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?

  • KarlJung [none/use name]
    hexagon
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • KarlJung [none/use name]
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]
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          1 year ago

          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 :

          1. 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.

          • KarlJung [none/use name]
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            1 year ago

            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.