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?
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.
