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?
She always covers the topic at hand at face value. She does the same when she discusses effective altruism in her last vid. She just leaves it to the audience to be smart enough to see that the thing she’s talking about is wrong. I don’t love how she presents the topics sometimes because I think media literacy is worse than ever nowadays so you can’t count on people to pick up on something subtle like that, they may end up getting the opposite message.
She at least brushes many of the problematic aspects of stoicism before and i don’t think she invalidates them at the end. My takeaway was more along the lines of “stoicism actually works extremely well as a self-management strategy, but there’s contexts where that kind of self-managing leads to quietism and passivity and allows us to ignore things we shouldn’t be ignoring.” It’s not always good to be a sage in the stoic sense, but if you are a sage, then there’s few things that can get to you. It’s not a path for me, i’m deliberately very far from being that, but i can see how that works out for others and i wouldn’t say it’s a problem when you’re aware of that philosophy’s limitations, when you know were you shouldn’t be sagely for once.
I guess my criticisms are less about social issues (though I think that’s a fair critique of the philosophy in some situations) and more about this idea of a perfect Sage figure. I don’t think they’d actually be as resistant or universally happy as lots of Stoics make it out to be. I don’t think anyone is just able to subvert or sublimate all of their desires for socialization, pleasure, etc. These are essential parts of human psychology. Not to mention physical things, like injury or pain or starvation, which the majority of people, no matter how hard they try, simply cannot ignore entirely.
So why is this important? Surely, since the philosophy is about accepting or ignoring things you can’t change, all of what I’m saying here is just pedantic, because if someone’s being stabbed or is cripplingly lonely, wouldn’t the best case scenario be that they can ignore those things and adapt to them?
Well, yeah, I’d certainly agree, but the problem is that, when you begin thinking that someone can adapt to horrifying extremes like this, suddenly, at least some blame gets put on the person who fails to adapt! Of course, no one would really fault someone for failing to react optimally to conditions like the ones I’m mentioning here, but the most harmful blame isn’t external, it’s internal.
When you assume that it’s possible for anyone to transcend all forms of mental and physical suffering through sheer brainpower, that creates a whole new form of suffering and anguish when they fail to live up to that. Even if they’re perfect stoics and don’t blame themselves in any way for failing to live up to it, this theoretical person in a terrible situation would still be spending inordinate amounts of time on pursuing an impossible goal. It, at best, does nothing for them, and at worst, gives them more mental stuff to work through!
Then, what I suggest is a kind of meta or post-stoicism. One of the things we have to learn to accept that we can’t change is sometimes ourselves. This isn’t free license to be a shitty person, or to do whatever you want without consequence, but it is an acknowledgement of your own needs as a person, and permission to simply let yourself be sad or angry when things suck. Paradoxically, I think that letting yourself suffer in those ways is essential to being happy. If you don’t, you spend massive amounts of time trying to get rid of those emotions, often to no avail.
Also, the categorical belief that all irrational or non-reality-centered emotions are bad needs to go, too. I’m a filthy postmodernist, so I think that the majority of human desires in general are entirely made up. That doesn’t make them invalid, though. This might sound like the romantic criticism that PhilosophyTube mentioned, but it’s more nuanced than that. I’m not saying that cheating on your spouse or risk-taking or anything like that is necessary for a happy life, I’m saying that happiness itself is irrational. All positive emotions, including mere contentment, come from entirely subjective and irrational experience. Happiness is brain chemicals generated from arbitrary biological stuff. Meaning in general is entirely inferred and does not exist in objective reality. So, grounding oneself in reality and only reality is completely meaningless advice.
In short: First principle of stoicism good, it’s generally better than epicureanism, especially given it’s communist-y emphasis, but it actually didn’t go far enough with the first principle’s own logic.
Figure out what you can change, figure out what you can’t, but sometimes the things that you can change are external from you, and sometimes the things that you can’t change are internal.
This is not edited at all so if I did anything wrong such as use the wrong pronouns again, or said something that sounds confusing, please let me know. If I said something that sounds really reactionary I probably intended something else, but let me know so I can clarify
Edit: Oh no I’m a Buddhist, thank you Philosophy Tube
A lot of transphobes will use “they” for binary trans people as a way of challenging their gender.
CW Transphobia
Looks like the other person deleted their comment but just to add in case someone’s reading, I used to do that myself before I got more educated and started to support trans people. It was a way I could have my cake and eat it too, I would deny their chosen identity but I wasn’t using their former pronouns so it was a shield against accusations of transphobia. We should be skeptical of it, even if it’s benign in some cases like here.
I’ve known too many people to go through the prison system, and some of them have said thay being in school and a consciousness raising group, meditating, all that can genuinely make you feel free even in prison.
Like there’s obviously no substitute for real freedom, but there is an amount of truth to the idea that you can be free in chains.
It’s just that, you need other people to do it and it will never quite get there.
Yeah that’s why I said it was technically true
I agree that it can help people cope, but IMO it’s never going to be as good as actually being free physically. And, freedom is different from happiness. You can feel plenty free in prison but your conditions can still make you miserable in other ways.
Yeah, I try to lean towards good faith interpretations when people are pretty much on our side like she is.
I’m not trying to argue they’re doing or saying anything wrong, at worst I just disagree with them on an abstract moral plane. Because of the context I got the impression that “freedom” was being used as a stand-in for “happiness”, implying that happiness can only be obtained “within”, which is something I don’t really agree with. People need to do work on themselves, yes, and individual coping mechanisms can help, yes, but you need both that and a change of environment for a fundamental change in attitude.
I think that someone who is liberated but misunderstands what that liberation is in reality is going to feel a lot freer than someone who is not liberated, even if they think they don’t. Someone could be a conservative who despises living in a socialist country but their subconscious attitudes caused by having free healthcare are going to affect them positively nonetheless.
TBH the people that “enjoy” prison time is probably because they get a structured daily routine with a roof, a bed, and food provided for. For a lot of prisoners, that is also the first time, they might get to see a therapist.
I wasn’t saying that they enjoyed it, just that through collective process they were able to feel free by focusing on consciousness raising, mutual education and meditation as a way of navigating those circumstances.
Obviously all this could and should happen in community, and prison is not the ideal environment for it. My point was more thay mental, social and spiritual practices like stoicism or in my friends case, feminist education, can be incredibly powerful.
I’d have to rewatch it but it didn’t really have anything that jumped out at me. Like the video on Confucianism this one feels like it stopped before it got into the interesting stuff.
Same, it felt like it just…ended? I thought we got to the good part and then it very abruptly ended into an ad for her other stuff.
I watched the video and while dramatically it wasn’t for me as target audience I did feel that in the end she was saying that no matter what you do stoicism doesn’t work unless you are an emperor (and even then you acknowledge that it is a vibe you do sometimes, but not how you act in regards to public persona or political power).
