I think it's quite big. Yeah. Oh, it's interesting. It's not it doesn't just fit in your hand.
It's big. Right. Right. If we're going to talk about Socrates, I guess, let me say the following, I don't know if this is where you want to go with this, but I think that Epic to this here in the handbook at least relies principally on the fatal and apology into a lesser extent, the credo, you just read the passage.
And so I don't know how much you want to get into this, but Alex, I just read the fatal with the group of people and I'm currently reading the fatal with some students. And the fatal does seem to imply or lie upon some kind of a deity, some kind of a providential God, rewarding those who do well and punishing those who don't pick it, strapped out at a certain point, but it seems to be an implicit undercurrent through the remainder arguments. Let me try that. I think the fatal Socrates exaggerates the extent to which he believes the body is not very important.
And it seems like epictitus is very much buying into that. Let me try this a slightly way. Epictitus is very clear. Socrates didn't fear death.
And so therefore we have no reason to fear death. I'm not so sure Socrates didn't fear death. In the FEDO, he's we catch him and he's just been singing songs, which they're sort of lullabies that you sing to kids. There's I think there are some implications that Socrates actually is afraid of dying.
And I don't know, Socrates is willing to undergo this punishment at 70 years old, what he's been willing to undergo at 35. I'm not so sure. The final quote is from the credo, by the way, anyone who's read the credo, I'm not sure that Socrates is being super philosophical credo, for it's worth. I guess that is a round of a way of saying, I'm not sure epictitus.
Epictetus seems to be picking on parts of Socrates that most are in line with still philosophy. There are other parts that are not in line with this. At the end of I think it's book nine of the Republic, Alex, you can correct me if I'm wrong, after he's just talked about the tyrants and this and the other, Socrates actually says, you know what, actually some pleasure is okay as long as it's in moderation and as long as the philosophy is most of a thing, actually wealth is okay. You'll want too much or too little.
Actually, honor even is okay. And so the idea that Socrates was this, the ascetic self-admigator strikes me as an incorrect reading of Socrates. It drives the drive that's just driven only from the fade up. Well, in book six of the Republic, the philosopher's moderation is on account of pursuing lowly pleasures, gaining the way of philosophy.
So he doesn't get wasted all the time or, you know, because he's trying to actually think about things, not that he doesn't want to or whatever, but it's just, it would get in the way that's very, and that's a very immodurate reason. I want to think all the time. You know, I only want to do things, so I won't do anything. It's actually a very immoderned business.
One of the difficulties in understanding the Fido is that in relation to the symposium, where in the symposium, according to Socrates, or what he argues, is that the natural way to preserve ourselves after death is through sexual reproduction, right? And so your happiness is dependent on this world. And the Fido is quite the opposite. And while they're love and death, they're deeply related, and the two dialogues are in a way kind of mirrors of one of others, multiple dramatic ways that this is confirmed.
But in the Fido, when even when he says philosophy is dying and being dead and detaching yourself from these desires, he ultimately says it's out of a kind of deep eros or longing for wisdom during this life, right? And so one of the things that I think comes out of this is that there's this interesting thing philosophic thought does, which is it detaches ourselves from our desires. It makes us question them and think about them. And it's but it's very easy to mistake that for asceticism.
When in reality, what you're doing that is because you want more than anything to live the best life. And the best life is a life, right? First and foremost. And I think it's very easy on the basis of the Fido and the way that Epictus doesn't, you know, many Christian thinkers do too, to understand it as ascetic.
But you lose the all too embodied, all too, this worldly character of the good life as Socrates envisioned it. And even to the extent that Socrates was ascetic, which I'm, you know, already expressed my skepticism. It's the kind of asceticism of the athlete, right? Who's putting off certain goods for something else that's also good.
It's not sort of a citizen for the sake of asceticism. It strikes me. That reminds me of one of my favorite of the sayings here, which we should probably reach just a little bit more to go. I think it is good.
There's one where he's talking about not forgetting which section is what we're talking about actually trying to go into the Olympics, right? I don't know how this is going to relate to what we're just talking about. But one of the things that kind of cracked me up was how I guess the stoic is supposed to not be concerned with any of the pleasures of the body, which I get, right? You shouldn't exercise a great deal and shouldn't, you know, okay, you shouldn't eat a great deal, drink a great deal, or currently move your bowels a great deal, which I find quite like who's taking a lot of pleasure in that or copulating a great deal by the way.
David could weigh in here. No, you have a counterbook. Also, by the way, just as criticism of the new thinkery, this is in section 33. He says, this is Epictetus, advice to Alex and David, stay away from raising a laugh since this manor slits easily into vulgarity.
And at the same time is liable to lessen your neighbor's respect for you. It is also risky to fall into foul language shown. So when anything like that occurs, if a good opportunity arises, go so far as to criticize the person who has done it. And otherwise, by staying silent and blushing and frowning, you will show that you are displeased by what has been saying.
Real rich coming from you, Greg, after you keep making jokes about the title of this book and giggling, you can't tell he's giggling like a small girl here. I was staying silent and blushing. Thank you. I'd rather hang out with fall staff any day of the week.
Section 29, I like the way he puts it here he goes. For each action, consider what leads up to it and what follows it and approach it in the light of that. I think it's really helpful. So what does he mean?
Otherwise, you will come to it enthusiastically at first, since you have not borne in mind any of what will happen next, but later when difficulties turn up, you will give up disgracefully. You want to win an Olympic victory. I do too by the gods, since that is a fine thing. So he affirms the goal.
He's not indifferent to fine things. But consider what leads up to it and what follows it. And undertake the action in the light of that. You must be disciplined.
Keep a strict diet. Stay away from cakes. Oof, David. Train according to strict routine at a fixed time in heat and cold, not drink cold water, not drink wine when you feel like it.
And in general, you must have turned yourself over to your trainer as to a doctor, then in a contest, dig in. I like that. I mean, it is really true when you start thinking about this, having to be a doctor, like your friend, Greg, I went into a lab practical in my freshman or sophomore year of college, I was like, I'm looking at a bone and I've got to name all these like dents and fish. I don't want to do this.
I didn't think about what leads up to being a doctor and what follows from it, which is just wanted to touch people. Yeah, I didn't think about what leads up to it. And then what follows from it, which is a long nose stiff, a stiff, unbending humorless soul. Like Greg's my amount of being buddy over there.
Well, there goes one of our 10 listeners. We're down to nine folks. Don't forget to subscribe rate and like us. Do we have some questions?
We have any mailbag questions? Is that it? We're done? Yeah, we do have some mailbag questions.
I have them in there. I'll ask the person you Alex. All right. I'm curious how Stos is this from Jack Guifre, Guifre a long time.
Close for me. Close friends. He's wondering how this is Alex. How does Stos is relate to platonism and Christianity?
For some reason, I always ignore Stos is him. That's not a deeply interesting thing. Smart man finding out. Smart man.
Again, you're not wrong, Jack. He's not wrong. Yeah, you know, I can say I'll put this in the group of this alongside Walker Percy, but this alongside who's the guy who did the moral war thing. That's the guy that's one you want to do.
Yeah, I'm gonna name Williams. What are these other crackers and just and these are our cautionary episodes. Listen to the episode. Don't read the book.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. In a way, we've sacrificed for you listener. I got another question for you.
If you're ready. Yeah. This is from Bowling Brook. Bowling Brook.
I like this guy. I like King Bowling Brook. He's hilarious. He's anonymous.
Which is to remain anonymous. Stos is a long- He's actually King Bowling Brook. Yeah. The question to repeat, John, is Stos is a political philosophy.
Does it apply on a level any higher than the personal? I think that if we had we'd have to read Epictetus's other book, I didn't realize it was so long. Maybe he really does. Maybe he does something interesting.
I don't think the political philosophy, the sense that it's a philosophy of politics. It is a political philosophy in that I think it is somewhat regime dependent, a philosophy dependent on a certain political range. I made this point a little earlier. Yeah.
I do think it applies to subjects and slaves and military types. It's dependent on one station, I think makes it more appealing. I don't think I'll put it like this. Oh, no.
You're not teasing out the reason why. It's because you're so ineffectual in politics, you turn inward and focus on your personal life. Exactly. Because you're a slave, because your subject, because the empire is running without you, because you live in a modern bureaucratic state, and you feel completely left out of the system.
Right. Make no mistake. Make no mistake. If Epictetus's life went different, he'd be an Epicurean, right?
That's what I say. Still it by day, but when night falls, he's going full Epicurean. I guarantee. So what?
Is this similar to what Nietzsche's critique of Christianity? Did Nietzsche have a critique of the Stoics? Yeah, we pull out the book, but it's in section nine of Beyond Good and Evil. It's actually pre- Come on, David.
Everybody knows that. Geez. It goes according to nature, you want to live, oh, you know, most Stoics, what deceptive words these are. Imagine a being like nature wasteful beyond measure indifferent beyond measure without purposes or consideration without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time.
Imagine indifference itself as a power. How could you live according to this indifference? Living. Is that precisely wanting to be other than this nature?
Is not living, estimating, preferring, being just, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative, live according to nature, meant at bottom as much as live according to life. How could you not do that? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be?
And he eventually goes on to say, it really just means that you want nature to be according to the Stoic. But I think it's interesting. He attacks the conception of nature, right? He understands that this is only tenable if nature isn't entirely indifferent.
I think that's why you end up with this theological side. Right? I think he sees the connection between the way of life and the account of the whole. And so the dependency of the way of life on the account of the whole, and therefore he attacks the account of the whole to watch the way of life kind of lose its sense.
Thank you. That's for me. Anything else to say is easy, Top? That's it out of the mailbag.
You're going to? I apologize for this episode. Well, I'm sorry. Is it good?
Yeah, it's a very short work. Yeah. It's good. It's like I'm going to apologize to the listeners.
I think myself. I only control myself. So I'm apologizing. Oh, there you go.
There's your hand in the fire, Alex. Put your hand in the fire, Dan. Fire can't harm me. I can fly.
You know what? We should our listeners should be Stoics, and they shouldn't think too much of their money or their stuff. They should just donate. Go right on to support us.
Well, we have to tell you, yeah, we have to tell people what they're getting. Because they're in the microphone. I don't feel like we should ask people to donate after subjecting them to this. No, this was a good episode.
It's short. It's good. You're short. Okay.
Thank you for listening.