Why the ancient philosophy of stoicism is having a modern revival

The Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism is having a moment. Through wisdom, temperance, courage and justice you can create a virtuous, well-lived life.

But have modern-day stoics got it right?

Today, On Point: Why the ancient philosophy of stoicism is having a modern revival.

Margaret Graver, professor in classics at Dartmouth College.

Nancy Sherman, professor of philosophy at Georgetown University.

Ryan Holiday, author, businessman and podcaster.

Ryan Mulkowsky, former pastor, current hospice chaplain and bereavement coordinator, mental health therapist.

John Knighton, co-founder of the Redwood Stoa.

Part I

(MONTAGE)

We start in the Middle East. Hamas has launched the biggest attack on Israel in years.

2023 will go down as the hottest year on record.

We have to act.

Southern California is under its first ever tropical storm watch.

First Republic is now the third major bank to fail since March.

Flames and plumes of smoke lit up the sky in East Ohio after a train derailed.

The deadliest earthquake that Morocco has suffered in more than 100 years.

The number of people killed in earthquakes in Turkey and Syria has risen to nearly 50,000.

Palestinians are dying in the tens of thousands, but we'll continue to say it is us who are not a glitching humanity.

Another mass shooting in this country. 10 people are dead.

In Mississippi, in Louisville, Kentucky.

In an elementary school in Nashville.

In no way in the world y'all are trying to ban TikTok and y'all haven't even flinched at changing the good news.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The bad news, the catastrophes, the never ending rush of history bowling over us all.

It's too much, too overwhelming. It just makes you want to 'Ah!'

RYAN HOLIDAY: There's a great quote from Flaubert that I think about. He says, there was this moment, he says, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, he said, when the gods had died out, but Christ had not yet come, he said that man stood alone in the universe.

CHAKRABARTI: This is Ryan Holiday. He says that time of humanism healing a loss of faith, neatly bookended by the ancient Greeks and Romans, is captured by one thing. The practice of stoicism.

HOLIDAY: To me, the essence of Stoic philosophy, what I feel like I can't repeat enough times, is this idea that we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens.

And the idea is that the Stoic responds always with courage, self discipline, justice, and wisdom. So that's what we're doing. And that's what I find myself saying in all these different mediums. And what you find when you pick up Marcus Aurelius, or Seneca, or Epictetus, or Cleanthes, or Zeno, or any of the ancients who wrote about this stuff, is some version of that repeated over and over again in all the different ways and contexts that a person can encounter it.

CHAKRABARTI: Holiday is a best-selling author and podcaster, whose millions of adherents follow his interpretations of Stoic philosophy.

HOLIDAY [ONLINE VIDEO]: Your opinions are your problem. Epictetus says, look, when you're offended, you have to realize that it takes two to tango. He says, we are complicit in the taking of offense. You don't have to have an opinion about this.

You don't have to take it personally. You can think the best of it. You can ignore it.

HOLIDAY: So I was in college and I got introduced to Marcus Aurelius's meditations. Someone recommended that I read the Stoics and I was sitting at the table in my college apartment, and it's just this magical book. You're reading the private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world, who's talking to himself about how to be a better person, how to manage his temper, how to think about his habits, what his obligations as a human being are.

CHAKRABARTI: That's quite a remarkable revelation for a young person. The mighty Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, a man who controlled a sizable portion of the known human world at the time. Even he needed a guiding philosophy to allow sane passage through the world, a Caligula he was not.

HOLIDAY: What I was interested in is the same reason that a lot of young men and young women, but professionals and ambitious people are attracted to stoicism.

At first, it's about what it can do for you, how to help you manage your emotions, good habits, good practices. How to exist in a world of frustrating, obnoxious, annoying people.

Questions to ask yourself every single day from the Stoics. What is the worst case scenario? That's the exercise of premeditatio malorum, planning in advance for adversity.

And then Seneca also says, you should ask yourself at the end of each day, where did I fall short? Where did I improve? And where can I do better?

CHAKRABARTI: Now, stoicism, today, does find some of its biggest fans amongst the Silicon Valley set, or Broicism, as Holiday jokes. But if it were just that, just tech bros trying to optimize their emotional regulation for maximum efficiency, then stoicism's modern resurgent really wouldn't be worth note.

But millions of people, from all walks of life, in fact, are turning to stoicism. Men and women, white collar and blue, people of all ages, seeking something to help find direction and peace.

HOLIDAY: We've seen a collapse in trust in so many different institutions, schools don't teach the humanities the way they once did, and people have turned away from the church.

And so philosophy as a guide to the good life, how to be a good person and how to flourish as a person. I think takes on a new residence and a new urgency in a world of similar sort of decline. And then also, as you said, turbulence and dysfunction.

CHAKRABARTI: But in the grand tradition of American self-reliance and self regard. It can seem like the modern day practice of stoicism is pretty self-absorbed. All about me, all about what the ancient Greeks and Romans can do for me and my inability to cope. But holiday says no. That's not what it's about at all. He says, in fact, what people don't realize when they pick up his books, podcasts, or online posts, is that stoicism makes people better for themselves.

And for the societies they live in.

HOLIDAY: And so I think this idea of stoicism opening you up and making you better, as opposed to hardening you and making you more disinterested, is a sort of a secret part of the stoic trajectory that a lot of people who maybe are reacting against how popular it is online or the sort of quotification of it, are missing.

That's the point. What draws you in is all these things it can do for you, but if you're doing it right, it opens you up and it gives you a sort of a moral compass with which to judge your own behavior and to operate in a world where many people are not. But it's working on you as you are working with those ideas and hopefully making you better as you go.

HOLIDAY [ONLINE POST]: You're going to die. You could die tomorrow, you could die the day after tomorrow, but it is a certainty you are going to die. You could leave life right now. Marcus Aurelius says, let that determine what you do and say and think.

CHAKRABARTI: That last bit there was from one of Ryan Holiday's online posts. Holiday is a best selling author of books such as The Daily Stoic, The Obstacle is the Way, Discipline is Destiny, Courage is Calling, and The Lives of the Stoics.

So what is it about this ancient Greco-Roman practice that is finding so many followers today? I have to say, when we said we were going to do a show about stoicism, we heard from a whole heck of a lot of you. So joining me now in the studio is Margaret Graver. She's a professor of classics at Dartmouth College and author of Seneca: The Literary Philosopher, amongst other books.

Professor Graver, welcome to you.

MARGARET GRAVER: Hi.

CHAKRABARTI: Also with us today is Nancy Sherman. She's a philosophy professor at Georgetown University and author of Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons from Modern Resilience, and Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers. Professor Sherman, welcome to you.

NANCY SHERMAN: Hi. Nice to be here, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: It's great to have you both with us because I have been captivated by how often I see amongst, for example, some of the YouTubers I follow, that they are quite dedicated to this idea of stoicism. And Professor Graver, let's start with a little bit of the history. Because we mentioned some names, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, et cetera.

How far back in time and where would we go to first pinpoint the rise or the flourishing of stoicism?

GRAVER: Sure, Meghna. So what we're talking about is a system of philosophy that originated in Athens in the 3rd century BCE. We speak of the Stoics rather than of any single name. Because there were really three founders of ancient stoicism.

Interestingly, none of them was an Athenian. So Zeno of Citium was from Cyprus. His pupil, Cleanthes of Assos, was from Asia Minor, what we think of as Turkey. And then the third and maybe the most brilliant of these three powerful thinkers was Chrysippus of Soli, also from Asia Minor. Then those three, although they did write voluminously, we only have snippets of their work.

Most of what we can read now of stoicism was from later authors, from the Roman, Cicero, was not a Stoic, but was very knowledgeable about stoicism, wrote a lot about it. And then especially the figures that Ryan Holiday mentioned, Seneca, a century later than Cicero, Epictetus, several generations later, and then Marcus Aurelius in the third century.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So we're going to talk about all of them more in just a moment, but let's jump back and forth here, while we learn about the ancient history. So Professor Sherman. You heard Ryan Holiday say that that he thinks the human experience now, in a certain sense, it does reflect the human experience that gave rise to stoicism in Ancient Greek and then flourishing in Ancient Rome.

What's your take on that?

SHERMAN: Certainly. Thanks very much. First of all. We certainly feel that we're in cataclysmic times with climate change, wars, partisan divides of the like that we've never seen. And, of course, the huge equity differences, income differences that create the resentments and the grievances and the sense of not getting the work you want and the like, so I think there's certainly some resonating with it. That said, a lot of the people that initially got interested didn't have those problems. That is by initially, the popular appeal, they were tech bros who felt that they had to dream big and contain their egos a bit as they dreamt big.

That's how Tim Ferriss once put it, the author of Four Day Week, that it was a way to monitor yourself a little bit. If your dreams got a bit too grandiose. And I think that still is some of it, but there's definitely the idea of wanting to have a religion that's secular. Where it doesn't require tithing, belonging to this synagogue, mosque, church, and all the buy up that comes with it.

In this case, you just tune in to your favorite podcasts, read a little bit of Seneca in the morning, or Marcus Aurelius in the morning.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: As I said a little earlier, when we told you On Point listeners last week that we were going to do this show, we heard from a ton of folks.

So for example, here's Sophie Magon in Michigan.

SOPHIE MAGON: A lot of times now the younger generation has unlimited access to news and horrifying things all the time. And so learning how to process those things in a way that doesn't affect your mental health in such a negative way, like turning on the internet and seeing all these deaths and things and just being able to process them and appreciate them and feel them, but not have it overtake your life.

I feel like it's a really strong point of stoicism nowadays.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Sophie in Michigan, and this is Nick Forbes, who called us from Salt Lake City, Utah, and he shared with us how his parents were divorced when he was very young. He found himself struggling with his Mormon religion. After that, he fell into drugs and alcohol in college.

NICK FORBES: And then the founding principles behind stoicism encourage self-control, and that really helped me in my journey of sobriety. And in a world where everyone is striving to be identical to each other, be different. That's the main takeaway that I got was, you know what, you are different, and that's okay.

That's an incredibly uplifting thing.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Nick from Salt Lake City, Utah. I'm joined today by Nancy Sherman and Margaret Graver. And Professor Graver, like I said, I want to bounce back and forth between the ancients and today. And you hear in those calls, and also in how I even introduced the show, this idea that stoicism is about self-control, self-moderation.

Is that how the ancient Greeks that you had mentioned first thought about and wrote about stoicism, or was it completely different in the Greek context?

GRAVER: I wouldn't say completely different. I would say that the practices you speak of and the strategies for gaining control of your life were a part of ancient stoicism.

But it's important to realize for someone like me, that we are talking about a philosophy here. Whether these are thinkers who are deeply analytical, and the ethical orientation that we hear so much about from Ryan Holiday and others, was only one branch element of a system that also included, for starters, logic.

These are the people who invented propositional logic. Cosmology and physics, that's their terminology. We would say, perhaps natural science. So you have Greek philosophers, as many people know, who talked about atoms and void. That's not the Stoic approach. They're much more interested in energy, movement, events, which they sum up in a concept of what they call designing fire. The energy that pervades the universe and gives rise to all events. These people are also fatalists. And then that also involves a theology. The designing fire is, hello, also God, a philosophical theology here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, I was going to say, it's a philosophical thought, it's not necessarily a religious one.

GRAVER: The comparisons to religion, they are helpful in a way but then there is this thought through as part of a philosophical system.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so actually the idea of that designing fire or being concerned with the energy that makes the universe actually seems very scientific to me. Energy being the only thing that cannot be created or destroyed, mostly, of all the factors that we know that make up the universe.

But was the development, centuries long development of stoicism, in response to something in ancient Greece or not? Was it just one of the ways in which the Greeks were thinking about and exploring the world?

GRAVER: It's probably helpful to think about stoicism in response to its not so very distant predecessors, Plato and Aristotle, but were both very important predecessors for stoicism and a tradition that goes back to Socrates of what is now called virtue ethics.

Stoics take up those strands that you find in Plato's depictions of Socrates, for instance, and make it into a tighter and more coherent and rigorous system, grounded in the idea that the human being is essentially a rational creature. Not to say that we always behave sensibly, but that our feelings and our behaviors arise from our beliefs.

Beliefs about value and beliefs about the world, and that we can self-correct. So if we are shown that we are mistaken about something, we have the impulse to correct our thinking. When we change our beliefs, we also change the way we feel about things and also the way that we act.

And that's just a design feature of the human species, so I spoke of designing fire, you have a providential deity who is designing the world, and this is how we, the kind of creature we are, is designed.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

GRAVER: Central fact about us.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, quick question, and then, and Professor Sherman, I promise I'll come back to you. When speaking, when focusing so much about a particular way of thinking, I sometimes find on this show that I get, I forget about the broader context. So just to place stoicism in the overall expanse of Greek thought, was it practiced by a lot of Greeks? Was it a fringe thing? How can we understand its influence on ancient Greek society?

GRAVER: To the extent that ancient Greek society did have intellectual activity, discussion, and philosophy as an important part of it, I'm not saying for everyone, but for people who could read, that portion of the population that could read, or had the luxury of doing this, would have been seen, was seen as a dominant philosophy for approximately five centuries, from the third century right through to the second century CE and beyond.

So these were the primary inheritors of the tradition of Plato and Aristotle.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. Fascinating. So Professor Sherman now let's move a little bit into the Roman period. The Romans did adopt a lot of what the Greeks created. But how do you see stoicism playing out amongst or playing out in ancient Rome?

SHERMAN: So let me just speak to that and also back up a tiny bit. They are. Very much, historics are very much practicing a philosophy that had deeper roots. As Margaret mentioned, Margaret Graver mentioned the Socratic background and Platonic background, but also Aristotle. And one of the critical pieces that Aristotle lays down is not just that we're rational animals, but our self-sufficiency is relational.

It's not alone that we survive and thrive and flourish. It's with each other in families and cities and in the greater community. And that often gets missed, even in the Roman practice, where it is very much about calming yourself, as Holiday said, at the end of the day, and it's yourself.

It's seeing how you can improve, how you can progress, yes, with virtue and virtue ethics, but very much a sort of a self-optimization, you might say. But that misses another strand that really was dominant in Aristotle, and there are strands of it even in the Roman Stoics. Marcus, who's writing his Meditations on the Battlefield, eight years of horrific, of campaigning along the Danube where he's probably sick with the Antonine Plague.

And he says, if you've ever seen a hand or a foot or a leg severed off from the rest of the trunk, that's what we make of ourselves when we cut ourselves off from each other. And they have this idea that we're in a commonwealth.

... The idea is you're a citizen of the universe, a citizen of the world, and you are connected, and so that would have been a part of Roman practice as well, but it's meshed with the idea that you are a self-critic, bring yourself, you know, before the court of opinion, in a sense, at the end of the day, Seneca says when it's quiet, his wife is asleep.

He's thinking about his failures during the day. And I often think it's very much a bit of self-flagellation or castigation. It's not very common to go through a litany of failures. But it is very much about how you improve. But there's also this sense, as I say, this strand, you see it in this quote from Marcus on the battlefield, he must have been thinking of a cadre and how we need each other to fight.

But also, Heracles, a lesser-known Roman during the Roman period, says, imagine a person at the center, and then all the concentric circles outwards. Your job is to zealously transfer the outer circle into the inner. To connect. And you can only zealously transfer if you have a sort of imagination that helps you appreciate the sense of the other in your own world.

And so I think that often gets missed in the worry about the upheavals of our personal lives.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Can I just jump in here?

SHERMAN: Stabilize.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Can I just jump in here for a quick second? Because Marcus Aurelius in particular fascinates me from the little I know about him. And in total transparency here, whenever I hear the name of that famed ancient Roman, honestly, the movie Gladiator is the first thing that comes to mind. When Russell Crowe's character of Maximus goes into the tent during one of the great wars that you were talking about, Professor Sherman, and there is Richard Harris's Marcus Aurelius just writing as this devastation is going on around him.

But as I said at the top of the show, and I'll ask both of you this, he was an emperor of Rome. If there was anyone who had power to make change in the environment around him, it was someone like that. But yet he is one of the most famed philosophers or at least writers of stoicism, which, I'm just looking at some quotes from him online.

'External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them, which you can erase right now.' And then he says, 'Think of the life you have lived until now as over and as a dead man, see what's left as a bonus and live it according to nature.' Can you tell me a little bit more about Marcus Aurelius and his relationship or why he was Such a stoic?

SHERMAN: This would have been his philosophy. It was taught then, and he viewed Epictetus as an inspiration of sorts, an enslaved person. Epictetus, we know, was enslaved around the time of Nero. But learned philosophy and started lecturing on it and had pithy witticisms that would appeal then and appeal now to the public and Marcus presumably came across them.

There's also the sense, he's got to be able to make it in 8 years of horrific war. He is presumably very sick. The fact that he commands enormous power doesn't mean that he's not aware of the dangers of the power. And also, how he is beholden to others for his success, whether or not he thanks in the acknowledgments to his book, you might say, at the beginning of the book or the end.

We probably think it wasn't where it appears in the beginning, but he thanks his grandmother. He thanks his mother. And he thanks, my favorite is the grammarian who wasn't, who didn't get angry at his howlers, when he misspoke. So he has a sense of humility. And I think he's trying to practice humility, despite his power and the abuses of power.

And of course, the dangers of death out there, he's dying, and he's got to make it back to Rome, and his brothers died. So these are hard times. There's no doubt that he needs to toughen it up a bit.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me, the idea of the Marcus rule is needing to tough it up. It really sticks with me. But Professor Graver, I know you want to jump. You want to jump in here.

GRAVER: Just to say that anyone who has ever held a leadership position knows that things don't always go the way you want them to. Marcus, as a leader, amazing leader of a world community, is in the same position. You can try, but you're not guaranteed of success. That person needs a coping strategy, just as much as anyone else, maybe even more.

I want to go back to something that Nancy emphasized, and I would also emphasize, which is the social dimension of stoicism. I had stressed that the human being is by design and inherently and essentially a rational creature. By the same token, a social creature. Even when we're babies or very young children, love to figure things out for themselves.

That's the rational nature beginning to manifest itself. But also, even a baby smiles at their caregiver more than at some random person. That's the beginnings of community right there. So Marcus, as a leader of the community, has a responsibility grounded in that design feature of the human, to work for the beautiful community.

It's not just the good self. It's the good community or the ideal community that one is striving to achieve. That's the responsibility, and that is pursued vigorously, energetically, at the same time, recognizing that not everything we try to achieve is going to be achieved.

CHAKRABARTI: That is such a good point, because, again, to emphasize that the responsibility to community was a overt and active part of stoic practice, right?

And it just gets me thinking to what Ryan Holiday said earlier, that maybe that's not the first thing these days that pulls folks into learning about stoicism, right? It's the effect on the self. He insists though, that it can be then, to use a terrible ancient pun. That could be the Trojan horse. (LAUGHS)

I'm sorry, I couldn't resist! That then gets people to think about society a little bit more. Oh my god, they're going to take me off the air right now for terrible ancient puns. But you know what? We have to we have to take a quick break here. When we come back, I want to, again, place us firmly into how this ancient philosophy is really finding a lot of resonance with people today.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I want to just continue to reflect the resonance that Stoicism had amongst or has amongst many of our own listeners.

This is Diane Allison from Spokane, Washington.

DIANE ALLISON: I practice the stoic principle of the fact that I have control over my mind, but not outside events. By, oh, you can control how you feel about others. You can control how you treat others. And I guess that's stoical, instead of complaining that people are all evil and unpleasant, you conclude that people are pretty nice and they do treat you pretty nice when you treat them nicely.

CHAKRABARTI: And here's Christian Boyd from Waukesha, Wisconsin, who says he's a quasi-practicing Stoic. He's a Presbyterian clergy person and says despite what people think, Christianity and Stoicism can exist together.

CHRISTIAN BOYD: And I think a lot of people may be turning to Stoicism today because it is, it doesn't have as much cultural baggage to it, especially in the American context where religion has become overwhelmingly heavy and divisive.

So stoicism seems to be a lot cleaner, philosophical approach to organizing your life.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so there's Christian Boyd saying Christianity and stoicism can exist together. On the other hand, Joel Karen from Salt Lake City, Utah, he grew up in the Mormon church and eventually decided to leave his faith.

JOEL KAREN: Stoicism encourages me to be the person I had hoped to be as a Christian. But without the all-seeing eye of God threatening to punish me if I disobey his word. As a practicing Stoic, I get to be honest, kind, ethical, moral, helpful, benevolent, and all those things. Because I choose to, not because God commanded me to. Stoicism works for me very well. I'm a much better person outside of religion as a stoic than I ever was inside religion as a believer.

CHAKRABARTI: So a couple of On Point listeners there reflecting what you Professor Sherman had said earlier about it's not just a way of being, but a system of belief that seems to be really attractive to a lot of Americans now.

With that thought in mind, I'd like to introduce you to one more. This fellow.

RYAN MULKOWSKY: My name is Ryan Mulkowsky. I live just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And currently I work as a hospice chaplain and bereavement coordinator, and I also work as a mental health therapist.

CHAKRABARTI: Back in 2021, Ryan wrote a blog post whose title was Stoicism Saved My Life, and we wanted to know more.

MULKOWSKY: I was raised fairly religious, Christian. Very conservative evangelical for a long time, and I was actually conservative evangelical pastor for a long time and then started just moving through the world and started interacting with people. I was kept in a very in a small bubble and didn't really have a lot of friends that thought differently than me or look differently than me or anything like that.

And when I became an adult and I started exploring what did life look like outside of my little bubble? It created a lot of questions and questions created a lot of doubts for me. And for me, it was a really slow process. It wasn't like overnight, I decided, okay, I'm not going to be a Christian anymore.

CHAKRABARTI: Ryan had been questioning his faith for years, but he says it wasn't until about 2019 that he decided he needed to move on from Christianity.

MULKOWSKY: Leaving that behind and everything that went with that. Was just really hard, I wasn't just leaving a job. I was leaving a community. I was leaving friends.

My entire academic career was built on that. So when I left that, it was, I felt completely lost. And didn't know what I was going to do with my life and I came across stoicism also, in part, because I got therapy and as my therapist was working with me, supporting me and trying to find, discover for myself, how am I going to change?

How am I going to move through these situations? I realized that cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a very popular form of therapy, actually has its roots in stoic philosophy.

CHAKRABARTI: And then the pandemic hit. Ryan worked in hospice and found those years to be incredibly trying. He says it was during the pandemic when he really leaned into Stoicism as a guiding philosophy for his daily life.

Now, a few years on, he says he's lucky that his parents and in laws continue to love and support him, even if not totally understanding why he left Christianity. He says he still remembers the night when he told his wife.

MULKOWSKY: It was a hard conversation. We talked for hours that night. I still remember it to this day, sitting in the living room.

I remember exactly where I sat, where she sat. I remember what was shared. I remember the tears in her eyes. I remember the tears in my eyes. It was a very difficult conversation. We talked for hours that night after the kids were asleep and everything. But she was so supportive. She just came up and gave me a hug and a kiss and she said, I love you no matter what.

And we'll navigate what is it like for me to have a faith and you not to have a faith? And what does that look like for our kids? We don't have to figure that out today. It was just her showing her love and devotion to me, meant the world to me.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Ryan Mulkowsky. He's a hospice chaplain, bereavement coordinator, and mental health therapist just outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

And Professor Graver, we wanted to actually feature a lot of those voices because many people, when they called us, they talked about either trying to find a way for Stoicism to fit into their current system of belief, most of the voices you heard there were Christian, or as Professor Sherman said, it seemed to be a better way of being than their current organized religion.

Why do you think that might be?

GRAVER: I think I'm not eager to talk about comparisons of stoicism with religious systems. I think we might want to go back to what I see as the core of pretty much everyone you've heard from, which is the idea of having a coping strategy for difficult modern world with a lot of stuff coming at us all at once.

The idea of being able to claim the self, and in particular to gain some measure of control over our emotional responses. So this is indeed part of ancient stoicism. I stressed earlier in the show that the core of ancient stoic ethics is about the essentially rational nature of the human being, but that doesn't mean that we always behave in a sensible way, far from it.

What it does mean is that both our behaviors and our feelings arise from things that we believe and the ways that we reason and put together our beliefs. It's important that the emotional response is also very carefully analyzed in the ancient texts. Emotions, the way you feel, the boiling up of anger, the clutch of fear, these things are also behaviors.

And arise from our rational mind in the same way as our actions and beliefs do. It's true that they don't always feel like something that is under our control. Chrysippus had the wonderful analogy to a runner heading downhill. In the moment when you're running, you can't necessarily stop. But it doesn't mean that running is not something that you chose to do.

So we need to give ourselves a little time in the moment of strong emotion. But afterwards, with some discussion, some reading, some working with other people, we can rethink those beliefs that are grounding our emotions and the values in particular. And make a difference for ourselves going forward.

CHAKRABARTI: For the way both of you described what the practice of stoicism allows a person to do, in a sense I really feel for a lot of the callers who said, I was a lifelong Christian, but there wasn't, something wasn't working for me. Because, as actually one of our listeners said, it's still a religion that externalizes a powerful deity, right?

And your practice is in trying to be in line with that external deity, but I think they found much more promise in the sort of, like you said, the internal practice of changing oneself. Now, that brings me to a point which I've been dying to get to, all throughout this conversation. We're really focused on the Greeks and Romans, because we're talking about Stoicism, but every single thing both of you have described sounds like it actually has an even more ancient history to me, and I'm thinking of ancient eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism, if you ask me.

But we did get a caller, we got a caller who pointed out exactly this. This is Zubin Billimoria from Los Angeles.

ZUBIN BILLIMORIA: When one focuses internally on oneself and one's own internal development and searching for the purpose in life, it automatically ends up that the external world surroundings around you, immediate surroundings around you, would not matter as much and you stay dissociated from the life around you.

Taking it just as it is, watching it like a movie and saying, this is what this is, and there is nothing that I could have done that would have changed this moment. And if there was, I learned a lesson from it and move on. I don't think, honestly, there's anything new that stoicism has brought to the table, unless one could say that it was probably an idea that has now been repackaged by westerners, for the Western world. And that's what makes it suddenly seem so much more interesting.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Sherman that holds a lot of sway with me. My father used to always say that one of the goals was to free yourself from attachment. And that didn't mean necessarily mean go live in a cave, but that free yourself from attachment so that you can actually operate in complete, being completely present in the world.

And that came from his Buddhist practice. What do you think about that?

SHERMAN: Oh, there's certainly overlaps, whatever the cross fertilization was in the ancient world. Stoics are certainly interested, as Margaret was saying, in retraining your emotions so that you don't have the same sticky acquisitive approach mechanisms or panicky aversion avoidance mechanism.

So you're trying to let go a little bit of the unruly passions, and train more, train calmer ones, but there are a few critical differences. I've practiced Buddhist meditation in my life, and there's a sense in which you really empty your mind and try to quiet it. And that's part of the idea of the selflessness.

And as you read the meditative practices of the ancients, they really were into, if not God punishing you, the self punishes. Seneca can be quite hard on himself. At the end of the day, you are the judge before yourself. What'd you do wrong? Did you scream at someone? Did you think you should be sitting at the dais when they put you in the back of the room at a sub table? Yeah. And I do remember this when Carl Reiner died his good friend Steve Martin, just prior to that, his good friend Steve Martin said am I, is it too late? He said, no, I'm just up here, going through my litany of failures.

It's that sort of self-examination that can be overly critical. And so there's a sense in which the self's improvement is really what the ancient world has always been about. And the idea of letting go of the ego is a much more eastern notion, even though there's definitely similarities, and permanence is a Buddhist notion.

Whereas the stoics think less about impermanence and more about, Have you done everything you can? And then it's time to let go.

CHAKRABARTI: Those are important distinctions. I see what you're talking about here. And I just want to give Professor Graver a chance to jump in.

GRAVER: I would echo some of that.

It's certainly true that there are some commonalities with Buddhist practice. The idea of self-knowledge, the idea of rethinking your desires, the idea of correcting your own attitudes, but also this Buddhist ideal of tranquility. And of having an ideal version of human existence to aspire to.

These things are also part of ancient Stoicism. Maybe not from coming from the same place, but getting to a place that for many people today will feel quite similar. And I think I would just add that for ancient Stoics, and maybe also for some modern Stoics, that this is experienced as liberation. As a kind of freedom.

SHERMAN: It is a freedom. Can I just add one thing?

CHAKRABARTI: Yes. Yeah. And then I have one last quick question. But we only have a minute now. You got 10 seconds and I'm going to give you that last question.

SHERMAN: Equanimity. Yes. But one thing that's often missing in these accounts is changing the social structure and not just your attitude to it.

And that I find really problematic, even ancient and modern. Social structure matters.

CHAKRABARTI: So I want to sneak this last one in here. We've just got under 60 seconds left. But what, one of the things that fascinates me about this is not some, is not just how many Americans these days are finding stoicism attractive, but all the principles both of you talked about are actually the opposite of what we teach young children today in school.

You're laughing because, right? It's true. Like the centrality of feeling, like being safe in all circumstances. About if you're hurt, it doesn't matter what the intention of the other person was about the facts are feelings. This is a completely different way of thinking. Professor Sherman, I'm going to give you the last 10 seconds here.

Should we be teaching stoicism in schools instead?

SHERMAN: I don't actually think so. I actually think being able to feel is critically important and not just changing how you feel and reducing the impact of others. I would say having resilience, he thought of as a social structure. And so that idea of Marcus, if you see yourself cut off from others, that's what we make of ourselves.

And we cut ourselves off from the community, having a supportive community. And the ways in which we support through understanding is really the way to strengthen. And I think that's an enlightened view of Stoicism that we need to teach our children, if through the Stoic texts or not.