You've read the books. You know what Marcus Aurelius would do. But when life gets hard, the philosophy disappears. This podcast is for people who want to close the gap between knowing Stoicism and actually living it. New episodes weekly. Start with the free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: https://www.stoicchallenge.co/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=show-description&utm_content=global
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
9:53
Modern Stoicism gets sold mostly as resilience and acceptance. But I wanted to ask the obvious follow-up: can it actually make life more joyful? Not just calmer, but richer in awe, laughter, the good stuff.
I put that to Donald Robertson. This is the first in a series where I pick his brain on the Stoic ideas I keep wrestling with.
My favorite Stoicism writer is Donald Robertson. He wrote books like Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, and more recently Verissimus, which is a graphic novel about the life of Marcus Aurelius. I am creating a new series of Stoic lessons where I feature a particular insight from Donald on a theme in Stoicism that I find important. Stoicism often gets a bad rap about being this philosophy or way of thinking that helps us to be resilient and tough. But when it comes to feelings of happiness and joy and awe, many of us might believe that we should turn to other approaches for living a good life. But is this fair to say can Stoicism actually help us live a more joyful life? Let's see what Donald said.
SPEAKER_01
If someone has already done a certain amount of work to kind of negate typical negative emotions, let's just say like uh melancholy, anxiety, things like this, maybe they feel like a sense of stability in their emotional life, but they would like to experience more joy and you know and laughter and and enthusiasm and wonder. Is there a a place for this in Stoicism and how might they access it using Stoicism?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think there's a way of reframing Stoicism that makes it a philosophy of love and joy. Um that would shock people. I've said that before and people thought I was joking. No, like totally I don't joke about things like this. Like, I'm deadly serious. It's got the word love in the name. Like we call it philosophy. Like it's more obvious if you speak Greek. Like it means love of wisdom. Like, they're not joking. Like they in in joy is bound up with uh with love in the philosophy. Like, you know, when you I think in the Greek it's more obvious actually. In the translation, somehow the way that we translate some of the terms kind of obscures the role that positive emotions play in Stoic philosophy a little bit, it gets a bit a little bit lost in translation. Um but for sure Marcus Aurelius has a systematic model of how to cultivate joy, believe it or not. As Pierre Hadot points out, in the meditations there's um it's a highly structured text in some ways. Like I remember talking to people in the past and they said meditations is not systematic, it's just a bunch of random musings. No, it's like really structured, and some not in terms of the structure of the chapters, but he has this model in mind that Hado talks a lot about, where he says there's kind of like a three-four, a threefold or a fourfold um classification that he uses over and over and over again. So the four cardinal virtues are these kind of three levels of relationship. So this goes back, I think, to the earliest Stoics like Xeno and Cleanthes and Chrysopus. They think we have a relationship with ourselves, we have a relationship with uh God or the cosmos as a whole. So the Stoics look the Stoics are pantheists, so those are the same thing. Like God, stroke, the universe, like like everything, like the totality of things we relate to. Um, and then we also have a relationship with the rest of mankind. Like so we they thought thought of it in terms of these kind of like three levels. And Marcus Aurelius has uh a systematic model for cultivating joy. So he thinks we should find joy in our relationship with ourself by focusing on and celebrating. He says the way to do that is we have to learn to cherish what's healthiest in our own character. So we have to change our values so that what we we we really celebrate and we really prize our own flourishing, basically, and and then we create this kind of cybernetic loop or whatever, whereby you know the thing that we we enjoy the most is the thing that's healthiest for us, like i.e., we have to celebrate virtue, like you know, because the Stoics believe virtue is our optimum state, like to virtue is just the life of reason, it's just us reaching our potential. Like so a man who really takes pride in uh achieving wisdom, like, and takes time to really contemplate that and praise himself for it, is going to be somebody that's kind of stays on the right path more in life. And and we can take pleasure in that. We can get, I guess you would one of the main criticisms that Christians made of the Stoics was they thought that they indulged in pride because they didn't focus enough on great the grace of God and salvation being due to God's kindness and generosity or grace or whatever they thought we were responsible for our own salvation. Um and that but actually most today like we we we we've come back round to that, like we place more emphasis on personal responsibility than the early Christians did, and and so we're back kind of where the Stoics were. But the Stoics think if you take responsibility for your own well-being, and that's the most important thing to you, then what does it mean to succeed? What does it mean to sense that you're making progress? You'd feel something, for want of a better word, you you'd experience some kind of pride or satisfaction or self-respect or self-esteem or something like that, right? Like you'd be looking at yourself, going, This is what it's all about, buddy. Like, you know, I'm I'm making some kind of progress. I'm trying, I'm making an effort, like, you know, I'm working on myself and I'm getting a little bit better every day. That's the main thing to me, like, and therefore I'm it it's what gives me a sense of satisfaction when I look in the mirror each day, like I think I'm a better person than I was yesterday. That's so that's the source of joy for the stories. And they think that's the number one, that's the main thing. We have to recalibrate so that we're experiencing joy in our own self-improvement, basically. The second one is that we how do we do this? We do it in part by modelling uh virtue that we perceive in other people. So we surround ourselves with the right people. Um, Seneca uh actually, I don't know if Seneca really said this, but it's often attributed to Seneca the this Latin saying, if you lay down with dogs, you'll get up with fleas. So the the Stoics say, you know, you have you have to try and keep good company, like you know, seek out role models, people that you you find inspirational in life and that you can learn from. Um and uh so Marcus Aurelius does this in Book One of the Meditations. The whole of Book One of the Meditations is an exercise in joy. He literally describes that later in the book. He says, in order to gladden your heart, reflect on the virtues of others. He says that, he explains that's what he's doing. Book one, you see him actually doing it. So he's this is an exercise in joy. He's rejoicing, he's thinking, what are the things that I really admire about my adoptive father? And he's training himself to take pleasure in contemplating the the best in other people because he thinks this is a very this is a healthy joy. Like if you're the sort of person that really, you know, can it can genuinely sincerely admire other people for their wisdom, then that's going to benefit you. Like it's a very healthy philosophy of life to have. And so that's in terms of our relationship with others. In relationship with the cosmos as a whole, for the Stoics it has to do with accepting our fate. And basically, uh, Marcus talks about this in terms of training and gratitude. He says something, uh, I think this is worth kind of explaining because to me it's one of the most curious and profound things that he says. Marcus says that normally people imagine absent things as if they were present and they desire them. So you think, I don't have a Ferrari, but it'd be really cool if I had one. And Marcus says this causes craving and pain. So you're imagining what it'd be like to have something that you don't have, and it causes a sense of kind of longing or craving that's uh painful. And it's maladaptive as well, because you're responding to something imaginary rather than like responding uh to your real situation. It it's not and it causes you to devalue what you currently have, so it's a kind of unhealthy way of doing things. And he says if you do the opposite and you imagine present things as if they were absent, the emotion that you cultivate is gratitude. So I'm you know, I this sounds ridiculous, right? But one of my favourite things is to imagine that I don't have a roof in my house. Like when it's snowing in Canada, and I think, geez man, you know, like a few hundred years ago, people were living in little shacks reading the Bible by candlelight in Canada in the winter, what was that like? They must have been freezing, like, you know. And I'm like, so look, we've got the internet now and microwave ovens and stuff. Like, so to experience gratitude for simple things that you take for having a roof over your head, having double glazing and stuff, having food any food at all, like it's uh a much healthier um attitude to adopt Marcus thinks um so this is the the joy that we pot the healthy joy that we can potentially get from our material environment, uh from our the fate that befalls us from the external universe. So there's ways of getting healthy joy from observing ourselves, from observing other people, and from observing external events. There's a whole system of joy in stoicism.
