Can You Just Shut Up? | Stoicism vs. Epicureanism: Enemies or Allies?
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Why is learning to shut up and truly listen important for Stoic practice?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. 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 Realis 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 gonna say next. We have to give the other person room 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 it, I'll 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 S U 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. Carl understood that a few seconds of silence can do what a dozen follow up questions cannot.
It 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, but also what is being avoided, softened, or left unsaid. Silence is the weapon, Caro said. Silence and people's need to fill it, as long as that person isn't you.
Hey, it's Ryan Holliday. 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 um Spartan. And then by Epicurean, we mean lover of pleasure, we mean decadent, uh, we mean weak, we mean soft, we mean removed from the world. And in the ancient world, This isn't really what the school's uppercase stoicism and lowercase stoicism had anything to do with.
So look, I spent 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 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 that Seneca quotes more than Epicurus. Uh 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. Like Seneca says, you know, we should really
like a spy in the enemy's camp. So I I don't want to overstate it. Like they they were rival schools and in in lives of the Stoics I I tell this little story about a Stoic named Diotymus. Let me let me plug that in here for you 'cause it it does show the the degree which there was real rivalry and and disagreement between the two. Diotemus the Vicious is Born unknown, died unknown, possibly around one hundred BC, 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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Why is learning to shut up and truly listen important for Stoic practice?
0:00–6:36
2
How did Robert Caro use silence as an interviewing technique and what can we learn from it?
6:36–12:48
3
What misconceptions exist about Stoicism and Epicureanism in modern culture?
12:48–16:42
4
Who was Diotemus and how does his story illustrate the conflict between Stoics and Epicureans?
16:42–25:15
5
What are the core similarities and differences between Stoic and Epicurean teachings on virtue and pleasure?
25:15–27:36
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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