Stoic Wisdom

0:00:00.8 Nancy Sherman: What if you killed 12 people because your arrow goes askew? They have trouble with that.

[music]

0:00:14.0 Aaron Powell: This is Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:15.1 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:16.9 Aaron Powell: Our guest today is Nancy Sherman. She’s a distinguished university professor and Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, and she was also the inaugural Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the United States Naval Academy. Professor Sherman is the author of a number of books on ancient and military ethics. Her latest is Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience. Welcome to the show, Professor Sherman.

0:00:40.9 Nancy Sherman: Thank you so much, Aaron. It’s a pleasure.

0:00:44.3 Aaron Powell: Maybe the best way to start our conversation about Stoicism is for you to tell us the story of James Stockdale and the Hanoi Hilton.

0:00:52.3 Nancy Sherman: Sure. So James Stockdale was an aviator, naval aviator, graduate of Annapolis of the Naval Academy. And he found himself on the USS Ticonderoga in the areas of the Mekong Delta near Saigon. He had been given as a mid-​career gift of education at Stanford, a very slim volume of the handbook by Epictetus, sometimes known as The Enchiridion, meaning at hand. And he said to, I think, it was the Dean of the Humanities at that time, a guy named Reinhardt, “What would a Martini-​drinking, golf-​playing naval aviator need with a book like that?” It turns out, he memorized it in his wardroom on the Ticonderoga and one fateful day in 1965, he was in his, I think, a Sky Hawk A-2 flying over North Vietnam, and he was shot down.

0:01:57.0 Nancy Sherman: And he said to himself, these very prescient words, “This is James Bond Stockdale, leaving the world of technology entering the world of Epictetus.” Maybe five years down there, turned out to be seven-​and-​a-​half years. And upon landing, if you can call it that, he was immediately pummelled by the North Vietnamese. He spent two-​and-​a-​half years in the Hanoi Hilton, in the prison of war camp in North Vietnam. And two, out of the seven-​and-​a-​half years, two-​and-​a-​half were in solitude, solitary, and much of that time in leg irons. So for him, Epictetus was salvation. I interviewed Stockdale several times toward the end of his life post 9/11, in Coronado near San Diego, where he said it was a silver lining for him, it kind of got him through. He was also at the head of the chain of command, as they call it.

0:03:06.5 Nancy Sherman: And he realized it was his philosophy and not necessarily everyone else’s, including perhaps John McCain, who was down the corridor, would glorify the situation. So James Bond Stockdale becomes a bit of a hero in the military community, not a bit, he’s quite idealized, for bringing Stoicism to those who have to deal with a lot of deprivation, a lot of things they can’t control. And in general circumstances, whether it’s your own chain of command, or the enemy or even your fellow, your buddies, who are doing things you don’t agree with, you don’t like but you kinda have to, as my young Midshipmen would say, “Over and over again, we’re Stoic, because we suck it up, or we embrace the suck.” It’s not an elegant phrase, but it is one that you can hear in the academies.

0:04:13.9 Trevor Burrus: Well, that’s what I was going to ask, is that Stoicism has a popular meaning if you’re not talking about the philosophers. You say, “Oh, he’s got a Stoic demeanor,” or something like that. So what is it about Stoicism as a philosophy, though, that it makes it useful for those situations rather than other types of philosophies?

0:04:32.9 Nancy Sherman: So Stoicism inherits, or the Stoics, there are a lot of them, Greeks and Romans spanning 400 to 500 years. They inherit Aristotle’s predicament, and that is that happiness or, better put, flourishing or thriving, what the Greeks call eudaimonia, is a combination of your virtues, say the dominant or principal good. But how you also use that virtue, given the external circumstances and positive external circumstances, some prosperity, health rather than disease, children who outlive you, children who are good, a political situation that isn’t stifling. All these things for Aristotle are critical for the good life. The Stoics hold that this makes your life fragile or vulnerable, and they inherit not just Aristotle but Socrates, as we know him through Plato, and Socrates’ view is that virtue is sufficient for goodness.

0:05:42.6 Nancy Sherman: So they really run with that theme, they run with the idea that if you are good, and if you really cultivate your virtue, you can learn to put a barrier of sorts between your goodness or your virtue, your virtuous character, your integrity, and all the crap outside that is the slings and arrows of fortune that could dismantle you in a certain way and ruin your chances for happiness. So they have incredible strategies. Now, these are the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics, not necessarily the ones my students were talking about, [chuckle] when they say they’re Stoic and suck it up. The ancient Greek and Romans have remarkable strategies for trying to put a buffer between you and the external world. I think some of their what modern Stoics tend to say life hacks can be used in more social and cooperative ways than is often picked up in the self-​help literature.

0:06:51.7 Nancy Sherman: But that said, the Stoics really have an argument with the Aristotle. He does leave things messy in the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics about just what place these external goods have in our life and whether or not they’ll derail you. He’s honest, Aristotle. He says Priam probably lost his shot at happiness when he lost all his sons so quickly in the Trojan War. That’s a reversal of fortune that you can’t really undo. So the Stoics pick up that morsel and they are very good at making distinctions and drawing bright stripes and inventing new words and they give a whole philosophy to that idea.

0:07:40.5 Aaron Powell: So for Aristotle, flourishing, eudaimonia, happiness is this activity… Activity of the soul in accord with virtue. So it’s an active thing. Is that the case for the Stoics, or is theirs more of just like a mental state?

0:07:57.4 Nancy Sherman: That’s a great question. So Aristotle says that Plato got it wrong in thinking that happiness was possession of virtue. He makes it very clear, it’s not possession. It’s activity of the psyche and the best part of our psyche. Soul and psyche is the translation for Psuche. It’s the best part of our psyche, and that is the reason, and you can’t actualize it without adequate external goods. It would be hard to be tortured on the rack and flourish.

0:08:34.9 Nancy Sherman: The Stoics don’t go back to the old idea, it’s just possession, something inside you, they do think that you are active in some ways with respect to your virtue or excellence, the real translation of the Greek word arete. The activity is striving or the activity is having, making a choice or a selection, they sometimes use very technical language, a preference or selection, with regards to the things out there and you do your best to aim it correctly at the objectives you’re searching for. You may not get there, the arrow may not hit the bullseye, but if you are a perfectly skilled bowsman and you get it right in terms of your skill and art, or we might say your virtue, then that activity is what counts as your flourishing. Now, what if you kill 12 people because your arrow goes off, it goes askew, what if the consequences go awry? They have trouble with that. [chuckle]

0:09:49.8 Nancy Sherman: It’s a dis-​preferred event, but then they introduce a whole other set of mental habits to try and distance yourself in a certain way from the perturbance and disturbance of disabling emotions that might ensue from things beyond your control.

0:10:13.0 Trevor Burrus: How does, in that sort of heyday of Stoicism, it strikes me that there’s a lot of commonalities to Buddhism, but Buddhism became a religion. How did Stoics relate to something that could be… For some, was it something like a religion? Did it ever move in that direction for theories of the metaphysical or was it always just sort of rooted in something that would just be a philosophy?

0:10:41.8 Nancy Sherman: Well, the philosophy at the time flourishes around the… It’s before the Common Era and after the Common Era, and so no surprise, the Romans, or Seneca, Cicero before him, he’s not a Stoic but he’s one of our great expositors of the texts. Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius are bumping up against Judeo-​Christian thought. And so Judeo-​Christian thought absorbs a lot of this. Part of the reason that Stoicism seemed so familiar to us, to founding fathers, maybe mothers of this country, to the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, to Kant, is because it gets absorbed, this whole idea of we share in reason, in the commonwealth of reason, that’s a theme in Kant, Immanuel Kant, 18th century German Enlightenment figure, who probably ran with the Stoics in the most philosophical way. That is a theme that gets absorbed.

0:11:57.0 Nancy Sherman: Now, Kant makes it very clear that he’s going to put the law, the divine law, you might say, that inside you, we’re autonomous, we don’t depend on a higher authority, or a lower, or the nature, but many internalize it as the law of nature that the Stoics are talking about as organizing the world and is really an embodiment of our reason. Many interpret this as God’s law. And so Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenized Jew, who made entreaties to Caligula on behalf of the Jewish people in Alexandria, has remarkable passages in his interpretation of Genesis that are straight out of the Stoics, about how Abraham didn’t really cry at the grave of Sarah in Hebron, if that’s where it was.

0:12:57.5 Nancy Sherman: He went there to cry, but didn’t give forth into tears. Sarah laughed. Did she laugh when she was told she’d have a child when she was 100? She didn’t really laugh, says Philo. It was a… We would say a nervous laugh. She caught herself, just before she laughed, it was like a little shudder or titter and she’s on the way to being a real matriarch, because that will soon turn into divine joy. These are very Stoic tropes that are in the air. I don’t know if he read Seneca, if Philo read Seneca or not, or what the common source for Seneca and Philo are, probably the Greeks, but they’re reading the same stuff. And so, when you ask is it a religion, it got absorbed into many of the ways in which we read religion.

0:13:55.7 Nancy Sherman: The idea of we’re children of God, this is a phrase you hear a lot in Marcus Aurelius, you sort of hear it in Epictetus. They would say we’re children of Zeus, so we turned Zeus into a different kind of divine being. The idea of laws of nature, natural law, which Aquinas of course develops, that is a Stoic theme. So I’d say much of Judeo-​Christian religion has certain elements, because they’re flourishing around the same time. Buddhism has a whole different path, and so this idea of letting go and finding equanimity, it’s really by giving up a self, or at least minimizing the self. The Stoics never talk about minimizing the self.

0:14:42.8 Nancy Sherman: They are very busy discursively talking to yourself, chastening yourself, making yourself better. There’s no ego that fully disappears. It kind of gets absorbed into a larger world, but it’s not about letting go of your ego, a very different kind of philosophy, even if both are seeking out equanimity. I’ll just make one last point about the religion. We all, many of us tire of institutional religion, the dues you have to pay, or you don’t like your rabbi, you don’t like your priest, you don’t like your ministers, so let’s do it on our own, self-​help becomes the way. You have non-​institutionalized religion, it seems, these days, and the Stoics have become a bit of a secular religion for many, many seeking comfort and strength. The industry is a mega industry, maybe not within institutional walls, maybe even so. [chuckle] I’m not sure where those walls are.

0:15:50.8 Aaron Powell: You mentioned how technical the Stoics often are with just their terminology and their approach to things, and we’ve touched a little bit on this, but maybe to help the conversation, as we go forward, can you give us the Stoic definition, exactly what they mean by both, by virtue and reason, given how prominent of a role both of those play?

0:16:14.8 Nancy Sherman: So virtue is something they simply inherit from the Greek tradition. The Greek word is arete and it really means excellence, and it could be excellence of anything, from a chair to a human being. When Cicero moves the Greek language into Latin and tries to keep as much philosophy as he can, arete or virtue or excellence, better, becomes virtus, VIRTUS, and that’s the word we hold on to. It has meaning often of virility, which some would not necessarily want to hold on to. Some say manly virtue. I disagree with that as a gloss. So, virtus is as old as Socrates, we might say. It’s been around, they just picked this up, it is a standard part of ancient ethics. Reason’s also been around since then. We know that Plato talks about educating reason till you become a philosopher king, and we know that Aristotle says that reason is the best part of your soul, your psyche, but he’s not quite sure how it blends with everything else.

0:17:37.2 Nancy Sherman: For the Stoics, it’s the only part of your psyche. There’s no parts, none of this three parts, or Freud takes up Plato and says, super-​ego, ego, id… No three parts, one part, it’s unitary, and the phrase often used for reason is it’s your hegemonic part, it’s your hegemony, we would say. It’s the ruling part of you. It’s often just referred to as the hegemonicon, ta hegemonikon, the ruler in you. And that’s a kind of old idea, but it pervades everything, you share it with Zeus, the cosmos, you share it in the world. That’s the promise of our shared humanity through reason, but it also infuses and permeates. It actually is the stuff of emotions. Emotions really are forms of reason, they’re perky or flat, they expand or they contract with your breath, your pneumon, the word for pneumonia, your soul breath, your psychic breath, but they are… But reason is polymorphous, it takes on all these shapes.

0:19:00.7 Nancy Sherman: And so when they talk about training emotions, regulating emotions that run away from you and don’t listen to you, they’re talking about trying to regulate your emotions that are, I’ll use a contemporary term, cognitive appraisals of the world, how you see the world and how you frame it, and whether that leads to grabby behavior, where you run out to get something, impulsive behavior, or it leads to really aversive behavior where you’re, or panicky aversion. And so they reason in thinking about, a Stoic spin on it is something that they’ve inherited from way back, but they now make it the only thing the psyche is made up of, and hence I think they think we’re extremely corrigible, we can be reformed in very great ways.

0:20:01.3 Trevor Burrus: We know from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, they all had a theory of the self of human nature, but they also went into politics, coming out of that. They politically theorized, starting with man is a political animal for Aristotle. Do we get much of that with the Stoics? Do we have anyone really taking Stoicism and saying this is what it means for collective bodies known as governments or states or whatever you want to call them, or do they just keep it as a more existential philosophy?

0:20:39.4 Nancy Sherman: Very good question. The first Stoic, who is Zeno of Citium, probably somewhere in Cyprus now, wrote a Republic, somewhat based on Plato’s. And in that Republic, we have a very, very inclusive polity, women are part of the citizenship and they need to be. In some ways, Zeno inherits important political and somewhat anti-​conventional views from the Cynics, a very colorful character, Diogenes the Cynic, who was somewhat skeptical of the narrow confines of current governments, and so he was sort of the yippie of the day. He says he’s a citizen from everywhere and nowhere, he is a citizen of the cosmos, hence our word cosmopolitan. He’s a world citizen, and he even burns coinage. He defaced the coinage, defaced the monetary coinage of your country. So he’s very much thinking about politics as global. He’s doing his best to disrupt the order as he knows it. But it’s political, it is very political and very outspoken.

0:22:04.4 Nancy Sherman: The Stoics inherit that, they are on the march. You might say, once we get to the Romans, they’re into territorial expansion, and they are very much against Aristotle’s view that citizenship stops at the border, and anything beyond the border are folks that can’t speak Greek, they say, “ba-​ba-​ba,” hence, they’re barbarians, and the Stoics expand the political borders outward to encompass the whole world. It may be part of a territorial quest… I’m not a military historian, but certainly, that’s where you find Marcus Aurelius on the shores of the Danube, in the Germanic campaigns against certain tribes. But they are experiencing a world that has moved outward, and since they hold on to the view that reason is our truest and only part of our psyche, anyone in this world has adequate reason to be part of this polity.

0:23:14.4 Nancy Sherman: So I’d say, “Absolutely, yes.” Unfortunately, we don’t have much of Zeno left. It’s in terrible bits and pieces, it’s been reconstructed by some scholars, but it’s not a tract we have. On the practical side, Seneca is of course, in a court, he’s in a court led by Nero. He was banished for eight years prior to getting to that court by Claudius, for an alleged adulterous relationship with Claudius’ niece, I believe, and he spends eight years in Corsica, writing this and that. It’s not the Corsica that we know, it was not then the place you would visit now as a destination. That said, his mom, Agrippina, works out that he’s going to get back to Nero’s court, and he does get back because he’s the best writer of speeches, the finest man of letters in all of Rome, and she wants her young prince, Nero, to have that at his side.

0:24:22.9 Nancy Sherman: So he’s in the court and much of his writing is the struggle for how you balance power with integrity. He doesn’t always succeed, and his plays are really about the polity, about how you might show mercy, if you’re, say, in the Trojan women, if you’ve won the war and you now have hostages, women and children, can you show mercy, you should show mercy and so forth. So it is not just a household philosophy, it is a philosophy of politics. A few people stay clear of politics and that would be Epictetus. He was formally enslaved, he has no interest in being in high places, and so stays clear. Marcus Aurelius is not only… He’s the emperor and a supreme military leader and he’s writing his philosophy at night in his tent. So he’s definitely talking about, “How can I be this amazing man with these huge gold effigies roll down in chariots to enliven my troops as they face horrible terror out on the battlefield, and how can I remain humble and true to the values I cherish that aren’t necessarily opulence and gold?”

0:25:49.5 Aaron Powell: In that context, then, where… If we can make such a comparison, where do we situate the Stoics on a spectrum from, say, an individualist philosophy, which it seems like there’s a strong element of that because of the rejection of external goods, including the necessity of external goods, including family… And then on the other hand, like a communitarian view that Aristotle sometimes I think somewhat inaccurately gets placed in. Is this more of an individualist or more of a communitarian approach to our position in the world and society?

0:26:35.2 Nancy Sherman: I think you can find elements of both. The thesis of my book, Stoic Wisdom, is that the self-​help industry has capitalized on one element, and that is your best self. How do you find your best self, and how do you find your best self if you’re stuck in the middle of a cube in Silicon Valley or your best self if you’re on a battlefield, like some of the folks I know. Or simply, if you’re going through rough times and you’ve tried Eastern philosophy, and now you go through Western philosophy, and it has the imprimatur of Western philosophy. So that for some is the right way to go.

0:27:20.5 Nancy Sherman: But I think the core and foundational elements of Stoicism are about a community. I don’t want to call it communitarian or individualistic, I will just call it, I will give you Marcus’ words. He says, if you’re on a battlefield and you see limbs, it’s parts or limbs, same Greek that he’s writing, separated from the trunk, that is what a human being makes of herself when she cuts herself off from the whole. He must have had imprinted in his mind, what he saw earlier in the day, although he’s somewhat protected from it as the head of the chain of command, we might say. But the battlefield must have been horrific.

0:28:12.2 Nancy Sherman: And he’s often talking about ways in which we’re silent workers working together, and if we don’t work together, we don’t understand how this world works. I mean, they view themselves as parts of the universe, granted, that works orderly, and you don’t know it’s order because you’re not omniscient. But you’re somehow working with the best plan, the laws of nature. And so Seneca, for example, in I think some of his most magisterial writing, writes De Beneficiis, on benefits or on benefactions. And it’s about the to and fro, the give and take of understanding what someone needs and giving that them that gift. “You wouldn’t give a country bumpkin a book,” he says. And you wouldn’t give someone a winter coat in the middle of summer, [chuckle] And you don’t give a gift with a furrowed brow or a supercilious glance.

0:29:21.1 Nancy Sherman: So emotional expression is part of it and sort of understanding the uptake of your gifts and how you’ll respond. It’s a lot of attention to the other. I don’t think it’s just about self-​help or a self-​journey. So they are writing a philosophy that has what’s become popular, life hacks, for minimizing fear, minimizing fear of death. I wouldn’t say living forever, though that is one of the tropes currently out there, bio-​hacking to beat death. But they’re actually facing fears that we face as individuals, but also collectively. So I think that’s the best way to think about it. And I think some of the things that people pick up as life hacks, like pre-​rehearse your evils, pre-​rehearse the bad so that you’re prepared and you’re not caught off guard, think about them in advance, you might say. And also idea of putting some sort of stop gap between the quick impressions that come in, and your impulsive responses as reactions to them, whether it’s about a threat or an insult.

0:30:40.0 Nancy Sherman: Those are ways that we can think about changing our habits of mind about each other, you know. Are we stereotyping that individual out there, profiling, are we going fast in our response to them? Do we need to push the pause a little bit and respond differently? So I think all of what they say is about me, but more importantly about us in creating what Seneca says in cultivating humanities. That’s his rallying call, over and over. Let us cultivate humanity.

0:31:21.2 Trevor Burrus: Marcus Aurelius is a fascinating figure, of course. And when you think of Roman emperors, you can kind of go down the Caligula, Nero, Claudius path and be like, okay, these people were not exactly the best people, or someone like Marcus Aurelius. I was not actually aware until reading your book that it was private journals. So he was not intending on writing a book, but do we know how he got to this point, I mean, that he was a philosopher writing in a tent on the Danube fighting Germanic tribes. Like in terms of his influences, who taught him, and then also, do we know how the book got out? I mean, maybe that’s just something lost to history, but how did that get out?

0:32:05.9 Nancy Sherman: If you or anyone in that period that Marcus Aurelius is raised, you had a tutor, and your tutor would be steeped in Stoicism, that wouldn’t be Epicureanism or Skepticism, it would be Stoicism, that was just the court philosophy. And in an irony of history, he either was taught or somehow got his hands on a papyrus or manuscript or some sort of Epictetus, so he seems to know Epictetus. He also knows a lot of other things. He throws Heraclitus around all the time. So he seems to know pre-​Socratics. So and, he says regularly, I’m not the smartest of guys, I wish I was smarter, I wish I was… Everyone wants to be a philosopher in this world, [chuckle] so he says, “I want to be a philosopher, but I’m not, I can’t be. I’ll settle for being a political animal. ”

0:32:58.8 Nancy Sherman: So this is a breviary of sorts, it’s almost like a religious breviary of humbling himself, and maybe that’s why General Mattis says he carries a tattered copy of the Meditations in his rucksack when he’s in the battlefield ’cause it’s very humbling if you read it. It’s, to my mother I thank you for this, to my grammarian for not catching all my grammatical mistakes or howlers. I mean, it’s kind of funny, [chuckle] I wish I was as… My students remember me in this way.

0:33:38.8 Nancy Sherman: That said, they’re all over the place. I mean, I wouldn’t really call him a philosopher, he’s distilling what a good student remembers from this lecture and that lecture and this lecture and that lecture, and he pops it all in, and I just taught this last week in my graduate seminar and my students said, “Please don’t assign this again. It’s not systematic, it jumps all over the place. There’s no theory here. It’s just witticisms, little pithy remarks of… ” I take that into consideration in developing a syllabus next year. [chuckle]

0:34:24.5 Nancy Sherman: That said, it’s written literally, the Greek is to myself or to oneself. So, how does it come to be? I think probably 16th to 15th century, but I don’t know the exact transmission of the text. I will say this, I was once in Geneva for a conference and I was at a museum, and there was the first Latin translation of the Greek which, as a well-​educated Roman, he was writing in the language of philosophy, which was Greek, and this was the first Latin translation of Marcus, that was around… I thought, if I remember correctly, I may have this wrong, mid-​16th century. So, I don’t know who the person was that dubs it the Meditations. I think I studied it this one point, but I can’t remember the exact transmission. But it becomes very much a leader’s book. I can’t tell you how many people that I know in the military cadre high up who say, “I don’t know any philosophy, I don’t read any philosophy, but I’ve read Marcus Aurelius twice this year and I do every year.” It has that kind of value.

0:35:47.1 Aaron Powell: You mentioned in passing a little earlier in our conversation that the idea that a lot of these Stoic virtues get framed as masculine virtues, and I wanted to pick up on that and ask you about the relationship between Stoicism as we understand it and kind of conceptions of masculinity, and in particular the way that Stoicism seems popular not just in like the Silicon Valley life-​hacking crowd, but also in the Red Pill online Reddit misogynist communities, and if that is… If there’s something in Stoicism or the Stoic writers that lends itself to that kind of thing or is this a misuse or misunderstanding of Stoicism and why… I guess why we see this connection, why it seems so popular in those communities.

0:36:40.6 Nancy Sherman: So, there is in general, I think, a misappropriation of Greco-​Roman texts. It’s got a long history. I don’t study the transmission or the appropriation per se, but I have colleagues that do as part of their educational materials. And we know that the Third Reich picked up on a lot of ancient Greek ideas of masculinity in forming their views. And even in some of their pictures you see the Parthenon and other sorts of notions. Marcus Aurelius on a horse, one of the most amazing bronze statues we have, still standing… People thought it was Constantine, that’s probably why it wasn’t torn down. Now it’s still in Rome. That to many is sort of the lone cowboy, the male horseman, a Marlboro Man of sorts, ruling the world.

0:37:54.2 Nancy Sherman: The Greek and Roman Stoics were not themselves misogynists. Any historical text that you go to, and if you do textual work as I do and teach it, you have to understand that it’s contextualized in their time, you can’t expect of them what you want of your own period, and so you have to be mindful of that. And just as we don’t accept Aristotle’s views these days that we are born slaves, that’s a view of his, so similarly, if you find some of this stuff in other texts, you understand the history and critique it. Why it’s picked up by Red Pill incels, the incelibate group and the like and I’ve gone down that rabbit hole a bit, though that’s not my primary preoccupation, I think it’s because virtue as virile, the same route and the kind of masculine notion, and if you read many of the translations they’re not going to be particularly inclusive.

0:39:07.2 Nancy Sherman: And I recently read some comment in a very benign way, “Oh, she’s only the second woman I know writing about Stoicism.” Well, that’s a view… If I could tell you how many leading classical philosophers there are out there, trained at Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and Yale that are women, it would be no… Duh, where are you reading this? So, I think some of it is simply a echoing of very prejudicial views and also an appropriation of a Western philosophy that doesn’t have any air of Eastern stuff in it that some might find corrupting. Musonius Rufus, a wonderful name, I think, and not well read because he wasn’t translated much and though there is a translation from the mid-​70s, 1974, I think, talks very much about the fact that women are… Have virtue, capable of virtue, and should be educated as a result, meaning they have the capacity to learn.

0:40:19.6 Nancy Sherman: He is the teacher of Epictetus. Now, Epictetus doesn’t give you much of that, but I think the other deal is that the Stoics are often read as some athletics for the soul on the model of athletics in the gym. That’s a reasonable… The palaestra is a reasonable way of thinking about Greek philosophy. And Plato tells you lots about naked wrestling of men in the gym. That’s what they did in rubbing their bodies with sand and oil and then sand, etcetera. So the idea of toughing it up with your mind, in the way you tough it up with your body and forget about this weak feminine stuff, is easy enough to pick up in Greek Roman philosophy, but it’s poor. Plato’s Book 5 of The Republic says, “Women should be guardians as well.” And he says, “The fact that they can bear children is as irrelevant as the fact that a cobbler can have hair or be bald,” [chuckle] which I think nails the point.

0:41:32.0 Aaron Powell: Now, it seems like, particularly over the last half decade or so, American politics and American political culture have been decidedly un-​Stoic, and a big part of this is like, everyone seems angry all the time, just in general, but also at each other, and particularly on social media. And is that… For a Stoic, is that okay? Like, is anger okay from a Stoic perspective? Is it one of those emotions that we should clamp down on or get away from, or does it have its uses?

0:42:16.4 Nancy Sherman: Another wonderful question. Anger for the Stoics is dangerous. It’s a runaway emotion. It’s one of the hardest emotions to regulate, and it’s an emotion whose… An emotion that inspires behavior that can be calamitous: Tyranny, bloodshed. If you want a list of all the horrors, not just appearing on your face, what your face looks like when you’re angry, but what happens in civilization when anger is unleashed, go to Seneca. There’s a whole book on anger and why it’s an emotion that should be highly regulated. And so a Stoic in many ways says that while there are good forms of most of the emotions, fear, pleasure, desire, not sure if there’s a good form of anger, at least if it’s a kind of distress that you feel, even if it has a kind of desire element that may be okay for making amendments. So I think, while anger is misplaced in much of our political discourse, I couldn’t agree with you more, in our dealings with neighbors who may not be like us in general, how we conduct ourselves of late, and, yes, in very un-​Stoic ways.

0:43:53.2 Nancy Sherman: Nonetheless, there is a form of anger that is, I think, critical that needs to be resurrected, and that is what I would call righteous indignation, moral outrage, moral outcry. But Aristotle seems to have left a place for this, and maybe it was a kind of emotion that would, as he would put it, is a response at the right time, for the right reason, in the right way, to the right people. And here’s an example in the book that really brought it home to me in a very profound way. When I was at the Naval Academy, it was 30 years after Vietnam roughly, and the issue of Vietnam was coming up over and over, and I thought, “Maybe it’s time to bring the person who stopped the Mỹ Lai massacre to the Academy,” and that was a young, young Warrant Officer, helicopter pilot, named Hugh Thompson.

0:44:54.1 Nancy Sherman: Hugh Thompson gave the order to the persons we later discovered were Lieutenant Calley and Captain Medina to stop the killing. He had been flying over the area we now know is Mỹ Lai earlier in their day, there was absolutely no enemy action and no American response. Two hours later, after refueling, there was a ditch filled with writhing bodies. And in his mind, he could not figure out what was going on, nor could the two people in his helicopter, Larry Colburn and a guy named Andreotta. Now, just the… Two of those individuals are now diseased.

0:45:40.6 Nancy Sherman: When he stopped the plane and got out, he said to his sort of co-​pilot, and that’s Larry Colburn, “If the GIs shoot at me, shoot back.” That order was incredibly controversial. But when he told me this tale, he said, in my office at Georgetown, almost cheerful, he said, “I was hot. I was so hot. I was going to stop and get down there, no matter what. This is not what we Americans do. This is what the Nazis did. There was no way I was not going to intervene.” And all his messages to the higher-​ups got garbled. Probably deliberately, they didn’t want to hear from this guy who was about to open arms on fellow Americans. But he stopped the… He stopped the massacre, it could have been 300 to 500 more killed that day.

0:46:36.2 Nancy Sherman: I think that’s well-​placed anger. I’m not sure he could have done what he did, which was very, very heroic, not in a self-​serving way. He could have gotten himself killed then, he definitely put himself on the line. I’m not sure I know what the moral motive would have been if it was cool and calm. I mean, he acted cool and calm, but he was feeling moral outrage. So I often pose this to my students as a question. What about that? What would the Stoics say to that? Did they leave room in their moral philosophy for the way in which we take care of not just ourselves, but others who we see being harmed in the most horrific ways?

0:47:26.3 Aaron Powell: What does progress look like in a Stoic world? Because if, to maybe overstate it, one of the goals of Stoicism is to be internally sufficient in the sense of not being overly bothered by other things, by external goods and so on, except for maybe in these very acute instances that drive us to act, does that effectively like sap the desire or the desirability of striving to make the world better in various ways, whether that’s technological or reform or whatever else?

0:48:09.4 Nancy Sherman: I don’t think so at all. Because I think moral progress, which is one of their themes, since we’ll never be sages, we’ll just be progressors, they say, is about, one, having emotions that are properly calibrated to things that matter out there. So they call them rational emotions or good emotions, but you’re not sapped of the energy of emotions, you just kind of… You want things, but in a rational way, and the values or the things to which you attach to are properly evaluated. That’s very hard, but that’s what they go for. So they want a certain kind of calm, equable, but good set of emotions properly attached to things in the world, including your children, including your friends, including your country. It’s just that when things go south, you will somehow figure out a way of rebalancing a little bit, you might say.

0:49:18.1 Nancy Sherman: They also are cosmopolitans. That is where we get the term, and they do believe that there is a way in which you can both reach out… I’ll use the phrase “across the aisle,” but they would say “to outer circles,” so that you bring the outermost circle inward. Here’s Hierocles… It’s not the Hierocles, we think of as Hercules, but a very lesser known guy whose name begins with an H, Hierocles. He says, “You’re at the center. Imagine concentric circles going outward, extending to the farthest reach. Your task is to bring the outermost circle inward so that the outermost person becomes kith and kin.” The Stoics have a phrase for this, it’s called oikeiôsis, bringing home, making familiar, making a kin. And so the political task for progress is to try not to be narrow-​minded, I’d say. [chuckle] Try to break down silos, try to work in cooperative endeavors so that people that seem rather other aren’t so other.

0:50:46.9 Nancy Sherman: They use the phrase all the time, “Bring home the outermost person to the center so they are more like kith and kin, and do it,” says Hierocles, “with respect and zeal.” So I take it that’s a moral commitment, I take it that’s what Kant was talking about in saying, “We have duties to try to create the commonwealth events in this world, and that will be the moral commonwealth.”

[music]

0:51:31.9 Aaron Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.