PhilosophyTube is usually pretty cool but I think this is kind of an L? She gets into some pretty heavy criticisms of the traditional Stoic philosophy and seem to just dismiss them all at the end. I don't know how someone can say that "You can be in literal chains and be the freest person in the world if you are a sage" with a straight face. I know it's technically true from some perspectives but it just seems so hollow compared to everything else in the video. Mental freedom doesn't help someone when they're doing a daily 12 hour shift that drives them to the edge of exhaustion and takes away everything they enjoy in life.
None of this is me criticizing Stoicism, btw, I don't think I'm smart enough to, just felt like a weird end to the discussion part of the video
Maybe, I'm just not familiar enough with PhilosophyTube's format?
She always covers the topic at hand at face value. She does the same when she discusses effective altruism in her last vid. She just leaves it to the audience to be smart enough to see that the thing she's talking about is wrong. I don't love how she presents the topics sometimes because I think media literacy is worse than ever nowadays so you can't count on people to pick up on something subtle like that, they may end up getting the opposite message.
She at least brushes many of the problematic aspects of stoicism before and i don't think she invalidates them at the end. My takeaway was more along the lines of "stoicism actually works extremely well as a self-management strategy, but there's contexts where that kind of self-managing leads to quietism and passivity and allows us to ignore things we shouldn't be ignoring." It's not always good to be a sage in the stoic sense, but if you are a sage, then there's few things that can get to you. It's not a path for me, i'm deliberately very far from being that, but i can see how that works out for others and i wouldn't say it's a problem when you're aware of that philosophy's limitations, when you know were you shouldn't be sagely for once.
I guess my criticisms are less about social issues (though I think that's a fair critique of the philosophy in some situations) and more about this idea of a perfect Sage figure. I don't think they'd actually be as resistant or universally happy as lots of Stoics make it out to be. I don't think anyone is just able to subvert or sublimate all of their desires for socialization, pleasure, etc. These are essential parts of human psychology. Not to mention physical things, like injury or pain or starvation, which the majority of people, no matter how hard they try, simply cannot ignore entirely.
So why is this important? Surely, since the philosophy is about accepting or ignoring things you can't change, all of what I'm saying here is just pedantic, because if someone's being stabbed or is cripplingly lonely, wouldn't the best case scenario be that they can ignore those things and adapt to them?
Well, yeah, I'd certainly agree, but the problem is that, when you begin thinking that someone can adapt to horrifying extremes like this, suddenly, at least some blame gets put on the person who fails to adapt! Of course, no one would really fault someone for failing to react optimally to conditions like the ones I'm mentioning here, but the most harmful blame isn't external, it's internal.
When you assume that it's possible for anyone to transcend all forms of mental and physical suffering through sheer brainpower, that creates a whole new form of suffering and anguish when they fail to live up to that. Even if they're perfect stoics and don't blame themselves in any way for failing to live up to it, this theoretical person in a terrible situation would still be spending inordinate amounts of time on pursuing an impossible goal. It, at best, does nothing for them, and at worst, gives them more mental stuff to work through!
Then, what I suggest is a kind of meta or post-stoicism. One of the things we have to learn to accept that we can't change is sometimes ourselves. This isn't free license to be a shitty person, or to do whatever you want without consequence, but it is an acknowledgement of your own needs as a person, and permission to simply let yourself be sad or angry when things suck. Paradoxically, I think that letting yourself suffer in those ways is essential to being happy. If you don't, you spend massive amounts of time trying to get rid of those emotions, often to no avail.
Also, the categorical belief that all irrational or non-reality-centered emotions are bad needs to go, too. I'm a filthy postmodernist, so I think that the majority of human desires in general are entirely made up. That doesn't make them invalid, though. This might sound like the romantic criticism that PhilosophyTube mentioned, but it's more nuanced than that. I'm not saying that cheating on your spouse or risk-taking or anything like that is necessary for a happy life, I'm saying that happiness itself is irrational. All positive emotions, including mere contentment, come from entirely subjective and irrational experience. Happiness is brain chemicals generated from arbitrary biological stuff. Meaning in general is entirely inferred and does not exist in objective reality. So, grounding oneself in reality and only reality is completely meaningless advice.
In short: First principle of stoicism good, it's generally better than epicureanism, especially given it's communist-y emphasis, but it actually didn't go far enough with the first principle's own logic.
Figure out what you can change, figure out what you can't, but sometimes the things that you can change are external from you, and sometimes the things that you can't change are internal.
This is not edited at all so if I did anything wrong such as use the wrong pronouns again, or said something that sounds confusing, please let me know. If I said something that sounds really reactionary I probably intended something else, but let me know so I can clarify
Edit: Oh no I'm a Buddhist, thank you Philosophy Tube
The impression I got from the video was that she doesn't buy into stoicism. She didn't like how it told oppressed people to just deal with it. She reads out the philosophy as purely as she can and then introduces criticism. That's how philosophy works, presenting ideas at face value, then criticizing them.
I haven't watched the video but I do enjoy this comic about modern stoicism
I don't see anyone in the present day actually following Stoicism (as in the original philosophy, not the generic and pop culture version of it). Acceptance of one's own emotions (but not necessarily acting on them) seems way more useful than trying to :galaxy-brain: your way out of sadness. Both are better than no regulation at all, of course.
I've known too many people to go through the prison system, and some of them have said thay being in school and a consciousness raising group, meditating, all that can genuinely make you feel free even in prison.
Like there's obviously no substitute for real freedom, but there is an amount of truth to the idea that you can be free in chains.
It's just that, you need other people to do it and it will never quite get there.
TBH the people that “enjoy” prison time is probably because they get a structured daily routine with a roof, a bed, and food provided for. For a lot of prisoners, that is also the first time, they might get to see a therapist.
I wasn't saying that they enjoyed it, just that through collective process they were able to feel free by focusing on consciousness raising, mutual education and meditation as a way of navigating those circumstances.
Obviously all this could and should happen in community, and prison is not the ideal environment for it. My point was more thay mental, social and spiritual practices like stoicism or in my friends case, feminist education, can be incredibly powerful.
Yeah that's why I said it was technically true
I agree that it can help people cope, but IMO it's never going to be as good as actually being free physically. And, freedom is different from happiness. You can feel plenty free in prison but your conditions can still make you miserable in other ways.
Yeah, I try to lean towards good faith interpretations when people are pretty much on our side like she is.
I'm not trying to argue they're doing or saying anything wrong, at worst I just disagree with them on an abstract moral plane. Because of the context I got the impression that "freedom" was being used as a stand-in for "happiness", implying that happiness can only be obtained "within", which is something I don't really agree with. People need to do work on themselves, yes, and individual coping mechanisms can help, yes, but you need both that and a change of environment for a fundamental change in attitude.
I think that someone who is liberated but misunderstands what that liberation is in reality is going to feel a lot freer than someone who is not liberated, even if they think they don't. Someone could be a conservative who despises living in a socialist country but their subconscious attitudes caused by having free healthcare are going to affect them positively nonetheless.
In stoicism, freedom has a specific meaning of not being controlled by your initial emotional impulses. It's the Greek thing of emphasizing freedom-from instead of freedom-to. It's a provocative phrase that rests on a specific definition, and is only literally true in the context of stoicism, but is a powerful metaphore outside of that context and is true (in the poetic sense)
The tricky part is when you start equivocating stoic freedom and socialist freedom. Or truth in the poetic sense with truth in the literal sense.
So, then, the Stoic "No" in response to the passivity problem just doesn't work? Or it does work, but relegates Stoicism to a kind of vibe rather than a lifestyle?
idk, i think shes just flaunting the fact that shes gorgeous at this point, i dont even know if she speaks words
I don’t know how someone can say that “You can be in literal chains and be the freest person in the world if you are a sage” with a straight face.
Yep. There's value in stoicism as cope, but it's just not a good politics
Yep. There’s value in stoicism as cope, but it’s just not a good politics
Stoicism in its pop variety is far too often "stop caring about things" which is reactionary bullshit and wreckery.
I think it's far better than the baseline beliefs most people follow, but the actual philosophy (not the pop version) still has it's flaws. I wrote a whole thing in another comment chain.
What doesn't have flaws, though? I guess all we can do is hammer away at the philosophical anvil until we have something vaguely resembling what we want.
I think that might be what she was getting at anyways, in retrospect I feel kind of bad, this post from me feels a bit like a nitpick
No it's a really legitimate critique. The fact is, stoicism remains really troubling, since it basically devalues politics. It's also just not a real replacement for real freedom, but the philosophy pretends that it is.
Stoics do not say that you should not fight to oppose your conditions, merely that fearing a blow before it has struck you is allowing it to hurt you twice. That doesn't mean blocking or dodging are out of the question.
Yeah, but this doesn't seem that insightful. Not beating yourself up for things that you can't control is pretty much common sense. But when you view your emotions as these things you can just control at will (or rationalize yourself out of), it actually opens yourself up to a lot more hurt as you try to fight your brain, instead of working with it. It's like trying to fight a rock.
Just read like the Enchiridion [Elizabeth Carter translation] or something and try to be charitable. You can't tell yourself what to feel, but you can develope your understanding of what you can and can't control, which will inevitably change how you relate to the world. For example, you are free to take a shot a something unlikely to work out, but you should understand the labor and the pain involved and the likelihood of failure, so that you don't just fantasize about it working out and approach the matter half-cocked, or try earnestly but fail and are a wreck because you didn't seriously cibsider that possibility from the outset.
"Yeah but that's obvious". Sure wonder why this classic of ancient philosophy is regarded as common sense. Oh well, here's a less common one from the Stoics:
"An uneducated person blames the gods. A partially-educated person blames himself. A fully-educated person blames no one."
Speaking of moral rather than causal blame (as they were), this is also my position as a Marxist because moral blame is broadly a waste of time.
I feel like a lot of this stuff is either common sense, interesting but flawed, or correct but arrived to again through Marxism or a similar position
It's like mathematics from the same time period. They had a lot of correct ideas but anyone who calls themselves a Pythagoreanist and insists that everything Pythagoras wrote was correct and without flaw is going to be missing a couple hundred years of critique and philosophical development
And the fundamental assumption of Stoicism that all issues come from internal judgements about external things is false. It sounds true, because our perceptions of things are the reason why we care about these things at all, but there is a lot of stuff we can't change that's apparently internal, like our need for food or water. The greatest sage cannot ignore the feeling of thirst, it will still suck.
It's worth raising the concern that trying to subvert or ignore irrational emotions only makes sense when you have a different irrational goal that it serves. This is because all goals are inherently irrational, there is no inherent meaning to life. There is no god from on high who decides that collecting rocks is less important than engineering.
The Stoics were all about consonance. I don't think they would support what you say about irrational goals, though obviously I agree with you, but they are mainly concerned in the writing I see with behaving in a way that is suitable for your goals, especially having smaller actions accord with greater ones. Quoting a passage I mentioned before :
- In every affair consider what precedes and follows, and then undertake it. Otherwise you will begin with spirit; but not having thought of the consequences, when some of them appear you will shamefully desist. "I would conquer at the Olympic games." But consider what precedes and follows, and then, if it is for your advantage, engage in the affair. You must conform to rules, submit to a diet, refrain from dainties; exercise your body, whether you choose it or not, at a stated hour, in heat and cold; you must drink no cold water, nor sometimes even wine. In a word, you must give yourself up to your master, as to a physician. Then, in the combat, you may be thrown into a ditch, dislocate your arm, turn your ankle, swallow dust, be whipped, and, after all, lose the victory. When you have evaluated all this, if your inclination still holds, then go to war. Otherwise, take notice, you will behave like children who sometimes play like wrestlers, sometimes gladiators, sometimes blow a trumpet, and sometimes act a tragedy when they have seen and admired these shows. Thus you too will be at one time a wrestler, at another a gladiator, now a philosopher, then an orator; but with your whole soul, nothing at all. Like an ape, you mimic all you see, and one thing after another is sure to please you, but is out of favor as soon as it becomes familiar. For you have never entered upon anything considerately, nor after having viewed the whole matter on all sides, or made any scrutiny into it, but rashly, and with a cold inclination. Thus some, when they have seen a philosopher and heard a man speaking like Euphrates (though, indeed, who can speak like him?), have a mind to be philosophers too. Consider first, man, what the matter is, and what your own nature is able to bear. If you would be a wrestler, consider your shoulders, your back, your thighs; for different persons are made for different things. Do you think that you can act as you do, and be a philosopher? That you can eat and drink, and be angry and discontented as you are now? You must watch, you must labor, you must get the better of certain appetites, must quit your acquaintance, be despised by your servant, be laughed at by those you meet; come off worse than others in everything, in magistracies, in honors, in courts of judicature. When you have considered all these things round, approach, if you please; if, by parting with them, you have a mind to purchase equanimity, freedom, and tranquillity. If not, don't come here; don't, like children, be one while a philosopher, then a publican, then an orator, and then one of Caesar's officers. These things are not consistent. You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling faculty or externals, and apply yourself either to things within or without you; that is, be either a philosopher, or one of the vulgar.
Obviously sports physiology has come a long way from "you must drink no cold water," but that's not the point here. The point is to consider how you want to live your life and the sort of person you want to be, to consider how likely plans are to succeed and fail, and to set plans understanding the reality of different possible outcomes. It's not revolutionary, but my main point is that this is not about what a worthy goal is nearly so much than it is about understanding how to get to one's goal and the costs and risks associated.
Of course, he privileges being a philosopher as a worthy goal, but that's because a) he was one, and actually quite an important one and b) speaking to his students, who already professed to wanting to be philosophers of the kind that he was.
I want to open by saying that I misspoke in my earlier comments, quite significantly. Stoicism is, like all works of philosophy, an idea with a lot of things worth considering in it.
I don't know if I'm really :galaxy-brain: to give much more to this conversation, other than that this reminds me a lot of how, supposedly, an outside observer seeing Stoic and Epicurean philosophers argue would be confused, as they would be advocating for quite similar lifestyles. I don't know if this is actually true, but it's something I've seen mentioned in a few, admittedly shitty, philosophy books. Of course, I do think that Stoicism did a lot better of a job advocating for this lifestyle, because lots of people seem to have interpreted Epicureanism drastically incorrectly during the time period.
I'd have to rewatch it but it didn't really have anything that jumped out at me. Like the video on Confucianism this one feels like it stopped before it got into the interesting stuff.
Same, it felt like it just..ended? I thought we got to the good part and then it very abruptly ended into an ad for her other stuff.
Holy shit PhilosophyTube lady has continued transitioning so much I didn't recognize her
Having done quite a bit of Philosophy and read more I really do find she stops where the question gets interesting.
Also I feel her insistence on assuming people argue in good faith stops her from putting forth her own opinion on the matter, which means the praxis that is supposed to follow from a philisophical investigation is never stated.
Philosophy should never be navel gazing, it should always result in a specific call to action.
I watched the video and while dramatically it wasn't for me as target audience I did feel that in the end she was saying that no matter what you do stoicism doesn't work unless you are an emperor (and even then you acknowledge that it is a vibe you do sometimes, but not how you act in regards to public persona or political power).
Thanks for just editing it instead of starting a debate, i see that happen way too often with that kind of subject.
A lot of transphobes will use "they" for binary trans people as a way of challenging their gender.
CW Transphobia
Looks like the other person deleted their comment but just to add in case someone's reading, I used to do that myself before I got more educated and started to support trans people. It was a way I could have my cake and eat it too, I would deny their chosen identity but I wasn't using their former pronouns so it was a shield against accusations of transphobia. We should be skeptical of it, even if it's benign in some cases like here.
I can’t remember where the criticism comes from, but someone said he writes like a man terrified of death and desperately trying to repress that fear.
Carl Jung was driven by thanatophobia when he came up with a quasi-immortality through collective consciousness.
Seneca was one of two people who ruled in Nero's stead while he was young, the other being a general, iirc. Not quite the same as joining Nero mid-tenure.
