Transcript for Interview with Katharina Volk on Cato's Stoicism

0. Introduction

Stoicism was one of my first introductions to philosophy, and I had picked it up during quite a difficult time in my life. I had dropped out of school, my startup was failing, and on top of all that, I was going through all the teenage growing pains. I was initially attracted to the stoic idea that happiness is in my control because it made me feel a bit better about my chaotic life.

But as I’ve matured, I’ve become increasingly suspicious of stoicism for that precise reason. Stoicism seems less like a philosophy that captured some fundamental truth, but more of a coping mechanism that at best told comforting lies. I started seeing stoic ideals, like being able to bear the death of your child unperturbed, as neither desirable nor plausible.

My guest today is a leading classicist, Katharina Volk, and we’re here to stress-test stoicism. Our goal is to see how well these ideas actually hold up under tension, specifically in the tumultuous late Roman Republic. This was a period of conflict, bloodshed, and rapid change, and we’re going to examine the fascinating lives of people like Cato to see how well Stoicism performed in reality.

What we find in this period is that Stoicism does often appear as a coping mechanism. You see a spike in popularity among the side who lost the Roman civil war, and you see another explosion of Stoicism as the republic gives way to empire, when citizens of a free state suddenly find their freedoms curtailed.

But is it bad that stoicism often manifests as cope? And what does that say about our own age, where stoicism is again on the rise?

1. What is Stoicism?

Johnathan Bi: In this interview, I want to examine not just the ideas of Stoicism, but how Stoicism and stoics held up under the tumultuous period of the late Roman Republic. But let’s begin on the ideas level first. Can you share with us the basic tenets of Stoicism? 

Katharina Volk: Yes. So Stoicism is a Hellenistic philosophy. It was founded in the late 4th century in Athens. And like most or maybe all philosophies of this time, the goal was happiness or eudaemonia. And there was this idea that there was one thing or just very few things that if you had that, you had the key to this happiness. And in Latin, this is called the Summum bonum or the “greatest good.” And for the Stoics, this is virtue. Virtue sounds a little bit sort of ye olde in English. But it’s still a good word to use. It means the morally right. So if you have virtue, you know what is right, and you know how to act in the right way. And so for the Stoics, that’s what you need. And if you have that, you have everything it takes. You have the Summum bonum, and you’re automatically going to be happy. Now this is -- of course, you have to have knowledge, you have to know what this is. And you have to act accordingly.

So you could say that’s not so easy. But if you do it, then you have happiness. And then you have basically fulfilled your task as a human being. And now the sort of interesting corollary of this is that this is completely independent from whether your virtuous action is successful or not.

Johnathan Bi: Interesting.

Katharina Volk: One image that the Stoics like to use is that of the archer who is shooting an arrow to hit a target. So what the archer needs to do is to shoot this arrow as well as he possibly can. That’s the art of archery. It is not actually hitting the target because in hitting the target, there could be all sorts of chance occurrences that could prevent you from hitting the target. Like, what if the target falls down? 

Johnathan Bi: If there’s wind or -- right.

Katharina Volk: Or there’s wind or something like that. So the archer, in this scenario, is not going to be upset if he didn’t hit the target through no fault of his own, because he did his best to do it. So his virtue consists in doing the best to hit the target. It does not consist in succeeding. So this, in a nutshell, is Stoic ethics.

Johnathan Bi: Can you tell us a bit more about the shape of virtue or the right thing? What is the form of virtue? Is it specific to us as humans or because we’re rational agents? Or yeah, just elaborate on that.

Katharina Volk: Yeah. So it is specific to us as humans, which as you say, does entail being rational agents. In theory, we have a knowledge of this that’s innate to us. In practice, unfortunately, because of society and education not being what it should be, lots of people get completely wrong ideas of right and wrong, and have to be sort of educated to understand what it is. But in principle, it is part of human nature.

Johnathan Bi: When we think of Roman philosophy, we think Stoicism. Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, but that’s in the empire.

Katharina Volk: Yes.

Johnathan Bi: Is Stoicism popular in this late Roman Republic era that we’re going to examine today? 

Katharina Volk: Yeah. Now it’s interesting because as you say, it does get very much associated with Rome, and there are a lot of Stoics in the empire. At the time, it’s certainly a philosophy that is well known to people who have studied philosophy, but we don’t actually know of that many adherents to it. I mean, named adherents. The younger Cato is actually the only one where we can be totally sure.

Johnathan Bi: Wow. Really? The only one? Wow. I see. And I want to start highlighting that interesting fact that as soon as people start losing their freedoms, as soon as people maybe could dictate their lives less, this philosophy about, it’s not important what the outcome of your actions is, it’s important about the internality of your decisions, became wildly popular. We’re going to come back to this motif of Stoicism as cope, over and over again in this interview, but I want to start highlighting that very fact that in the Roman Republic period, it actually wasn’t very popular, so far as we know. Here’s my last general question I want to ask about Stoicism. Does Stoicism naturally tend to retreat, withdraw, or to political engagement?