Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 074 - Tony Long on the Self in Hellenistic Philosophy.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Tony Long, Professor of Classics and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley. Hi Tony, thanks for coming. Hi Peter. So, what we're going to be talking about in this interview will be the self in Hellenistic philosophy as a kind of crowning moment for this whole series of episodes on Hellenistic philosophy. Can you begin by telling us just what you mean by the self in this context? The best way to start, I think, is from the Greek word pysche, psyche, which has given rise to our word psychology. To go back to the very beginning of our recorded literary history, in the poems of Homer, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, psyche is what leaves the body when the person dies. Empathy in the Homeric poems is something like a ghost, except that the ghost that survives the death of the body is what we might call an ex-person. The reason I bring this up is because self, I think, in the Greek context that we're going to talk about, is primarily thought of as something like the person, the character, rather than the fully embodied human being. It's an aspect of the human being, what we might call the mental, the moral, the psychological aspect of a human being. Just as I might say, John is an amazingly strong character, but did you know that he's been terrible asthmatic all his life? When we draw distinctions between body and mind, self is going to figure on the mind side. Would you say that for most speakers of Greek, the word suhe would have meant something more like that and something less like soul, which is how it's usually translated in, say, Plato and Aristotle? Yeah. The problem with soul, of course, in English is that we don't really have a contemporary use for soul. We talk about soul music. We can still use old expressions like keeping body and soul together, but in everyday life, soul has really vanished. When I was a student, I was asked to write a paper on suke in Plato without using the word soul, which was quite a good exercise. I would say that in traditional Greek, and that philosophers inherit this, the idea that there are body predicates, we could say, to do with physique and stature and weight and so forth, and there are what we might call mental predicates to do with intelligence and personality, and those figure on the side of suke. I guess that in the context of Hellenistic philosophy, that contrast might be somewhat problematic because, of course, the Epicureans and Stoics are materialists. Right. Thus, they wouldn't think that there was, or at least it might seem that they wouldn't think there was a distinction to be drawn there between the mental and the physical. Would they handle that problem by saying, well, by the physical, we don't necessarily mean the body, there might be the soul which is physical and also the body which is physical? Yes, that is a possible problem that one might have if one was a very strong materialist, physicalist. One might say all there ever is to a human being are physical states, but even, I think, the strongest materialist is going to have to recognize that we need in everyday life to distinguish between things like feelings, which are, say, emotions on the one hand, and pains and pleasures which are physical on the other hand. So I think we're not going to ever be able to get away with some sort of distinction as such between body and mind, body and soul. And what do the Hellenistic schools then bring to the conception of self that we don't already find in Plato and Aristotle? Good. I'll just say a word about what I do think we find in Plato and Aristotle because I think that tends to push the discussion in a certain direction. In the early dialogues of Plato, where Socrates, of course, is the principal character, we find Socrates, for instance, in Plato's Apology, telling the Athenians that he's God's gift to the city because the city needs someone to tell them that what's much more important than making money and looking after their reputation is caring for justice, and he says there, and caring for the soul more than the body. So I'm using the word soul, the word psuke. This has been picked up by the modern philosopher Michel Foucault in what he called, with a rather literal translation of the Plato, care of the self. So to get now to the Hellenistics, I think what's happening in Hellenistic philosophy, perhaps partly because the political structures of ancient Greece have ceased to be as effective for people's sense of their own identity, perhaps a certain sense in which people are being thrown back upon, to break the question, is themselves. The philosophers pick up on that by getting into very detailed analysis of what kind of state of soul, mind, spirit, whatever we want to translate this word, is going to make for the happiest, the most effective life. And one of the things that they put a lot of emphasis on would be the idea of being autonomous, having control over yourself. Absolutely. Another way to try to look at analysis of the self is to think of the self as that with which you identify. A very famous modern book by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor called Sources of the Self. When you study this book, what you find Taylor is really talking about is self in the sense of what makes my life worthwhile? What could I say at the end of my life I'd been here for? What would I be willing to live or die for? So the net sense identifying with, the Hellenistic philosophers are very concerned about coming up with what they see as a valid value system and anchoring the self to a certain set of values. It's interesting that they share that approach given that they have such radically different ideas of what's valuable. So the Epicureans are hedonists, obviously. They think that what will bring them happiness is maximizing pleasure, whereas the Stoics think that pleasure doesn't matter at all really, and that the only thing that matters is virtue. But you're saying that they share some kind of commitment to an idea of the self, which is really the same idea in both Stoicism and Epicureanism? Well, of course, Peter, you're totally right in drawing very sharp contrast between the officially hedonistic Epicureans and the Stoics who officially maintain that pleasure is entirely unimportant to the quality of a life. But when you probe more deeply into these two philosophies, you're going to find quite a lot of features that they have in common, which I think are very relevant to the question we're exploring, the question of the kind of selfhood that will make for a successful and happy life. And Epicureans are going to agree just as strongly as Stoics that a life which was not grounded in some sort of valid and truthful understanding of the nature of things is going to be an impoverished life, that we need, in other words, to have something we can call a rational life, a life which is grounded upon some defensible system of values, and also a life in which we feel we are in control of where we're going. So to give an example from the Epicurean system, while the Epicureans, of course, insist that nothing is per se good except pleasure and nothing is per se bad except pain, they have a very radical way of trying to analyze what kind of pleasures and what kind of pains are the things we should be concerned about. And what we typically think of as a hedonistic life, a voluptuary life, or an Epicurean life in the way the word Epicurean has come down through our own culture, is quite the reverse of the very austere life that Epicurus himself advocated. As you remember, he said that if he had, I think it was a bit of cheese and bread, he would feel he was having as much as a feast. I mean, the crucial feature here for the Epicurean being to control one's desires and maximize one's autonomy in that way. And I guess that because they're hedonists, the reason why they would place value on self-mastery and autonomy and self-control couldn't be that these things are intrinsically worth pursuing. It must be because they think that self-mastery will prevent you from undergoing pain, for example. So if you're in control of your own life, then, for example, you might not need to worry about what will happen to you because you're in control. And so it's a way of forestalling pain rather than putting the value on self-mastery as such. Do you think that's fair? Yeah. The official bottom line would be exactly as you say. I'm not sure in the last resort where the Epicureans are entirely consistent. There are two areas, I think, where critics have perhaps said that they're really pushing the limit here as far as hedonism is concerned. One is over the theory of friendship because the Epicureans seem to say that what we need friends for in the first instance is our own self-advantage. Friendship begins with utility. But friendship, according to some Epicureans, can then flower into something which is valuable for its own sake, even to the point that an Epicurean is prepared to die for his own friend. Actually then, if you think about the Stoics, there's a problem maybe in Stoicism as well, something I haven't really talked about much in the podcast so far, which is how the Stoics think they should relate to other people. Because in the Stoics, especially I guess the Roman Stoics, you have this great emphasis on the idea of the agents' autonomy and their independence. Yet the Stoics also seem to want to say that it's important for us to have relationships with other people, and not merely because it would be vicious to treat other people wrong, but also because there's some actual value to the relationships we have with other people. Is that right? Yes. Well, I think that's a very important point in this regard. He's perhaps, of all the Stoics who survive, the one who has the deepest and most interesting things to say about friendship. On the one hand, and this picks up on your first point, the Stoics are very concerned to insist that if you can truly live the Stoic way of life, all your unreasonable desires are going to be satisfied. You are self-contained. You're self-sufficient. You won't be having to look over your shoulder all the time to think about things you're missing out on. For instance, he says that the wise man, wise man being the Stoic ideal, even on a desert island would be completely happy. Does that mean that he wouldn't prefer to have friends? No, it doesn't mean that he wouldn't prefer to have friends. He would prefer to have friends not because he needs them, but because if he has the opportunity to have them, then the friend and his own virtues would somehow set up a kind of symphony. It's as if friendship is a requirement of Stoicism, not in the sense that you need a friend in order to fulfill wants that you have. But the true Stoic life is a sociable life. This would be, I think, true of all ancient philosophies. We might want to consider about Plotinus here, it might be somewhat different. But Stoics, Epicureans, Platonists, Aristotelians are all very much more concerned, I think, than modern moral philosophers are, where the typical question is, what's the right action? Much more concerned with what would make mine a fulfilled life. I guess that you just mentioned Aristotle, and I guess that there's an interesting possible contrast between the Stoics and Aristotle here. You just said that the Stoics would encourage us to have friends because we could set up some kind of symphony of virtuous action. That sounds a lot like Aristotle. But on the other hand, it's hard to imagine Aristotle saying, well, look, in the last analysis, friends are indifferent, but we should prefer them the way that we should prefer health. So the Stoics are really just going to say that a friend is a preferred indifferent, the way that money or health might be? No. The material we have on Stoic friendship suggests that true friendship is actually a good, even in the strict Stoic sense. The strict Stoic sense is that the only things that can be strictly good are virtues and things that are related to virtue. So virtuous character. And a true friend for a Stoic would have to be another person with a virtuous – if you yourself had a virtuous character, how wonderful that would be – your friend would also, to be a true friend, would also need to have a virtuous character. And in that sense, they say that friends are external goods. And I wonder what that could mean because surely all goods for a Stoic are strictly internal. Well, I think it means that they're external in a very literal sense. You and I are external to one another. In that sense, the friend is an external good. But to be a good friend, he has to have the same kind of virtues that you have. And so this comes back to my symphony point. There's going to be a kind of congruity of minds. And the notion is that a true friend – and this would go across all, I think, the schools – a true friend will be someone who can benefit you, not in the sense that you need them to, say, augment your bank balance, but benefit you in a much deeper sense that you can feel your gaining in amity and other psychological goods from friendship. And it's only virtuous friends who could therefore help each other because virtue is the only – virtue intrinsically is something that is beneficial to you. Maybe we could extend that to look at something else I haven't talked about a lot in the podcast, which is political philosophy in the Hellenistic period. Certainly in Aristotle, there seems to be a very close connection between friendship and political union. Now the Epicureans, famously, aren't very much in favor of political engagement. So maybe we could focus on the Stoics. How would they extend this idea of virtuous friendship into the idea of political union or political action? Or would they not do that? Yes, I think they would extend it. People often, I think, misunderstand the Stoics because the Stoics were rather in the habit of trying to divide the world into two categories of persons – the truly virtuous and the non-virtuous. And then they got into paradoxes because they said, well, perhaps there never have been any truly virtuous people, so everybody is non-virtuous. And so then if you say, well, the only true friends can be virtuous friends, there are no friends. Yes, there are texts which put things in an extreme way like that, but I think this is meant to be challenging rather than the end of the story. And so there can be gradations of friendship, just as in Aristotle. Aristotle talks about utility friends, pleasure friends, and virtue friends. So the Stoics would agree that just ordinary people can have friendships of a certain kind. And no doubt what would make those friendships, true friendships, would be in some sense approximating to the ideal friendships. And in this sense, political friendships would be perhaps a lower form of friendship, but they would be certainly a necessary thing for society to work at all. They have to be social groups and bondings between people. And in fact, the Stoics even sometimes talk about being citizens of the universe. Yes, absolutely. So that to some extent there must be a feeling of union with not just all other humans but with everything. Oh, absolutely. But it just tails off so that if I'm an Athenian, I should have a greater feeling of union with other Athenians than I do to people from outside Athens. And ultimately, and again, this of course is again a very different way from looking at how we relate to things than, say, Christianity. To say you're a friend of God would perhaps almost seem impious in traditional Christianity, whereas that comes as a very natural thing to the Stoics. Does this actually have any concrete political ramifications? I guess what I mean by that is does it tell us what a Stoic-minded politician would actually do or does it just say, well, when you're in political affairs, bear in mind that you have this kinship to other people? Good question. An answer I can give in some depth, I think, by reference to Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius, as many of your listeners may know, was himself of course not only the most powerful figure in the Roman world in the second century of our era, but he was also a really committed Stoic. And we have his own reflections on what it was to be a ruler and a Stoic ruler. And of all the ancient Stoics, he is the one who emphasizes what he calls one's social or political nature. Aristotle had already said that human beings are political animals, meaning political not in the sense that they want to get into Parliament or something like that, but politicos in the Greek sense, being a member of a polis. And it's fascinating, I think, therefore, that the Roman emperor, who probably in many ways was an incredibly lonely figure, was at the same time someone who had this intense feeling, not of being bonded in the friends of hail fellow well-met sense to other people, but that this is his role. His role is to be sociable to people, finding out the best, what would be in their interests. So in this sense, I think of all ancient philosophies, Marcus Aurelius perhaps would come closest to someone we might think of as a truly benevolent person. The 19th century English essayist Matthew Arnold described Marcus Aurelius as perhaps the noblest figure in literature, and then went on, I think, rather to spoil it by saying if only he could have had the benefit of Christianity, how much better he'd even off. An idea that would not have appealed to Marcus himself. No, indeed. Indeed it didn't. One other thing that springs to mind here is that if you are committed to this idea of kinship with all other humans, you might think that one particular ancient institution, namely slavery, is something that is pretty questionable. Yes. Stoics, of course, have an interesting way of looking at this. Well, both schools do. I mean, let's just start with the simplest, mention the Epicureans. Epicurus, of course, founded his school as a garden community, and then after his death, other such communities spread up in the Mediterranean world. One of the interesting things about those communities was that they admitted women and slaves as it were as full members of those communities. In the case of Stoicism, Stoics liked to take traditional words like slave or wise or foolish and give them a special kind of coloring. Stoics wanted to say that anybody who is not trying or is not succeeding in being a Stoic is actually a slave. It doesn't matter. They could be the freest and wealthiest person in the world if they are not in control of their desires. If they're enthralled to needs and other impulses, then in that sense, they're self-enslaved. That way, the chattel slave could be a free man and the non-chattel slave could be a slave. The emperor could be a slave. Exactly. In fact, Epictetus often addresses his hearers as slaves. Yes. This goes right back, I think. The origin of that is already Socratic, or at least Plato's Socrates in the Gorgias, where the tyrant is supposed to be the least free of men. Before we finish, I should try to get the last of the main Hellenistic traditions in, namely the skeptics. I guess you might think that the skeptics would have very little to say on this topic of the self because they don't have anything positive to say about any topic just by the nature of their philosophical persuasion. But it seems to me there is a question here because the skeptics in a way are, you might say, alienated from themselves. They're walking around acting like normal people, seeming to have beliefs, and yet they claim not to have any beliefs. So do you think that the skeptics in a way have a problem with some kind of dissonance or tension within the self? It might appear that way. The question, I think, is quite complicated because when we say that the skeptic has no beliefs, then there's a question precisely of what we mean by a belief. The skeptic ideal is a life without belief, but in a rather special sense. The skeptic doesn't think that he is in a position or she is in a position to get to anything like the ultimate nature of things. In that sense, we should suspend judgment about, say, is there such a thing as the real good or is there such a thing as the real bad? In a way, the Plato would say that there was, probably the Stoics too. So what are we left with? We're still left, according to the skeptics, with certain inalienable feelings, what they call pathe. We can do nothing about those. If you say, well, I want to rationalize my feelings, I think the skeptic will say, well, you just have to go along with your feelings. In that sense, these can be a guide to living. You drink when you're thirsty. You feel cold in the snow. But you don't say feeling cold in the snow is good or bad. You don't say drinking when you're thirsty is good or bad. It's just something you do. So in that sense, the skeptic may seem to be following in their instincts, what we might call our instincts, rather than trying to live a rational life. The Stoics often say that the pathe, these feelings or emotions that we have, are not part of ourselves. They're something external. They're something that we stand in judgment over. Are the skeptics then objecting to that and suggesting that we should identify more with our feelings? Or are they accepting the idea that we have this detachment with respect to our feelings, but that there's nothing else for us to do other than just let these things affect us and be at their mercy? OK, good. Let's start with your point about the Stoics. The Stoics, I think, have a slightly more complicated view than that might have suggested, seemingly that even the most committed and successful Stoic will still start if there's an earthquake or feel cold in the snow. There's nothing he can do about that. There's just an irreducible physical reaction. What the Stoic will try to avoid doing is then simply committing a judgment to those feelings without reflection. That's where Stoic rationality comes in. The Stoic won't think that there's anything rational about having these feelings. Indeed, it will then be irrational on the Stoic's part just to let your judgment go along with those feelings. I think there's an interesting question here about the skeptics. A skeptic perhaps cannot officially claim to be following reason, because if he were, then you'd have to ask him to define what reason is. On the other hand, in the sense in which I think the skeptic does think of himself as being almost hyper-rational, in the sense that what is irrational for the skeptic is to think that you know things when you don't know them. In that sense, the skeptic's suspension of judgment is quite an arduous thing. It's not actually, perhaps I'm a bit misleading before when I said it would amount to simply going along with your feelings. Because after all, you might hear, let's say you've gone to listen to a Stoic professor this morning, and he was pretty good. Then you listen to an Epicurean professor this afternoon, and he was pretty good. Which way do you go? The skeptic way is to then try to distance yourself from both these positions by coming up with counterarguments, and in that way suspending your judgment. What's that going to leave you with? Ideally, it will leave you with perhaps a mental blank at the level of theory, but all the normal human reactions. Then there's a little bit more to be said about that, because skeptics recognize that how we react and behave in the world very much depends upon our own culture. In certain cultures, the seemingly natural thing to do will be X, and otherwise it would be not X. So you sort of, when in Rome, go along with the Roman way. That may sound a little bit evasive, and I think there's a lot more we could say about that, but that's the official line. We follow the guidance of our feelings and our cultures. The upshot of that then is that what you were saying at the very beginning, that Hellenistic philosophy is committed to the idea that we're trying to care for the self, is something that the skeptics would go along with as well. Yes, I think so. Yes, they might have a bit of a problem about saying what the self is, but then I think we still have that ourselves. Right. Good point. Yes. Well, speaking of taking care of people, next time my topic is going to be medicine and ancient philosophy, but for now I'll just thank Professor Long for coming on the show. Thank you very much, Peter, for having me. And join me next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.