The Stoic Guide To A Happy Life | Massimo Pigliucci | Modern Wisdom Podcast 239

... the people that came before us are not our masters, they're our teachers, they're our guides. But if I find a new way to proceed that is better, I'll do it, because, you know, the truth, it- it says it's open to all and, and it will be uncovered by future generations. (wind blowing)

Twice in a year, what a treat.

I know. (laughs) Well, you know, it's the pandemic, it's easier to get people stuck at home. (laughs)

That's true. Well, we've got nothing else to do, we might as well just keep on talking about Stoicism. The Stoic-

That's right.

... The Stoic Guide to a Happy Life: 53 Brief, Brief Lessons for Living. Why'd you write this?

For two reasons. Uh, on the one hand, there's kind of a personal reason. Uh, the, the book is really an ambitious, uh, to some extent, rewriting of the Encheiridion, which is one of the classic texts in Stoicism, in ancient Stoicism, and, and, and it's, um ... it wasn't written by Epictetus, uh, but it, uh, uh, it is about Epictetus' teaching. Epictetus didn't write anything, um, and, uh, one of his best students, or most famous students, Arrian of Nicomedia, uh, write- wrote down both of his courses and the Encheiridion. To some extent, this is my person homage to Epictetus because he has been my steady guide throughout my Stoic path. Um, you know, I love all of the Stoics. I read Marcus Aurelius, I lea- I read Seneca, I read some of the so-called minor Stoics that are not really minor, they're just minor because we don't have a hell of a lot, uh, that survived of his- of, of their writings. But Epictetus has been the one that really got me into it and it has been sort of a constant companion. So to one ex- to ... in some- in one sense, it is just a- my personal homage to Epictetus. But more importantly, it is an attempt to update Stoicism, and in particular Epictetus' version of Stoicism, to the 21st century. And the reason for that is that Stoicism, in a sense, got interrupted. Uh, you know, it, it started out in, um, uh, the late 4th century BCE. It flourished for five or six centuries, until the early 3rd century of the modern era, and then it kind of got interrupted by Christianity, just like every other, uh, you know, Hellenistic philosophy. It just like, it, it disappeared from, from view. And in that sense, the Greek, Greek-Roman philosophies are very different from, let's say, a number of Eastern traditions, such as Buddhism or Confucianism or Taoism, which evolved and developed gradually over time in essentially uninterrupted fashion. So for instance, if you compare Stoicism with Buddhism, today it's not even correct, really, to talk about Buddhism in the singular. There i- there are many Buddhisms, right? Because there's a number of traditions that evolved over, continuously over two and a half millennia, and clearly nobody today is a Buddhist in the same sense in which somebody was a Buddhist 2000 and, you know, and a half, uh, you know, years ago. But that's not true for Stoicism, because it's like after the third ... the, the, the 2nd or 3rd centuries, like, we, we have a lot of influence of Stoicism on other thinkers, like, uh, Christian writers throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and, you know, early modern philosophers. But then we kind of have a jump (laughs) to the 20th century, essentially. And so, um, uh, I'm not the first one to do this kind of thing. Thing ... My friend and, um, colleague, uh, Larry Baker, who wrote A New Stoicism, uh, did a similar thing, uh, with the entire Stoic system. Uh, however, Larry, Larry's attempt is, on the one hand, more comprehensive than mine, because he didn't focus just on Epictetus, he focused, like, the whole thing. Ɣρεμάι. But it's also much more difficult, uh, in terms of, you know, it's not ac- as accessible to the general public, because he wrote for philosophers for, for, you know, in a technical fashion. If you don't have at least a couple of courses on- of logic under your belly, you're not gonna get much out of that book. (laughs) Um, so, so my attempt has been to update Stoicism to the 21st century, but also to make Epictetus accessible again, uh, to a wider public. 'Cause, you know, most people, I bet, today, don't ... haven't heard the term ... the, the word Epi- ... you know, the name of Epictetus. It's like, "Uh, who the hell was this guy?" People have heard Plato, people have heard Socrates, they've heard Marcus Aurelius. They might not have read them, but they've heard of them. Epictetus, like, "Epi- epi- who?" Uh, and, uh, this is unfortunate, and it's also rather anomalous. It is a, like a 20th century, early 21st century feature, because before that, Epictetus was actually a household name. His school in Nicopolis in Northwestern Greece was very famous through- throughout antiquity. You know, the Emperor Adrian, uh, went to visit. You know, a lot of, uh, of, um, sort of high-level Roman aristocrats sent their kids to, uh, study with him, that sort of stuff. Then, throughou- throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Encheiridion was actually rewritten and updated several times, because it was used as a trainual ... (laughs) as a, a training manual for ... Trainual is a new word that I just invented.