The Daily Stoic - Dr. Shadi Bartsch on Eastern vs. Western Philosophy

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Ryan speaks with Dr. Shadi Bartsch about her new book Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism, the controversial role that Greek classics are taking in China, the surprising similarities between western and eastern philosophical interpretations, and more. Dr. Shadi Bartsch is an American academic and author and the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. Shadi is an expert on Roman Stoicism, the reigns of Hadrean, Nero, and Augustus, and The Aeneid, which she translated in 2021. She has written and/or edited thirteen books, including the acclaimed Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural and The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire. Shadi can be followed on Twitter @ShadiBartsch. ✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short Passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are,

and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. You ever meet a college professor and you're just like, this person is born to do this. They're just so amazing at communicating the ideas, at captivating your attention, sharing their infectious love of the topic. Also, they're sort of infectious love of the topic. Also, their deep and profound love of the topic. I had a couple of those professors when I was in college, obviously not enough of them,

where I probably wouldn't have left. But when I talk to people like Shadi Barge, who is a distinguished professor of classics at the University of Chicago, I think, man, I would have loved to be in one of your classes. And I feel very lucky to talk to her on the podcast. I feel very lucky. We all should be lucky to enjoy her books. This is her second time on the podcast. Previously, she was on discussing her beautiful, readable, riveting translation of the Ineid. Well, in her new book, she's talking about basically the application of Western philosophy in the Eastern world and the unique role,

the controversial role that the classics are taking in China right now. The book is called Plato Goes to China, the Greek classics in Chinese nationalism. And because of her expertise on the iniyid, she is an expert on Roman stoicism, the reign of Hadrian, the reign of Nero, the reign of Augustus. She is a big fan of Seneca. And I just really enjoyed this conversation.

I think you're really going to enjoy listening to it. And so I'll just get right into it. You can follow Shadi Barch on Twitter at Shadi Barch. That's S-H-A-D-I-B-A-R-T-S-C-H. You can check out her new book, Play Do Goes to China, The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism, and do read her translation of Virgil's The Nid. I found that absolutely fascinating,

and I think you're really going to enjoy this interview. The Dell Technologies Black Friday in July event is on with limited quantity deals on top business PCs with Windows 11 Pro. Save on select Vostro laptops with built-in OS recovery fingerprint readers and antivirus protections. Plus you can save on select latitude laptops with a wide range of built-in privacy, collaboration, and connectivity features.

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I listened to him every morning. She was so excited, more excited than I'm a remater. That's so funny. Yeah, on the one hand, it's not what you would expect, right, that a trainer would be into ancient philosophy. And yet, at the same time, I think in the ancient world, that wouldn't have been anomalous at all. It may not even be that anomalous in our world, right?

I mean, given that stoicism is about self-control and I don't know, working through pain in some ways and sticking to your guns. But it's also, I think, a very Roman, if not a Greek idea, you know, a strong mind in a strong body that one has to be sort of active and trained both physically and mentally. Yup, and then of course there's the paradox

that the Stoics also spend a lot of time denigrating the body and saying, you know, forget your body, it's nothing, it's a Hulk, it's a casing, it's all about the mind. There's a little anecdote in Epictetus Book One, so Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who was once a slave, is talking to somebody high at court who's terrified of the crazy emperor. And the guy is quivering about the thought of contradicting the emperor and he says to

Epictetus, but oh my god, you know, what if the tyrant cuts my leg off? And Epictetus says in a very sneering tone, your leg, you fool, do you not have another one? He would be speaking from experience having his own leg sort of mutilated or broken in captivity. Well, there you go. He learned how to live with a half a leg. Yeah, he says, lameness is an impediment to the body, but not to the mind.

Absolutely. Let that be a lesson for us. Well, right? Don't be reluctant to give up your leg for a good cause. Well, Seneca says that we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. And I do like the idea of sort of physical training being a way to assert control. It's the mind asserting control over the body and making it clear who is in charge. That's exactly it, Ryan. So when I'm in the gym and I'm sweating and I'm pulling on those weights, every weight I pull down is a minor triumph of mind over body. Yes, because you'd rather not be doing it.

And then afterwards, you're glad slash proud that you did do it. And then I think you're able to carry that over when you're sitting down trying to work on a translation or a manuscript and you don't want to. And you have to sort of remind yourself who's in charge. Yep, really psychologically true. Okay, so I want to start with the sort of transition that you talk about in the book, which is that several years ago or in recent memory, you were saying that

the sort of Chinese culture was interested in exploring Western classics to sort of understand a world that they didn't fully understand, to get insights into the American mind, the democratic mind, and then that sort of goes away. And I wondered if sort of an embodiment of that, I remember in the first translation of meditations that I ever read. This would have been a translation that I think dates to the late 90s, early 2000s. It's talking about a former Chinese prime minister as it went jobbo, who would read meditations on an annual basis. He said he'd read it something like a hundred times.

I can't imagine a current Chinese leader bragging about reading a Western text that way. Yeah, with the recent wave of Confucian flavored nationalism, most of the bragging is being done about reading their own classics and claiming an intellectual projectory that goes back unbroken in their claim for thousands of years, whereas they see the West as kind of broken several times by changes into trajectory. So you've got philosophy, but then you've got Christianity, but then you've got enlightenment values

and they're all different. One of the Chinese historians that I write about in Plato goes to China, goes so far as to say not only does China have these unbroken millennia of development, but the West doesn't even have a past. And I read that and I was like, what do you mean? And he, according to this guy, whose name is Hushin, the West, Europe in particular, during the Renaissance, looked back at the Chinese trajectory and said, oh gosh, it's really embarrassing. We Westerners don't have an intellectual history like the Chinese. And so says Hushin, they made it all up. They made up Socrates, they wrote out Plato's dialogues, they wrote out Aristotle, they created a

guy called Thesidides and a guy called Cicero, and they just wrote like crazy and produced masses of ancient, well supposedly ancient documents so that the West could also have a pass and be as good as China. I think that's really interesting. Well what's interesting about that is, although it's not true, there is a history of trying to, in the West, as far as I know, trying to make things older and more connected to things, for instance, where you talked about the sort

of Western philosophy than this Christianity, there's a bunch of interesting letters that try to connect the Christians to the Greeks and the Romans. There's the letters between Seneca and St. Paul and the sort of forgeries that are designed to make Christianity seem less like a clean break and more like a continuation or an heir

to a more ancient tradition. Absolutely. And in the case of stoicism and Christianity, as you said, that's particularly true, because there were some shared elements in both those philosophies, and I think that's why it was important to have this pseudo correspondence between Seneca and Paul, simply to show that dialogue was possible

between these traditions, and there were things that Paul appreciated about Seneca and vice versa. You know, and it's interesting in this light, you know, Christianity and stoicism having connections. Well, several things are interesting in this light. I'll just mention two. One is that when the Jesuit Mateo Ricci went to China in the 16th century to try to convert the Chinese to Christianity, he first told him about the crucifixion and Jesus on the cross

and the son of God and all this stuff, and the Chinese Confucians were like, no thanks. We don't need to worship somebody who died like a criminal. We also don't believe in a god and none of this fits. Bye-bye, Mateo. So then Mateo goes to our friend Epictetus and he takes his work, the 25 paragraphs that's translated in Mandarin, and he says that's a Christian text. And he just fiddles with it a bit. He translates it into Mandarin. He takes out the polytheistic system of the Greeks, and he put in one God.

He takes the Christian virtues out, and he puts in the five Confucian virtues. He takes out things that would offend the Chinese Confucians at court. So the gladiatorial games are taken out, that's savage. Oh, references to sexuality are taken out That's not good crucifixion nope son of God nope, but everything else he leaves in and the Chinese really like it It speaks to their values

So There in stoicism you had an early way of the Christians to connect with the Chinese despite their very different belief systems. And when was this? This was at the end of the 16th century. Wow. So, so, so, epic teedus, epic teedus makes his way to China in... Wearing Christian bark.

Wow, that's fascinating. I know, I know. And, um, at first I thought, gosh, that's really cynical of this Jesuit, you know, to grab a, a, a, a, a foreign Greek text that has nothing to do with Christianity and to say, hey, here's one of the classics of Christianity. But then I realized that the Jesuits actually in their own teaching study, often took material from antiquity, tweaked it a bit and said, now it's fit for Christianity. And so they were just doing what they always do, was their practice. It wasn't necessarily cynical.

It was like they believed that, well, it was like the Jesuits believed that people like Abictetus had had an early premonition of Christianity. You know, they were as good as they could be without having a monotheistic God. It was like Christianity without God. It is interesting the way that the sort of Stoics and the Christians and the Greeks and all these different schools. And then when you look at a lot of the confusion thought, that they are kind of dancing around very similar conclusions. It's sort of like convergent evolution

where they're kind of independently discovering certain adaptations. Like I make up that that Santa Cah and Confucius had very similar experiences, sort of being philosophers in sort of corrupt real courts of, you know, princes, thousands of years apart, but then we can imagine them sort of sitting down and trying to solve very similar problems pertaining to human nature. For example.

Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, I think Confucius talks about, when one should continue to serve and work in a corrupt court, like when should one try to make things better and then when should one wash their hands and walk away? And then, yeah, thousands of years later, or many centuries later, you know, Santa Cah wakes up and sort of catches Nero in a certain light and is having to wrestle with this very notion that Confucius also had to wrestle with.

Absolutely, but by the time Santa Cah comes around to dealing with it, it's too late for Santa Cah. Yes. Sanika comes around to dealing with it. It's too late for Sanika. So after having been complicit and all sorts of neuronian crimes, having helped Nero write the speech that justified murder in Nero's mother, only stabbed to death and the stomach, nasty stuff, then at 62, Sanika realizes he's getting a little bit too close to the fire and he goes to Nero and he says, oh Emperor Nero, you've been so good to me. I could ask for nothing more except for now having talked to you everything I know just to be allowed to retire from the court, you know, and hide away in my little bungalow

or whatever. And Nero is very crafty and he's what Sonica's doing. And he's like, oh no Sonica, what would people think of me if I allowed my dearest friend and advisor to leave the court? No, no, you must stay. And three years later, he tells Sanika to kill himself, and Sanika has to kill himself. So that relationship was going south. Sanika tried to get out of it, and Nero would not allow him. At least consider yourself the yeah. To flash forward to the present, not to compare them to philosophers, but don't you think that's a similar discussion that many Chinese billionaires are having to have with the states that have been both instrumental in their rise and that they have probably done

some good at restraining. And then are realizing, oh, this isn't a ride you can get off. Same with Russian billionaires, I think, who are disappearing mysteriously at a fairly rapid rate or else they're leaving the country. Have you ever seen the movie The Last King of Scotland? No. You would love it. It's a biographical account, a historical account of a Scottish doctor who was recruited to Uganda by Idiah Meehn, who said to this guy, you can run my entire medical program.

And this isn't the early days of Idiah Meehn's rule. So of course, the Scottish doctor is incredibly flattered and tempted. Ophi goes to EDI and Ophi goes to Uganda, works for EDI Amin, and runs the entire medical system. But then he starts having to do things like patch up people who are tortured, and he starts to see the underside of EDI Amin, and he wants out, but he can't get out, because EDI Amin is insane. And there's this, I won't do the thing where they give away the ending, but just that understanding, the moment of understanding, that you thought you could do good, but

your trend, your own, honorable intentions have led you to a situation where you too are corrupt. And there's no escaping without something horrible happening. Well, I think last time we talked, we talked about Athena Doris and Areas Dittimus, who, you know, it's a similar thing, you know, the stillicks are the Republicans, they're the tradition of Cato, and then one wakes up and Rome is now the empire with an emperor, and you have to decide what your role in that is going to be. And I imagine it's a trade-off because being an outsider is a pure place, but one has a lot less influence and ability to change or do things.

And then as you said, it's also much less appealing to the ego and to one's sort of confidence or craft if one wants to do things. And so, it's this kind of timeless thing. It goes back to Confucius, it's the Stoics. And then it's also, if you want to talk about a modern Stoic, it's general Mattis deciding, does he want to be secretary of defense or not Even if he finds you know the person who is offering him the job to be more or less Repugment in everything that he holds dear. It's it's a very human

Dilemma we put ourselves in Absolutely and the other thing you mentioned about We put ourselves in. Absolutely. And the other thing you mentioned about this kind of transition from Republic to Empire and to stoicism, I think that's very much connected with what used to be the traditional role of the Roman upper class elite, political elite, the senators. They used to have a general role in running the state, leading wars, going through the cursus, the norm, the set of offices you have to get through to get to the top of government, et cetera.

And then boom, right, it goes from Republic to Empire. And all of a sudden, as a senator, you're politically irrelevant, right? You don't lead wars, really. You don't, your position in determining justice is much diminished. Your power is diminished. And so what happens then, and I think this is linked to stoicism, is that all the words that used to be used for external progress

in the Roman elite career, like doing battle against the enemy or what else, considering yourself virtuous because of your actions within the state, all of that gets internalized. So it's recognized that nothing I do externally anymore counts, but I'm going to take the same vocabulary of merit and use it internally so that if I'm sick, I'm doing battle against the disease, and I'm going to bring all my troops to bear on it, and I'm going to use a special military formation, or if people are attacking me physically, I won't defend myself, but I'll remind myself that the body is nothing. So, they managed to hang on to their old values, except the values now refer to completely

new things, which are all internal, not external. Right. It's like as their ability to influence externals diminishes, they have to turn that energy and that gaze inward and conquer. Well, what what's that it could cause the greatest empire, which is which is oneself the empire of the self Yeah Yeah, isn't that amazing? So so when we're looking at China, I do find that interesting. There was sort of this closing of

interesting. There was sort of this closing of what was available intellectually to explore and use, and they're sort of turning away from the Western classics you're saying, and turning towards Eastern classics. Is that the idea? Actually, not exactly. So what happened is, both during the May 4th movement in 1919 after the fall of the Dynastic system and in the 80s with the opening up of China, many Western classical texts were seen as offering advice on how China could reform, have greater freedom of the press, have greater civil liberties, have the vote, right, instead of living in a system with no vote, whether it's under Mao or under the Dynasties. But after what happens at Tiananmen Square, all these protestors in the 80s go away for a while, and when they come back, if they come back, they are drastically changed.

And whatever they were saying before about classical texts being useful so that we can be more like the West, now they're saying classical texts are useful because they either condemn the West, right? In which case, we like those classical texts, right? Like all those classical texts that are against democracy, right? That's just bomb to Chinese ears. Or because they show that the West ideally could be very much China-like, but that it has fallen away from that great aspiration. So for example, what's a good example? Well, I talk a

little bit in the book about Plato's Republic and Plato or Socrates, I should say, in this book written by Plato, advances a hypothetical ideal state. And nobody really knows whether he means this literally or ironically or what. But Chinese commentators have pointed out certain similarities between Plato's ideal state, which is very stable, but also very hierarchical, and governed by an elite, and there's also almost no class mobility.

They have compared that to Confucius' ideal state. And there's actually a book published by Princeton University Press written by a well-known Chinese, a very well-respected Chinese intellectual by Tang Dong, who takes the the anilex and then takes Plato's Republic and says literally in today's world which of these two is a better blueprint for government and he's dead serious. So it manned in somebody today writing about Plato's Republic as if it were an option, right? In China, these are treated as options and he goes through both governmental systems very slowly and carefully in comparison each. And at the end, he concludes that the Confucian system is better because the Confucian system doesn't banish the family, which is one of the things Plato has to do in his ideal

republic so that you won't have ties to your mother or father. All your ties will be to the state. But the point there is that there are Chinese intellectuals today looking at the Western intellectual tradition, not so much to say, hey, let's reform China, as to say, hey, why is America running around saying democracy is so great when the ancient texts of that civilization which comes from Europe, but we mourn with the Chinese and they do with the modern Americans. And then they go, so it's fascinating. It is, isn't it? And where in the old days they would say things like, oh, let's, you know, let's, let's

read Aristotle's politics where he says democracy is the second best form of government. He made a mistake. It was actually the first best form of government, right? They're reading this great authority, Aristotle, and they're bleeding on his authority, but they're also tweaking him so that he'll say democracy is the best form of government. And this is what they do in 1919, and this is what they're doing again later. And then the turn happens, the Tiam and then turn happens. And now people are reading Aristotle and they're like,

oh my god, you know, the Athenians weren't free. The Athenians were all slaves. They were slaves to a governmental system that demanded the participation of every single man who was a citizen. What if you didn't want to go to be in politics or sit on a jury? What if you just wanted to sit at home and read a book? Oh, then you were a bad citizen,

and you were also very unmanly for that matter. So they point out this, they say, look, Athenian democracy was a system of ideological slavery. Then they point out that Athenian democracy had actual slavery, right? Like one of the reasons the elite could sit around and talk politics all day is because somebody was back home like, you know, hoeing the corn or whatever, or working in the mines, right?

And they go on and on, picking out things about Aristotle that are now bad, not good, but it's the same text that's in politics. It's just a different way of reading it. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all! I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo.

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and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freed. Follow Spellcaster, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. what's happening in the West itself for different reasons along different lines, but it's also a questioning, a chipping away at, it's an undermining of the classics and their supremacy in culture. Absolutely. So I'm not one of those who say the classics should be supremaculture. I just say that for one culture, they carry a lot of baggage and a lot of interest.

But yes, you're absolutely right. At this time in history, the loudest voices, other ones, denouncing classical texts, even despite the fact that you've got all sorts of classical texts that are LGBTQ friendly or relativism-friendly or what have you. denouncing the classics on block as some kind of elite supreme conspiracy and denouncing that heritage as imperialist, racist, you know, bloodthirsty, blind, etc. all of which is true but it's not the whole truth, right? But what we're doing, and this is so hilarious, what we're doing is we're giving the Chinese a

stick to beat us with, which they do. So they say not only do we know that Chinese civilization is better, but the West itself is backing off Western civilization, and it's admitting all its human rights abuses, for example. And we're just giving them fodder to think that the West is even, you know, suckier than they think. So they will say, oh, you know, you complain that we abuse human rights because we've put several, you know, more many journalists or free speakers or anti-regime people in jail or we disappeared them. But what about you? Not only do you have this horrific history of slavery, but your entire culture is still overrun with racism, poverty, unequal opportunities for education, people in underprivileged neighborhoods that are not well-policed or killing each other

with these guns that you seem to have lying around on every bookcase, America. So yeah, that is, as you said, supremely ironic. Yeah, and it's not dissimilar to what happened with the Soviets, right? They would point to sort of our call for human rights or free speech or free travel, free movement equality under the law, and they would go, look at the American South. What are you talking about? How could you dare tell us that there's some flaw in our system?

Exactly, exactly. And what I wish this country would do a little bit more maybe is acknowledge that we're not, you know, kind of all pure and 100% morally good. And as such, we don't necessarily have the right or the responsibility to run around preaching to others, right? We would be better off looking at ourselves first. Yeah, well, it's the very ideas of the culture or the ideals of the culture set up the lines of criticism. For, you know, like, obviously it's not as potent of a force.

Now, but you look at something like WikiLeaks, right? WikiLeaks disproportionately does damage to regimes or administrations or countries where there is the veneer of honesty and transparency and accountability. An actual authoritarian regime is not damaged by these things, not only because they're better at suppressing it entirely, but there was never any high ground they were standing on to begin with to then be bludgeoned with it. Yeah, that's a really nice point. Right, if you're not claiming the high ground,

you can't be bludgeoned for failing to provide it or stand on it. Yeah, I'll be like, thanks. China is claiming the high ground these days at least, again since the turn in 1989. So for example, both Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping are touting as their foreign policy, the policy of Hushy, which means harmony, and the policy of, quote, looking towards the community of mankind in the future together, or something along those lines. So they're really posing as past fists and people who are concerned

for the welfare of the whole world But just something they also claimed with their belt and road initiatives that they were doing all this good stuff in Africa because they had so few charts And they weren't imposing their government on those countries the way they US did when they helped other people but You know, of course, it course, it's a political stance. But I think it's a very smart political stance because the US doesn't stand up and say, we stand for harmony and love among individuals and nations, and that's what we're working for and whatever

your politics are. We can all just get along. And even if it's not true, it's a powerful message. Instead, we're like, you bad, you bad, you bad, we good. Yes, we like the sort of putting things in the good and evil camps. And we are always in the good camp. We do. So there was a series of conferences a couple couple decades ago about Confucius and Socrates and they were being compared and there were western scholars and Chinese scholars.

And it's really funny because the Chinese scholars all said, oh, Confucius and Socrates can be harmonized, right? We know our philosophies mesh together in a very nice way. And the westerners, that Westerners were all saying Well the difference between Socrates and Confucius is and they would list all the differences So right there paradoxically you see the Chinese harmonizing and you see the West dividing and making differences and Harmonizing is obviously the way to go because that way you can claim that the Socratic legacy is the same as your Confucian legacy, whereas in the West we're all going, no, no, no,

it's totally different, which you can trace back if you want to, to the Socratic way of asking questions and making people contradict themselves and always looking for differences rather than similarities. Right? I do find it with the exception of Socrates, it does feel like Western philosophy seems to go more and more towards conclusions or certainty.

And I've always found that Eastern philosophy sits better with paradoxes and confusion, and not confusion. But even like sort of meditation, and not confusion, but even meditation is about just sitting with it, or you think about some of these sort of mantras or these philosophical questions central to Eastern enlightenment, it's not that they're nonsense, but that they don't, it's not clear what they mean, and you're just supposed to sit and think about it for a while, and that almost in and of itself is the source of enlightenment, not solving it because perhaps it cannot actually

be solved. You know, it's so interesting, this business about embracing opposites or complexity as opposed to separating them and as in the way that the West does. I can give you a really simple example of this, which is, you know, ying and yang, yin and yang are seen as opposite principles, but every time they're represented, they're shown in a circle complementing each other, right? And so, in English English we say black and white are opposites, right? But I think in Mandarin you would say black and white are colors. They are members of the same family, so you don't stress the opposition, you stress what they have in similarity, and you say black and white together as it were, are they in an yang? And they complete the picture. They're not two different halves of the picture.

I find that a really engaging and sympathetic way to think, I have to say. Yes, yes. Yes. The ambiguity of life and the contradictions of life. And also, I think there's, it may be actually Confucius, but it's a sort of an old Zen story. It's this idea of like Confucius is advising

these two brothers and he tells one to do less of something and then he tells the other to do more of that thing. And then someone says, how you gave these different advice and he says, you know, different people. Different people. Different advice. And he says, you know, different people. Different people. And advice. And that, that is a, I think, Socrates would understand that,

but I'm not sure Epicetus would understand that. Absolutely agree with you. Epicetus would not say different people, different advice. Although he might say this person is not as far along on the path of being a good stoic. So he might have to start with something smaller, right? But yes, the sense in Western philosophy that it's right for everybody the way it is, and also that it's self-evidently true. I mean, it's not self-evidently true, but Western philosophers from Plato onwards are obsessed with creating a philosophy that relies on rational steps taken one after another

that are supposedly un-undoable, right? So they all start with an axiom that can't be knocked over and they build on it. Take-take-hart, right? I think, therefore I am. So axiomatic statement, I think, So, axiomatic statement, I think, rationally derived result, therefore I am, and then he builds on that step by step by step by step to create an entire philosophical system. It's absolutely the same with Kant who draws all his moral laws out of rational thinking, right? It's certainly true of Plato, who privileges mathematics and the abstract forms over the everyday around us. So in the West, we're all going, oh, my prephical logical conclusions must convince you that Western

philosophy speaks truth to all. And in many forms of, I mean, we shouldn't just focus on Confucianism because of course there's Taoism, there's Buddhism and so forth. But none of them are so obsessed with rationality as a way of providing philosophy to humans. Because, and I think they understand this in a way the West doesn't, humans are not rational. We may kid ourselves, but we're not.

That's why behavioral economics suddenly became a field. Why do I buy the cheaper pack of gum and save five cents when I'm not hassling with the 10K that the price on my car could be going up, not being very articulate, but you know, you understand what I'm saying? I'm not arguing about this huge sum of my car, but I'm saving three cents on the gum, yeah.

No, that's really interesting. And yeah, I mean, you mentioned Kant, there's sort of, is there a phrase that captures the tendency in Western philosophy to do that more than the two words, categorical imperative? There is no phrase besides that that more greatly captures that, right? The whole idea that you can create an imperative that is true under any conditions just I mean it It confells me if I believe in anything I believe in context right context

Something have meaning you can't take something without context and say does meaning as Plato tried to do with his forms Right, so you know if it's always wrong to lie It is so stupid. Of course, it's not always wrong to lie. You know, the Gestapo come to your door. You're going to, and you're, you're fostering or hiding a family, and are you supposed to say, yes, you know, SS officer, they're down on the basement, take a sharp left, you'll find them all there, you know? So, I may be misrepresenting Kant, I'm not a Kantian, you'll find them all there. So I may be just representing Kant, I'm not a Kantian, but a categorical anything to my mind sounds like a bad idea.

No, it's silly, it's silly. It almost sets up the criticism because that doesn't sound like a thing that an adult who is existed in the world would possibly put forward as a way to go through life or as a way that justice would be brought into the world. I mean, it's nonsense. Yeah, in fact, I'm not sure Kant actually did live in the world. I think he kind of wandered around in a haze. There's a story about a Western philosopher. I'm not sure it's

Kant, but it's somebody equally obsessive. And this person gets married and their wife takes off her clothes. And he realizes that his wife looks nothing like all the classical statues he's seen because she's hairy. And he so grossed out. Like that's the end of their sex life right there before it starts. And you know, I mean, some people ought to live in the world a little more, maybe. Well, that's what I love. You know, and it's sometimes it highlights just how long we were dependent on these ancient texts, even though the paradigm for them no longer fit, which is like, you have these, sometimes as late as the Renaissance, but you have these drawings of things that are described in

Fini or Senica or these natural histories that they themselves got from a source, got from a source, got from a source, and then you're like, you're describing a rhinoceros, but clearly no one involved in this chain knows what a rhinoceros is. But you're so confident in it. And it's based effectively on nothing. Absolutely. I think there are more things like that that we don't even see how much we've mangled them.

Well, I loved your piece about speaking of abusing the classics, but you're talking about, you know, it's not just the east that's trying to sort of undermine or take away. We also are dealing with sort of a threat to the classics from the far right. And so we're talking about the story, but some people wanted to, yeah, right, I'm both, but I like the idea, you're sort of argument that we shouldn't surrender these texts to people who want to abuse or undermine them. Absolutely. So my position would be, yeah, these texts have been used to support bad stuff. In fact, you can look at the modern university and almost every department has been used to do bad stuff with, you know, physics, the atomic bomb, you know, biology, eugenics, you know, whatever. But nobody's saying let's not do physics, let's not do biology. People in this thing seem to grasp more readily than we do in the humanities,

that we have agency. We can choose to do with these things what we want, and we can we can choose to do with these things what we want and we can use the guidance of our ethical beliefs and how we use them, right? So take the inay, my favorite text, of course. So when it was written, the emperor Augustus immediately nabbed it and made a part of the school curriculum, thereby declaring as it were, that it was a pro-imperial piece otherwise why would he be using it, right?

So that was the first spin as it were. And then his commentators come along a couple of centuries later and say, oh yes, the innate was written to praise Augustus in the guise of a nays. So everybody's like, yeah, it's about Augustus, right? Fast forward a couple of centuries, you've got the Christians, they read it, do they think it's about Augustus? No, they say it's about the Christian every man and his travails in life, right? And they have the craziest allegorical readings like, you know, when Anayas washes up on the shores of Carthage after his shipwreck in Book 2, they're like, oh, shipwreck in Book one, sorry, they're like, oh, that represents the birth of the baby from the mother, you know, in pain and in water and so forth. And then when

in book four he's having his fling with Daito, the Christian reading is, ah, the temptations of adolescence beset the good Christian, you know, and so forth. It's that flash forward again, and you will see it being used by the Americans as just a fine with the Western expansion, right? And the killing of the Native Americans. Oh, God told us to do this, just like in the Nade, you know, go west, young man, right? God is behind us. It's like that picture with, oh, I can't even remember the name of the picture, but it shows these guys marching westward and the hand

of destiny is kind of floating above them. Or fast forward to Mussolini who thinks he's a neus reincarnated, I mean, not exactly, but more or less, and that the great Roman Empire that was supposed to be bound by neither time nor space is now coming back under Mussolini, right, or take the Vietnam War, where they saw it as a protest against war. Well, if everybody else is reading these texts in a manner that makes sense to them, why do we have to read them in a manner that doesn't make sense to us? I don't read the innate as being pro-imperial at all. I read it as if anything being a warning about pro-imperial propaganda because you see the propaganda in the task. Everybody's like,

oh yes, you know, let's go conquer the Italians. Woo-hoo! But then you see all the suffering and you realize that the propaganda is just there to cover up the suffering. The other really funny thing about that epic is that all the Italians who hate the neus, who coos Trojan, say nasty things about him. Like, oh, you know, here's another Trojan. This is a one to actually betray Troy to the Greeks. Oh, those Trojans are sneaky, they stole Helen. This guy's coming here and now he's going to steal our Italian version of Helen, Yadde, Yadde, Yadde, and commentators have said, oh we can't read that stuff because people who don't like an AS are saying it, so it's obviously not true. No, people who don't like an AS are saying it, and we're supposed to be hearing it, right? We can't just cut it out. So all meetings are partial readings,

and I think it's time for us to let our readings flourish as well. Well, and also, like if you think about, okay, so you go to sort of Imperial, Japan, the Second World War, Peshito culture is part of that, Zen Buddhism, is Zen, Buddhist culture is part of that. We would never then say because there was a philosophical underpinning to the modern injustices

meted out by a regime or a culture or a group of individuals, we would never throw the baby out with the bath water there, right? But it's only with our own culture. Yeah, it's silly. We shouldn't. It's a, you know, it's, with the, with the Chinese throughout their culture, they wouldn't. They're very proud of it.

It's not a totally admirable culture, I mean, that's so-called continuous millennia of dynasties, they weren't really continuous, who is people killing each other every two or three hundred years, right? And then, my long comes along, and the first thing he does is ban confucius and confucian teaching and make some all illegal. So it's not exactly continuous, but they like to think of it that way, because they see it as giving them a civilization so long that it's basically far outshadowing

the other civilizations on Earth. When I think it was Marke Eveli who said something like the reason we like these classic texts and these ancient bits of history is that we can use them to say whatever we want. They're ciphers, right? We can use them to make the examples that we want to make or the stories that we want to tell. And I think that's obviously what we've been doing to these texts for very long time.

We use them to suit our agendas. The more complex the text, the easier it is to get what you want out of it, right? Which is one of the reasons classical texts have survived so long, they're very, very complex. And so they lend themselves to different needs. Well, yeah, you think about the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the than we see the trap, right? Like I imagine, like when they look at it, who is Athens and who is Sparta and when we look at it, who is Athens and who is Sparta. Right. So in the original trap, the Spartans are made, sorry, the Athenians, no wait, now which way am I going? The Spartans are made anxious by the rise of Athens. So the monarchy, the monarchy country that's landlocked is threatened by the democracy with its navy. Now, how do you want to fit that into the

Chinese-US situation? Who has risen quickly? Well, I guess we would say the Chinese have risen quickly. So the Chinese are the Athenians in this picture, which means they're also the seafaring Democrats, which is pretty funny given that it behaved like a landlocked country for hundreds of years and in fact even built a great wall to keep people out and people in, right? So none of these analyses make much sense but they're great propaganda material. Well, and even I think this is why we continue

to study that conflict is, okay, Sparta wins, but it's also a lesson about how you can win, but not actually win, right? So Sparta wins militarily, but it sort of doesn't have the cultural values or the ability to then rule the empire that they win and it quickly leads to their undoing. And then we hold Athens as the ultimate victor

because they win the cultural victory and their achievements stand for a longer period of time. And so the whole thing is, depending on what you're trying to argue, it's not even clear who won, right? This isn't like we're looking at an ancient basketball game and one team has more points than the other, right? This is like a dance-off or something

and you can argue either way, depending on the other, right? This is like a dance offer or something and you can argue either way depending on the day, depending on your motivations, what the lesson actually be learned here is, and that's what makes the classics so great is there's an infinite amount of lessons they contain multiple. Yes, and I bet if this country were not a democracy, we'd be pulling different lessons out of Athens, right? Yes. Yes.

Like, gosh, it so quickly it went to the demagogues, so quickly it went to people looking out for their own interests. And by the way, somebody would say, did you know that Paracles passed a law, I think in 451, saying that, is it 451? I'm always nervous around dates. No, it's probably later. Anyhow, saying that you couldn't be an Athenian citizen unless both your parents were Athenian citizens.

So you see what that does? It takes something that's a democracy, and it turns it into a republic of blood, like the nobility, right? You can only inherit the status of being a Democrat, which goes so much against democracy that it actually makes a mockery of the idea of democracy. And yet we still talk about Athens as,

the era of democracy and how it did all this good stuff. Well, I find that when I read about Stoicism, and you know, you read American history, basically, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, there is this resurgence of what they call Southern Stoicism. So you have these interesting sort of the purses, the Faulkners, your sort of Southern writers, who are interested in Stoicism as a kind of philosophy, not of despair or defeat,

but this idea that they were fighting and inherently losing battle against modernity and change that they were protecting the, like they were more the Kato model of stoicism that were the elites, the blueato model of stoicism, that were the elites, the blue bloods, the pure, and were resisting the change and the federalism, right? Like, I just, it's just so interesting that you could pick up stoicism and see

that it celebrates the following virtues. And then someone could pick it up and see that it celebrates the following virtues. And then someone could pick it up and see that it celebrates the exact opposite of those virtues in many ways. And maybe even uses it to produce a beautiful essay, but only when you step back and go, oh, this is like a four-learn racist lamenting that the system is changing. Like they're looking at these stoics and going,

hey, I have an estate worked by slaves. They had an estate worked by slaves, we're the same. And when I pick up the stoics, that's not what I like about Seneca. That's not what strikes me, but you can see what you want to see in these texts. I have absolutely, and you can see what you want to see in these texts. Absolutely. And you know, in Roman times, people were so suspicious about Sonica's wealth that when

they ran around nominating who was the Roman Socrates, they didn't pick Sonica as you would expect, and this is before Marcus Aurelius. So they pick, um, um, they pick, see now, moment. uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, And it could just be that none of his works really survived. I mean, we have these handful of fragments and little speeches, but like, I'm not seeing the faculties there. Yeah, me neither. Yeah, it's fascinating. And then it continues to this day, right?

Like the debate rages on as it is raised on. Oh, yes. Yeah, in Santa Cruz time, right? Right. Like, is Santa Cahippecrit, is Santa Cah doing the best you can? I see the adult in the room, you know, is he the, is he complicit? I mean, again, we have these exact discussions

during the Trump administration. So, I've thought about this, and I have a question, and maybe you can answer it, which is that, do we only accept role models if they are able to carry out the philosophy or the religion that they enjoy upon others? So did Jesus preach humility? Was he humble, did he die, etc? Yes, yes, yes. Did you know, Socrates follow what he believed? Did he question people and bug them until he was put to death? Yes, yes, yes.

Okay, those are great guys. Now let's take Seneca. Really amazing philosophy, really powerful. It could help a lot of people, but he had tons of wealth. He practiced usury with the Brits. He was Neuros buddy, he liked luxury food, he had slaves, he was ginormous, this is not the typical picture of your aesthetic philosopher. So is it for that reason that we can embrace him, that he's trying to do something that he

fails? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Sennaka himself sort of dances around this question. You know, he basically says like, what matters is what I say, not what I do, which is, which is, you never want to hear somebody say. I think what's so interesting is it goes to what we were talking about earlier, which is like, this doesn't exist on paper, it exists in the real world. And, you know, would Rome have been better without Sennaka in Nero's administration? I don't know, right? Like, in modern times, I think how could someone have possibly worked for Trump? He's obviously deranged. He's a fool. You know, his administration is borrowing the legitimacy of the figures that it co-hosts, right? But when I look at history, I think, yeah,

would Nero have been better off with more lackeys? Or does, you know, the first five years more lackeys or does, you know, the first five years of Nero's regime where Sennaka seems to wield more power, gets a pretty good grade from historians. It does, it does. You know, maybe Sennaka was actually a moderating impulse. It's complicated. I don't know. We don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have this historical wish that why didn't that painting school in Vienna embrace Hitler and tell him he was talented. My God, the Holocaust would not have happened as opposed to flunking him and setting him away telling him he was mediocre and then look what he does. So. Well, and I mean, you know, it's like why didn't one of these generals, who's carrying a gun around Hitler, just put one into a skull at some point, right?

And then I think, you know, if you'd asked them, they would have said, that's not how it works. You can't just execute someone that, you can't execute your boss because you think they're crazy, right? And I imagine what Senaika would say is, do you know what happened last time some stillics got rid of the emperor, right? It ended in a very, very bloody civil war

and Rome was never the same. And so these are, these are vexing, complicated, impossible to answer questions that we only have a relatively limited amount of information about. We don't know. And then, you know, Sennaka was executed potentially for collaborating in a plot. What did that accomplish? Not, you know, I don't know. I feel like myself, depending on the point that I want to make, depending on the lesson,

I feel like I need to learn that day. I can see Sennaka in both lights. Yeah. Yeah, just like the last king of Scotland. Yes, yes. You go, this is my job. I'm supposed to do this. If I don't do it, someone else will do it worse.

Maybe I can make the human mind is very good at convincing ourselves. But yes, very good. He spends. You know, it's interesting. In his letters, Seneca nowhere talks about the Royal Court. Never mentions the hero once. Never mentions what he's doing at the Royal Court. But in one of the later letters, he does say something like, I stuck around hoping to make

a difference and I don't think I succeeded. And that is like the saddest testimony of all. Totally. And then when you read his plays, you're like, is this about your day job? That is his day job. Babies and pots, you know, boils into tatters and murders and this guy turning black and people being struck down by the crazy madman protagonist. Yep. That is. But then pull it into the modern context.

It's like, okay, you're watching this politician three years ago, you know, giving these, you know, interviews or making these statements about how everything's good and they're doing this and this and this. And then their memoir comes out post-presidency and they're like, he was deranged, he was an idiot, you know, and you're going down the same, you're like, yeah, you're like, okay, Seneca, this would have been nice to know at the time. Yes, indeed, indeed. And I imagine if Confucius's letters or his memoirs survive, we might have a different picture of him also.

Yeah, except he never wrote anything because he said all he was doing is bringing down traditional teachings into the present. He wasn't adding anything, of course, that's probably not true. But he represented himself as adding nothing, which is interesting because Socrates represented himself as a revolutionary, and there again, you have harmony versus change, I guess. Or I mean, I was talking to a professor the other day, but I think Socrates is so interesting because he has all this stuff.

And then his protege, Alcy Abides, the guy he sees so much potential in, is like the worst. And you're like, well, does this reflect poorly on Socrates? Maybe it does. Parachly's sons were apparently not so hot either. And the whole question is, well, how can parachly be good if he raised his sons to be bad?

Yeah. One mark is the real is his son is terrible. Cyrus, the great sons are not too great. He absolutely works. How did he get comedists out of his nice stoic leadership? Well, my argument is that all his other sons died. And so not only was that the process of elimination, he had six children who died before they reached adulthood.

So not only is each one of the children, he's, it'd be like if it's like the Kennedys, they keep getting crossed off the list until you're left with Robert Kennedy Jr. But- You can't guarantee that you can't be Kennedy Jr. to comment us. Well, I mean, he is a deranged anti-vaxxer, so- But my point is, his best laid plans keep getting disrupted from Mark's realist.

And then, I've always been interested in looking back at history and the under-explored role that trauma would have in that role. So imagine you're a communist, you have six brothers, and then at the end of it, they're all dead of terrible causes, right? Today, we'd be like, why is Ryan an alcoholic? We'd be like, well, because six of his brothers died, you know? You would accept that the horrendous randomness of the luck of my life had changed, you know, who I ended up becoming. But we don't see history that way. No, no, we don't. We don't at all. Yeah.

On the other hand, how much, how much ground should we give to people who are deranged and murderers? You know, a whole other question in the American justice system. How close are you getting to the twinkie defense? arranged and murderers, you know, a whole other question in the American justice system. How close are you getting to the twinkie defense? You know, I ate him with junk food. Therefore, I turned into a man. Right. Right, how responsible are you for yourself at the end of the day? Such an interesting question. I don't have an answer to that, you know. Well, and I think, and this is probably a good spot to wrap up, that that is the beauty of history and the classics, which is that you can argue it anyway depending on your purposes, depending on your cultural lens, and depending on the moment and time that you

happen to be in. And that's what, that's why I think remains so fascinating, but also why you can't dismiss them. You have to understand them for the nuance that they, like we can't be like the classics are flawed, let's throw them out, or they were misused by this group, let's throw them out. We have to understand all the different interpretations

of the classics and be able to sort of sit with that. Absolutely, and that would be historically genuinely open-minded and true attempt to embrace complexity rather than whittling it down to a single sound bite, I think. Yeah. What a Keats' concept, you know, a negative capability? Yes. Yeah. Like, can you have two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time? That's the mark of a smart person. But also the mark of a very stupid person. Alright, I'll go with smart. Ending the conversation. I'm gonna land on the side of smart, I think. Hopefully. I love it. Professor, thank you so much. Ryan, thank you.

Always a pleasure. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.