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In this episode of the Artidote podcast, Vashik Armenikus asks Steven Gambardella – a writer on philosophy and art – the difference between ancient and modern Stoic ideas: Why did Nietzsche dislike Stoics? Can art serve as therapy? And why you should get into opera?
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In this episode of the Artidote podcast, Vashik Armenikus asks Steven Gambardella – a writer on philosophy and art – the difference between ancient and modern Stoic ideas: Why did Nietzsche dislike Stoics? Can art serve as therapy? And why you should get into opera?
Listen to Stoicism 3.0, Nietzsche & Art as a Therapy - Steven Gambardella by Vashik Armenikus MP3 song. Stoicism 3.0, Nietzsche & Art as a Therapy - Steven Gambardella song from Vashik Armenikus is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 56:04. This high-quality MP3 track has 256 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 7 Jun 2023. Stream and download Stoicism 3.0, Nietzsche & Art as a Therapy - Steven Gambardella by Vashik Armenikus for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
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Hello everyone, welcome to the R2D2 podcast, I'm Vasi Karmenikas. One of the most highlighted books in my library is Meditations, written by Marcus Aurelius, one of the great Stoic philosophers. There is a quote in that book that I come back to every now and then. It says that once we realize that we have no control over the outside events, and the only control that we have is over our minds, we become stronger every day. It is a very practical quote, and this is what philosophy should be. To paraphrase one of the great philosophers of 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, he said that true philosophy is never theoretical, it's always practical. To talk about practical philosophy, I decided to invite Stephen Gambardella, who is a top writer on philosophy, on a platform called Medium. If you go on Stephen's page on Medium, you'll see an index of articles written by him, and you'll witness on how many philosophers he wrote. He wrote on Spinoza, on Marcus Aurelius, on Seneca, on Friedrich Nietzsche, and many others, and all of his articles are full of practical advice that can improve your life almost immediately. He also wrote a lot on painting and music. He wrote on how we can start appreciating fine art, and how we can get into classical music, particularly opera. Stephen loves opera, and he gives really good advice on where to start with opera. So many, many things that I had in mind when I was launching Archido Podcast. I hope you will enjoy this episode, and let's get started. It is nice to see you, Stephen. Thank you for coming, it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you. It's good to speak to you. I would like to start by telling how I discovered your writings. I was browsing through Medium, and if some of our listeners haven't heard about Medium, Medium is a platform that was created by one of the Twitter founders, I think six years ago, and it is kind of a YouTube for writers. So you can write your articles, and you can monetize them. After some time, I was thinking of cancelling my subscription, but then I stumbled upon your page, your blog, and I really enjoyed reading your articles. So you kind of pulled me back to Medium, and I stayed there until today. Could you please tell, when did you start writing about philosophy? Why do you write about philosophy at your free time? Yeah, yeah, sure, so I basically, I have quite a long background in academia, so I did a master's and a PhD, and that really, I didn't really follow up into the academic life. I actually, you know, I work for a museum now, but it actually taught me how to just write large quantities of writing, so, you know, doing a PhD, I had to write something like 85,000 words, and the PhD that I wrote is horribly academic and opaque and quite difficult to read. So although I'd learned to write vast quantities of writing, you know, I'd basically written a book and became self-disciplined as a writer in doing so, it took me a while to actually learn to write in a simple fashion, and blogging has really been my road to achieving that. So the two went together really well, like on the one hand, I have a lot of, you know, knowledge that I've built up over the years being in academia, and then on the other hand, I've been a blogger that has had to communicate simply and effectively. It also helps that I work in marketing, so, like, you know, I'm a kind of expert in concise communication. So the two really came together, I, you know, I've always kind of this abundance of knowledge, huge bookshelf of books that, you know, bookmarks in them, and then I have this kind of capacity or capability to kind of communicate things quite simply, so Medium was really my way of doing that, and Medium's a fantastic platform, it's enabled amateur writers like me to make an income from writing, a fairly substantial income actually, not enough to give up the day job, but certainly enough to get by. So yeah, that's how I kind of got there, that's how I arrived on Medium. You are quite lucky that you managed to monetize your PhD and to go past it, because I've done a Master's degree and I was thinking to continue with a PhD, but when I heard from my fellow students who went to PhD while I was doing Master's, it kind of discouraged me in some sense, so they're quite lucky that your knowledge went into something that you really enjoy. You write on topics of philosophy which can be applicable to day-to-day lives of your readers, not about, you don't write about abstracts or academic philosophy, and one of the philosophies that is applicable to day-to-day life is Stoicism, and you wrote extensively about it. It seems that Stoicism sees some kind of resurgence in the 21st century, and more and more people find it very helpful to overcome their daily problems. Some modern thinkers try to add a contemporary spin to it, but I think we lose what Stoicism really essentially consisted of. Could you please tell us about the key ideas of Stoicism, and what makes someone a Stoic? Yeah, sure, so Stoicism is really interesting, it's such a popular phenomenon at the moment. I could swear that it all began probably with the movie Gladiator, and people being kind of impressed by the figure of Marcus Aurelius in that movie, because Stoicism traditionally has always been associated with the kind of British public school system, and the stiff upper lip, and that kind of dour Britishness, that Second World War spirit. That's the way that modern Stoicism is mostly being expressed in the 20th century. But recently, and I don't mean this in a horrible way, but recently it's become Americanized, it's become a philosophy that's much more practical, applicable, and more upbeat than it's traditionally been known to be. It's really, in the modern world, it's seen as an attitudinal kind of stance that you would take on life. In the ancient world, it was something completely different, it was an absolutely different species of thought, even from what we consider to be philosophy these days, encompassed science and religion, as much as it did the kind of abstract thought that we associate with philosophy today. And, to me, it was a spiritual way of life. And what's really fascinating to me is the history of Stoicism, the way that Stoicism evolved over hundreds of years, from its founding in ancient Athens, all the way to the Western Roman Empire, where it was even referred to by a Judean apostate in 361 AD. And that's really what kind of captures my attention, but it's really a way of conjoining yourself to the universe in a way that not only gives you a life meaning, but also allows you to take a particular stance on life that allows you to cope with its ups and downs. And that really is a kind of byproduct of the Stoic cosmology, the Stoic understanding of the universe. So that's the answer to your question with regards to ancient Stoicism. With modern Stoicism, it's kind of morphed into more of a kind of philosophical slash psychological stance on life. And I'm talking about modern with a capital M now, I'm not talking about just like small S Stoicism. A modern Stoicism is much more focused on that kind of psychological resilience part of Stoicism. It's a way of like, you know, the world is not in your control. The only thing that you really are in control of is your own thought patterns. You're not even particularly in control of your thoughts themselves. It's more about taking control of your thought patterns. So whilst you aren't in control of events, you are in control of how you respond to events. And that's really an essential tenet that kind of modern Stoics have adopted as a kind of keystone of modern Stoicism. And to me, it's, you know, it's a different species of thought from ancient Stoicism. The relation that they bear with each other is really just a kind of the example of the ancient Stoics and their kind of literary example. The way they express their concepts is something that's been adopted by modern Stoics. And when we look at some ancient Stoics, they embodied what they preached by their own life. Some of them even didn't see a necessity to write down their ideas and it was written by their students because they felt like just by the example, they can show what they actually, how they actually look at life. Do you think there are kind of modern examples of people who we know who lead Stoic life? Oh gosh, people who lead a Stoic life, I know it's a complex question, but like, I was thinking just as an example, the founder of Stoicism, if I'm not mistaken, his name was Zeno. And his life, he embodied kind of what he preached after he lost his business, let's call it. He had to find a new way. So I wonder if there are people who maybe do not declare themselves as Stoics today, but lead a life like that. Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, I'll give you an example, perhaps, of somebody who lived a Stoical life, who was a philosopher, but didn't deem himself to be a Stoic. And that was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He's a modern philosopher, lived in the mid-century, well, he kind of, he died in the mid-century, lived in the first part of the 20th century. He kind of embodied that Stoic viewpoint that no matter what happens, it will be okay, right? There's a fantastic biography of Wittgenstein by a philosopher called Ray Monk. And he talks about how Wittgenstein had almost a sense of invincibility, like he, you know, no matter what happened, like he embodied that Epictetum Stoicism where like, even if your head was chopped off, it would not hurt you, because, you know, you are, what you are is your soul, you are not your body, you are not your reputation. Wittgenstein didn't care about his reputation. He was a real, you know, he didn't give an F about anything. And that was really to his benefit, because he's widely regarded as one of the most significant philosophers of all time, and perhaps the most gifted philosopher of the 20th century. I love one of the Wittgenstein's quotes, and I come back to it quite often, which sounds like the limits of my language means the limits of my world. And to come back to Stoicism, on my desk here I have a book written by one of the modern Stoics. His name is Massimo Pellucci. And in this book, Pellucci suggests what he calls Stoicism 2.0, in which he adapts certain ideas of the ancient Stoics to the modern world. You wrote a response to Pellucci, and you suggested some changes to what he suggested. You called yours Stoicism 3.0. Could you please tell us what was Pellucci trying to suggest, and why did you decide to write a response? Yeah, yeah. I mean, firstly, he's a great writer. He's a really interesting philosopher. He makes Stoicism incredibly accessible by actually giving people a grasp of the theories and concepts behind Stoicism. A lot of what is counted as modern philosophy, in this kind of psychological mold, teaches by rote. It says to you, here's a toolkit for coping with life, it's called Stoicism, you can apply it to your everyday life. Pellucci, I think, I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, he actually breaks down Stoicism as a philosopher and says, look, this is why the philosophers thought the way they did, and this is why I consider myself a Stoic. That really centers upon causality, the law of cause and effect. So to give you an example, there's no fire without heat, right? Like heat is a consequence of fire. Everything has a knock-on effect. Every action you undertake has a knock-on effect. Now, the Stoics took this to give them a sense that the universe is deterministic. And Pellucci says the same thing, they're in agreement that we live in a deterministic universe and every effect has a cause, which is predetermined. Now, where they actually diverge is that the Stoics believe that the universe is a kind of determined universe because it's perfect. And the reason that it's perfect is because it's Zeus, it's God writ large. They subscribe to a pantheistic view of the world. Pellucci is obviously not like that, he's secular, possibly an atheist, I'm not sure if I've ever read him explicitly state that, but it seems that way. And he believes that because he's a scientist, I think he's a biologist. And basically, Pellucci says, look, I'm updating Stoicism to 2.0 because we can't really seriously claim that the universe is one and the same as God, right? Like there's no evidence for that, science just doesn't back it up. So he's proposing that we update Stoicism to a new iteration called 2.0. And he goes about, I think, for the purposes of the book you mentioned, he updates Epictetus's handbook, the Enchiridion, and basically secularizes it. He removes his references to God and in its place uses things like fate, and also updates some of the anachronisms with modern things that happen in our everyday life. So that's where Pellucci's coming from with his idea of Stoicism 2.0, which I think is great. I think it's really helpful for people and it helps them understand Stoicism. The reasoning behind Stoicism 3.0, as I call it, is to kind of engage with that debate. Like, you know, Pellucci says that Stoicism has always been a philosophy that's about contention and debate, and Stoics have always welcomed that, and that's the strength of Stoicism. So I'm kind of, you know, entering that debate and saying, well, that, you know, Stoicism 2.0 is great, but you kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? So you can't, there's no firm basis. Once you remove God from Stoicism, as I mentioned earlier, Stoicism, I believe, is a spiritual way of life. Once you remove God, you remove the Stoic idea of the self, because the Stoic idea of the self is a self that stands in relation to God, right? So we understand ourselves as we exist in relation to the universe, which is God. And with modern Stoicism, that sense of self has actually unraveled, because there's no longer anything doing the determining. There's just something like, you know, impersonal mechanical laws of nature. There's actually nothing that constitutes us. We are mere matter. Answer for interrupting. Do you think that it will lead kind of to, kind of a nihilism in the sense that, you know, if you are indifferent, because I'm simplifying here, is that if Stoic concept is being indifferent to the things that are beyond your control, and you can control simply like only your thoughts and your reaction, then if you throw, as you say, the God version, the pantheistic version, that leads to indifference to everything, including injustice, it removes the reason towards the improvement. It kind of says, as long as you don't care about the things beyond your control, which is most of the things, you just focus on yourself and on nothing else. I understand that I'm simplifying, and I also understand that you don't mean Christian God by saying the pantheistic. Is that, do I interpret correctly, you know, that this can lead kind of to nihilism? Yeah, I think you're onto something there. I mean, I wouldn't accuse P.T.U.C. of being a nihilist himself, or anything like that. But what you're saying makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, the problem is, is like, by removing God from Stoicism, when I say God, I don't mean the Christian idea of God, I mean the kind of ancient pantheist idea of God. When you remove God from Stoicism, you rest all of your kind of moral understanding on societal norms, right? So let me give you an example. In the Roman world, suicide was virtuous. You know, brave people took their own lives, right? In the modern world, it's the complete opposite, right? Suicide has a stigma attached to it as being something that's cowardice. You know, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, and that's seen as him not being able to face up to the consequences of his actions. So you have two sets of societal norms there, entirely based on their kind of culture and context. Now, if we're going to talk about virtue in the modern world, we're talking about very specific virtues that are tied to our own culture. Like, what's good now can be bad in a hundred years' time. And, you know, I think what you're getting at is this kind of Nietzschean understanding of relativism and nihilism. So, yeah, I think you have a good point there. I think that, you know, there is a slippery slope there when you decide that you're going to remove the kind of cosmological basis of a philosophy. You know, the consequence is that it's no longer anchored to anything that's like real, I guess. You mentioned Nietzsche, and he's a philosopher whose works are also getting popular in our time. I discovered that you can easily identify personality traits of people who like Nietzsche's works by asking them which book is their favorite. If they say that it is Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it shows the literary side of the character of the person. While people who say that The Birth of Tragedy is their favorite work by Nietzsche, it usually shows that the person is more artistic and interested in aesthetics. My first book that I've read by Nietzsche was his Twilight of Idols, and it's a great book, and it totally justifies Nietzsche's quote that he said about himself. He said that he writes in a sentence what some authors attempt to write in a book. What was your first book by Nietzsche? Because he wrote six or seven articles. So Nietzsche, I started at a very young age. While I was at university, about 19 years old, I think I was forced to read The Birth of Tragedy because I actually went to art school. The Birth of Tragedy is really a book about aesthetics. It's about a kind of tension in music specifically, but a lot of people involved in the art world refer to The Birth of Tragedy as a book about aesthetics. So I actually started there, but I kind of agree with you. I think Twilight of the Idols is one of his masterpieces. It's short and sharp, and it's really interesting. I actually think Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a bad way to start with Nietzsche. It's actually quite repetitive, dare I say it. It's quite difficult to read for a beginner. I think the genealogy of morals is quite good as a start. Just looking up on my bookshelf, trying to think what else is a good read. I mean, the Joyful Science is also a good one, which directly preceded Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I read the Twilight of Idols and then tried reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and I agree with you that it was a bit of a difficult read for, let's say, a beginner into works of Nietzsche. But then I continued to his Beyond Good and Evil, and I thought there he kind of explains well his main topics. Not as vaguely and repetitively as in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but gives a good introduction. How do you explain the popularity of Nietzschean works by different people completely? Some people take him through political lens, some people take him through kind of spiritual lens. I think, I guess I'm more interested in people who are looking at Nietzsche as a philosophy, as to Stoicism, a different kind of, like, modus operandi in our world. Yes, well, I think you almost answered your own question there, because I think Nietzsche can be, there's a different Nietzsche for everyone, right? So, there's, you know, Nietzsche's work is so varied. It's almost like a Scorsese knife of, like, not just philosophy, but history and theory, criticism and things like that. I mean, he was genuinely a foundational thinker for the 20th century and the 21st century, in that he was so adaptable to different kind of genres and styles and ways of thinking. And I think that's really part of his appeal. The other part of his appeal is he was so prescient. I mean, he really, he kind of nailed it. He knew that something bad was on its way. The 20th century was a pretty rough century by historical standards. So, I think there's something in that that lends itself to almost like a validation. Like, people kind of say, okay, yeah, well, you know, he was right about nihilism. He was right about the kind of death of religion as being something that's important to the nation state and things like that. So, yeah, and also as a kind of proto-psychologist as well. Like, Nietzsche was profoundly influential in the way that he spoke about psychology before Freud and people like that, and the way that he talked about group psychology. I mean, just a great writer as well. I mean, astonishingly great writer. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode so far. And before we continue, I would like to recommend some books on philosophy that are very connected to my conversation with Stephen. The first book that I would recommend is Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy. It's a beautifully written book and a beautifully narrated book. And I think it is a work that cannot be read just once, should not be read just once, because it expresses so many ideas. It tells you a whole story of how our approach to life has changed from the ancient times all the way to our modern day. So, audio format is really great because you can relisten your favorite part and absorb all the ideas. The second book is Michel de Montaigne's Essays. Actually, Montaigne was the person who invented the genre of essay. So, if you were looking all this time for a person to blame for all the assignments that you got at school to write an essay on this subject to that subject, Michel is the person to address your claims to. But before you do that, please check his essays. They are wonderfully written, full of great advice, and he touches upon all the crucial questions that all of us want to know in life. The third book is Seneca's Letters. Seneca's Letters are like letters from a friend to you who tries to give you the best impartial advice. Stephen loves this book as well, and I would like to recommend to you to listen to it in audio format as well. As always, I would like to say that this podcast was sponsored by Audible, and I personally am an Audible subscriber for the past seven years. I really enjoy it. I have hundreds of titles in my personal library. It is the best way to consume certain books. So, thank you for listening, and let's continue with the rest of the episode. How, according to Nietzsche, we can become wise? He wrote a piece that focuses on the allegory of three stages of life, which is an instruction from Nietzsche on how he thinks individuals can become wiser. Could you please tell more about it? Yes, so it's from Nietzsche. It's a piece of, it's like, I guess, a kind of allegory that appears close to the stars, and thus spoke Zarathustra. And basically, it's a kind of teaching of Nietzsche's about the three stages of becoming wise, right? So, firstly, we're the camel. We're overlaid, and we're weighed down with baggage. We're like a camel on a baggage train. And we build up all this kind of knowledge and education. We're told how to live our lives and what to do. So, as relatively young people, we kind of hold, carry all this baggage, and we can spend the rest of our lives in that way. And then the next is the lion, which is almost a kind of rebellious, you know, phase where we actually, we roar back, and we decide that, you know, we want to take on these, you know, pre-received notions and ideas. And Nietzsche actually brings another figure into this at this point, another allegorical or metaphorical figure of the dragon. And Nietzsche says, I mean, it's a beautiful piece of literature. Nietzsche says that on every scale of the dragon's skin is written, Thou shalt. And I find that really amazing, like this idea that you build, he built a monster out of all the Thou shalts that we're subjected to. You know, you must do this, you must do that in your life. And the idea of the lion is to actually take on that dragon and use your ferocity against it, to rebel against these kind of rules and these ways of doing things. And then the final stage of the metamorphosis, again, something that people don't necessarily achieve in their lives. I think Nietzsche basically says what sage achieves is the child. And that's where you begin anew. You understand the world with the child's eyes, and everything is a game to you. And I think Nietzsche finishes it by saying, you know, you need to say the sacred yes to life. And the sacred yes is, to me, you know, my interpretation of it is that you are open to looking at life in a different way. And you're looking at life anew as if it's a kind of a sandbox that a child can sit in. If I'm not mistaken, Nietzsche had kind of a grudge against the Stoics. Can you say why he disliked Stoics? What was the reason there? Yeah, so with Stoicism, I think there's a couple of things. There are ways in which Nietzsche's thought converges with the Stoics. So Nietzsche himself was a determinist. So he believed, just like the Stoics, that we live in a deterministic universe. But where he diverged from the Stoics was that the Stoics believed that the universe has an order to it, thanks to the kind of pneuma, the breath of God, the divine logos of God. Nietzsche was an atheist, and he just didn't buy that theory. For Nietzsche, he was a proto-existentialist. He believed that life was meaningless, the universe was meaningless, and the universe is ultimately chaotic. Nietzsche did not believe in the so-called laws of nature. Those are just contingent facts about the universe as it is now. So his determinism was of a different kind, and that kind of meaningless for him was actually empowering. Because he preached that, like the lion roaring back at a dragon, you can find your own meaning. It's incumbent upon you as a human being to make meaning for yourself. You said about, like, he was kind of a proto-existentialist, and you have an article called Existentialism vs. Anxiety, if I'm not mistaken. I like that article explained what is anxiety, and can you tell about your approach to anxiety in that article? What is it, and how we can tackle it philosophically? Yeah, so it's really a look at existential angst and anxiety. I kind of conflate the two in a way because, again, I want to speak to a modern audience, and I want the writing to let them understand the kind of feelings they feel. If I called it existential angst, as it's often translated from the existentialist text, it might not feel as applicable to people. But basically, anxiety is a generalized feeling of dread about the future. When we worry, we worry about specific things. We worry about paying the bills. We worry about paying our mortgages or having a job. And at the moment, there's a lot to worry about. You know, the economy is in free fall. But anxiety is a different kind of dread. It's implacable. So it's something that you can't quite pin down. And the existentialists argued that it's related in some ways to our freedom as human beings. And it's this idea that, you know, we must make choices. But the problem is, is that no matter what choice we make, we'd never be kind of happy with it or comfortable with it. So anxiety is that idea that I have this generalized feeling of dread about what I should do with my life or the choices I should make, because there's always that feeling that they're judged somehow, but they're not being judged by anyone specifically. So it's a really interesting concept where psychology and philosophy overlap. Other than philosophy, you write about art, and you have an article which is called How to Appreciate Fine Art, which is a good introduction to those who would like to get into it. Could you please tell your own journey into how did you get into art? I was always good at art at school. And I went on to go to art school myself. I went to art college. I studied art at university. I went to Goldsmiths College in London, where I kind of, you know, I did my own art. Now, what got me into it, I guess, was I went to my local library and got a book about Picasso. And it just blew me away. Like, I just, it threw open the doors of modern art for me. And I was absolutely gripped since then. And, yeah, I just, yeah, it's always, I guess it's always been there. I was always good at drawing. So, like, I, you know, I just got into art. Do you think that art can help us kind of psychologically the same way as philosophy does? Can a visit to a gallery, whether it's National Gallery of London or whichever gallery it is, can kind of help us? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, like, with philosophy, you know, I consider philosophical contemplation almost meditative in itself, like thinking about thinking allows you to work stuff out in your brain and spiritually. Now, art is thinking without words. So when you look at art, you're engaged in a kind of different kind of thought. And that's, that's really, you know, I think that's really helpful. I think that painting and sculpture allow you to think in a way that is self-contemplative. It allows you to access the structures of your brain, the process thing. So if you think about the idea of, like, Kantian categories, categories of, like, understanding the world. So, like, you know, I can comprehend the world because, you know, I have the category of, you know, substance, for example. When you look at art, or when you think about philosophy, you, your thoughts reflect back those categories themselves. And there's something about doing that, that is very good for your, very good for your mind and very good for your soul. And that's, that's really what art can unlock. Other than Picasso, do you have artists that you come back to more often than the others? And why do you come back to those artists and not the others? Yeah, I really like Manet, the French painter Manet. To me, you know, he's a really interesting liminal figure because he stands between what I would call classic art and modern art, which is an entirely different kind of art from all the art that came before it. I'm also really interested in Picasso and Cubism. You know, I'm a huge, I'm hugely fond of Spanish and French culture. And Caravaggio and Velázquez, I find really interesting figures as well. Because they were realists. And they depicted life in a very, in a very kind of frank way that was very loyal to the kind of materiality of paint. And to me, that's really interesting for all the reasons I gave before about being contemplative about the way that thought is structured. So I'm really particularly fond of those artists. Yes, I think Caravaggio is the second most popular artist that people get into when they start their journey into the world of fine art, after Da Vinci, perhaps. You also write about opera, and I find opera to be much less accessible than almost any other art form. Maybe I'm wrong. But if you would, if you would give a reason to a person like me, who is not as familiar with the world of opera, and to our listeners, why we should buy a ticket to an opera right after the lockdown is over, the virus is gone, what would be the reasons? Yeah, sure. It's got to be the music. I, you know, it's the music that got me into it. And it's the music that carries it on. I mean, a lot of, you know, let's be honest, there's a lot of lousy acting in opera. And it can seem quite inaccessible. It's a very, very snobby world. It requires quite a lot of obscure kind of knowledge. And it wears that on its sleeve. Like there's a lot in opera to dislike. And people genuinely do really dislike opera. Like, you know, if you talked about art, or, you know, music, or even just classical music, people would say, well, it's not my thing. But, you know, it's, you know, if it floats other people's boat, that's fine. With opera, people are like, you know, I hate opera, like people really hate it. But what the thing about opera is, is like the music is absolutely sublime. And it's the marriage of drama with the visuals of, of the opera set of the stage, and the music, the kind of that kind of triumvirate that that kind of triangle is really compelling. And it's, you know, Greek theatre had a chorus, like, I don't think anyone really knows whether the chorus sang or chanted or whatever. I'm not, I'm not that up on, you know, the history of theatre. But it seems to me that opera is the closest thing to Greek theatre as it was practiced by the Greeks. So it's, I think it might be compelling for that reason. I mean, the music sublime, if anyone wants to get into, wants to hear something great, like just listen to the humming chorus in Madame Butterfly, or listen to the overture of the Magic Flute, or listen to any overture of any Wagner opera, I, you know, I challenge you to listen to that and not be impressed. My personal favourite is Lohengrin from Wagner. I don't know, it's the overture to that one is amazing. Yeah, it's really like really moving. Do you think experiencing opera through your laptop screen or TV screen is the same? Can someone get into the opera through the laptop or TV screen? That's a really good question. I guess. Yeah, like, I think people should give it a shot. You could, you know, there's a lot of, you can watch opera on, I think, you know, on TV these days. You can watch it on demand, the Royal Opera House and places like that. So, you know, I'd say give it a shot, because if you watch it on TV, you can walk away. Like, you know, I'll be really honest, like, opera can be incredibly boring. Like, you know, I've certainly felt like falling asleep through some operas. They can be extremely long. And they can really sag in places. But it's worth it for the great moments and the great operas. A good opera house will put on a compelling opera from start to finish. But yeah, give it a go. How would you define snobbishness? So, yeah, it's quite interesting. I'm actually really interested in snobbery from a philosophical perspective. There's a crossover with stoicism here, because snobbery is making value judgments based on all the things that aren't really you. Right. So, like, when you're kind of snobbish or feel snobbish about something, and we all fall into snobbery. Like, you know, I'm guilty of feeling snobbish sometimes. It's because you're evaluating another person or whatever it may be by the things that don't really actually matter. So, you're making evaluation based on material or social standing. Right. So, you know, opera is based on a kind of social standing. It requires knowledge that comes from education. And it comes from knowledge that comes with an expensive education. You know, not many kids grow up with classical music around. It takes a particular household that kind of has a lot of social, intellectual and financial capital to do that. So, snobbery is really evaluating people by what is not them, by their reputation or by what they own or the money in their bank account or anything like that. But the stoic conception of the self is none of that. The stoic conception of the self is the soul. And it's not even about the body either. Right. Like, you can be, you know, the kind of vanity is another kind of snobbery. Like, you may judge someone by their looks. You may say, oh, that person's ugly or they look weird. You know, Socrates looked weird. He was an ugly guy. But it didn't matter because he had a, you know, he had a pure soul. And that's really interesting to me. I think our world, the time that we live in is unique because everything is so accessible in terms of books or even the same opera before 200 years ago. 100 years ago it was impossible without buying an expensive ticket. Now I can put and listen to Lohengrin on YouTube quite easily. And I think I would like to ask you to recommend some books. If you can recommend a book that you come back to every now and then, that is on your kind of life shelf, you know, the books that you read and you come back to, what would those be? Right. So, yeah, I think you asked me to recommend a book on philosophy, art and history. Right. So I think for anyone who wants to get into philosophy as a beginner, I'd recommend Seneca. Right. Because Seneca writes very beautifully. And he's actually very accessible. I think he was a silver age Latin writer. He was alive in the first century CE. And a lot of the writing of his that survived is his letters to console and to help friends. And he knew that these letters would be published. Like he knowingly wrote them with a public audience in mind. And they're just beautifully written. They're very rich with metaphors, maybe even too rich. Like, you know, you kind of get sick of the metaphors at certain points because he really lays them on thickly. But I just think he's a great philosopher for people to start out with. You know, they can get a basic grasp of Stoicism and Epicureanism and Socrates and Platonism by reading Seneca. The book, I think you in your email to me, you mentioned history book. The book I'd recommend is like, you know, I'm going to cheat with this one because like, like instead of like I actually don't read many history books. I'm pretty I'm pretty poorly read with history books. But I thought I would go right to the source of history and actually read a historical text. And the text that comes to mind for me is the Satyricon by Gaius Petronius. And that's also from the first century, roughly the same time as Seneca. So, you know, Petronius and Seneca may have actually known each other. Both of them were believed to have been murdered at Nero's request. If they've got the right Petronius, it may well be that they haven't got the right Petronius. But basically, the Satyricon is a novel from the first century, and it really brings the Roman world to life. What I find really interesting about the Roman world in particular is that it's foundational to Western civilization, yet also so alien to Western civilization, like Roman morality. Roman spirituality, Roman ways of life, so unbelievably different from the way we are, and yet so foundational to the kind of lives we live now. So, the Satyricon really brings that to life. It's bawdy, it's smutty, it's got jokes in it. It just absolutely brings the Roman world to life. And I think it's a great book for that. And it's also, again, beautifully written. And I think the book about art, I would read Julian Barnes's Keeping an Eye Open. Julian Barnes is a novelist. He's an English novelist. I think he's won the Booker Prize. And he writes really well about art. So, if you want a good example of art writing, read Julian Barnes. Don't read Art Theory. I mean, a lot of Art Theory is just awful. I personally also recommend to our listeners that book. I really love Julian Barnes's Keeping an Eye Open. It's a brilliant book. His essay on Delacroix and on Géricault and on Courbet are just brilliantly written pieces. Thank you so much, Stephen. It was a pleasure talking to you. I really love your articles. I would strongly recommend to all our listeners to go and check Stephen's articles on philosophy. They are applicable to our life, especially at the times that we're all in lockdown. Once again, thank you, Stephen. Thank you for having me. Cheers. Thank you. It was such a pleasure meeting Stephen and speaking to him. I had so many other questions to him. I wanted to ask him about Spinoza's idea of freedom. I wanted to speak more about art. Hopefully, we'll have another conversation very soon and I will be able to ask all these questions. Until then, please check Stephen's profile on our website artidote.uk. I'll add all the links in the description of this episode. In that profile, you'll find all the Stephen's articles, all his book recommendations, a link to his Medium page, so you can go and check out his writing. And once again, thank you for listening and I will see you in the next one. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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