Stoa Conversations: Stoicism Applied

Every gain in our power over nature is also a gain in some people’s power over other people.

That’s the argument at the center of the final chapter of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Once human nature becomes one more thing to conquer, values stop being handed down and start being engineered. Teachers become conditioners.

Caleb and Michael close out the series. They cover what Lewis means by the conquest of nature, why he thinks explaining things can slide into explaining them away, and his picture of a science that could study the world without stripping it of meaning.

(03:00) The Foil: Conquering Human Nature

(06:35) Eugenics and Transhumanism

(08:10) Power Over Nature Is Power Over Other Men

(11:30) Who Really Conquered Gravity?

(12:50) Conditioners and the Old Way of Teaching

(15:35) Education as Conditioning

(19:55) Why Not Just Teach What People Like?

(27:05) Dryads, Body-Snatchers, and a Disenchanted World

(29:55) Lightning Is Not Zeus

(33:05) Is Science the Problem?

(37:55) Closing the Book on Human Nature

(40:35) A Regenerate Science

(43:50) The Clear Window

(45:05) Thinking From Within

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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations:

https://ancientlyre.com/

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Emily Wilson translated The Odyssey. She also reviewed a new translation of Epictetus, and she wasn’t impressed.

Michael thinks she got him wrong. Not because she doesn’t know the ancient world. She does. Because her criticisms rest on misreadings that a lot of smart, well-read people make.

Caleb and Michael work through three of them. Epictetus ignores collective action. Epictetus wrote therapy for privileged men. Epictetus is good for pain but bad for love.

One of her points lands. The other two don’t.

(00:00) Emily Wilson Reviews Epictetus

(04:00) A Classicist Hostile to Stoicism

(05:30) Argument One: No Room for Collective Action

(09:40) Epictetus as a Make-Your-Own-Bed Philosopher

(14:40) What “Collective Action” Smuggles In

(19:10) Argument Two: Philosophy for Privileged Men

(24:00) Misreading Desire and Prohairesis

(30:00) Stoicism, Martial Arts, and Shifting the Goalposts

(38:20) Argument Three: Good for Pain, Bad for Relationships

(41:40) The Sick Child: Virtue, Not Tranquility

(46:40) The Iliad, Grief, and Collective Mourning

(51:30) Waterfield’s Translation and Final Thoughts

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Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/

Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations:

https://ancientlyre.com/

Are we blank slates? Or does the mind come pre-furnished?

The Stoics said blank. Aetius describes a newborn soul as a sheet of paper waiting to be written on. Every idea you have got there through experience. Plato said the opposite. Your soul already knew everything and forgot it at birth. Learning is just remembering.

Michael and Caleb work through both views, then run them against modern psychology. Core cognition theory. Preparedness theory. The monkey experiments where infants learn to fear snakes fast but never learn to fear flowers?

(05:30) Plato on innate ideas and recollection in the Meno

(11:00) The learner’s paradox

(12:00) The Stoic tabula rasa: Aetius on the mind as blank paper

(15:00) Are emotions innate categories or built from experience?

(20:00) Chomsky, Nussbaum, and cross-cultural anger

(22:30) Preconceptions: why every culture has an idea of justice

(28:00) Philosophy begins with disagreement

(30:00) Do the two views actually differ that much?

(36:00) Modern psychology: core cognition and a few innate ideas

(38:00) Preparedness theory and the snake experiments

(42:00) Proto-passions: when an impression carries force

(45:00) Self-knowledge, and the case against relativism

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Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/

Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations:

https://ancientlyre.com/

Most people who say values are just opinions don’t actually believe it. They have values. They defend them. They just save the skepticism for everyone else.

That’s C.S. Lewis’s charge in the second chapter of The Abolition of Man. Caleb and Michael work through his argument: why altruism, self-interest, and instinct all fail to ground morality, and why Lewis thinks you have to appeal to what he calls the Tao, the Way — the shared moral core running through Stoicism, Confucianism, Christianity, and the rest.

(03:00) Subjectivism and Selective Skepticism

(09:00) Epictetus and the Flying Pot

(14:00) Three Failed Groundings: Altruism, Egoism, Instinct

(22:00) The Rebellious Teenager

(27:00) Vegetables, Bricks, and Centipedes

(32:00) Alteration From Within: The Poet and His Language

(37:00) Conservatism and Moral Progress

(42:00) Expanding the Circle: Kymlicka and the Utilitarian Trap

(48:00) The Eight Laws of the Tao

(54:00) Common Sense Morality

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Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/

Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations:

https://ancientlyre.com/

Caleb and Michael both saw the film. This is a proper review.

Caleb and Michael share what they think and work through what lands and what doesn’t.

Don’t worry this is our last bit of Odyssey content for sometime.

(00:00) Introduction: A Proper Review of Nolan’s Odyssey

(03:30) Ranking Nolan’s Films

(08:15) Zeus’s Law and Odysseus’s Guilt

(13:45) An American Odyssey

(19:00) A Fair Fight: Softening the Slaughter

(20:50) The Horror of Circe, the Cyclops, and Scylla

(23:50) Downplaying the Gods: The Naturalist Reading

(27:40) The Hero Who Doesn’t Shirk Responsibility

(30:40) What’s Lost: Nausicaa and the Choice of Immortality

(36:20) The Calypso Problem: Therapy-Speak in the Bronze Age

(40:30) Athena as a Figment

(43:40) Why Zeus’s Law Doesn’t Cohere

(46:20) Clean Hands, Batman, and Moral Purity

(50:00) The Ending: Exile, Retirement, and the Next Generation

(55:10) Where Nolan Is More Stoic Than Homer

(56:00) Final Verdict: Watch It and Judge for Yourself

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Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/

Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations:

https://ancientlyre.com/

Is Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey more Stoic than Homer’s?

Caleb shares a quick solo take. A look at the movie through a Stoic lens.

There are “spoilers” – don’t listen yet if you don’t want to hear about Nolan’s approach.

(00:00) Introduction: A Stoic Take on Nolan’s Odyssey

(03:50) Gods as Nature, Not Beings

(07:40) Responsibility and Hard Choices

(10:10) Perseverance: Seneca on Odysseus

(11:10) The Sirens and the Drive to Know

(12:30) The Suitors: Justified Revenge?

(16:20) Exile and the Problem with Xenia

(19:40) Calypso, the Lotus, and Therapy Culture

(22:40) Final Verdict

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Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/

Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations:

https://ancientlyre.com/

Can you say a waterfall is sublime? Or are you just describing your feelings?

C.S. Lewis thought this question mattered more than it looks. In the first chapter of The Abolition of Man, he argues that modern education smuggles in a dangerous idea: that value judgments are just reports of emotion. Nothing to debate. Nothing to get right or wrong.

Caleb and Michael work through Lewis’s argument in this first episode of a series on the book. They cover his case for objective value, what he calls the Tao, and his warning about producing “men without chests” — people with sharp intellects, strong appetites, and nothing in between.

(00:00) Introduction: C.S. Lewis and The Abolition of Man

(06:30) The Green Book and the Waterfall

(10:10) Emotivism, Expressivism, and Subjectivism

(13:40) The Fact vs Opinion Distinction

(19:00) Education as Cultivating the Right Feelings

(25:40) The Way, the Tao

(28:50) The Head, the Belly, and the Chest

(34:50) Dulce et Decorum Est

(43:20) Are Aesthetic Judgments Objective?

(47:50) Men Without Chests

(52:00) Takeaways

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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations:

https://ancientlyre.com/

In this episode, Caleb talks with Massimo Pigliucci about his new book, How to Be a Happy Skeptic, and the thinker at its center: Cicero. They trace skepticism from Pyrrho’s radical doubt to the Academics, who found a better path. You don’t need certainty. You need to know how sure to be, then act (or not).

The Stoics and skeptics argued for decades over whether truth leaves a mark you can trust. What happens when you admit you might be wrong?

Read How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic.

(03:00) Pyrrhonism: suspend judgment, find peace

(06:50) The Academics go back to Socrates

(08:40) Fallibilism: senses and reason both fail

(10:20) Carneades and the degrees of probability

(18:00) Skeptics versus Stoics: the cataleptic impression

(22:20) Certainty, polarization, and the case for doubt

(25:30) Cicero, friend and critic of the Stoics

(27:00) On Divination: the first book against pseudoscience

(31:40) On Ends and the gift of aporia

(37:00) Virtue, friendship, and the good life

(41:50) Seneca and skeptical Stoicism

(44:50) Cicero’s life and death

(55:40) Being useful to others

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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations:

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People love to pair Stoicism and Buddhism. Both blame suffering on desire. Both teach a kind of meditation. Both are about 2,500 years old. So how similar are they, really?

Michael and Caleb run a Buddhism 101 for Stoics. They start with the Buddha: a prince who had everything, saw old age, sickness, and death for the first time, and walked away from the palace to figure out why we suffer. From there it’s the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and the Middle Way.

(00:00) Introduction

(06:28) The Buddha’s Founding Parable

(14:24) The Four Noble Truths

(19:59) The Middle Way and the Eightfold Path

(31:30) The Evolutionary Case for Buddhism

(40:09) Where Stoicism and Buddhism Overlap

(48:02) Where They Split Apart

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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations:

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What makes some people excellent at their craft and others just average? Michael walks through a classic 1989 sociology paper on Olympic swimmers and pulls out three lessons that apply directly to Stoic practice.

The answer is not what most people expect. It is not extreme effort. It is not raw talent. Excellence turns out to be mundane. It is how you do the boring things, every day, for a long time. And when the pressure is on, excellence is just doing those boring things well one more time.

(00:00) Introduction: What makes someone excellent?

(02:50) Lesson One: Excellence requires qualitative differentiation

(06:40) Separate worlds: how levels differ in kind, not amount

(07:40) Lesson Two: Talent does not lead to excellence

(09:40) Talent is indistinguishable from its effects

(11:00) Talent as a floor, not a ceiling

(14:20) Lesson Three: Excellence is mundane

(14:30) Mary Meagher: show up on time, nail the turns

(17:40) Long-term motivation is boring

(18:30) Excellence is doing the boring stuff under pressure

(20:40) How refusing the mundane caps your ceiling

(23:10) Summary of the three lessons

(25:50) Takeaways for Stoic practice: making good use of impressions

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Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/

Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations:

https://ancientlyre.com/