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?
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 :
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.