A Stoic Life: Real-world Applications of Stoic Principles with Donald Robertson

Donald Robertson describes Stoicism as "a kind of psychological toolbox", full of strategies for handling anxiety, anger and pain, and that framing runs through this whole conversation. We trace the history of the philosophy and pull practical use out of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca rather than treating them as museum pieces.

One note: I originally recorded this a few years ago for the HighExistence podcast and never shared it here, so it is new to the Stoic Handbook feed. We work through some of the key Stoic texts and how to actually apply them in daily life, which is the part that tends to get skipped.

Donald Robertson's courses: learn.donaldrobertson.name

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Donald's books: on Amazon

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The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Welcome, fellow Stoics. A while back I had the pleasure of speaking with Donald Robertson. Donald is one of my favorite Stoicism writers. He is the author of Verissimus, a graphic novel about the life of Marcus Aurelius, Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. He's currently working on a book about Socrates, and I generally recommend read everything written by Donald Robertson, and you can't go far wrong. Donald also has a background as a clinical psychologist with expertise in cognitive behavioral therapy. This episode was originally published on the High Existence podcast, but this is going to be the first time I've ever shared it with a stoic handbook audience. In the episode, you'll get a fantastic introduction to ancient philosophy and stoicism. We'll talk about how to read the key Stoic texts, the relationship between therapy and stoicism, as well as tons of personal recommendations of how to apply Stoicism to your daily life. Wishing you a great day, and I hope you enjoy the episode. Okay, so you've just written you've written a few books, but your most recent book is How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. So I want to start here with like a specific question. Then the specific question is why did you uh why did you personally want to write this book? Why were you passionate about spending the time writing this book? And the the second more general question is why would someone want to think like Marcus Aurelius? Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Cool. So those are both very good questions. And the the reason why I wanted to write this book in particular is I guess there's two parts to it. I mean, one is that I've been involved with Stoicism for about 20 years now, I think. Um so there's a long backstory to my involvement with Stoicism personally and in my work and my previous writing about it, and also my involvement with what's now called the Modern Stoicism Organization, which is a non-profit organization run by a multidisciplinary team of volunteers that was founded in 2012, and I'm one of the founding members of that organization. So there's all that side of it. And then why specifically did I write this rather than, for example, just another kind of general introduction to Stoicism? Well, I'd already written um a couple of books on Stoicism and I'd written a general self-help introduction to the subject, and there are a bunch of books like that that came out recently. So I wanted to write something different. I didn't think there was any point reinventing the wheel. And I I felt that from my experience of teaching people about stoicism, they there are certain typical misconceptions that people have or stumbling points. So, for example, many people confuse Stoicism with the an uppercase S, the Greek school of philosophy, with lowercase stoicism, the personality trait or coping style, which kind of means being unemotional or just kind of being tough-minded or something. And so sometimes people think stoics are kind of unemotional, and they have a kind of simplistic view of what it would mean to be stoic, because they confuse these two words basically. So that's fairly common. And I I realize that often we can get around some of the misconceptions by pointing at examples of real people who were real Stoics and using them as role models, as it were, and talking about how they actually applied it in practice. And then you get to put a human face on stoicism and you get a kind of more rounded and more complete picture of what it actually means. And also for many people it's much more engaging to hear anecdotes and stories about historical figures rather than just to be kind of lectured on the theory, as it were. And uh, you know, I looked around for a good example for the Stoics. Their supreme role model was Socrates actually, um, and to some extent Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, but we don't know that much about Zeno. And the Stoic we know most about, without a shadow of doubt, the most famous Stoic is Marcus Aurelius, because he was a Roman Emperor, so we have several surviving Roman histories that describe his reign, and we have his book The Meditations, which gives us some pers insights into his own personal uh coping style, and uh he talks, for example, in the first book of the Meditations a lot about his relationships with his family and teachers. So we can kind of reconstruct the picture of Marcus Aurelius' life, and I wanted to tell in parallel or intertwined the external story of his reign and his actions uh as Roman Emperor and the internal story of his journey and personal development and coping style as a Stoic philosopher, um, through which we know mainly through his writings and the meditations, and to kind of weave these two things more closely together. So I I thought Marcus Aurelius uh is very popular, like he's he's the best-known stoic uh among people that are interested in the subject today, and it makes for a kind of engaging story, it's easy to portray stoicism in this way. And the other reason I chose to do that is that I have a daughter who was five years old, she's now seven. Uh she was five when I started working on this, and she loves Greek mythology, and I told her a lot of stories, and when I ran out of stories from Greek mythology, I started to tell her stories about Greek philosophy, and she loves Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic. Incidentally, we mainly know about Diogenes the Cynic through anecdotes about his life. Uh he has no surviving writings. So there are Greek philosophers who we we know primarily through anecdotes, and there are lots of anecdotes about them. And so my little girl Poppy was very interested in these stories, and I realised that's one way that philosophy was communicated in the ancient world, and I thought if it's good enough for her and she finds it relatable in this way, then for adults as well, maybe telling the story about uh Marcus Aurelius and also some anecdotes about Socrates and Diogenes and the figures that inspired Marcus would be a a different way of communicating the philosophy and helping people to understand it. So I think maybe that's a bit long-winded, but hopefully that's a good answer to your first question.

unknown 6:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

And then remind me, what was the second question again?

SPEAKER_00 6:38

So the the second question was like in a general sense, why would someone want to think more like Marcus Aurelius?

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Why would somebody want to think more like Marcus Aurelius? And I suppose that's like asking why would somebody want to think like a Stoic? Because you know, everything we know about Marcus' in our life comes from his writings, The Meditations, where he's very much enacting and applying Stoic philosophy. And Stoic philosophy you could say is a kind of in some ways was a sort of resurgence and a condensation of the Socratic tradition. So the Stoics would say to think like a Stoic, to a large extent, is kind of like thinking like Socrates as well. And they would say that what they were trying to do was encapture practical wisdom of the form embodied by Socrates, and that this is the key to fulfilment and also to a kind of happiness. So for them it's kind of an odd question because they think they're just describing the optimum state of mind for a human being, and also a state of that for them was synonymous with mental health. They thought if you think like Socrates and you uh attain the state of enlightenment or practical wisdom, you'll also learn to master your desires and your emotions and become more emotionally healthy and more uh uh better able to function and flourish in life as a result. So it's a recipe for mental health and fulfillment, uh a kind of self-help philosophy, if you like.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

And like you've you've been a practicing psychotherapist, right, for like many years?

SPEAKER_01 8:10

Yes, uh most of my adult life, really, as soon as I left university, it was unusual actually. I became a psychotherapist at a kind of slightly younger age than normal. Um, in fact, I had to get exemption from the the school that I uh initially trained with had an age limit. I think it was maybe 25, and I started training when I was 23 or 24 or something. Um, and you know, I was able to do that in part because initially I worked as a schools counsellor and for a youth project in South London. So even though I was kind of in my mid-20s, I was working with mainly teenagers as my clients initially, and then I in London I had a clinic for many years in Harley Street doing psychotherapy, and I became a trainer of psychotherapists and a supervisor as well, and began writing and lecturing and speaking at conferences and stuff. And uh, since I immigrated to Canada uh about uh five years ago now, though, I've mainly been writing and uh uh and doing training, uh primarily online training. I do a lot of e-learning-based stuff as well.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

And did you get a chance to um incorporate stoicism, stoic thought into your psychotherapy practice?

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Yeah, um, because I mainly practice cognitive behavioral therapy, which is inspired by stoicism originally, anyway. So Albert Ellis in the 1950s was the pioneer of cognitive therapy. Uh he called his approach rational emotive behavior therapy, and Ellis had read the Stoics, and he was originally a psychoanalytic therapist, but he became disillusioned with that, like a lot of people around that time, and he decided to kind of start again from scratch and reinvent his whole therapeutic approach. And he did that by drawing to a large extent upon the Stoics. And in fact, Ellis used to quote Epictetus, the most famous Stoic teacher, to all of his clients, and he shared a very famous quote that became a cliche among subsequent generations of cognitive therapists, and it comes from section five of the handbook of Epictetus, where he says it's not things that upset us, but our judgments about things, and that encapsulates what psychologists call the cognitive theory of emotion today, the idea that it's beliefs or thoughts that determine to a large extent our emotional responses, and that's really the cornerstone of cognitive therapy. So it was kind of easy for me to assimilate stoicism because it's a kind of cousin of cognitive therapy anyway. And uh, you know, I didn't usually kind of introduce my clients to stoicism, but I wrote about it online and I talked about it. So increasingly over the years I found that my clients were asking me about stoicism and saying they were interested in it. And so if it kind of came from them, then I'd I'd I'd maybe give them some stuff to read or I'd teach them some stoic exercises and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

So you uh mentioned that stoicism is a is a kind of a philosophy that will help people who practice it uh achieve mental health, uh a good mental health. Yeah. So does that apply across the board? Are there certain things the stoicism is better, is stoicism is better for, or or like I was thinking trauma, for example. Um if someone has experienced trauma, would stoicism be useful for that situation, or is it more useful for for like sort of coping with adversity?

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Well, the answer short answer is kind of yes and no, and it's complicated basically. So in cognitive therapy, uh I guess this the one of the things that people often don't understand about the the way these two things would be related is that in cognitive therapy we normally match the treatment protocol to the diagnosis, basically. And so that would mean that the type of treatment that we do with a client is research-based. So if you're treating post-traumatic stress disorder, you look at what all the research evidence says about post-traumatic stress disorder, and you look at, in addition to that, specific protocols or treatment approaches that have been tested out with that particular problem, and you pick an evidence-based approach to treatments. That's how we do things these days. So the idea that you would just kind of draw on stoicism as your main approach doesn't fly, that doesn't make sense as in cognitive therapy in general, and because it would be too broad and too generic, if you like. We normally have to look for tried and tested empirically based protocols. But those protocols often overlap a lot with many of the principles and techniques of Stoicism, because Stoicism was a more generic, general purpose sort of forerunner of cognitive therapy. So it may be that some of the things that you're doing in treatment for PTSD resemble things that you could relate to Marcus Aurelius or Seneca or other Stoics' writings. There would be bits and pieces of overlap, and that the degree of that would vary from one client to another, and it would vary depending on the type of treatment that you're doing. For example, if you're treating somebody who has a blood phobia, like your main treatment approach would be exposure therapy and teaching them techniques to control their blood pressure so that they don't faint. And so that's not very cognitive, it's more behavioural, and there wouldn't be as much overlap there with stoicism, if you like. But in treating problems like generalized anxiety disorder or clinical depression, it would pro it would potentially be a more cognitive-oriented treatment, and there might be might be more opportunities to make connection with stoic philosophy. But there's another part to the story, which is that prevention is as we all know is better than cure, right? And cognitive therapy is a therapy, it's remedial, and it's designed to be short-term, time-limited, diagnosis-driven, so it's more narrow in scope by its very nature, and it comes after the event, so it's remedial, it's a therapy. But the holy grail of mental health would be a preventative training approach or intervention. And we tend to refer to preventative approaches in mental health as emotional resilience training. And so I believe that Stoicism holds more promise as a preventative emotional resilience-building approach, a broad-based approach to long-term well-being and resilience, rather than thinking of it as an intervention for a specific type of problem that would come after the event. So it can kind of do both, and the ancient Stoics did both to some extent, but it was originally conceptualised obviously as a philosophy of life and therefore as a broad-based, more preventative approach. And we haven't there's not as much research in that area, it's harder to do research in that area, but I really believe that the future of stoicism, actually, I just wrote an article about this in a journal called The Behaviour Therapist, where I argued that you know it's important to draw parallels with cognitive therapy, but we should be looking more at stoicism uh as a different type of intervention, as a preventative intervention.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Right, yeah, that makes sense to me because stoicism is you know, you can practice it as a way of life. Yeah, it's permanent, right? It's permanent.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

You you permanently embrace is your worldview, whereas cognitive therapy to a larger extent is something you do for a few months and then you stop doing.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Right, yeah. One question that I like this something that kind of um inspires me about the great stoics is the the level that they attained in their tranquility. Uh, like Marcus Aurelius isn't like just an incredible figure, that much power, um, like the ability to be so corrupt, and yet, you know, like I don't think there's much evidence of him acting in a way that abused his power. Um, is that right?

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Yeah, I mean, there are actually there are criticisms of Marcus Aurelius, both explicit ones and kind of implied ones in the histories. If you look closely, I wrote an article about this at one point, but for any of the criticisms, it's kind of easy to answer them. Um, and so there's a bunch of different things, but there's there's kind of responses to them to them all that we can use to defend Marcus or to dismiss the things that were said. There's not really many serious criticisms of him, you could say. Um but he he did have uh a faction opposing him, and actually there was a civil war during his reign. So you could say, well, that from that it's clear that he did have political enemies. Right. Um but certainly as emperors go, history and you know, in the generations that followed judged him as one of the good emperors, one of the best emperors. He was reputed as a philosopher, as someone who showed clemency and uh beneficence, generosity. He was known for his uh philanthropy. And uh, you know, it's easy to compare him to bad emperors like Caligula and Nero, for example, or his own son, Commodus. So you can see how power corrupted other emperors, and Marcus uh is definitely someone that contrasts with that. He he kept his head even though he was in supreme power.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

Well, that's one of the things that I find so inspiring is that uh like today there are a lot of people now with the the resurgence of stoicism in our popular culture that practice stoicism and people who practice personal development, but very few people seem to go to the same lengths as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. So, what do you think set these figures apart from sort of like your everyday practitioners of stoicism? What did they do that we are not? Because I can't really imagine myself being able to, you know, kill myself with tranquility, you know, like Seneca. Yeah, like Seneca.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Actually, I would say that they're they they're different, they're very different examples. Um, although they differ from us today, I would also distinguish them from each other. So Seneca has a more complicated political history. Um, there are definitely grounds for questioning Seneca's adherence to Stoicism, and and that's long been uh questioned. So we don't really, it's hard to say for sure, but history has left us uh painted as a more ambiguous picture of Seneca's character. Um you could you could argue that he propped up Nero's like basically dictatorship, that he was a propagandist for uh an oppressive regime, and it it there's some indications that the other Stoics weren't very keen on Seneca as well. He during Nero's reign uh Thrracea was the head of the Stoic opposition, and uh Cassius Dio implies very strongly that Thrasea said that no one should mention uh people like Seneca's name again, and it's notable that actually Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius never mentioned Seneca. Um so it may be that his name was kind of mud among subsequent generations of Stoics, possibly, we can't know for sure. And certainly Cassius Dale paints quite a negative picture of him at times. Um history's left us a more ambiguous picture of Seneca's character. Epictetus seems like someone who had a reputation for being very committed to living like a stoic, and someone who appears to have lived in poverty, um, and to have had a very uh quite an austere view of Stoicism closer to ancient cynicism. And uh Epictetus may also represent a kind of return to the roots of Stoicism, whereas Seneca has a more urbane kind of view of Stoicism. Seneca was one of the wealthiest men in history, actually, um whereas Epictetus was a very uh a very humble and a very poor man. So they're quite contrasting characters in terms of their social status and lifestyle. Um and Marcus Aurelius is kind of weirdly somewhere in between. He was emperor and obviously so very powerful, but also he seems to have aligned himself with Epictetus's approach to Stoicism, and so he has quite a strict view of Stoicism. Marcus is the sort of guy who is today we would call a workaholic. Um he was incredibly dedicated to his duties as emperor. I mean, one thing that really shines through is he took his role incredibly seriously, and he was very studious about it and very committed to it, and he was trying really hard to live up to the high standard that he believed had been set by his adoptive father, the Emperor Antoninus Pius, who he took as a uh the role model as a of a kind of ideal, um, benevolent and just emperor. So he he took out his role very, very seriously. We can see that in the meditations. And what I guess in terms of commitment to it, Marcus started training in philosophy at an unusually early age. Um people would get into philosophy normally, uh, Romans not until they were about maybe 15 at the earliest, and perhaps significantly older than that. But Marcus allegedly started studying philosophy when he was 12 years old, which was notable to the Romans. They thought that was unusually early. And he had some of the best Stoic tutors and philosophical tutors assigned to him in the world at that time, and he seems to have been pretty committed to studying philosophy throughout his life. There's also an anecdote about how he was laughed at for still attending the lectures of stoic philosophers toward the end of his life. So it was joked that you know it's usually younger men that attend these lectures, and and even the emperor is going to school as an old man, and people thought that was kind of amusing. So he seems thoroughly dedicated to Stoicism from an early age, and you know, that's partly why he we might say he he achieved uh a more thorough transformation, if you like, than most people would would uh imagine.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

possible today um but uh also oddly perhaps Marcus Aurelius wasn't a stoic teacher and he he certainly he seems to have thought of himself even in middle age or old age as a as a novice stoic a student of stoicism um and you know so despite the fact that he was committed to to it and uh studying it very intensely from uh throughout you know his entire life from age twelve so you like I I find it super fascinating what like the study of stoicism is you said that Marx Aurelius considered himself a novice he there there are examples of him attending stoic classes middle aged towards the end of his life I from what I know about stoicism stoicism is not just the acquisition of knowledge um so what to you is the study of stoicism and how could you continue to deepen your study as you as you age uh today the I mean stoicism is a practical philosophy and actually you could even say some people say the clue is in the name itself now funnily enough uh some of the other philosophical schools maybe most of the philosophical schools in in Greece and Rome tended to be named after their founder like Pythagoreanism and Epicureanism and you know maybe even to some extent Platonism and Aristotelianism although they kind of also had other names.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

And Stoicism was originally called Xenoism or Xenoism after its founder Xeno but that name was dropped almost immediately by the Stoics and they instead named what they did after the place where they met the Stoappoikyle or the painted porch and I think that's significant because they it to me it suggests that they didn't want to turn it into a kind of personality cult and that Xeno didn't claim to be an enlightened sage. He uh you know he thought we were all flawed and so part of Stoicism seems to be this kind of acknowledgement that nobody is perfect which I I I think is quite significant actually but also you could say the name resonates at another level because the Stoepoikile was on the edge of the agora where Socrates used to teach in the the the city centre of Athens in the marketplace among common people and that was odd because philosophers and sophists used to teach more commonly in the gymnasia you know where you'd expect people to give large public lectures and stuff and Socrates was just kind of milling about talking to tradesmen and stuff and random people he was known for talking to a really mixed bag of different people from different walks of life men, women, younger older Athenians foreigners free men slaves you know he didn't kind of discriminate he was very cosmopolitan in that respect and that kind of shocked Athenians in a way but the Stoics were reprising that they taught out in the open in public on the edge of the marketplace and Stoicism was always kind of known for this openness and egalitarianism but also you could say like a stoic is kind of like an arcade it's it's covered for shade and there might have been like exhibits there or possibly stalls on it but it's a little bit like calling it a philosophy of the street is what I'm driving at the name itself like the stoic philosophy the philosophy of the porch you could say also kind of implies philosophy out in the open philosophy on the street philosophy in the marketplace and it implies this kind of reaching out to the common people and doing things out in public aspect of Stoicism and you know so Stoicism was was always a kind of grassroots kind of practical philosophy more so than for example Plato's Academy taught as the name implies Plato's approach became more academic and more abstract in a way and so the Stoics put more emphasis on psychological techniques in my first book on Stoicism I made a list of the ones that we can identify and I think there are about 20 there that are listed depending on how you kind of carve that list up. So in the meditations we see Marcus using those psychological techniques and describing his use of them in a kind of private journal like a therapy journal format if you like and so people today can practice the same psychological techniques and we can reconstruct those from the ancient techniques from the ancient texts and we can also kind of adapt them by looking at what we know about modern psychology and CBT and what's kind of practical today in terms of some of these exercises or what how we might tweak or adjust them to make them more workable. And we do that in modern stoicism we have an event every year called Stoic Week where last year 8,000 people around the world took part and Stoic week is for seven days an online course where people listen to audio recordings of guided meditations where they discuss ideas and where they practice contemplation exercises or other psychological strategies trying out different ones on each of the seven days of the course and so that's one way people can immediately get some experience of the practical side of stoicism and I I love that and I I know that like one of the things I've struggled with with the practice of stoicism is is having a like some sort of roadmap for it.

SPEAKER_00 27:43

When it comes to Buddhism there's you know that it's quite simple it's like daily meditation with stoicism there are many different type you have recorded meditations on your site that I've listened to that I think are fantastic. There are many different books um how how does someone you know become a stoic like so I'm 29 how would you recommend if I've got 10 years now to really like embody the stoic philosophy what could I do you know over the next 10 years to to rise to that challenge?

SPEAKER_01 28:15

Okay well I mean I I'll give you a short answer to that. I mean one like I say would be have a go at doing stoic week because it's a good introduction another one would be if you wanted a real kind of reduction of stoicism we kinda have that already in the form of the handbook of Epictetus right which was designed to be a condensed version of Stoicism like a bunch of bullet points almost it's like 50 passages so it's just really a a short booklet and uh it was designed to focus on the practical application of Stoicism so we have a ancient little handbook and the you if you want to get to the essence of that handbook you just need to look at the opening sentence and the opening sentence of the the the Encharidian or the handbook of Epictetus says some things are up to us and other things are not and then and we call this the dichotomy of control today or I call it the stoic fork so making a clearer distinction between the things that are under our direct voluntary control and everything else in life which isn't under our direct voluntary control or not entirely so and so Epictetus clearly thinks this is absolutely foundational to even a basic understanding of Stoicism putting it into practice and I think that's a good place to start today so grasping that idea returning to it from different perspectives working on it every day you know everything else in Stoicism can be seen as relating back to that foundational concept and then also like I mentioned earlier passage five it's close to the start of the same handbook says it's not things that upset us but our judgments about things. Incidentally that concept can be found in the Socratic dialogues both of Plato and Xenophon so I'm gonna stick my neck out and say I think that probably goes all the way back to Socrates. It's not an innovation of Epictetus as such but that idea which I would call cognitive distancing is foundational to cognitive therapy and I think that's also a saying that people should meditate on every day or certainly that they should return to very frequently and and reading the handbook and particularly focusing on those two foundational principles is a good conceptual or theoretical starting point. It's you know it is I say theoretical but really those are concepts that have a direct practical application. And the two other practical things I would suggest is that this is hinted at in the Stoics um but it kind of when we started teaching people about stoicism we realized it makes it much easier if they have a daily routine whereby in the evening they review their progress and then in the morning they plan the day ahead and so that framework complements the other stoic exercises really well. We use it in Stoic week and also in stoic mindfulness and resilience training which is the other bigger training course that we run through the modern stoicism organization. And the the Galen Marcus is a real Marcus Aurelius's physician he wrote a book about philosophical therapy which draws on lost works by the Stoics about therapy and he describes this idea of reviewing your day referring to a famous text called the Golden Verses of Pythagoras where it says you should never allow your eyes to close at night until you've reviewed the preceding day three times and that same passage is referred to also by Seneca and Epictetus and directly in relation to Stoicism so it looks like that idea originated with the Pythagoreans and was probably adopted by the Stoics but certainly it provides a very good framework within which you can then use any number of other stoic practices and in addition to that I would say a good contemplative technique Pierre Hado one of the main now deceased modern scholars of Stoicism said that a technique that he called he dubbed the view from above which is very popular among followers of Stoicism today is important because it brings together many of the philosophical and metaphysical themes found in Stoicism. So in the view from above we try to imagine the universe as a whole or we try to imagine the world seen from high above basically and that particular exercise I think unites many of the different themes and concepts that are found within Stoicism so it's a good technique for Stoics to return to frequently if they want to kind of consolidate their their practice wonderful those are some really good starting points I think for the practice of Stoicism with regards to reading is there a specific way you recommend reading Stoicism how do how do you approach reading well I've talked to many many people about this over the years.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

Do you mean which texts people should read and stuff like that or which texts but also like um you know I I would imagine that just simply reading cover to cover is not the best way to to soak up the wisdom in these books.

SPEAKER_01 33:41

No I mean in terms of first of all the easy part of the question is which books to read almost everybody reads the meditations first. Yeah and Marcus is largely a follower of Epictetus so and as I've mentioned the handbook of Epictetus is pretty short it's like a digested version of his philosophy. So read the meditations then read the handbook then if you like that read the discourses of Epictetus which are extended version of the same ideas then read Seneca's letters to Licilius or moral epistles or whatever you want to call them. If you like that read Seneca's other letters and essays and then from that point onwards you can just choose whatever but the the next thing people would normally read would be Cicero who was not a Stoic he was an academic philosopher but he was into a form of academic philosophy that assimilated many aspects of stoicism and Cicero was a very highly educated man and he knew a great deal about Stoicism so he's he although not a stoic himself he's one of our major sources for understanding early Greek Stoicism so usually people will turn to Cicero next and the probably the main texts there would be Definibus or on moral ends and also the Tuscan disputations and then there's like a bunch of other things by him that might be relevant. And then you may people might want to look at modern books in Stoicism like maybe Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle is the way or William Irving's A Guide to the Good Life or My Own Stoicism and the Art of Happiness or How to Think Like a Roman Emperor there's a bunch of more recent books that that people enjoy reading as well. So those are the books I would say to people that to read and there are loads and loads of other ancient texts that are relevant as well I have to say by the way if anyone's familiar with the Stoics and I'm looking for a slightly more obscure book there's an early modern author called the Earl of Shaftesbury who was writing in the 17th century if I remember rightly and he wrote a book called The Philosophical Regimen which is his own version of the meditations and he quotes the Greek of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus pretty extensively so you also get a kind of commentary on the Stoics who wrote in Greek alongside his own kind of attempt to reproduce their philosophy and apply it in the 16th or 17th century. So it's a fantastic book and if people haven't come across that and they love the meditations of Marcus Aurelius they might also want to read the Philosophical regimen of the the Earl of Shaftesbury it's it's thoroughly a stoic text. So in terms of how you read the books some it depends which books we're talking about the the meditations I I've l I don't know how many times I've read the meditations and in how many different translations and and that's not unusual like many people will actually just read that book over and over and over again and and then read it in the in different orders and in different translations. And the same with the handbook of of Epictetus so there are some people that will just kind of immerse themselves in the texts like that. Another way of of studying the subject is I see what I do and and this is kind of it's easier actually if if people would look at the course that I run in Marcus Aurelius How to Think Like a Roman Emperor the online course or the book that that I've written that another way of approaching it is to kind of look for the themes in the text. So for example Marcus Aurelius says that he struggled with his own feelings of anger and there are many references to anger management in the meditations and also we have a whole book by Seneca called On Anger so another good way of reading the text is to say well what do the Stoics specifically say about coping with anger and kind of bringing all of that information together or what do they say about coping with pain there's a lot of stuff in the meditations about how Marcus coped with chronic pain and illness but it's scattered throughout the text but what happens if we kind of bring all those references together in one place and review how they relate to one another and it paints a slightly different picture a more rounded and more coherent picture of what he's saying about that particular problem and it it's obviously of direct practical relevance if that's a problem that people are dealing with.

SPEAKER_00 37:51

So in my course and in my book I I I organise the content thematically like that and that that's another good way of accessing the text wow okay yeah thank you for listing some of those books because a few of those I would never have thought to look at especially Cicero so I'm excited to dive into that so and generally you're saying like rereading um books the the books in different translations and just going back over them is so like aiming for depth rather than just adding more stoic books to the reading list is a good way to the Stoics would say that I think I believe there's a passage if I remember rightly where Marcus even says or Seneca I think actually says this that you know it's better to read one book very thoroughly and slowly and really digest it than just to read lots of different books superficially.

SPEAKER_01 38:39

So people that love Stoicism often read the meditations over and over and over again. I I don't know how many times I've read that book you know I've been I've been reading it over and over for years and and studying it in the original Greek to some extent as well. And you you can squeeze more and more out of it the more you read it. I'm always I meet people who tell me they've read that book many times and so they think they've nothing else to learn from it but I can tell you within five minutes of talking to them I I I can usually identify that they they've only really you know scratched the surface that you know that there's a lot of things they haven't noticed about it. If they dug a little bit deeper they would they would probably realise. So it takes a little bit of work really to kind of get all of the meaning out of these texts and to really digest also the practical relevance of them you need to start living by them and putting them into practice on a daily basis obviously and also just to return to what I said earlier by the way in addition to all of the other stuff I said I as a little footnote to that I I'm very much one of these people who believed the Stoics were Socratic philosophers and therefore I strongly believe that if you've read most of the Stoic texts you should definitely also read the Socratic dialogues and study Socrates in general like so particularly the early Platonic dialogues and the the dialogues of Xenophon the memorabilia of Xenophon was reputedly what inspired Xeno to become a philosopher actually and that the Stoics refer to Xenophon's version of Socrates as much as they refer to Plato incidentally so I I would say to people go and study Socrates because he was the kind of granddaddy of Stoicism and so he he helps to shed a lot of light on what they're saying from Socrates we actually get more of the kind of argument the philosophical basis for the techniques whereas with the Stoics you get something that's more like a kind of condensed or bullet point version of Socratic philosophy arguably great great point is regarding the dialogues um I I got my hands on the complete works of Plato but it's such a big collection other are there any like sort of places to start that you recommend yeah yeah definitely I'll tell you exactly where to start the so this might be I mean everyone's got their favourite dialogues right but it's the earlier Socratic dialogues are are the ones that are most relevant to Stoicism the the one that I would tell everyone to start with is the Apology because it's a masterpiece right everyone on the planet you know I don't force books on people normally but there's a part of me that thinks everybody on the planet should be forced to read Plato's Apology because it's one of the finest pieces of philosophical literature in the history of the Western canon right and uh and it's a book it's a text that you should read multiple times and study in different translations it's incredible and you get in tiny fragmentary form the kind of precursor of ideas that were developed by later schools of philosophy and using more complex arguments. So the definitely read the Apology and the Euthydemus is also kind of particularly relevant to the stoic concept of virtue in addition to Plato I would also say definitely read Xenophon's memorabilia because that's a collection of shorter dialogues that's very relevant to to Stoicism as well just work your way through the memorabilia. And then you know obviously also I'm a it a little bit of explanation that Plato's Magnum opus is the Republic obviously and a lot of people start reading Plato by trying to read the Republic which is a bad idea because it's his longest book right or I think it may be his second longest actually but it it's really ten separate dialogues and it's generally felt that the first book of the Republic is stylistically different from the rest of it and looks like it may have been written at a much earlier stage and then the other nine books were added later and the other nine books are kind of more repetitive and more political and more platonic whereas the first book seems much more Socratic and so I would say read book one of the Republic and then you know forget about the rest of it for the short term you can come back to it later but read the Apology in book one of the Republic first and then maybe the Euthymus and then Xenophon.

SPEAKER_00 43:06

Excellent wow okay so I have some reading to do and I'm sure our listen our listeners do too you talk about this a little bit in how to think like a Roman Emperor but um for our listeners as well I'm I want you to if you could talk a little bit about how Stoicism has changed your life personally and like what kind of changes you've experienced in your own development from the study of Stoicism.

SPEAKER_01 43:31

Gosh I mean actually I there's a preface to how to think like a Roman Emperor where I I talk about my own personal development because that's something that people ask about so it's hard for me to write that because it's quite personal. It begins actually with my father passing away when I was about 13 years old or 14 years old and so I I kind of was looking for a philosophy of life and and my father was a Freemason and you know people might not know much about Freemasonry but it's pretty popular in the part of Scotland where I grew up and most of my friends' fathers were were Freemasons as well. And what my father took from that was a kind of Hellenistic inspired philosophy of life that was you know also inspired by Christianity and the and the Old Testament and stuff as well and I was looking for something like that but maybe a little bit different and so I found it first of all in Socrates and in Plato and then I studied philosophy at university but I I reached a point where I had a kind of internal conflict in a way because I was studying Buddhism and practicing Buddhism and I was practicing self help Techniques and meditation and self-hypnosis, and I was into Freud and psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general, and I was studying philosophy, particularly Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Um and I I kind of wanted to bring philosophy, self-help, and psychology or psychotherapy together somehow, but it felt to me like these were basically three different things that were kind of fighting within me. Like uh and they they didn't really connect together, like there were like three jigsaw pieces that didn't really slot together like they should. And then I discovered the Stoics, because usually when you study philosophy, your Stoicism is one of the few major schools of philosophy that you don't normally get taught about in a degree course, uh uh typically. So I kind of had to discover the Stoics myself after I'd been studying philosophy for four years at Aberdeen, and as soon as I began reading the Stoics and reading Pierre Hadot's comment books on them, his excellent commentaries on them, um suddenly I had a kind of epiphany and I realized that Stoicism was like cognitive therapy, that it was like Buddhism, because it had these uh contemplative exercises and the spiritual philosophy of life, and that it it was like Socratic philosophy, like and I thought in this kind of blinding flash of lightning, I thought these three things that I'm interested in are perfectly welded together, synthesized and united in the stoic school of philosophy. And uh something within me kind of relaxed the moment I realised that, and throughout the rest of my life I felt that I'd solved a puzzle that had been bugging me until I was like about you know twenty-two years old or however old I was at that point, and then one day it just resolved itself and it all came together, and I thought I now know what it is I'm into. I'm into stoicism because it unites the three main aspects of life and of self-improvement that I'm concerned with into one holistic uh philosophy.

SPEAKER_00 46:48

Wow, that's a beautiful story. Uh and I can tell that you're still so passionate about it, and that really comes through. Um, it's an amazing teacher. Yeah, well, that's testament.

SPEAKER_01 47:00

I've stayed with it. And I you I usually find that people, you know, it's funny, I've not met many, I mean, I've met many, many, many people over the years who are into stoicism. It's part of my job, you know. I organized the conference in Toronto a couple of years ago, and we had 400 people at that. We had 8,000 people doing uh Stoic Week Online, we do that every year, and then we've got 46,000 people in the Facebook group I run. So I mean every day I'm talking to people about it. And I I don't think I've ever met anyone, strangely, who told me they used to be into stoicism. How weird is that? I've never met anyone who said I used to be into stoicism and then I moved on to Taoism or something else instead. Never met a single person that said that to me. Every person I've ever met who's got into stoicism seems to have to some extent stayed into it. Like they they never kind uh they never seem to let it drop, oddly.

SPEAKER_00 47:50

That's and that's quite remarkable. That is remarkable, and it like the I I was having similar thoughts about that as well. And one of the reasons I think that might be the case is because unlike a lot of contemporary self-help, stoicism deals with these existential issues that never go away, you know, just like like life, death, desire, relationships, wealth, fame, and it's a philosophy of life, it's a blueprint, and I I don't see how like it's so wise, unless you've got a a like a better philosophy than than Stoicism. I don't really see why you would stop being into Stoicism.

SPEAKER_01 48:31

Yeah, and the Stoic writers are very memorable as well. Uh the Stoics wrote in a laconic style, inspired by the inspired by the Spartans, and so they they tend to write like in aphorisms. Seneca was criticized for that during his day. People thought it was a bit crass that he came out with all these sound bites, but now it it it's people appreciate it more fully and it because it's easy to memorize these sayings and principles, and that that remains with people. I used to joke about this and say, I've never met anyone with a a cognitive therapy tattoo, right? I've never met anyone that had a quote from Albert Ellis tattooed on them, but I keep meeting people that have got stoic tattoos. Like so they'll have something that symbolises stoicism, or or they'll have a quote from the meditations tattooed on their arm or something like that. And you know, that that symbolizes something to me, like people identify with these sayings and ideas at a deeper level, like it's uh like Buddhism or Christianity or something, it's a philosophy of life to them. But also, you know, it may be, you know, I'll I'll stick my neck out there and say something very unfashionable, which is uh maybe the Stoics were just right. You know, maybe some of the the psychological and even philosophical principles that Stoicism is based on are correct uh or closer to the truth than the alternatives. The Stoics believed in the cognitive theory of emotion, and two thousand years later that's now substantiated by huge volumes of research evidence. Um so you know, they arguably they were just right about that, and uh and we now know that they were right about it. So when people tell themselves it's not things that upset us but our judgments about it, you know, that's a principle that they can apply throughout life and they find consistently helpful because it's accurate. Um whereas other self-help principles and new age philosophies and stuff are are maybe based on shakier foundations.

SPEAKER_00 50:30

That's a really good point. I I do also see people with stoic tattoos, and yeah, it's kind of funny how you don't see uh cogn cognitive therapy tattoos on people. Uh what is the overlap between Buddhism and Stoicism?

SPEAKER_01 50:46

Well, that's a that's another big cold question. So the first thing I'll do is apologize about my answer to that because I would say Buddhist I think Buddhism, some people disagree with me about this, although I studied Buddhism for a couple of years at university, funnily enough. But Buddhism is a very diverse tradition. So you've got things like the Four Noble Truths, but really there are many very different forms of Buddhism, so it's difficult to make generalizations about what Buddhism represents. Um and and stoicism has a little bit of diversity to it as well. So it's tricky to make a simple comparison between uh those two things because they're both quite complex. However, um the I mean arguably in ancient philosophy the there were you know several major schools of ancient Hellenistic philosophy, and the way that they're normally compared, and actually Cicero does this very explicitly in Definibus, the way people compared them was by asking what they defined as the fundamental goal of life, the t the telos. Um and that's what distinguished them. So the Stoics said that the fundamental goal of life is virtue, or arate, and the Epicureans said that the goal of life is pleasure, Hedone, or Ataraxia, tranquility. And so that's how people distinguish philosophies. So if you're going to make a comparison from the Greco-Roman point of view, you would say, well, what is the fundamental goal of life in Buddhism? And actually it's not entirely clear what the answer to that question would be, except that maybe it's nirvana, uh depending on whether you're a Hinayana or a Mahayana Buddhist, you might conceptualise that slightly differently. But if it's nirvana and the cessation of suffering that's the fundamental goal in Buddhism, that sounds more like Epicureanism in some ways. It sounds like the goal is a kind of subjective state of peace of mind, and that other things might be similar to Buddha uh to Stoicism, but they're kind of subordinate to that. Whereas Stoicism makes something else more fundamental, it makes wisdom more fundamental than peace of mind. Although many people say, well, aren't they the same thing or aren't they closely related? The Stoics would say, nah, it makes a bit of difference which one you think comes first, or which one you think is is most fundamental. So, you know, people will argue about that till the cows come home, but certainly the Stoics thought that that made a practical difference, and so we don't know what they would have said about the Buddhists, but I think they would have said it's similar and they would have admired a lot of aspects of Buddhism, but they would have probably argued with them a little bit as well about what the the the real goal was or the real priority in life.

SPEAKER_00 53:25

Hmm, interesting. And do you think that the like the enlightened state that the the Buddhists claim to be able to achieve, like the Buddha himself? Do you think there's a kind of a stoic version of that?

SPEAKER_01 53:39

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's uh what word would they use? Like ataraxia is a bit like that, or you eudaimanea it has a kind of similar connotation in some ways to nirvana, a little bit. So that eudaimenea in Greek means is usually translated as happiness, but that's a really garbage translation, and uh a better translation would be flourishing or fulfilment. Um so it's the kind of pinnacle, that's the optimum state for a human being to be in, is better defined as the condition of a being that's living the best possible life, so it's fulfillment basically. But in Greek it mean is literal meaning is something more mystical. Um because daemon uh or daimonos is a spiritual being, um, and it kind of might it for the Platonists it came to imply something like your higher self or the divine spark within us, and you just means good or well, so it means having a good inner divine spark or a good relationship with your higher self. So it means something kind of slightly spiritual and metaphysical, but it also refers to someone's fulfilment. So this term, which is foundational to all Greek philosophy, um we can kind of compare a little bit to the the the Buddhist concept of uh nirvana. And then it Eudaimenea means something slightly different to Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics, they all have a slightly different take on what it looks like in practice. But you could definitely compare many aspects of Buddhism to Stoicism on many different levels. Um I guess the Stoics don't really seem to have done seated meditation in the same kind of formal way, but they they certainly employed meditative or contemplative practices um throughout their their day on a regular basis. They probably didn't sit cross-legged, right, and have beads and stuff like that or incense, but they certainly sat down and deliberately practiced visualization and contemplative exercises, and they would definitely have recognized the Buddhists as doing something kind of similar in that respect.

SPEAKER_00 55:49

Wow. Okay, yeah, so I can see that there's uh there's an overlap there then. Uh regarding the modern stoicism that I see, um, like especially from people like Ryan Holliday, uh, there is a big emphasis on like how stoicism can help us be more resilient, which is I find very, very power empowering. But what about how can Stoics is there much in Stoicism about how we can experience more joy and um you know like have a skip in our step as well?

SPEAKER_01 56:20

Well, funnily enough, there actually is like and and people kind of overlook that. And I as I I'd give some credit to Bill Irving uh because his book, A Guide to the Good Life, I I try to reach into the recesses of my memory a bit here, but the subtitle of that is something like The Art of Stoic Joy, isn't it? I uh I need to, you know, your listeners will need to go and look that up. But he explicitly acknowledges this in his book, and I I've tried to highlight it in my books as well. The Stoics have a very formal, a highly structured. I mean, the odd thing about Stoicism, right, is that the the books we have surviving, Seneca's writings, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, are provide an unsystematic account of a highly systematic philosophy. So we don't really have a systematic account of Stoicism, except actually in Cicero, in Definibus we have something that's more like a systematic description of stoic ethical theory. So that's another reason why I think people should go and read Cicero. But um sorry, what was your question again?

SPEAKER_00 57:25

I've gone about uh just like how there's a lot of emphasis on how Stoicism can be more resilient.

SPEAKER_01 57:32

I'll tell you where I was going with that. So the the Stoics have a highly structured concept of emotion, um, a classificatory system of for emotion and psychopathology as well, actually. So they they have a system for classifying negative or unhealthy emotions, and they also have a system for classifying healthy emotions. Uh they call them the eupathii, or like the healthy or positive emotions or passions. And one of them uh is chara or joy, um, and that plays a central place in in stoic psychology. And Marcus Aurelius in particular refers to it quite a lot or or to related concepts quite a lot throughout the meditation. So joy plays an important role in stoicism, as do other healthy emotions like love and friendship, for example, and even healthy aversion, like having a a healthy, rational conscience about things. Uh the Stoics thought kind of painful or unpleasant emotions could could be healthy and appropriate sometimes. But they certainly think joy is important. And and Marcus describes three main ways in which Stoics experience rational, healthy joy. And he says the main one is that Stoics delight in virtue, which kind of seems obvious if you know much about Stoic theory. Virtue is the goal of life in Stoicism, um, and virtue is synonymous with practical wisdom, incidentally, for Stoics. So a Stoic would rejoice first and foremost in wisdom and and the other virtues. And he particularly would rejoice in his own experience of these things, because it's the most important thing for him to achieve. But he also experiences joy secondly in perceiving the wisdom flourishing in virtue of other people, so in his friends and role models and teachers, and in the people that he admires, and even in the tiny glimmers or seeds, as the Stoics say, of virtue that we see in ordinary everyday people who are a mixture of good and bad, like the Stoics would look for the good in people and rejoice in the seeds of virtue that they perceive in them. So that's another source of joy. There's a joy that Stoics take in their own capacity for excellence, and also they take joy in perceiving the capacity or potential for excellence in the rest of humankind. And also there's another type of joy that they take. There's another Greek word, charis, which means gratitude, and is closely related to the word for joy, and that's the other type of uh positive emotion or joy that Marcus talks about. So there's a type of gratitude that Stoics experience by um picturing uh or thinking about the things that fate gives them, the things that they benefit from and experience in life, um, and you know whether they're healthy or or constructive or not. So Stoics have a funny attitude towards external goods, like they're meant to view them with indifference, but they do rationally prefer some things over others. So Stoics may prefer health, wealth, and good reputation over their opposites. They prefer health over sickness, but they're not attached to it, they don't demand it, they don't view it as intrinsically good, but nevertheless, they would experience gratitude for health, they would experience gratitude for not being in pro poverty, for having uh uh enough to money to feed themselves, for example, and so on. And the the the Stoics link this to the uh their idea of contemplating transience or impermanence, which again obviously is similar to the concept of impermanence in Buddhism. So Marcus at one point says that if we imagine things that we don't have, things that are absent as though they were present, uh then we desire them, we crave what we don't have, and that's painful and potentially upsets our tranquility. But he says, what happens if you do the opposite and think of things that are present as if they were absent? And he says, then you can train yourself to experience rather than desire to experience gratitude, and that's a much healthier um emotion to have, but it takes more effort to evoke that emotion in ourselves. So the Stoics would typically contemplate loss and contemplate the impermanence of things that they're enjoying in life in order to remind themselves to experience gratitude for them, which is a another form of stoic joy.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:05

Wow, yeah. I think that um that yeah, that's um a big missing piece of the puzzle for many people who study Stoicism, and I think that you clearing that up there will be really useful for our listeners. So thank you for that. That's an important part.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:18

I should just as a little addenda to that. For the Stoics, yeah, um, these positive emotions are kind of a added bonus in life, they're they they follow on from virtue. So the the Stoics are kind of careful to say, and I think this is very astute of them, to say that the goal of life isn't joy, but joy is kind of a side effect. They say it supervenes on the goal of life. So the goal of life is wisdom and virtue. But if you are wise and virtuous, you'll probably experience joy as a consequence of that. But if you try to get a shortcut to joy, that potentially can lead you in a round in a circle or lead you in the the wrong direction. So the Stoics thought it it's not healthy to try and pursue these emotions directly, but to try and pursue the underlying cognitive states, uh, which which um you know tend to lead to healthy emotions as a consequence.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:12

So those healthy emotions are like uh should be seen as a really nice bonus. Yeah, like an added thing. If they if they if they come amazing, but if they don't, then you you still have you know pro progress as a stoic.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:24

Yeah, you shouldn't abandon the pursuit of wisdom just because it's not making you feel joy. Like so they thought, no, it's but the main thing is to pursue wisdom, and then that should like that will lead to love and joy and friendship and all these good things. Um, but that's not why you're doing it. And Kant actually says a similar thing, you know, many centuries later, um, that there's a type of happiness that supervenes on virtue and wisdom, but it shouldn't really be seen as the goal of life.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:51

I first heard about you in a book by the psychological illusionist Darren Brown. He wrote a book called Happy, and it's it's it's a book on like he covers all the different um ideas on happiness, and he's a big advocate of Stoicism, and he talks a lot about Stoicism. Um it's a really, really good, good read. Um, but he does mention that like one of the issues he has, it's only a small issue, is that he thinks that the Stoics um sort of like uh saw anxiety in these sort of like anxious anxious emotions, um, they demonize them a little bit too much, and anxiety is actually useful for growth, and we need to feel a little bit anxious and afraid at times to help us grow. So I just wanted to ask you, do you agree with this? And in a more general sense, do you see any weaknesses with the stoic philosophy?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:43

Well, actually, first of all, like I would say I I have to read a lot of self-help and personal development books for a number of reasons, like um, and you know, Darren Brown's book Happy is one of the best books that I've read in a long time, and I thought it was beautifully written. I think he's a talented writer, and also many of these books are formulaic as hell, right? And his isn't, I would describe it as a very reflective book, and he's very considered in the things that he has to say about different psychological techniques and philosophical concepts. You can tell he's kind of working them out in his own mind, and he brings the reader into that kind of internal dialogue in a very interesting way. I thought that was a great book, and I'm I'm sure it's never going to reach the audience it it deserves, um, sadly, you know. Although I'm sure many, many people will read it, but I think I really think it should be you know top of the best seller list in the US, for example, um for for self-help books. It's much better than most of the other books that I've read recently. And actually, I I speak to Darren a little bit, he came to one of our conferences, so like I I should say, like, yeah, I think he's a good guy. Um, but also uh the what he says in that book. I I tend to say when people criticize stoicism like that, I'll often respond by saying, Look, I think you're more of a stoic than you realise, buddy. Right? And so I wrote a review of his book, and I I if I remember rightly, that was kind of the angle that I took, and I said, I actually disagree with you, and I think you probably are more into stoicism than you realise. Like, so this thing about the Stoics being negative about anxiety, the Stoics distinguish between three types of emotions. So it's highly systematic philosophy, we have an unsystematic account of it. Uh, they had a classificatory system where they distinguished between good, bad, and different emotions. So, we talked a moment ago uh about the good emotions, the They also have a system for classifying unhealthy emotions, the passions they call them, and that leads to a lot of confusion because some people have assumed that the Stoics are condemning all emotion. Whereas really they specifically say that they're concerned with negative emotions that are irrational, excessive, and unhealthy. The Greek word for passion is related to our word pathology, as in psychopathology, and it implies suffering. So the Greeks and the Romans were very aware that when they talk about passions, they're they're talking about pathological emotions mainly, although their definition of that is broader than ours would be today, to be fair. But they're also talking about emotions that are in a sense voluntary or potentially under our control. Because the Stoics think that we need to distinguish carefully, as we we talked about earlier, between what's up to us and what's not. So you might think, well, surely are are our negative emotions up to us? I thought the Stoics said we we should kind of be indifferent towards things that aren't under our control. But we don't normally think of our emotions as being up to us. Well the Stoics are talking about a type of emotion, a passion, an unhealthy passion, that's in a sense under voluntary control, and they say so. And in fact in modern cognitive psychotherapy it's very important that we distinguish between voluntary and involuntary aspects of emotions. And people I would say are very often suffer and experience mental health problems uh in part because they st take too much responsibility and struggle too much with aspects of emotion that aren't under their control, and whereas they should learn to accept those and view them as inevitable and treat them with greater indifference. And at the same time, they often neglect and fail to take responsibility or ownership for aspects of emotion that are under their voluntary control. So this is a kind of the paradox of control, if you like, when it comes to emotion. Um and it really often requires the help of a psychotherapist to get people to more clearly distinguish between what bits of their emotion are under their control and what bits aren't. It's certainly not true that none of our emotions are under our control. There are certainly aspects that are under direct voluntary control. And so the the Stoics also have a term uh propathei, which is kind of tricky to translate, but it basically means involuntary emotional reactions, or it it could be translated as proto-passions, or uh Seneca calls them the first movements of the soul. But basically they're ref they're clearly referring to our initial physiological emotional reactions. So the the examples they give, for example, for instance, are if someone is startled that they might jump, their heart rate might increase, they might begin to shake, they might turn pale. And so those kind of initial autonomic responses, if you like, physiological responses, the Stoics said, Well, those aren't under voluntary control, right? Um, those just happen to us. Like it's kind of a physical reaction, but they're part of what we mean by emotion. And certainly when we talk about anxiety, often a lot of it consists in these physiological and also to some extent some psychological uh responses, automatic thoughts and impressions, which are clearly not under voluntary control. And so the Stoics think that those propathei and automatic impressions should not we should learn not to view them as bad or negative, but actually to view them with indifference, studied indifference, and to gain greater detachment from them and to be more accepting towards them. And so sometimes people think the Stoics are overly negative about anxiety and other unpleasant emotions, but I would say no no no, if you dig deeper, what they're really saying is that you should be more accepting towards what you're perhaps referring to there, and more discriminating, or to distinguish more carefully the voluntary aspects of those emotions and to take greater ownership for those. So the the the heart racing, the Stoics would say, that's not voluntary, you just have to accept that. In fact, you're crazy if you try to struggle against it, you'll probably make it worse. Um, however, some of the stuff you're saying to yourself in response to that is probably under your voluntary control, and you could do that differently.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:10

Hmm. Wow, that's a powerful distinction. Okay, yeah, you completely cleared that up for me. Um, so yeah, I would I would love to see you and Darren actually discuss these um in in a kind of like a back and forth.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:24

There's a blog article I wrote about it, and I he he's read it, I think I I sent it to him. Um but yeah, I I'm always happy to discuss these things with people. It just isn't aside, there's a famous passage in a fragment from Epictetus that is referred to it's in a story by a Roman author called Aulus Gellius, who was a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius. So it's one of the more obscure stoic fragments, if you like, but it happens to really clearly explain this point, and uh he tells a story about a stoic teacher who was on a ship going from Greece to Italy, and he was caught in a storm, and Aulus saw, um, Alus Gellius saw this stoic teacher turn pale, but he remained silent, and his hands were shaking, and everyone else was freaking out and screaming because they all thought they were going to die. And then eventually they survived and they get to shore and they were kind of offloading the ship and they were they were they were sitting um um in the by the in the dock and talking and stuff, and people were complaining about it and going, Oh my god, I can't believe we survived us and still freaking out and stuff. And the Stoic could calm down and and Olus Gellius approached him and said, Listen, I hope you don't mind me asking, but I noticed you you looked as scared as everyone else, although you weren't really kind of running around and freaking out and stuff like they were. He said, like, so I thought Stoics were meant to be kind of uh impassive and unaffected by stress, and the guy pulled out of his satchel one of the lost books of Epictetus and gave it to Gellius to read, and he explained to him that the founders of Stoicism, Zeno and Chrysopus and Cleanthes, had taught this distinction between involuntary and voluntary aspects of emotion. So he said, just like everyone else, even he says, even like the most hardened sailors, in the middle of a storm like that, where it looks like you might die, of course I turn pale and my hands shake, just like everyone else, those are propathei, there are involuntary natural emotional reactions, and we should accept those as natural and inevitable. Even an animal would experience those emotions in a stressful situation like that. But what Stoic doesn't do is add to them by dwelling on them, perpetuating them and amplifying them and by projecting or imposing value judgments on top of them. So Stoic should regain his composure more quickly afterwards, and so he wasn't running around screaming and stuff like other people, and he'd calm down more quickly afterwards. And he said that that's the difference. We're not like stoke, we're not made from stone, like we have feelings and stuff, but we're careful not to perpetuate them and make them worse, which is what you saw those other people doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:55

Right, yeah, that actually reminds me of like uh something that the Buddha talked about with the the two arrows. Uh so the first arrow is just the pain, and then the second arrow is the thoughts you have about the pain, and that you know you can't avoid you can't avoid the first arrow, but you should you can can avoid the second.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:16

Yeah, that's exactly the point. Seneca says something similar where he talks about how animals like deer, if they're startled by a predator, their heart will race and they'll run away in fear, but then when the threat has gone, they calm down quickly and they just return to grazing as normal. And he said so. Hans have these emotions as well, but because we can reason and think about the past and the future, we carry on worrying about it afterwards. So he says reason, our greatest gift, is also our greatest burden, like because it allows us to perpetuate anxiety, which for animals would be you know done and dusted and over with once the threat's gone away. Um so the Stoics would say the animal part of emotion is natural and we should accept it with indifference, um, but we've just got to be careful that we don't misuse reason to amplify it or perpetuate it in an unhealthy way.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:08

Right. Uh well I I'm totally loaded up on and and super um motivated now to dive deeper into stoicism. Enough stoicism for one day. Uh well, I mean I'm I'm well, I mean it kind of it is, but it's like I'm so looking forward to diving into into the into the things you recommend. And I want to finish the rest of your book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. Um I've started it, I love it. And um, yeah, you are I think gotta be one of the most knowledgeable people on stoicism like in the world. Like I you were I don't think there are many people that could uh compete with you on stoic knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:49

So what's my hobby? And I guess you know, I I feel like an old man now. I'm not quite as I'm not quite as old as I said, and I'm 47 now, but I keep saying to people, when I first got into this, like there weren't really that many other people that that seemed to be that interested in stoicism. You know, when I I talked to therapists about it and stuff, they kind of said to me, Why are you why do you keep going on about stoicism? Like, you know, and uh I it people thought it was a little bit of an odd idea, and you know, 20 years later, like we've kind of won the argument. Like we won the argument about 10 years ago, and and now everybody takes it for granted that that stoicism is consists of a load of psychological exercises similar to CBT, whereas when I started off, people didn't believe that, and you know, we had to kind of cite all the evidence and prove the point over and over again. So there's still a lot of things to kind of there are misconceptions about stoicism that still have to be corrected, but things have changed a lot recently and and people have become much more uh started to view stoicism in a much more positive and favorable light. Um I you know, so I'm pleased to have seen that happen in my lifetime, as it were.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:54

Yeah, um Stoicism seems to be just like on the rise uh on high existence. We're publishing more and more articles uh about stoicism. Hopefully we can publish some of your writing on the side too. Um and hopefully we can talk again. Yeah. Um but for now, where where can people find more about about you and and connect with you?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:15

Well, if they want if they want to go to my website, there's like tons of stuff on there because um I write a lot, so I put a lot of stuff online. And my blog and website is just my name, it's Donald Roberts in all one word, and then dot name, not dot com, but dot name. And also I have an e-learning site that's attached to it with lots of downloadable stuff and free courses and things. And that's just uh on the subdomain learn. So it's learn, L-E-A-R-N, learn.donaldrobertson.name. So if they want to look at either of those two sites, they'll they'll find tons and tons and tons of resources about stoicism. And also, I should give a plug for the modern stoicism organization, the non-profit, and I'm a member of its multidisciplinary team. And so the modern stoicism website has tons and tons of resources on it as well. It's got over 500 articles by loads of different people, and it the modern stoicism website is just modernstoicism.com, like all one word, modernstoicism.com. And your books just like where's the best place to purchase those? You can you should be able to buy them anywhere, like but you know, you're from Amazon or whatever. So How to Think Like a Roman Emperor comes out on the 2nd of April. Um, and but you can pre-order it now if people want to pre-order it. Uh that's a good idea, actually, because you potentially get it slightly cheaper that way if you're lucky. So they you can get that on Amazon or from the publisher McMillan or you know, pretty much any online bookstore or sell it.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:42

Excellent. Um, okay, wonderful. Well, uh Donald, thank you very much. I've learned uh so much talking to you.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:49

Well, thanks for having me along, and I know you've got a slightly different audience from the usual like stoic group, so hopefully we'll reach some people who are kind of on the periphery this way. I'd like to think so. We we kind of reach out to a slightly different community.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:01

Yeah, I think like our audience um uh uh across the board is very fascinated by Stoicism, but they just haven't um figured out a way to connect with the text in in the way that like more avid readers of Stoicism have. So um yeah, I think the pointers that you've gave in this discussion would be really useful. So thank you.