As many of you listeners know, I teach classes both in traditional academic settings, in institutions that, you know, have a kind of formalized approach to education, and I do those face-to-face and online. And I also teach, in the Study with Sadler Academy, online classes and seminars to a much wider variety of people, in part because I open it up. You don't have to be enrolled in a particular school in order to take classes. And I also make them a good bit more affordable. Now, that's a totally different topic.
Where am I going with this? So I had something interesting come up in both a seminar that I was teaching this last weekend, specifically on Stoic philosophy, and it's something that is coming up pretty frequently in the two classes that I'm teaching this semester, one of which is focused directly on the emotion of anger and looking at it from avariety of different perspectives, many of which are drawn from ancient philosophy, and another class which is explicitly about what we call philosophy as a way of life.
And so what I'm going to talk about are what we call practices or spiritual exercises. There's a variety of different names for these. And I've talked about this a little bit before in the past. So what I want to bring up today is something that I ended up, I've been thinking about it for quite a while with respect to my academic classes. I brought up in a response to a question that I was asked in the Stoicism seminar.
So it had to do with, well, how do we actually apply this philosophical stuff if we don't already have practices outlined for us? Because, you know, when it comes to a lot of matters, the Stoics really stand out, at least with the literature that we have of them, in providing us with a lot of explicit practices.
So when Epictetus will say: When you're in this kind of situation, have ready at hand these thoughts. That's a practice. Or when he says: “You're encountering this sort of problem, do this.” Or: “Think about this every once in a while.” And Seneca has a lot of these as well. So does Marcus Aurelius. And we could go on and on.
So what do we do when we're thinking about matters about which the philosophers have a lot to contribute, a lot of theory, a lot of exploration, but they don't actually advise us to do this or that as a practice. A prime example of this would be Aristotle and his predecessor Plato's discussions about the emotion of anger, which are kind of scattered across their texts.
With Plato, we get a good bit of discussion of this part of ourselves called thumos, which is the part that gets angry in Republic book four and in other parts of the Republic. Then we get a lot of other partial discussions of anger in other dialogues like the Gorgias or Protagoras or Euthyphro, and there's some really useful stuff in there
With Aristotle we get a more systematic, and we could even say scientific examination, of anger. But it's still scattered across multiple texts, so you have to do some correlating it if you want to say, well, here's the theory. And it's nice to have the theory, but we could easily say, sure, it's great to have a viewpoint on it. But what do I actually do with this?
And there's a very simple answer to that, namely that you take the ideas and then you have to exercise a little bit of thought on your own part about how could these actually be applied? And in some cases, it's pretty straightforward. It's very low hanging fruit, so to speak. So I'll give you a couple examples.
Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, he has this great line that you actually see used by other people who aren't Aristotelians, where he says it's easy to get angry. Anybody can do that. But getting angry with the right person for the right reason at the right time in the right way for the right amount of time, that is not easy and not everybody can do that. And there will be a couple other rights, or as one should in Greek dei is the terminology there, that we could bring up as well.
Now, that's great. You can say, aha, so we have a way of understanding whether anger felt by a particular person or exhibited by them is good or bad, virtuous or vicious. And that leads to making ethical judgments, but you could also use this for anger management. And how would you do that? Well, you would say to yourself or to somebody else, when you actually start getting irritated, am I or are you getting angry with the right person? You just think about that.
And merely turning your attention to that question and seriously asking yourself that question, not just giving yourself a pass. Obviously, I'm angry at the right person. I don't get angry at the wrong people. But, you know, actually questioning yourself. Maybe I am angry at the wrong person in this case. That can help you to manage your anger.
And you could go further with it. You could ask yourself, well, what is going on with me? That I'm transferring my anger from somebody who perhaps I should be angry with or the person who at least is making me angry to somebody else instead and maybe deflecting it or using them as a scapegoat or however you want to conceive of it. See, you've got a practice there and you could do this with all those other rights as well.
Am I expressing my anger in the right way? I know i'm angry, but should I be saying these sorts of things to these people? Or is this going to be damaging to the relationship that I claim to value with them? Or is anger leading me to do or say things that are morally dishonorable or shameful? Those are questions you can ask. And that's a philosophical practice.
I'll give you another example coming from Plato in the Euthyphro, he very very helpfully tells us that the matters about which human beings and gods, in their own relationships and communities, disagree about with each other, and as a result either hate or get angry with each other over, are not questions that can be easily resolved. Like matters of mathematics where you can get it wrong, and then say let's do the operation or sum again, and see who's got the right answer.
Instead they have to do with what we call moral values. In ancient Greek thought, something you see in Plato, and Aristotle, and the Stoics, and so many others, they distinguished between modalities like the good and the bad, or the just and the unjust, or the honorable and the shameful (also translatable as beautiful and ugly, or fair and foul), the useful and the harmful, and a number of other things as well.
These are the things that we often do disagree about, you know, what they are, how they apply. And when people get these wrong in our eyes, we often get angry with them and they get angry with us. So if we know that we're heading into a situation where we are going to have that sort of disagreement, disagreement about those kinds of matters, we can say to ourselves, aha, I've got to watch getting angry, because this is exactly the sort of thing that does tend to make people angry with each other.
So you notice what we've done there. This is some creative application of ideas that are taken from a philosopher. It doesn't take an awful lot to be able to extrapolate from the theory to the actual practice. And I think that in a lot of cases, this is exactly not just what we can do, but what we should do whenever we don't have a number of already outlined practices. So perhaps that's of some use to you.
I know that I do it a lot. People will often ask me, oh, what are your favorite stoic practices that you do every day? And I'll often say, I don't actually have a lot of them because I get myself into situations. And then I've been doing it so long that I think about, well, what is the stuff that I need to apply to here, and that works for me. Whereas other people might need things to be a lot more structured
If you actually do know the theory, turning it into practice is something that shouldn't be all that difficult. And if it is, well perhaps you want to look at why that's the case but if it isn't you can say aha i'm on the right track here and this is exactly what we should do with theories and practices.
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