Are You High or Low?

“Even in the ancient world, the classics scholar (and recent podcast guest) Robin Waterfield says, there was a distinction between high philosophy and low philosophy. Which was better?”Ryan explains the difference in high and low philosophy, and relaunches Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  Are you high or low? Even in the ancient world, the classic scholar and recent podcast guest, Robin Waterfield, says, "There was a distinction between high philosophy and low philosophy, which was better." You might think it's high philosophy. It was certainly more advanced. It was fancied by fancier people. It explored subtle ideas and encouraged the mastery of logic and epistemology. But low philosophy? Low philosophy was hardly crass. No, low philosophy meant practical. You could actually use it. And that's, of course, what we had in mind in our Stoicism 101 course. But Marcus Aurelius, as Waterfield writes in his intro

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  to the annotated Meditations, was the perfect candidate for this second school. "He was interested in the austere life, despite his wealth. Although he liked reading and had a brilliant mind, what he was looking for was stuff that would make him better, help him with his temper, help him with his stress, help him help others as emperor." But unfortunately, most philosophers today and generations of bright students have been drawn towards high philosophy. They've gotten their advanced degrees. They've become brilliant debaters of complicated questions. But has it helped them live? Helped them make a difference in the world? Not usually. And in this sense, low philosophy is not low at all. It's just accessible. It's practical.

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  It's within reach when one has problems. It's something you stand on rather than something you hide behind. It makes you taller. So which philosophy are you studying? That's the question. And to help answer that question, we are relaunching our Stoicism 101 course, Ancient Philosophy for Your Actual Life, which we just went through. This was originally intended as a live course, but because of all the responses that we've received, we decided to make it available to everyone who couldn't participate. We've recorded and edited down the live office hour sessions with me. It's five hours of Q and A about the most pressing Stoic questions on a variety of topics, including how I apply Stoicism in my own life, how a Stoic gets the most out

• 2:42Ryan Holiday?

  of what they read, how a Stoic balances the tension between acceptance and the discipline of action, and what the Stoics think about so many other topics. And as part of Stoicism 101, you get 14 custom emails delivered daily. That's 20,000 words of exclusive content. You learn about the famous Stoics, the things a Stoic does, the things a Stoic doesn't do, what sets Stoicism apart from other philosophies, key components of an ideal day for a Stoic, secrets to success, the Stoic secrets to resilience, the Stoic's secret to productivity, and how we master our emotions, and much, much more. So what will it be? Are you studying high philosophy or low philosophy? Are you putting it to work or not? And if your answer is you want to study low philosophy, you can check out our new course,

• 3:27Ryan Holiday?

  Stoicism 101. That's Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy for Your Actual Life. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/101. And remember that the Daily Stoic Life members, which you can sign up at dailystoiclife.com, get this course and all our Daily Stoic courses for free, so check it out.