Kate Bowler Challenges Stoicism’s Most Famous Idea
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What does Kate Bowler criticize about the popular Stoic idea of controlling your response?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's always interesting when you find out you disagree with someone. Like, you're aligned on most things, and then they just have a very different opinion than you. You know, like, put aside bad faith, disagreements or criticisms, those are difficult to handle. And none of us are particularly great at dealing with that. But what about when there's someone who you're lined up with on most things, you are fans of many of the same things, and then you find out that they've got a very different opinion than you.
Kate Bowler, whose work I love, she's a professor of religious history at Duke University. At 35, she basically finds out she has stage four cancer, basically a terminal diagnosis. And all of a sudden, she has to rethink, like, not just her life, how little of it might be left, but, you know, all her views about suffering and success and control and faith and hope, all of that, right? In the way that a diagnosis like that would turn everything upside down. And she wrote this beautiful essay in the New York Times that my sister and I connected over when my sister was going through cancer. And that essay, she quotes and talks about the Stokes. She's been on the podcast a couple of times. I'm a huge fan of her work.
We've always gotten along. I don't know if we're friends. We hadn't ever met, but we were certainly friendly. So it was interesting. I read this interview that she did. And she basically is saying in the interview, like, I think it's total crap, this idea when people say, you might not be able to control what happens, but you can always control how you respond to what happens. And I was like, ooh, I feel attacked. I mean, not literally. It was just like, oh, that's like colloquially the definition I often give for stoicism. And then I'm like still reading the interview and she says, and when I say modern, she meant like the 2010s, which is wild. She says, it is in part a result of an incomplete theology of masculinity that has been available and has become a way to explain specifically to men that there's almost a natural impassivity that is there should they claim it.
And then in the face of chaos, global and personal, that there's this higher path. She says stoicism is being stripped of its original cosmology and refitted with self-help techniques. She says, but what she really objects to at the core is this idea about control. And so it's like, whoa, OK, are we having beef here?
How did Kate Bowler’s cancer diagnosis shape her view of control and suffering?
And I've seen that before. Right. I've seen people who love to come on the podcast. They've asked me to blur their books. And then, you know, I see them say something really nasty. about me in an interview or something. And I knew that wasn't what Kate was doing because she's great and nice. And if she had a problem with me, she would say to my face. But I was like, oh, suddenly do we have like a very... different opinion on this. And this is how I think you want to approach this. And I thought, well, what about her experiences would give her a different perspective on these things? And what can she teach me? So she was coming out. She has a lovely new book called Joyful Anyway, which I love, reminds me of Viktor Frankl's little essay collection, Yes to Life in Spite of Everything.
She has two other books that I've really liked, Everything Happens for Reason and No Care for Being Human. What about her experience as a professor of religious studies? What about her experience going through this cancer thing? What about all the people she's met that have gone through profound suffering and pain and loss? Like, is there something about stoicism that's inadequate, that's falling short, that's not working? And maybe we could talk about it. So she came out. We had a lovely conversation. And I think we... We don't hash it out because there's no beef, but this is my point. What you tend to find is actually you agree way more than you think, but sometimes there's a disagreement on terms.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What does Kate Bowler criticize about the popular Stoic idea of controlling your response?
0:00–2:33
2
How did Kate Bowler’s cancer diagnosis shape her view of control and suffering?
2:33–5:24
3
Why does Kate argue the “you control your response” message can be harmful to the ill?
5:24–11:18
4
How do Ryan and Kate compare Stoic teachings with modern self-help culture?
11:18–18:17
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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