This Is Inseparable From Living a Good Life

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?

  This is inseparable from living a good life. Courage is an obvious choice for being the most important of the four Stoic virtues. In fact, it was Aristotle who said that courage was the mother of all the rest. In a world that is scary, in a world that is hard, it is a brave thing to go out there and do what needs to be done. Self-discipline or temperance is another obvious choice for the most important virtue because, well, you can't do anything without it. And as Aristotle pointed out, courage that isn't checked by temperance can quite easily veer into recklessness. Justice, Marx wrote, is the source of all the other virtues. And the Stoics were quite clear that the point of philosophy,

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  the point of life, is to direct a person towards doing what's right. Courage in service of injustice, discipline aimed at selfish ends, that's not what Marcus or Epictetus or Zeno would have called the good life. And then, of course, making the distinctions between these virtues, making sense of what the ancients said about them requires no small amount of wisdom. And it's this critical, but I think too rare, ability, discernment, is not something anyone is born with, and yet all the other virtues are born from it. And doesn't the development of this ability of wisdom require courage and discipline and justice? Of course it does. The fact that you can argue for any of these four as the most important virtue, which I did,

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  you know, each time I announced the books in the Virtue Series, I said courage is the most important. When I was writing Courage is Calling, and when I wrote Discipline is Destiny, I said, "Discipline is the most important." When I wrote Right Thing Right Now, I said, "Justice is the most important." And of course, when I wrote Wisdom Takes Work, I said, "This is the most important." But I think that's a testament to the interrelatedness of these virtues, to their importance in living a good life. As Zeno said, the four virtues are inseparable but distinct and different from one another. It's hard to know, though, where one ends and another begins, which is sort of the whole point. They're not supposed to be pursued in isolation. Instead, they come together under the idea of virtue itself. Each are pieces of a larger goal.

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  I started this series of books way back in 2019, and now, more than seven years later, the first time, all four books are available in the Stoic Virtue Series Box Set, which Penguin Random House is putting out. It's coming out on May 19th. We've got some copies for preorder here at The Painted Porch. I'll sign them if you like. Each one of the books, right? Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, Right Thing Right Now, and Wisdom Takes Work. Each one is a prescription for a specific virtue. And if you've read one of them or none of them, this might be a great thing, or it's a great grad gift, or Father's Day gift, or, I don't know. All I'm telling you is that the Four Virtues Box Set is out. Chapter of my life is done. The whole series is done. It's in one place. And check it out in the show notes. Thanks, everyone.