Interview: Spencer Klavan on Diogenes Laërtius' The Life of Zeno

Welcome back to New Thinkery. My name is David Barr. With me as always, is my good friend. I was pretty hard.

You do. Well, how are you doing? I'm well, I'm well, I'm well, black and blue. And black and blue, I'm a little I've been tenderized.

And speaking of tenderized, which is how he likes his animals. How are you doing, Greg? Well, I'm doing great because I understand that we've actually vanquished our first foe in the podcast Wars. We're on to another who is our first foe.

I don't like the brag, but we've got to live the young heretics. But we outlive them. Yeah, I don't know what that means. I was playing this off Mike.

Yeah, you have in fact, I'll live to my podcast you narratives. So number one, we are number one. We're I mean, it's mostly impressive because you're so advanced in years, Greg. This was actually this podcast started as a kind of sort of just, you know, how like Eskimos will put their grandpa on like an ice raft and kind of away and shoot arrows, like that.

Right. But he defact doctors, the doctors prognosis. So anyways, who's our guest? I want to revisit the Eskimos thing, but who may be in another podcast, sorry, guest tonight.

I'm really excited is my colleague and friend Spencer Klavin. How are you doing? Spencer? I'm doing great bar.

I never wanted to use the word tender in relation to yourself. Never again. No, guys, I thought so. Spencer to pay him a compliment.

He's one of these people that I've never met him. And real long never met him. No, no, which is so strange because he's one of these people you can just call him on the phone and talk to him for a few weeks. It's like we just pick up like old friends and you have that nice quality sensor.

And even though we've never met in real life, colleagues for three years or so, three and a half years, I feel like we have, if that makes sense, does that feeling make sense? It definitely does. In fact, it's like kind of a weird for me. I'm a big like advocate of, you know, in bodyglove, I've been just a pleasure, my, the cloud or whatever.

And yet, in fact, yes, you are one of my dear friends and we've literally never met in person. So it's good to see you. So let me give you guys very envy for more than one reason now Spencer. Let me do your friends with David's really they've never met.

Yeah, yeah, that's why we've stayed friends. So very quick introduction Spencer, just off the top of my head, he is the associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books. And the features editor at the American Mind, which is another publication of the Claremont Institute. How many podcasts do you host these days, Spencer?

Oh, geez, it's, I feel like it's different on a daily basis. But I've got a bunch of them over at Claremont, which I should chill. There's the Claremont Review of Books podcast, the close read. And then there's the American Roundtable, which you callously of the engines David used to be a regular on the editors podcast at TAM.

And actually, I think that's all that I do. And then I should also definitely show my new show. I mentioned that Young Hairtics, which was an introduction to the Great Works of the West is closing out is ending. But that's because I'm taking the show over to my podcasting talent, such as the over two daily wire plus to introduce their audience to the Great Works of the West.

So what will it be? Well, it's still be called Young Hairtics, just over on the new platform? No, it'll be kind of a little bit of a blow up. It's like, I'm thinking of it as Young Hairtics 2.0, although that's not what we're calling it.

We haven't yet landed on the exact title. But instead of like one episode of week, it's going to be kind of like big deep dives, each season, you'll get like a bunch of content that all comes out kind of at once or in rapid succession. So our first one's going to be on Babylon, Babylon and Jerusalem, which I'm really excited about. It's really fun.

And so for your audience, everybody from homeschooled kids to intellectuals to Alex Prio. Yeah, well, I can't, I'm not so sure I think Alex, maybe so advanced. So far advanced. Oh, no, no, no, I meant to generate.

But yeah, oh, I'm sorry. So right. Yeah. Okay.

By the way, just, you know, you talked about David on the roundtable podcast. I used to listen when David would be on there. And typically David would be silent for about 45 minutes come in, make a joke about James Poulow's being Greek and the certain habits. I mean, if you ever missed David just come on here.

He just recycles the jokes for our friend here and says, Oh, you know, he turns out that the Greeks and you know, the Americans out of similar, you know, sexual proclivities with barnyard animals according to David, according to David. You're also the author of three books, right? First, you know, you can grease that from 2021. And then just, I came out Wait, wait, wait, I want to talk more about that.

How is it? Can I do it really? This is actual proclivities of a cornered animals is that sorry? Oh, no, no, that's my book.

More of a field guide. But anyways, there's a gateway to the stokes that came out about a week ago. And it's a reader of the stokes right and then coming out on Valentine's Day, how to save the worst ancient wisdom for five modern crises. And that's available, not just in hardcovering Kindle, but also audio CD is your is your sterling voice reading the book.

I will be gently lulling listeners off to sleep. Yes, on the on the audio book, as insofar as they are interested in downloading it. How to save the West, I really like the idea that we call how to say the worst. How to save the brought words.

The wrong word. Sorry. So that's incredible. The hubris it takes to title book, how to save the West.

I know it's really shameful. I I'm going to spend the rest of my life apologizing. No, no, I realize, but we're happy to have you also just like Alex and Craig. I mean, you have to what we have a PhD in the classics to another classicist, right?

So classics a Yale and then classics at Harvard or Oxford. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right.

That's right. That's right. That's the PhD at Oxford on ancient Greek music. And that's what turned into your first book from Bloomsbury, right?

That's right. Yes. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. And then the other thing we do to the stokes one is I think any listener of this podcast will probably be interested in that. It's a reader of snow. Like you said, it's got the full text of Aurelius, the meditations.

And then there's a big thesis handbook. And I added in some of my own translations of letters by Seneca and a little fragment from Heerickley's of the country. Our culture translations years. No, the first two are the long, the classic long translations, which were it's a reissue of an older collection, which was introduced by Russell Kirk and the discussion is still in there.

And then yeah, yeah. So the Hebrews, you talk about the Hebrews of the title of the book, how to say the West, the real Hebrews is to bear to appear side by side of Russell Kirk on the cover of a book. No, I thought that was all probably what I'll say. No, no, no.

Can I say a simple question? Like we were in New Zealand, I sounds like from Diagens Allerdas and the book you've got gateway to the soaks. I mean, it sounds like you have more than an academic interest in soaks. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. I think that's right. Everything or what are you talking about? That's my fondness for figs.

Yeah. No, I, I mean, if you're asking, like, am I one of these new fangled modern stoics that you've heard out, like kind of on the model of the Ryan Holiday? I think the answer is basically no, just because I am a Christian. And so I sort of consider that the final word on my like metaphysical commitments.

But I do think and I write about this in the forward that among that sort of when Paul of Tarsus was surveying the Hellenistic philosophical schools as he had to do in order to evangelize the Greeks, it looks to me as a he and also some of the gospel writers found like the most material in stoicism that they could work with out of the other available options, certainly have to re-ism is like most compelling. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, there's this whole universe of just like, there's this whole universe of like actual modern so like r slash stoicism on on Reddit is right huge. Yeah. And not really.

I don't know what those guys are saying. Oh, yeah. Just a YouTuber guy that, uh, do you want to talk about? Not PewDiePie PewDiePie is very into Aristotle.

No, no, it's like your daily stoicism. It's just this guy. And he's like, oh, the daily stoicism. But I, you know, he's like, uh, stoic was his right.

He's like, you know, he's a million subscribers. It's a boulder. Z is it Ryan Holiday? I'll have a good day.

So that's a guy that he was still a lot of books about. But yeah, we're gonna say I was just gonna say that, you know, one thing I think stoicism more than say other sort of ancient velocities does does creep closer to Chris. Yeah. I mean, they both developed under an empire, right?

And pretty impressive empire. And they're both helpful ways. This is productive, obviously, but just on a sort of initial level with helpful ways of coping with not having much control over your life, not having much external freedom. So having to find a kind of internal.

Yeah, that's a cool point. And I think it's definitely it squares as we'll probably get into talking about it squares with the kind of biographies that often get attached to stoicism, which are often, you know, you get the philosopher sold into slavery, the philosopher under Nero is Seneca, you know, having to compel to commit suicide. And I do think that right there is this common thread of, well, fate or providence kind of throws us up and down the human hierarchy. But in the end, we're all children of Zeus, which is obviously has some consonants with and is more distinctive in the ancient world than now when it's become kind of a commonplace, in part because of this, you know, the way that Christianity sort of snow sized us all in a certain sense.

Say more Spencer. Yeah. Okay. Well, so I mean, the other kind of dimension of this, and these things are related, but like the Christian texts that people cite, maybe most often when talking about these parallels is the introduction of the gospel of John, right?

In the beginning was the word with God was God and famously, right? The word is the logos. And this is not identical in important ways with stoic physics and cosmology, in particular, because the the Stoics are if they're not sure materialists, then they're at least corporalist. They think everything is a soul of a body that everything that exists as a body, but they have this important concept that God, Zeus, or logos, or whatever, noose canal, whatever you would call it, is pervaded through the entirety of what is of all creation.

And that it's got terminus, got his go terminus with the universe with the cosmos. And this is in sharp contradiction to the Epicureans, famously, our major rivals, right? So in Epicureans, you've got an endless void and a bunch of atoms that move through it. And they generate all sorts of different worlds, mostly almost entirely without any divine intervention.

So you can see why, like, you know, if you're going to, if you're a Christian evangelist in the first century, and you have to talk to those Greeks and Athens, who nothing but discussing the latest new idea, you know, your sort of cosmology is going to be way, way closer to the stoic physics. I'm not going to be able to find it quickly, but there was this line in the beginning was the mind or something like that, like noose, you want to say, which sounds remarkably like the very first so very opening of John. So noose, not logos, but very similar. I thought there's also the theology.

This is the theology was also really simple. They talked about how there's different aspects of God and different theologies borrow one or the other aspect, but it reminds three aspects. Well, guys, guys, people don't know what we're talking about yet. Oh, sorry.

Okay, so this is a sort of formal man. It reminded me a lot of Christian theology where there's like a list of qualities of God. When you think about it, who here? Well, there is this remarkable passage in Dioges, his layers, just as people to know what we're here to talk about, this biographer of a bunch of different Hellenistic and earlier, as well earlier philosophers.

He's surveying like stoic ideas about God and the cosmos, and he has this remarkable paragraph about how like all the different Greek gods of the Pantheon are actually just different names for the one cosmic mind. And so he's got Zeus because Zden and Greek means to live and he's a lord of life, but he's also called Athena and he's called Hephaicus because he has the power of the refining fire. And I mean, this is like, you see this sometimes in polytheistic, within polytheistic context, like another classic example is in ancient Assyria as the scholars are reflecting on the Near Eastern Pantheon. You do get some texts that sort of say, well, actually, maybe these are all sort of aspects or derivations of like one thought because otherwise you end up with all the problems that you get in the youth of the world.

I mean, the minute you start thinking about polytheism, you do start to raise these questions about like, well, you know, just that means that there's one ultimate good. And if so, like, which God is associated with that good. And if not, then how do we reconcile the existence of all these other people? So it seems like there was a string of that in Stoicism as well.

And you're right, Christianity has various different ways throughout his history of sort of incorporating, of interpreting what was really meant by or what people were sort of seeing their way to half measures in these older and these older. And you know, it's. Yeah, I also read the, maybe this is a good way to transition to the Arctic's lyricist, because I also read the prologue to the whole work just to see how he kind of presents his project. And one of the interesting things he does is he's able to summarize like Persian quote unquote philosophy or any barbarian, the Egyptians, for example, in a matter of like a page or two, right?

And a lot of it is very conventional and and conventionally theological, right? So it's actually, for instance, big count of the Persians reminds you a lot of things you might read about the customs of the Persians in Herodotans and book three of them. Right. So there's, there's, but when it gets to the Greeks, all of a sudden it turns out you need these two massive volumes.

I've got the low right here. You need two massive volumes because there's so much internal disagreement, even in the Zeno. So the Zeno chapters, you know, of, of Sittium has a huge chunk of it is just a summary of stoic doctrine. But then immediately, the end says that was going to all the actual differences and he's going to go through all the various stoics that come come afterwards.

There's something, this, so this kind of reminds me of this monotheism, polytheism thing, but there is something about Greek philosophy or the way the Greeks practice philosophy. You know, we use the term loosely today, we're like, refer to Buddhist philosophy or Muslim philosophy, but the way the Greeks and philosophy is not like this. It was not theologically or doctrinally monolithic, but rather quite diverse and full of tensions and factions. And in a way, that's, that's, you know, Western thought in general, it's like, right?

It's full of all these different, different approaches to the same question. But I was wondering if you just had any reflections, maybe along the lines of this, this difference between the Greeks and the non Greeks or Greeks and barbarians, as the audience understands it, or just what he's up to generally in his enterprise as he announces in the prologue and as it develops afterwards. Yeah, that's really, that's a cool observation. I think, you know, a few different things.

The comparison with the Rochester is really, is really apt and revisiting some of this material. As I was getting ready to talk to you guys, I was reflecting that, you know, the, the worst, what we might say about the worth or interest of some of the more outlandish tales about these philosophers by all. These like the, you know, the virgin birth of Plato, which comes up at one point in D'Arsham's, they are just like, we might say a lot of the same things about those sorts of tales in dioces that we say about them when they come up in Herodotus, namely, well, they don't have historical value of the kind that we would describe hope for from the modern work of history, but they certainly have, you, and we're intended to have, I think, real valuings, like conveying what these people meant to their followers, what sorts of folk tales came up around them. But then, yeah, in this, in this idea of the Greek world over the Greek intellectual world of East, sort of irreducibly plural, I think, you know, whatever you might say about the accuracy or lack thereof of the diocesanist understanding of like, his orastrianism and the kelteans and so forth.

When he turns to the Greeks, he bequeathes to us this division that is still extant, still in use and still has its uses, which is this big kind of geographical division right between the Italian schools and the Ionian schools, the ones that come from from the East from Asia Minor. And there's also two problems and exceptions with that, you know, that categorization, but it does, I think, force us always to reckon with the fact that, yeah, you're not really, I mean, in the kind of Athenian, golden era, you do have the birth of a kind of tradition that you could chart in this neat way from like Socrates to play out to Aristotle. But even there, when you start to look under the skin, you've got these very distinct influences of, you know, the kind of the like, you know, the Militus area, the Militus school, which is like Thales and these enquirers after the first principle of nature, like what's the world made out of, kind of. And then in the Iliatics and in the kind of Italian philosophers, you have a very different, much more kind of abstract and the physical set of questions.

And yeah, these are all sort of funneling into Athens in the fifth century, but they're also developing their own history and Diogenes, Laetres is really sensitive to that. I think it's something that he doesn't always get a lot of credit for. But that's part of the reason for writing a lives at all, right, is to understand that you're not just dealing with these kind of doctrines that float in the air, but you're dealing with people from places who have relationships with one another and whose life stories might actually have something to contribute to understanding why they looked the world the way they did. I think that's really important.

Not ethnically or nationally determined. See, that's the funny thing, right, is while there are these kinds of like schools, and one of the things that's interesting about Zeno is he ends up living in Athens, even though he's not from there. And he's still proud of where he's from, right? So he has that kind of identity.

It's not like the Persians where the Magi all have one view or something like that, or the Egyptians where the Brits all do one thing, right, and have one view. It's on the one hand, distinctively Greek and then remarkably open. I mean, that's part of the mystery of the magic of the Greeks is that they have this kind of, right? So you have these schools that, you know, in Melidas over in Asia Minor or in Italy and in Athens, of course, you know, the Socratic's coming out of there and that spreads from there.

But there are these kind of hometown heroes in a way and their schools. Yeah. But there's immediately there's right controversy, right? I mean, the US soccer player or stuff, first of all, you've already got like NASA disagreements, you know, that emerge there.

So there's something, I don't know, there's something, I think, you know, if you want, you know, there's the accusation that the audience is just kind of throwing a bunch of stuff together, which seems largely true in my opinion. But there is also this strange sort of story of teachers and students and hometowns and stuff that's kind of charming in its way. Can I push that? Yeah.

I'll push that. No, I'll push that. I mean, go ahead. Oh, yeah.

Well, I mean, you could tell maybe to need or pat story, but you could tell a story about the, you know, you look at some of these texts that do come to us from like the major, or the caltean astronomers or even like, you know, some of the kind of mythology, which is also cosmology that we get in like the new myelition, you know, the sort of dynast of war. And it's like, you know, there is certainly a lot of multiplicity there as well, but you do have a sense of centralized control. I mean, so many of those texts are associated in some way or another with like an official state narrative. And of course, in Greece, because you do have this kind of very fractious geography and, you know, set of different political constitutions and so forth.

You're, I think you are getting a kind of a more plural world and more multiplicity. Yeah. You know, I don't know if this is related point. It was just a general observation.

I was going to ask if you consider Diogenes a philosopher in his own right, or if he's just kind of superficial, but the, the, the mere act of writing a book, which understands the totality of philosophy in the world up to his present day is, is itself a kind of a sounding comment on one's prowess. It's like you're able to take in the whole of human thought and in comprehend everything in such a way in your two books. And I didn't really have a comment past that. And I just, well, one, I mean, you know, they're very famous biographers of presidents.

So I mean, one ostensibly could write, I mean, I take the heart of your question, asking, can one actually write a mean autobiography with floss or that one? That's better point. Yeah. So can, or is it like other disciplines where essentially like one could write an ex-lobography of a scientist or a politician or something like this without having to understand the science of politics?

Well, that's good. That's what I put in it. Yeah. I mean, the classic accusation is that Diogenesism is a magpie and he doesn't really have a kind of like working knowledge under the skin knowledge of the doctors he's presenting.

And I agree with you, Alex, I think it was you said, like that's a pretty valid accusation. Like there are some sections even, for instance, in this long treatment of stoicism that come across to me as pretty garbled, you know, the treatment of indifference, for instance, which is a fine grained and difficult aspect of stoic ethics. Like the indifference are the things that, you know, you are, you neither want nor sort of shy away from, but they're also living inherently have no value or so you've got like a kind of a certain confusion there that they then followed on with confusion about how we're exactly supposed to treat them. And so, you know, if what you're doing is you're coming to this text, as many many people have done to extract the sort of doctrines of otherwise unknown philosophers, you're going to have to do a little bit of comparing to other sources, digging around and delicate unpicking.

But that having been said, I mean, I also think like, you know, you know, Audrey has something to offer us as the enthusiastic amateur, like that is actually a worthwhile view of things to have preserved from antiquity, like this guy that is out here writing like distinctly bad and uninspired poems about the lines of these guys. You know, what does he make of them? What does he make of their sort of their philosophy in totality? And yeah, like, how is he able to, to what extent is he able to boil these these philosophies down to well there's physics, there's ethics and there's logic that I like to think this is how it all works.

Yeah, I think I definitely think, you know, it would be bad if this were the only text we had about Greek philosophy, but since it's not, it has value with some. There's one thing I mean, I'm actually, I'm not sure if he's serious, but I'm not because of my first time reading dodges of layers, I've read them for like just catalogs of works by philosophers, just like what are the ancient sources, what they say so on so well, but one of the one of the implicit premises here, which I would have to read more to see if it's sort of consistent is that, and this is something you write about. So maybe just help talk about this, but I have two ways I want to ask the question first, there seems to be the presumption that your philosophy must be manifested in the way you live your life, which seems to me on the surface of things that seems to be that seems, of course, you live your way, you live your life, the way you believe, but you know, the first book that is read was Zenfins memorabilia. And I think one of the things that Zenfins tries to show us in fact is that Socrates' thought was radically different from the way he lived his life, that there was an enormous gulf between what he said and did and what he thought.

So this would see, I'm wondering if this was pushing back against that. So I'm wondering if that's my first question, does it actually presume that? And then just related to that, we don't have biographies of these guys of Socrates from Zenfins and Plato. You get hints of biographical information here and there, which I think is trying to privilege the thought over the life.

And then is it clined? You guys remember Jacob Klein wrote this Aristotle in introduction, which begins, Aristotle lived, pursued philosophy and died. Enough of his life. Yeah, he's quoting how you're right, exactly.

Yeah, but in other words, the life doesn't matter. What matters is the philosophical thinking or something like this. So I realize there's a lot bundled in that questions, I think a serious case can be made. It does matter how you lived and that how you live clearly is reflective of what you think.

Let me throw one more detail on that just before you jump in. Spencer, I just say that. Well, that is true. It's also the case that Zenfins and Plato present the life of Socrates, right?

Especially Plato where you get these stages, right? We're asking different questions come up. But I mean, they show us philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, philosophy going around, talking. You don't get, you don't get any play about like, well, here's what's actually how he's raised.

There was kids, you know, I mean, like it's all just like, you're just who he banned. It's just the little two things actually, but he did not say these sprinkles. You just get these sprinkles to the biker. There's the adodes.

Yeah, sorry. I was thinking about him. That's what I'm talking about. What you guys, you guys don't think he bang down?

Anyways, just a question. Yeah, I think he's easy. Yeah. But let me take an example from Zeno, what I think is really, really a good sort of substance.

Zeno says at one point, he has this rich guy come to his classes, right? And he has him sit down next to all these filthy guys and right and hang out with all these derelicts. Do you remember this? And because he was close.

And then the guy, the guy's like, what are you talking? And so he gets it. That to me taught me more about Zeno's way of thinking and his attitude, philosophical attitude, that anything that came later. I do think you get moments like that.

Sure. That's fair. That's fair. Yeah.

I mean, this is the defenders of the audience, defending in both and defending these terms. And what I would say about this question, generally, is that the more you think about it, the more delicate and difficult question it actually is, which is remarkable, given that everybody has a really, there's like strong and absolutist opinion about it. Like you get the kind of who gives a flying who, well, how the guy lived and the art is what's important or the philosophy is what's important. And then you get the like, no, we must, I mean, we're dealing with this now where we have been, it's like the me too, you're like, how do we separate the art from the artist?

And suddenly we have this with reckoning. And in fact, like we can't watch anything by a flawed human being. And therefore, like we can't watch anything. And so actually, these two things are, you know, so life and thought are delicately interrelated.

I, the piece I said to you guys about Dioges that I wrote, I give the example of the guy that preaches fidelity and she sounds white. He's a hypocrite, but he's not wrong, right? His arguments for being faithful may be absolutely correct. And in fact, you should do what he says and not what he does.

At the same time, in Dioges' layershures, we get a bunch of anecdotes that either flesh out these, like Alex, like you were saying, flesh out the way somebody thinks like that. That's, you know, example is a great one. And these are really intriguing to me. You get these examples of people who like proclaim something for a long time and then basically back off of it when life got in the way.

So one of them is in the Stoics section. And that's Dioges, it's the turncoat. And in what happened to Dioges is that he got like a really bad eye disease and he was unable then to maintain the opinion that pain, physical pain is a matter of indifference. He was like, in fact, a direct and persistent experience with this.

This is actually terrible. Yeah, exactly. This actually sucks. And I can't wish that away or abstract it away.

And you know, I don't think that we have a good evidence to conform or refute that anecdote. But even as a thought experiment, it's a really helpful kind of way of engaging with stoic philosophy. Right. What would you do confronted, you know, can you maintain your indifference in the actual periods of pain?

Or are you just pontificating about from your armchair? And then the other one that I love is in before. And this is a bion of baristhenes, somebody who otherwise doesn't really, like, but merit a lot of mention. But the bion is an atheist or a famous kind of preacher against the gods.

But his death permitted for, you know, amulets and charms to be kind of like waved about him and basically just reneged out of his fear that when he gets to the other side and, you know, some divine justice is going to be visited upon him. And, you know, Dioges is right. Someone that's in terminal homes about this guy. But it really does, I think, you know, as I was revisiting this, I was thinking like, oh, this is like a, you know, compare this with David Hume, right, who famously, like, went to his death bed or at least was reported to God, like unconcerned about the consequences of, of 80s.

And like, just sort of, yes, I, you know, death is nothing to us. And I go, and then I think also about, like, you know, saffillos being a republic, right? Like the closer you get to death, kind of the more these ideas become, they're not playthings, right? Tell me about it, brother.

You take tech though. Yeah. I hear that, I mean, you're about five minutes away. Yeah, seven.

Yeah. Right. Okay. And then this is, you know, I think the philosophers, the wise man doesn't fear has no fear at all.

It says right of death. Well, I'm not so sure. Right. But I just, you want to, you know, just some serious, so much, so small.

We've been playing Spencer's work here. I just want to mention that I did really enjoy your piece on Dajini's Layershows and Antigone, the journal Antigone, your article is called The Philosophical Life, the value of Dajini's Layershows' Biographies, which one can find by Googling Antigone, Spencer Clevin, Layershows should get that pop-up. So Alex has a series one. No, I did.

I actually had a question about Dajini's. I love that moment. I love that moment. And presumably Dajini's, presumably Dajini's did not do it.

He's just separating them all. Well, presumably he did not name himself the turncoat, right? The rest of the show is the ball of the circle. I thought that was revealing.

They just name him Dajini's the ****. Like the guy gave in to, what do you have a toothache? An eye infection, right? You have an eye infection.

Like Stoicism has a nobility behind it, right? And there's this sense that you need to discipline yourself and sort of be able to withdraw from circumstances and take things as they come, right? Dajini's going to do it. They act like this is a massive problem, right?

And so they call me. Like it's a betrayal rather than a weakness. I didn't understand that. It just struck me as a very odd nickname, because I would think that if I built my whole doctrine about being strong against chance and pain and stuff like that, and then my buddy's like, oh, I heard give me some time on all the weather.

I'd be like, you're being such a coward, David. You know, like, and that would be the sort of, I don't know, I don't know if you have thoughts on that, but that moment struck me as odd that they chose the nickname turncoat. Just type it out. You have to wear David for instance, right?

You might and potentially. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, no, this is, I mean, so the thing to which Stoicism still gives its name, right?

Which is this strong will kind of manly fortitude in the face of trials. I mean, unlike the English word epicureanism, the English word Stoicism actually describes something to do with the actual Stoic philosophy. And something I think that we miss about it, if we just kind of stop there is that there's actually a very specific idea about kind of affective ethics behind this notion, which has to do the best way I can put it is like, you're trying to align your feelings, your sort of emotional reactions to things with what you believe to be the real sort of metaphysical truth about them. So like physical pain causes you distress and makes you want to give up or whatever curl up in a heap and wail like David.

But actually, since pain is really, it doesn't actually take us away from virtue, which is the real good of humanity. We should just kind of regard it as like another sensation. And that's where you get this like attachment, just the same attachment that you're supposed to have from like reversals of fortune and stuff like that. So maybe it's something to do, like maybe turncoat is like almost an in-ear for hypocrite or something.

You sort of said one thing, but then when you confronted with the experience, you acted another way rather than it's just a failure of will because it's not quite that. It's like a failure of intellect in some way or a failure to kind of believe in your heart of hearts what your mind is able to know rationally. That's a really good explanation. I have one last thing to say about the life, the question of life, doesn't matter.

One of my favorites, so another thing I love about this text is like it's a Rorschach text or historical attitudes about what philosophy is and what you're supposed to do in people's lives. So up until about 1700, it enjoyed a pretty good reputation. Everybody has always had sort of nippics and criticisms about it that we've aired already. But like, you know, Montana loved Diogenes.

I just thought it was like, I wish we had like a million of these guys because I'm so interested to know how people's lives turned out. Right? How did this work out for them? And Montana himself, in kind of the best tradition of the ancient Vita and of the Diogenes, does kind of make up or falsify these fanciful versions of things that are in Diogenes, they sort of half-miss or whatever.

So if you have an idea about philosophy that it is a way of life in addition to, or that ideas are useful primarily or at least in part because of how they have a guide you're living, then Diogenes is this fantastic resource. If you have a kind of more of a brain and a jar attitude about it, then Diogenes is almost completely worthless or at least requires a great deal of chiseled. And somebody who reverses his opinion about this or at least modifies, is Friedrich Nietzsche, who early in his career writes at length about Diogenes' many failings from the point of view of like hard-nosed German philology, right? As a philosopher, an analytical philosopher, he's garbage.

But then later on in this essay about Schopenhauer and his relationship with Schopenhauer and the kind of personal attachment he felt to German-n philosophy. And the great irony that adds this like the extra layer of complexity is like if anybody is a philosopher to whom you could apply the accusation that your life didn't actually work out in the way that your philosophy lies. It's Friedrich Nietzsche, right? The great philosophy of the Ubermensch, the strong man, we have to just take action and I'm bastardizing each other here, but people have often observed, well actually you were like he spent your life pining after another guy's woman and she just wasn't really into you.

So the delicacy of this is like we both, I think if we think about it, recognize the force of both claims. Like yes, Nietzsche's philosophy remains of enduring and enduring value in richness, even though he kind of went off the rails, but also the fact that he went off the rails, he's like a meaningful data point in understanding and discussing the ultimate use of his ideas in our lives. So I mean, it's complicated. Yeah, you know, I like Diogne's because he confirms all my priors talking about Rorschach tests, you know, Paris bottle puts on makeup and with his book perhaps he was a trans, which I've always suspected people push back on me in the academic world Spencer, but you know today, are you kidding?

No, no, like Duke University Press, you got to get on. I mean, anybody has anybody done this yet? Like trans and sta, I think that's got to be like the title of your next book. I don't appreciate this laughter about a group that suffers quite a bit, but most of the others always been dead for 25 years.

What are you talking about? Can I pick up on something you said, Spencer, that the Greg Greg will really, I think Greg will have something at this. Philosophy is always in the danger of self forgetting, right? Getting caught in systematic thinking is a more modern version or just say everything's water and then falling in a well with the aliens purportedly did, right?

Is this danger that when you're, you know, one of the things, all philosophy involves thinking about the nature of thinking and the nature of, you know, logic of the world and all that sort of stuff. When you do that reflecting, there's the danger that your reflection on yourself makes yourself abstract and then loses your grounds in the human world and, you know, to take the, you know, everybody knows the Cicero line, but this idea that Socrates took it down from the heavens and prided down to earth and taught it to philosophy about human life. One way to think about what Deogenes is onto in an amateurish way, but in a real way, as I think you rightly point out, is that he's saying, no, sometimes philosophy is shown in the actual practice of the way you live in your life. How well you're able to handle complex human affairs, because that's part of the whole of things.

And it's a part that you ought to understand and be able to manage in a competent way to the degree that a human being can't, right? And you see this even with soccer, Socrates gets put to death. And so there's, you can point the finger, but it seems like he provokes it. He seems like he has an objective in mind.

It seems like Socrates is very deliberate about what conversations he does and does not have, how far he's willing to push the argument and when he disengages, when he wants to really push buttons and how he navigates these situations that shows an adeptness in the human things that most politicians would be lucky to have a shred of, right? Just that sort of perception of where a conversation, even at the beginning is going to go, you can see Socrates as sometimes 300 pages ahead with, for example, glaucomon and itemantis. I do think what you're getting at is in a way that sense that as you're trying to understand the whole of things, don't forget this little but all important part, human beings and the world in which they live, the political community. Yeah, yeah.

Like don't abstract your way out of reality. I mean, this is not for nothing, but when you start to think about these things, it naturally occurs to you to think about the difference between Plato and Aristotle when it comes to literary form, right? I mean, I take the point that Plato's not writing a life of Socrates by any stretch of the imagination. We're not dealing with biography and the dialogues, but we're obviously dealing with somebody who has some idea expressed in his comments on writing.

It was some idea that like, to convey a philosophy you need more than a list of precepts or even a logical syllogism, that there's something embodied or enacted about philosophies that is essential, but you can't lose sight of it. And I have no way like laying at Aristotle's feet, the turn away from that insight or forgetting of that insight. But I do think that the endoxic method as Aristotle practices it does end you up kind of laying out these names next to one another and tacked onto each name is like a little doctrine. And with some exceptions, you don't really get the flavor of this whole kind of integrated system of thought because what you're getting is Aristotle's system.

There's values to both approaches, but I do think that in the same way that diogenes can be usedfully compared with Herodotus, I think it'd be usedfully compared with Playo and contrasted to Aristotle. It's okay. I'll mention this a log on trying to revisit now at Alex's product. But one of the things I think that this maybe I wasn't clear earlier, one of the things that seems to deny to me is the kind of esotericism or the kind of idea that Socrates is actually quite open about his thought.

So here using as an example, in Xenophon's symposium, Xenophon implies that Socrates had a little too much to drink and starts letting some things slip that he shouldn't about his way of life. So in other words, there were things about his way. In other words, if you saw the way that he lived his life, you might not know that he was you might not understand what he's like because he hides certain things about his way of life from ordinary view. So for example, he still doesn't have natural science.

He's a little drunk. He says, isn't it weird that oil burns and water puts stuff out? That's kind of weird. Perhaps a silly example, but the idea there is that I don't know how better to say this, but the things that these biographies seem to take what these philosophers say at face value, not thinking that, let's take your example of the guy who professes value, you should not commit adultery.

That could be something that McBrayer says. So McBrayer, we caught you last week in the barn with five animals. You weren't married to any of them. I would say, and there's the claim of hypocrisy on the one hand.

There could be some bifurcation in my own mind. This is not a teaching that should be taught. It actually is good that people don't commit adultery. Also to be honest, ultimately breaks down the last analysis, but that's very complicated.

We can't explain that to people. Is that in the other? And so therefore, yeah. Totally.

No, no, I think you raised a point that vexes me a lot just in private meditations. In an American context, when we start having political conversations, it's like because of the way our regime is structured to have one rule for everybody. Right. And there are some kind of moral questions that actually are best answered by site-specific rules for individual community.

Yeah, exactly. And those are as opposed to be esoteric teachings or they destroy the regime. They destroy the public. And there is one hint of this in the zero section that is worth thinking about here, and that's Zeno's Republic.

Because Dajne tells us that Zeno's Republic is a little bit too racy, basically. He keeps it under wraps. And he gives us an account after he gives us an account of Zeno's death, which I think it's a long introduction, sort of says this is like a subtle way of not ignoring it, but minimizing it or sort of passing over, drawing a tender veil over it. And we get that the soaks, he claims later on, this is a good example of Dajne's not really being the sharpest thinker on these matters.

We later get this claim that so-to-stick that all wives should be held in common. And of course, this is the Republic. The Republic. It's just like the only one tech.

The source for this is actually the guy with the voice. We should just trade. We should have positive. You know what's a great idea?

Everybody's like, what the hell? But you know, I mean, look, you get Descartes in his discourse on Method, I think, talks about how he was so shocked and alarmed by what happened between Galileo and Pope Urban that he just didn't publish these treatises that he had written, these vast reasons on man and on lights, right? And then the treatise on light, indeed, it's very sort of David Hume kind of gesture when Hume puts all his arguments into Edichurus' mouth. It's couch and it's like, if we could imagine another universe, very like ours, but not ours, where the earth revolves around the sun.

And so, yeah, I mean, we can see that philosophers do this for all sorts of reasons. It's a well-known, sprousy, and teaching. And I think we can find them doing it in diogenes as well, but I don't think the diogenes, I mean, the very thing that we don't get from the diogenes that we might like more of depending on our proclivities is like reflection on that phenomenon. You have to kind of read it into the text.

I wonder, I mean, look, Diogenes has this like reputation about him where it's just a collection. And when I read it, I'm like, okay, say number 57, that's like mildly humorous and okay, moving along. Oh, he was kind of doughy. We find out.

But there's a lot of information. There's a hundred pages or whatever of this life. I don't think any of us sorted through it carefully, right? It might be that there are problems inherent in the surface of this text that are also at the heart of things, right?

I said that again, I'm not sure I'm not confident that this might not. This may be very serious stuff. We haven't done the homework, right? I mean, I think it's great that you homed in on the adult or things.

That's exactly the one you think that we react to that with moral of program. But one could craft an entirely different narrative that explains all the data. Is there something else going on with with Zeno? I don't know.

I mean, Spencer, you said you wanted to talk about this moment about him occasionally having a fluke girl over to keep up appearances. But then there's also the stuff about him being about against pleasure, but he was also kind of blubbery, right? A little bit. So there are some contradictions between his teaching and his doing that are not negligible.

I wonder, I wonder, I don't know what you guys mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, right. I mean, like, there is in fact, in the summary of so it doctrines, there is a mention of this very issue to the effect that like so it's not your life and your philosophy should align, should go here.

And you're right, like we could pick out all sorts of moments where Zeno at least, you know, he doesn't accept imitations to parties because he's a little bit like sort of weird looking or connect and not great athlete. He likes to drink, right? And when he drinks, he sort of loses control of his tongue a little bit. So in that way, he doesn't pour something exactly to the picture of the ideal stage.

You know, there is a matter I think he would literally taste. What commentators, what commenters typically say about this is like the diogenes has a kind of dry wit that he sometimes gives us like a little wink. And you know, your mileage might vary. I think I'm no expert on this text, but I think that that's true.

I think like we're supposed to, we're invited at least to hold up this life through the doctrines, even at points where it's not expressly said, you know, and that didn't quite conform with what he said in the show or whatever. Could you name a, I mean, do you have anybody in mind who does good scholarship on dodges? You mentioned a couple of times. Commentators, let's wink him back that I don't have anybody at hand.

But just a question I was thinking of. No. There's an addition in the critical edition of the original text that Cambridge put out on to go with by T.S. on a Doran.

I think that's right. And off the top of my head, I mean, the introduction in this mentioned edition by James Miller is really good. Okay. But yeah, you should like maybe I'll send you guys some like questions or something.

Yeah, for sure. I have two more steps and questions. I don't know how much time we're doing on time, but one is, I'll ask both of them, you can answer whichever you like. One is that there's this great emphasis on the serious or earnest human beings with dioces and Greek.

And in the air, so I think that that's the gentleman. It's a morally serious person. And I think in Aristotle, just because this is not episode and yourself, the theoretical man is a superior type to the more serious man. So one question here is it seems like what Dijan is saying is the case for Zeno and the other Stoics is that the morally serious man is the highest type.

And I even noticed sometimes they are identified nearly. And I think this is related. My second question is I thought I saw a conflation of the beautiful and the good in this text. There was no definite article in front of the beautiful, the one place I highlighted.

It was the good is beautiful. So maybe that's not a complete identity. But it seemed like that was direction was tending, whereas I see more attention between the beautiful and played over example where Aristotle and those might not be interconnected. But the primacy of the morally serious man being on the long end and then the identity of the good in the old.

Is that a common feature of Stoicism? I mean, either one both sides. I mean, the unity of the virtues is a very pronounced, most of the reason we get it in Christ's we get it in here in the audience. And you can figure it in various different ways.

And many have, right? I mean, this is something that long has written about in others as well. You can either say that what this means is, once you grab hold of one of the virtues, it's kind of unraveling a thread in its half as read and you kind of grab all the others. But you can also say that, you know, it's highest form, each implies all of the others.

And they certainly say, or Diology certainly says that when you attain one, you never attain one virtue without getting the others thrown in, at least at its highest. I think one of the difficulties with Stoicism is because it urges this sort of not with you all, but it kind of imperviousness to chance it prizes courage, I think quite a bit. Obviously, there's virtues that have existed before cardinal virtues. I think courage because they're focused so much on pain, right?

That's Diogese's turncoast problem. But I think courage becomes extremely important. And therefore, the noble and the good have to be collapsed in a very fundamental way. Whereas Plato and Aristotle, you know, are open like you might just have a life, right?

And just like you can deal about it. But for that reason, I think they're more open to the problems of more virtue, right? Or more virtue doesn't have to be as fundamental for them. That's mine.

Yeah. So there are some there are some fragments. And it's going to escape me to give you chapter in verse here and now. But since the seat that since I will cite myself here and point you to an essay I wrote in the Massanet a while back about Diogese's Babylon, who's another Stoic scholar.

And there are citations in that about this idea that, you know, beauty is a kind of symmetry. And actually, symmetry is a principle that underlies all sorts of excellences, all sorts of art. And I think that this is implied in a certain sense, not only by the kind of unity of virtues, but by corporalism. You know, like there's less space room to maneuver away from the root facts of the physical world if there is no kind of vertical dimension into the realm of the forms or the realm of the incorporeal or whatever.

So it's not impossible, but it's much harder in that framework to deny that, you know, physical excellence, let's say, for instance, and beauty more generally has some inherent direct connection to excellence full stop, including moral excellence. And so maybe that's something to be made out of that. I think that, like, you know, if everything is a body, then the beauty of bodies must typify in some way that the beauty is every. A couple of those references for this, but I also the serious man, if you're interested in chapters one 18 and one 23, but it was peppered throughout there at the heart.

It's on page two 22 and two 28 in the low. So chapter one, again, the good or genuinely in earnest or more serious and vigilant for their own improvements. And then in two 29, my translation says, nor yet they go on to say, well, the wise man live in solitude, or he is naturally made for society in action, but the Greek actually, it's not the wise man, but the Sudeios. So there seems to be some kind of identity between the serious human being and the good or the wise man.

And I only point that out because I think that there's a gap between the serious man and the wise man in Aristotle. But I just think this is part of the elevation of world virtue as the most highest thing. Yeah, that seems, that seems right to me. I'm looking at the big rig to see if I can make any more interesting.

Yeah, I could really make that. I mean, I got a couple hours to do some looking tonight. I didn't make a joke, but it just struck me as, okay, this is evidence that I don't know. I mean, to Alice's point about whether or not, and he's writing this sort of not entirely straightforward manner, this could be a critique.

If this is right, if there's some, I'd have to look at the air cell, the life of air cell, too, to see. So there is some speculation in the scholar literature about whether the audience there is just an epicurean and so get out of here. Oh, yeah. Like, well, cool.

Long, so, so, okay. So here's how this works very briefly is like this life that we're reading on this episode, if you take it along with the kind of summary of so a doctor and as people do count that as part of, you know, it's like, that's the longest life. I don't remember reading it than being this long. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's kind of cheating because he says, like, because, you know, it was the founder of this school, let's just summarize, like, the whole thing now. And then you get a bunch of precipice and you get a bunch of cicadas, so I got to just Babylon and sort of work. But the second longest is epicureus.

And the epicureus life, which kind of occupies the whole section on epicureanism because there aren't, like, a lot of, you know, this is before, well, you know, there just aren't a lot of notable, like, disciples of epicureus that you can kind of like turn to. But it begins with a laundry list of the accusations that were made against epicureus in antiquity, specifically with his way of life, because like, he was a hedonist, that he slept with everything that moved, that he was just a total deviant. That his philosophy was kind of a cover for the vaudry. And then Diogenes inserts himself into this.

But those people are, those people are lost their minds. And this is a total corruption of what Epicureus actually believed. And then we get these three long letters, which are, you know, major sources for Epicureus and thought even though passages of him that are not interpolated in support. So, I mean, because of the primacy of that kind of whole section, people have so speculated maybe maybe he was an Epicureus in himself, or he thought this was basic, but that's the question is basically, and specific as to which is defensive Epicureus life, which is which is kind of interesting.

So if that's the case, then like, even though he's very positive towards socialism, even though in Book 7, he says, you know, he phrases, you know, for learning from multiple teachers and exploring multiple different kinds of goals of thought, it would fit if he wasn't Epicureus, and Epicureus, he would get in a couple of days of that sort of system as well. Well, at this point, I think we should transition to the biography of a different philosopher, different major thinker Spencer Clayton. We have guests on the show, we like to ask them about their own lives. Like, how did you first become interested in this thing?

Is it something you were nursed from the womb listening, been reading these kinds of things? Or was there a moment in junior high school college? How did you know that the great books and the classics were something that you'd introduce to me, teachers that were informative for you? What was all your education, just toogwash?

And you know, is that new sacred podcast that turns you on to the series intellectual life? Whatever. If you prefer, just give us 50 of your kind of like lukewarm, witty, witty remarks. That would be all true.

You want to get by it. So if you can, if you feel comfortable or free, just tell us a little about your own intellectual journey as well. Well, actually until the age of about 28, I was just wandering in back alleys with a paper bag containing a handle of vodka until I met this guy called David Barr, picking up off the street and one of my vendors. No, I was very, very lucky that I went to a high school that required one year of Latin.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, required one year of Latin. And after that, you could go learn, you know, French, you know, whatever, whatever other useless mongrel tongue. But the the year of Latin, for me, at least in my recollection, is like a formative transformative moment. I did have two Latin teachers shout out to Meghis Erandersson and Meghis Erhikak, both who, you know, most people that I know who got into class, at some point have that like real fire rans teacher that just liked your hair on fire.

and I had two, I was really, really lucky with that. There was something just to me that I've always felt the only way I can describe the quality of richness in the great texts and a childlike wonderment that you might be able to read them in their original language. I think it's bonkers that we still know how to read, Latin and Greek, let alone like Sumerian and Acadia. These things are to me just they never stop being miracles.

I think Mary B. Ritkel's like a face-to-face encounter when he first read a text in its original language and never gone over that. I'm still on over it. That's kind of what Erry B.

Threw High School and College. I had this cock-me-me idea that I was going to be an actor for most of my childhood. I thought of this as something that was just a great passion of mine, but I really wanted to move to Dork and tread the floorboards. Naturally, now I hold a much more sober opinion that we ought to class actors among prostitutes and other degenerates.

At the time, I was very eager to get on stage. I went through a year in college. I was in the Wittenproof, which is a singing group where you take a year off and travel the world and sing, which was just incredible. That's an awesome...

You know, about that, Greg. It's a really famous thing at Yale. It's the... Cole Porter was in Wittenproof, so that's the...

He was the same, Greg. Cole Porter? No, just trying to educate. He was the talent educator.

Oh, right. Greg doesn't know about it unless it's an ox or an... Real America. Yeah, so that year was very instructive and beautiful in a lot of ways.

In one way, it made me realize that actually, when people ask me younger listeners to my podcast, or whatever, ask me, like, how do I pick what to do? I'd say, like, hey, it's interesting to me even when it's not going well or you're not having success. Because I loved and still loved the morning, singing, acting, whatever. But I don't actually derive joy from just hanging the lights, learning the lines, laying apart in the chorus, whatever.

And what I noticed during that year was, I loved pouring over old books and writing essays about them even when I thought nobody would read them, even when the library was empty. And that's when I figured it out. Oh, this is the thing. You'll be happy your whole life to do this and not.

So that's what led me to grad school. I had missed all of the American deadlines for grad school, so I didn't apply to any American schools, ended up at Oxford. I thought I would just do a master's in the kind of across the pond, but fell so in love with walking through the oxonian fields that I stayed on in my vacation there. And that's when David Barr picked me up on the street.

I don't want to be a fan of teachers that really stand out and your education is having helped shave your mind or either directly, like, you know, professor, someone's over indirectly, like, Russell Kirk, for example, or other people who are plume or somebody else you shamed at Yale. Well, I mean, at Yale, I had a professor, Andrew Johnson, who was the sort of new young Roman history professor who kind of picked me up at this particular moment where I was realizing people at grad school. And so he was very influential as a mentor. But, you know, I had a supervisor, an excellent graduate supervisor, Armand Dengueur, who was, you know, it wasn't his, you know, one of the only people you can go to if you want to get really solid scholarship on Greek music.

And what I was really liberating for me about Armand was that he was obviously a serious scholar, but he wore his leg very likely and was ashamed to do like public racing work, which obviously has been a central part of my life as well. And I think like, you know, the temptation is to want to just say face academics have this thing that they do that we do, I guess, that kind of where we complain that nobody listens to us, nobody's going to do our work. But don't try. And we jumped on people's throats when they do try because they've always simplified their missing things and whatever.

And Armand just had no time for any of that. And that was, has no time to talk about him like, he's dead, he's still very much alive and working, but like, he has no time for any of that. And that really was inspiring for me as a matter of method. Very cool.

He's on Twitter and interactive with it. He is out there. He's facing us, Socrates in love. Well, lightning round gentlemen.

Yeah, his best way. This is Greg's portion of the it's my contribution as in addition to being the straight guy on the show in the butt of every joke. I get to ask the lightning round questions. We all have our roles in life Spencer.

I feel like it's just straight facts. But, you know, see, fair enough. All right, who's your favorite philosopher? Oh, golly.

I don't know him. Oh, heres a little. Heres a very good. Have you, lightning round question.

Have you read Al for always the big book of music? Yes. Yes, I have. Did you ever interact with the word?

Yeah, I think I emailed with him. Maybe I'm just remembering this. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Second question. Second question.

What is your favorite work of philosophy? The Tameis. Oh, wow. We should do that.

Third, we should not say that. Oh, don't you read that part. You can just talk about hot dogs and yell and stuff. It's fine.

You have to read it. Favorite non-philosopher writer? Man, these are hard. He's Greg McBrayer.

He's not. It just means he's gonna write at the moment. Okay. I'm gonna do really badly here.

I'm reading Ed Wumbet and symbolism of the lead right now. He does kind of slap. Oh, I guess it's gotta be C.S. Lewis.

He's not really a philosopher. He's not really a philosopher. He's C.S. Lewis.

Oh, that's fine. Good. C.S. Lewis.

All right. Only one more favorite question. Favorite work of literature? Again, changes with the day, the day, the time, brother's care, and so.

Thank you. My favorite. We've talked about this. That has to be, I think that's the answer we get most on the show.

Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Have you ever had any nicknames?

Spencer? Yes, I have. Only a few of you have them are appropriate for. Well, he has hit us.

I use any other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.