Can You Just Shut Up? | Stoicism vs. Epicureanism: Enemies or Allies?

To enter into another person’s mind, even for a moment, we first need to get out of our own head. 📚 Books Mentioned: Working by Robert Caro https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/writing11?_pos=1&_sid=2daa8982d&_ss=r Art of Happiness by Epicurus https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/art-of-happiness?_pos=3&_sid=039d83ad4&_ss=r Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday https://store.dailystoic.com/products/lives-of-the-stoics-signed-edition 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  Can you just shut up? Before they finish their sentence, we're ready with our response, ready to show them how smart we are, how much we know, or how quickly we can solve the problem. But what would happen if we shut up and listened? If we stopped trying to win the conversation and started trying to understand the person in front of us? That's what Marcus Aurelius tried to do. He reminded himself to get into the habit of listening attentively to anything that anyone says and to enter as much as he could the mind of the speaker. Now, this is harder than it sounds, because to enter another person's mind, even for a moment, we first have to get out of our own head. We have to stop rehearsing our own answer, stop preparing the clever thing we're going to say next. We have to give the other person room

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  to reveal what they are thinking. Robert Carroll, one of the great biographers of the last century, he turned that ancient advice into a practical interviewing technique. He talks about this in his book, Working, which I love, I've raved about, I'll all link to it in today's show notes. He explained that when he's waiting for the person he's interviewing to break silence by giving me a piece of information, he says he writes "SU" for "shut up" in his notebook. He says, "If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of "SU"s there." Carroll understood that a few seconds of silence can do what a dozen follow-up questions cannot, gives the other person room to think, to search, to keep going, and it gives us the space to actually listen, not just to what is being said,

• 1:43Ryan Holiday?

  but also what is being avoided, softened, or left unsaid. Silence is the weapon, Carroll said. Silence and people's need to fill it, as long as that person isn't you.

• 2:05Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. There's a famous Will Durant quote. He says, "A nation is born Stoic and it dies Epicurean." Right? People use this word lowercase Stoic. They use this word lowercase Epicurean, and they really have almost nothing to do with the philosophy, right? These are stereotypes. Lowercase Stoic, you know, he's meaning disciplined. He's meaning stern. He's meaning restrained. He's meaning Spartan. And then by Epicurean, we mean lover of pleasure. We mean decadent. We mean weak. We mean soft. We mean removed from the world. And in the ancient world, this isn't really what the schools,

• 2:49Ryan Holiday?

  uppercase Stoicism and lowercase Stoicism had anything to do with. So, look, I spend a lot of time defining Stoicism and combating some of these perceptions of lowercase Stoicism. I spend less time doing that on Epicureanism, because that's not the philosophy I talk about. But the Stoics had no real problem with Epicureanism. I mean, they disagreed with it, but Seneca is very, very familiar with the works of Epicurus, and he's reading them, and he's talking about them, and he's taking what he likes from them. There's probably no philosopher that Seneca quotes more than Epicurus. We have a great edition of Epicurus in the Painted Porch that I really love, called The Art of Happiness, which I will link to in today's show notes. It's worth reading.

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  Like, Seneca says, you know, "We should read like a spy in the enemy's camp." So, I don't want to overstate it. Like, they were rival schools. And in Lives of the Stoics, I tell this little story about a Stoic named Diotymus. Let me plug that in here for you, because it does show the degree of which there was real rivalry and disagreement between the two.

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  Diotymus, the vicious. Born unknown, died unknown, possibly around 100 B.C. Origin unknown. It was Shakespeare, the great observer of the Stoics, who would say in his most Stoic play, no less, that "the good we do in life is easily forgotten, but the evil that we do lives on and on." Perhaps no Stoic philosopher illustrates this principle more than Diotymus, of whom so little is known. We don't know when he was born. We're not sure when or how he died. We know only a few of his beliefs. For instance, that the chief end in life was well-being and that the pursuit of virtue was how we got it. Who did he study under?

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  We're not sure about that either. Sources suggest that he knew Postidonius, but that's it. How was he introduced to philosophy? Who were his parents? Who were his students? How did he help them? How did he live? What acts of kindness did he perform? What honors did he decline? Again, we know nothing of any of this. He is a cipher to us. All we know about him is from a single act of indisputable malice, one that has baffled historians and students of Stoicism for more than 2,000 years. It's an act that seems so pointless, so petty, so comically at odds with the teachings of the philosophy that Diotymus claimed to adhere to,

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  that it almost sounds made up. Sometime around the turn of the first century B.C., as the philosophies of Epicurus enjoyed a resurgence in Athens amid the rising splendor and power of Rome, Diotymus sat down and forged more than 50 licentious letters intended to slander the reputation of the founder of that rival school. Indeed, he went much further than that. Diotymus portrayed Epicurus as some kind of depraved maniac, a reputation that Epicurus has struggled to completely shed, even to this day, in order to bolster the Stoic arguments against the philosophy. Part of the motivation was no doubt self-defense.

• 6:09Ryan Holiday?

  The Epicurean school at this time was ascendant and under the leadership of the prolific Apollodorus, who in addition to writing some 400 books, was nicknamed "The Garden Tyrant." We are told by Diogenes Laertus that Apollodorus had taken to smearing Chrysippus, claiming that the Stoic had filled his books with quotes he had stolen from others. Such slander of the Stoic's great fighter would need to be addressed. Diotymus chose to respond to slander with slander. He decided to commit a crime worse than what Apollodorus was falsely alleging against Chrysippus. For a school that praised logic and truth as much as virtuous behavior, Diotymus's actions would have been inexcusable.

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  Even if Epicureanism was now posing some kind of existential threat to Stoicism, it hardly justifies the commission of literary fraud. "If it is not right, do not do it," Marcus Aurelius would write in his encapsulation of Stoic doctrine. "If it is not true, do not say it." The Stoic is supposed to be beyond grudges, beyond revenge, beyond silly competition or the need to win arguments. Certainly, they're not supposed to do anything, let alone lie or mislead out of spite. Somehow, somewhere, Diotymus went astray. And to what end? To discredit a school that was also earnestly seeking to lead its students toward the good life?

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  It would be then Diotymus's sole contribution to the history of Stoicism, to make himself a cautionary tale. He proved that the Stoics were hardly perfect and that no matter how much training or reading we have done, a snap decision made in the moment can undo all of it. What might Rutilius Rufus have thought to know that at roughly the same time he was being brought up on false charges by his political enemies, another Stoic was hard at work posthumously framing Epicurus? But such is life and history, complicated, contradictory, and often disappointing. Athenius, citing Demetrius of Magnesia, says that Zeno of Sidon, who succeeded Apollodorus as head of the Epicurean school,

• 8:22Ryan Holiday?

  tracked Diotymus down and filed suit against him. The court sided with Zeno and sentenced Diotymus to death, which is a rather extreme form of justice and certainly not one Rome would have tolerated. While it's unlikely that the death penalty would have been given for something as common as slander, there can be no doubt that a strong fine and exile from Athens were imposed, and greater than that, a personal shaming. This is the mistake we make. We fight fire with fire and end up burning ourselves. No one remembers who started it, and our scars stay forever, even if we manage to survive the blaze. When we are angry, it's almost always better to wait and do nothing. And as far as our enemies go, if possible,

• 9:06Ryan Holiday?

  we ought to let them destroy themselves. Diotymus's infamy stained his fellow Stoics to enough of an extent, for example, that it prompted Postidonius to write what was certainly a more measured book against Diotymus's accuser, Zeno of Sidon, than he might otherwise have intended. It's not as if such an honorable man would have defended Diotymus's forgeries. Instead, it's likely that he needed to shift the focus away from the student and towards the school, clarifying what Stoicism's actual objections to the teaching of Epicurus were. Did Postidonius apologize for Diotymus? Did he disavow the man's despicable tactics? Did he correct Apollodorus's own slander against Chrysippus?

• 9:49Ryan Holiday?

  One hopes, but one does not know. Still, it remains interesting that we have no record of any other Stoic disavowing Diotymus's crime at the time or in generations after. Seneca, who writes expansively on all sorts of philosophers and their behaviors and about the Epicureans more than 80 times across his surviving works, never once mentions this incident and the sad failing of his own school. Perhaps the desperation of the intra-academic squabble hit too close to home. “It has never been easy to understand the bitterness of disputes between classical scholars,” Samuel Johnson once observed. “Small things make mean men proud,” he said, “and vanity catches small occasions,

• 10:32Ryan Holiday?

  or that all contrarity of opinion, even in those that can defend it no longer, makes proud men angry. There is often in commentaries a spontaneous strain of invective and contempt, more eager and venomous than is vented by the most furious controvertist in politics against those whom he is hired to defame.” He could not have captured the folly of Diotymus better, nor could Shakespeare’s funeral oration of Caesar been any more apt, for in that play the once Stoic Brutus’s single deed, the assassination of Julius Caesar, would come to overwhelm and obscure everything else the man would do in his life. And so it went for Diotymus, a philosopher who may well have had many interesting and

• 11:16Ryan Holiday?

  profound things to say about the pursuit of moral perfection and well-being, but instead is known to us only for his evil and vengeful decision to attempt to destroy the reputation of the founder of his rival’s school.

• 11:33Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, I disagree with what Diotymus did. It was pointless. So what I wanted to do today was bring you a piece we put together for Daily Stoic on Epicureanism and Stoicism, some lessons, some similarities, and differences. I think this should be really helpful to you. It was helpful to me, and I think you’ll really like this. So let’s just get into it, and hopefully you learn something.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Epicureanism and Stoicism: Lessons, Similarities, and Differences. Stoic and Epicurean: Two words that do not mean what people think they mean. The image of the Stoic is the unfeeling, emotionless brute, and the Epicurean as the pleasure-loving, self-indulgent hedonist. Stereotypes always fall short, but in this case, the common understanding of what it means to be a follower of the Stoics or Epicureanism has dealt two vibrant philosophies a grave injustice. Both philosophies were founded in Athens around 300 B.C., as the lives of both Zeno and Epicurus, the founders of the two schools, overlapped.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  They both counseled that we should avoid excessive pleasure and desires, and to settle an important point early on, Epicureanism did not advocate for excessive self-indulgence the way we may think they did, just as the Stoics were not unfeeling and reject emotions.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  One starting point, which might surprise many, is that it is worth noting just how much the Stoics borrowed from the opposing and rival philosophical school. While the Stoic philosopher Seneca did offer a critique of Epicurus in his Letters from a Stoic, it would be unfair not to mention the numerous times he positively quoted him. In one letter, he writes, “My thought for today is something which I found in Epicurus. Yes, I actually make a practice of going over to the enemy’s camp, by way of reconnaissance, not as a deserter. A cheerful poverty, he says, is an honorable state.” In another, Seneca says this to his correspondent Lucilius, “I’m still turning over the

• 13:46Speaker 01

  pages of Epicurus, and the following saying, one I read today, comes from him. To win true freedom, you must be a slave to philosophy.” Why was Seneca quoting a rival’s school, you may ask? This was, of course, a question he had foreseen.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Quite possibly, you’ll be demanding to know why I’m quoting so many fine sayings from Epicurus rather than ones belonging to our own school. But why should you think of them as belonging to Epicurus and not as common property?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Or, as he once poignantly remarked, “I’ll never be ashamed to quote a bad writer with a good saying.” But this is true to form for Seneca. He was looking for wisdom, period. It didn’t matter where it came from. This is something that a lot of fundamentalists, in religion, philosophy, anything, seem to miss. Who cares whether some bit of wisdom is from a Stoic or an Epicurean? Who cares whether it perfectly jibes with Stoicism? What matters is whether it makes your life better, whether it makes you better.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  It is the same attitude Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius had, evoking Epicurus in one of his Notes to Self in Meditations. “And in most cases, you should be helped by the saying of Epicurus, that pain is never unbearable or unending, so you can remember these limits and not add to them in your imagination.” Epictetus, for his part, one of the other three major Stoic philosophers, does not borrow from Epicurus. Instead, he calls him preacher of effeminacy and showers abuse on him, as Diogenes Laertius would say. Let’s now examine the differences between the schools.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Stoicism claims that living justly and virtuously is the highest good that one can experience, and that pleasure and pain are to be treated indifferently, while Epicureanism claims that we should seek to maximize our own pleasure, mainly by removing pain from our lives. Pleasure, as Epicurus regarded it, was the beginning and end of the blessed life. And you’ve probably also heard of the famous Garden of the Epicurean School and its motto as inscribed on the gate, “Stranger, you would do good to stay awhile, for here the highest good is pleasure.”

• 16:11Speaker 01

  For Epicureans, virtue was a means to an end, that is, pleasure, whereas for Stoics, it was their guiding principle and the foundation of their way of life. As the Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “Let virtue lead the way, then every step will be safe.”

• 16:29Speaker 01

  As you can probably conclude, although the ways that both philosophies recommend we live are very similar, they ultimately point us towards differing ideals. They both offer ways to avoid pain in life. In Epicureanism, by living very simply and having strong friendships, and in Stoicism, by fully accepting the course of nature. Epicureans claim we can be happy like the gods if we live free of anxiety, especially the fear of death and fear of the gods, and satisfy our basic desires. Epicureans believed in the atomistic theory of the world, and thought that when we died, the atoms that made up our soul become disorganized and then we no longer exist.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  As Epicurus said, “The most terrible evil, death, is nothing for us, since when we exist, death does not exist, and when death exists, we do not exist.”

• 17:28Speaker 01

  The Stoics sought to live in accordance with nature, emphasizing living in agreement with what happens, rather than rebelling against and lamenting what we cannot change.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, “We are like a little appendage of Zeus, and who is an appendage to question the plans of the whole body?”

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Epicureans and Stoics also differ on how to avoid suffering. Stoics believe that all pain stems from our perceptions, and that we have the ability to not suffer when things typically considered bad happen to us.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Epictetus again, “Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.” The Stoics teach that one can be happy no matter what obstacles or tragedies they might face. By accepting all that happens to us in life and understanding that we are never harmed unless we believe we are, we can avoid suffering and live a joyful life. Epicureans believe that avoiding pain means not fearing the gods or death, and not desiring things that are not both natural and necessary. Peace of mind should be maintained by living simply and having strong friendships with people you can count on. Their ideal for life was to withdraw from public life.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Epicurus’s principle, “Lathbiosis,” or “Live Hidden,” often by staying close to home to avoid all complex desires and spend a lot of time with close friends. As Epicurus said, “Of all the means to ensure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.”

• 19:21Speaker 01

  The Stoic way of life does not involve withdrawing from society at all, however, and it is considered unvirtuous to do so. The Stoics understand that we have obligations to each other, and that public life depends on participation. A Stoic is supposed to fulfill his or her role in society and accept it even if it is a humble or stressful position. Failing to be a good citizen violates one of the four core Stoic virtues, justice. Both Epicureanism and Stoicism recommend not harming others or breaking the law, but for different reasons. Remember, the Stoics value virtue above all else, to the point that they believed that

• 20:04Speaker 01

  virtue was all when needed to be happy, and all else should be viewed with equanimity. In other words, virtue gives meaning to life. Epicureans view virtue much more practically. Epicurus said that you should not break the law because the fear of being punished would detract from your happiness, claiming that injustice is not an evil in itself. However, this fails to consider those who don’t feel bad breaking the law, the people who are most likely to break it.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Epicureans also believed in the importance of the social contract, the agreement not to harm each other, and described morality in terms of this agreement. Treating your friends correctly is important because it is what will make your friends loyal to you as well. As we mentioned earlier, Seneca, in Letters from a Stoic, had strong criticisms for the Epicureans, and in particular, their idea of friendship, which is one based on mutual self-interest. “He who regards himself only, and enters upon friendships for this reason, reckons wrongly.” These are the so-called fair-weather friendships. One who is chosen for the sake of utility will be satisfactory only so long as he is useful.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  He who begins to be your friend because it pays will also cease because it pays.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  This is in contrast with Stoic friendship, one based on having things in common and admiring each other's character. Liking someone genuinely makes one more likely to put the friend's interests above their own, a vital aspect of friendship. With virtue being only a means to an end in Epicureanism, it seems that the philosophy is indeed lacking when it comes to one of its primary prescriptions for life: having good friends. What about the hedonism and pleasure aspect, you ask? How much of hedonism were the Epicureans after all? Recall that for the Epicureans, what is considered good is pleasure.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Nature has designed us in a way so that satisfying certain goals brings us happiness, and seeking this happiness is what is good and natural. However, the pleasures we seek should not be excessive, because of the pain that tends to be the flipside of profound pleasure. As to avoid this pain, Epicurus divided pleasures into three categories: 1) Natural and necessary; 2) Natural and not necessary; and 3) Not natural and not necessary. Natural and necessary pleasures are the ones we should always seek, because they are easily satisfied. Having these alone is enough for peace of mind, a highly valued good in Epicureanism.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  These include the necessities of life, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, shelter, social interaction, etc. Natural but unnecessary pleasures include sex, having children, or being held in high esteem by others. These aren't needed for happiness, and we should avoid pursuing these too much to avoid suffering and not overcomplicate things. And to dispel the myth of the Epicureans as self-indulgent hedonists, there are unnatural and unnecessary pleasures, which are difficult to attain and include the usual vices of alcohol and excessive sexual pleasures. Epicureanism teaches that we should always avoid these. Epicurus warned, regarding these last two categories:

• 23:39Speaker 01

  "He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing." How does this contrast to Stoic philosophy? In Stoicism, virtue is the highest good and having a will that agrees with nature. It is clearly best to want to happen what will happen anyway, since it is natural that you will want to get the necessities of life. Your urges should be accepted. But in Stoicism, it is equally acceptable for urges such as hunger and thirst to go unsatisfied. If it happens to us, we should accept it. In summary, a simple heuristic to remember the difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans:

• 24:21Speaker 01

  The Stoics cared about virtuous behavior and living according to nature, while the Epicureans were all about avoiding pain and seeking natural and necessary pleasure. And a subtle but important lesson from this article that we have forgotten as a society is the importance of borrowing wisdom and insight from our intellectual rivals. If it's true and useful, use it, just like Seneca and Marcus did with Epicurus's work.