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?
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.
