The Daily Stoic - Sarah Bakewell on Humanism and The Power of Connection

Episode Date: April 22, 2023

Ryan speaks with Sarah Bakewell about her new book Humanly Possible: seven hundred years of humanist freethinking, inquiry, and hope, how growing up surrounded by books shaped her philosophical mindset, the philosophical principles that she applies to her life, and more.Sarah Bakewell is an author and professor whose work focuses on existentialist philosophy and biographies of adventurers and philosophers. After growing up surrounded by books as the daughter of a bookseller father and a librarian mother, Sarah studied philosophy at the University of Essex, and she later completed a postgraduate degree on Artificial Intelligence. Her work in the 1990s as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library led her to taking on writing seriously, and she has since published five books, including the lauded At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, and How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. Her work can be found on her website: sarahbakewell.com.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes. Something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives

and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down be sure to take some time to think to go for a walk to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey it's Ryan Holiday welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. You know, there's that Steve Jobs quote about you realize sort of the world and its rules were made up by people who are not that much smarter than you. I had this breakthrough in that regard, I guess it was over 10 years ago now. I wanted to be a writer and I knew there were

people who were writing about books as they came out and I did not know who those people were, how they got to do that. I heard about this new book that was coming out about Montaigne, the French essayist who I was vaguely familiar with through some of his writings on the Stoics, but certainly didn't feel qualified to write about it. Anyways, this author, her name was Sarah Bakewell, was coming out with a book on Montaigne. And I had written a post for Tim Ferriss's website about the Stoics, not that long before and it had done well.

And anyways, I just emailed her and her publisher and said, hey, I would like to write an article about your book, can I get an early copy? And they were like, sure, are you kidding? And they sent it to me. And I don't know, it was this breakthrough, it was like, oh, that's how it works. Like anyone can do this.

Now part of this was the internet allowing this to be possible that you know, sort of online. Everyone's a quote unquote journalist or a writer or influencer, whatever you want to have it. But it's also like, no, it's the people who take the time to put themselves out there who write the email, who make the ask that, you know, sometimes get lucky. It's crazy to me all these years later, like I'm one of those people, I have books. And yet also my life is still defined by the same bit, but the same logic that when I put myself out there, when I take some initiative, when I ask, sometimes I get lucky. So anyways, that book that I got from Sarah Bakewell, How to Live, is one of my favorite

philosophy books of all time. We sell it at the painted porch. It's a incredible book. It's a great introduction to Montana. I've recommended it to so many people over the years. Flash forward all these years later, Sarah is the guest on today's podcast. She has a new book out called Humanly Possible, 700 years of humanist-free thinking, inquiry and hope. It's a lovely book, and I really enjoyed reading it.

And we had a conversation about that book. Her growing up, the daughter of a bookseller, her mother was a librarian. She worked in bookstores. She went to the University of a bookseller. Her mother was a librarian. She worked in bookstores. She went to the University of Essex in England. She has a postgraduate degree in artificial intelligence. She wrote a great book on the existentialists. Had a live on a National Book Critics Circle award and the Duff Cooper Prize. Just an absolutely wonderful writer. And someone I'm very excited to bring to you. If you haven't read how to live, grab it. I'll link to it at the painted porch or grab it wherever you can. It's a

wonderful book. And we talk a lot about Montenia. We talk about the Stoics. We talk about philosophy. It's some other lovely topics. So here is my interview with Sarah Bakewell, a new book, Humanly Possible, 700 years of humanist-free thinking inquiry in hope is also out now. It's funny, I talked to lots of people and a good chunk of those people haven't been readers for a long time. They've just gotten back into it. And I always love hearing that and they tell me how they fall in love with reading, they're reading more than ever, and I go, let me guess, you listen audio books, audio books don't you and it's true and almost invariably they listen to them on

Audible that's because audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks across every genre from best sellers and new releases to celebrity Memories and of course ancient philosophy all my books are available on audio read by me for the most part Audible let's you enjoy all your audio entertainment in one app You'll always find the best of what you love or something new to discover and as an audible member you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog including the latest best sellers and new releases. You'll discover thousands of titles from popular favorites, exclusive new series, exciting new voices in audio. You can check out Stillness is the key, the daily dad. I just recorded so that's up on Audible now. Coming up on the 10-year anniversary

of the obstacle is the way audiobooks, so all those are available and new members can try Audible for free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500-500. That's audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500-500. Life can get you down. I'm no stranger to that. When I find things are piling up. I'm struggling to deal with something Obviously, I use my journal obviously a turn of stochism But I also turn to my therapist which I've had for a long time and has helped me through a bunch of stuff And because I'm so busy and I live out in the country I do therapy remote so I don't have to drive somewhere and that's where today's sponsor comes in

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Yeah, thanks for having me on. Well, I'm very excited to do this. You and I go way back. This is a gallery of how to live. Wow, that's quite, yeah, that goes back quite away. Yes, yes, I remember that. Yes, I remember that we went back to talking about Montana. I remember that.

Well, it's one of my absolute favorite books, and I think about it all the time. And I also got referred by you to Zwaiig's little biography of Montana, which I loved, although I reread it in 2016, and then I reread it at the beginning of the pandemic and it was both very reassuring and very terrifying and depressing at the same time. I'll have to reread that too because yeah, I mean, I haven't read it since I was working on the Montaigne book and yeah, I wonder, I think I'm sure it would re-read a bit differently

now, like a lot of things. Well, I think that's kind of the theme of a lot of the characters in all of your books, which is, as the world tears itself to pieces and seems more and more chaotic or dysfunctional or violent, a certain breed of people turn inward and produce beautiful, wonderful, lasting things as a result of those explorations. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, that is a thing. Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about Montagne

if you have the time, which is, so my favorite thing, or one of my favorite things in the book, is you talk about the quote, sort of the motto that he has on the ceiling beams in his library, his sort of philosophical principles or the things he builds his life around. What are some of yours?

If you had such a room and you were carving the philosophical principles that have affected you the most, what would you put on yours? I don't think I could ever settle on anything because as soon as I did, as soon as I started actually immortalizing it on the roof beam. I'd start thinking, oh, but maybe, I don't know, do I really agree with that? And what happens if I change my mind? I'm going to have to change all the roof beams in my

house. So, no, I mean, there are some that I like that he liked too. I mean this famous one from Terence, I am human and find nothing human alien to me. That was a favorite one of Montaigne's and was on his roof beams. You know, I think I could live with that. It might be a good reminder as well if I do start thinking that there are people are doing things that I just can't understand and can't cope with, it's probably quite a kind of useful reminder when you look at some of the things that are going on in the world. Well, is it one of them, is it one of Montains undecided from sexist empiricus? That sounds like you might agree with that also. That sounds like you might agree with that or not. Yeah, I suspend judgment.

I think that was his part of his motto. Of course, I suppose you could take that too far. Maybe there's a place for saying, no, no, I'm going to make up my mind. I do think this interesting question. You mentioned Stefan's vague. I'm going to make up my mind. I do think this interesting question. I mean, you mentioned Stefan's vague, one of the things that he identified as being a bit of a problem with the humanistic, a lot of humanist writers, including Monten and Erasmus, was particularly who he was talking about, was that there's a kind of weakness that comes from always seeing the other side or we're seeing

another point of view and not being prepared to just come right out and say, right, I think this and that's the end of it. So he was particularly talking about that context of the rise of Nazism and humanists being a little bit as Erasmus had been during the terrible wars of the 16th century, being just not knowing how do you respond to that? What do you do? How can you stop it? How can you oppose it effectively? And I mean, you know, that's a problem that arises for many generations, including our own, I think. You know, it's, I don't think humanists are necessarily any worse than anybody else, or most people are deciding what to do about it. But... Well, that's sort of the paradox is that you can retreat from the chaos and the unpleasantness of the world into the world of ideas. But you can't entirely retreat or in a way

you are complicit in or endorsing those, the things that are happening in the outside world by refusing to take a stand or get involved. This is one of the things I find most interesting in Seneca's writings, he's sort of saying that, you know, the difference between the Epicurians and the Stelix is that the Epicurians sort of retreat into the Garden and the Stelix sort of don't believe that they fully have that luxury, that they have to participate in public affairs. And they're sort of attention between, I guess, living in the world of ideas and living in the world of man Yeah, I mean it is the classical distinction isn't it between the The kind of the life of leisure and the life of business, but given a political application

And you know, there are famous lines like who was it who said, all that it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. So yeah, I mean, there's definitely, there's, I don't know if there's a very neat and clear answer to that. I think we all kind of also, even in one lifespan, it's not that you come to one definitive statement or conclusion about how you're going to respond to the world and how far you're going to be involved or not. I think you have different mixes of that at different stages of your life or different situations call forth a different response. You can get people who sort of live a very

private life, but finally they draw the line somewhere and say, right, thus far and no further, I'm going to go out and engage with the world. Humanism, for example. Yeah, go ahead. There's a, well, I was just going to say there's a, there's a long tradition of which comes again from writers like Cicero and Seneca, the idea of civic humanism was the phrase that was used by some historians to be a good humanist means to be engaged with the world and engaged with the life of the polis. You can't withdraw and just call it a day and say, right, that's it. So yeah, there are different traditions there.

And I'm sure we both know people that are so wrapped up in current events or news as it is breaking in real time that they actually don't have that sort of philosophical perspective. They haven't immersed themselves in the big ideas. It's almost foreign to them that, maintain 500 years ago, could have been thinking about this exact thing or Cicero 2000 years ago has an essay about this exact topic. And so I do think it's a tension between, you know, being informed about what's happening in the world around you

and also understanding the ancient world and the wisdom that comes to us through those ancient and timeless ideas. Well, they were struggling with the same things, but there are some things, I think, in the modern world that do slightly change the balance or raise new problems, and one of them is the technology. So there's a very modern problem, I think, that a lot of people, well, I know I've had it, of becoming addicted to the news or addicted to scrolling through the social media feeds for, you know, because

of political events, and a kind of state of permacrisis in which, you know, you always feel like you have to know the next thing. But how much of that is turning itself into meaningful action is a good question. And how much of it is just totally destabilizing question and how much of it is just totally destabilizing our mental health and causing immense anxiety without ever translating into action. So I think it's more important than ever to think, as you say, with looking back to authors of the past, but to think about how we manage that balance and to be even a little more deliberate about how we engage with that constant stream of news from the world and often bad news from the world. I know I certainly have struggled with that at various times in the last few years.

And I think one, Tain is a good example, two of, you know, questioning one's assumptions about things. So not hearing something that happens in the news and immediately forming an opinion about it or believing this about human nature, believing this about people and just sort of taking it for granted, but he also by giving himself that space by his retreat a little bit and his sort of withdrawal from public life, which is ultimately resumed later when he takes political office. But he really questions what it means to know something

and he questions his own assumptions and he really thinks about the issues and who people are and what's important and how things work. You know, so often I think today we're firing off opinions, the second we get the information and this leads to a lot of what the call hot takes, but they're not very valuable takes. Yeah, and also, I mean, something else

that comes to mind here is among the existentialists in the 20th century, which was the title of my the subject of my last book between Montanen and this present one. The quarrel between Camus and Sart, which was overall sorts of things to do with politics, but one of the oh no, it wasn't Camus actually. The quarrel between Meloponte, the philosopher Maurice Meloponte and Sart, which concerned politics, just like the more famous quarrel between Kamu and Sart, one of the things where they had a kind of encounter that was quite bad tempered and sort of marked a total division between them as when Meloponty once said to Sartre, you know, you don't have to keep firing off instant opinions

about everything that happens as soon as it happens, there's a place for taking longer reflecting and you know not having to say something immediately about every event that occurs in the news. And when I read, I mean, now thinking back to that encounter, it immediately makes you think of Twitter and Twitter spats and all these things that we now live with. And the thought of Jean Paul Sartre with a Twitter account is mind blowing, because he would have done just that. I mean, I have a lot of respect for him in all sorts of ways, but I shudder at the thought of him, having a Twitter account and immediately putting forth

a political or philosophical opinion about absolutely everything that happens. So, I mean, that little debate between them, I think is very telling in debate between them, I think, is very telling from our point of view, how long do you need to reflect between, you know, before firing off a... I agree, I think we do weigh too much instant hot take-hurry. I suspect we might think some... I think differently of some of these philosophers, if they had access to the tools that we had today.

You know, the difficulty of publishing, the difficulty even of writing things down, the time span and the runway that they had on some of these ideas. It gives us the sense that these were fundamentally deliberate, patient, self-controlled individuals. And I do wonder if they had access to social media if it might take some of the shine off of who they were and we might go, oh, there Aristotle was a little bit more like us than we think.

Yeah, I mean, I think we can assume that Socrates would have refused to tweet because if he Refused to write anything down he would have probably refused to tweet as well But he might have you know, he might have had a YouTube channel or a podcast, you know Yes, well, he was I think his way of thinking actually is quite conducive to the medium of podcasting and that what he's doing is asking questions and he's of podcasting and that what he's doing is asking questions and he's preventing us to do some dialogues. Yes. Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, so going back to your roof beams and this new

book, I suspect one one thing you might carve there that I thought was quite beautiful in the book is that that line only connect. Tell me what that means. Only connect. Yeah, that comes from a novel by Ian Forster Howard's End. And one of the characters says it, in fact refers to that idea repeatedly, and Forster made it a kind of epigraph on the title. So it was very important to him. What he meant by it, well, what the character means by it is, she explains that this is Margaret Schlagel in the book, that it means she's talking about another character who doesn't see, for example, the consequences of his actions. He doesn't see any relationship between how he feels about things

and the fact that other people might feel bad about things that he's done or might feel similar things. And he also doesn't connect ideas within himself. So he's a hypocrite. He's divided within himself because he doesn't recognize his own motives and doing things. So that's what he means by it. I think for Forster it meant all of that and also a more general connection in personal relationships. He described himself as a humanist. He was a member of humanist organizations, but he said that for him being a humanist mainly meant people that he'd loved, friends, things that he'd been interested in, I mean, connections with all sorts of things in the human world. And for me, it means all of that as well.

And also, I kind of took it as a bit of a motto for myself in the book because what I wanted to do was to make connections between different forms of humanism as well. It's a word that can mean all sorts of things, humanism or humanist. I mean, I can come onto the various meanings of it, but I wanted to explore the connections between them. So only connect for me meant find the points of dialogue, the points of interaction between these different kinds of humanism and see where it leads us. Rather than, as sometimes is done, well, you know, there's this kind of humanism that and this and they're all, they just happen to share a word. It doesn't mean anything beyond that. And I thought it did mean more than that.

And I think there were interesting things to explore in those connections. So it's doing a lot of work for two words. I might just, if I was going to write a motto on sealing beams, I might just have only connect because if nothing else, it would be quite short. It would be quite easy if I changed my mind to the rubbed off. Is it also the idea that all human beings are fundamentally connected in some way, that our actions impact each other, that our ideas influence each other, that we should go through the world thinking about, you know, someone and some things other than ourselves. Yeah, it touches on that other quote from Terence that we've been mentioning, I am human and find nothing human alien to me

because that also is saying that we're all connected. And I think, I mean, it's just undeniable. We're very, very social creatures. We write from birth, you know, I mean, well, before birth, I mean, you know, we are absolutely born into a close relationships with those around us. I think that is so fundamental to who we are. Most of us, you know, I mean, it can go, it can be damaged to those relationships, things can chips things can become damaged in that part of our lives. Yeah, I think that we are such social creatures. And also it grows in a larger dimension because we have things like writing, for example, and reading, which means that we can also connect

with people who are long dead or people that have said things in other languages, but then they can be translated and so we can read them and we can listen to them. That enormously expands the circle of our connectivity and very much to the good, I think. I mean, I think this is all wonderful and should be encouraged and developed and explored as much as possible. Because it is, yeah, I mean, it's, yeah. It is who we are, but I think we've worked on that side

of ourselves over time and expanded our range, if you like. I'm having Peter Singer on the podcast in a few months. I've had him on the form, having him on again, but it's like the 30th or 40th anniversary of his first book, which is called the Expanding Circle, which I thought is actually a kind of a great, it's a great actually encapsulation of I think one of the core ideas of Stereoc philosophy also seems like a core idea of humanism itself is, is this, is our ability to expand that circle of what we think about, what we care about, what we're connected to. It's expanding a circle of concern, isn't it, for him?

Yes. Yeah. And yeah, at one point actually, I was going to steal or borrow that for the title of one of my chapters, but it ended up changing to something different, but, yeah, very much so. And you have Vonnegut at the beginning of the book. He started to find humanism as basically doing things and caring for other people with no hope of reward after death.

Yeah, he says I've tried to behave decently, you know, despite not for a reward after death, but just for its own sake and for others. Isn't that fundamentally the journey of humanism, religion makes it clear why you should do certain things, do them because God said so, do them because God will punish you, do them because society will crumble, do them or don't, do them because you will go to heaven or you will go to hell, do them because we said so basically right. Humanism as I take it is the intellectual journey over thousands of years of really smart people

who found that to be insufficient or unsatisfying and they're struggling to come up with, in the end, similar codes of conduct and advice, similar definitions of decency, in many cases, but without the, because I said so, or because you will burn in hell for all of eternity if you don't. I should say you announced that one of the things that is central with my book is not only talking about the definition of humanism, which is centered on discussion of religion. So there's the best-known meaning of the word humanism in the English language, English-speaking countries is choosing to live

finding one's meaning as well, sense of meaning as well as one's moral motivation, if you like, from factors other than scriptures that are of divine origin, you know, the institutional religion, or really anything that has a extra human or superhuman source. In other words, we find it in ourselves, we find it in our relationships. That's usually what takes the place of a religious commandment. But there's a whole humanist strand, several humanist strands which don't really center around the question of religion at all, they don't really center around the question of supernatural belief. But what they do have in common is finding the center of concern is this human connection, human relationships, and that includes the moral dimension. So there's a focus on our moral connection to each other

and our cultural connection to each other, whether it's arts, literature, science, science also being very much a human activity. But that is where the center of a humanist concern is in all sorts of different kinds of humanism. The one that's most different, if you like, from the secular humanist view is the long tradition of literary humanists. I use that term kind of loosely to talk about all the people who study the humanities, because the meaning of humanists that was dominant

through the Renaissance and remains so for a long time and still is one of the meanings of humanist is especially in the humanities, somebody who reads, writes, teaches, passes on the cultural study of the humanities in all its variety. And there's no, that doesn't necessarily mean anything in connection with religious views or views about the afterlife or expectations of the afterlife. But what it does have is whether or not they believed in God, whether or not they believed in the afterlife, those humanists did have a tendency to be writing about the human world and about culture, relationships with each other, the moral life that is centered on the present world, the world that we have around us in the human world, rather than matters of theology which were considered quite properly to be dealt with separately. So, Montan is a good example of someone who says, look, I'm sorry, there's not very much

about theology in my book, but this is a human book, meaning this is a book about the human world, not a book about the world of theology. And he says, and he's fine with that, that's what he wants to do, because we can, any compares it to the way that royalty, which is the realm of the gods and theology or God in his case, is set apart and quite rightly, and then the world of the commoners is the world that, or the minor nobility is the world that he counts himself out of. And it's right that royals should keep separate.

So what he's saying is it's right that theology should keep separate, and for him it's right that royals should keep separate. So what he's saying is it's right that theology should keep separate. And for him, it's the world of literature and people and behavior and what it is to be human is what he's interested in. So yeah, I think that's more fundamental in a way than the actual question of whether people believed in God or not, whether they believed in an afterlife or not. It's a matter of what they focus on. The Dell Technologies Black Friday in July event is on with limited quantity deals on top business

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Well, that is what was so sort of radically transgressive about Montan. As he said, I'm not going to think about these enormous existential questions or religious questions necessarily, but I'm going to explore what it means to be a person in the world. And some of the questions are mundane. Some of them end up, I think, transcending to a sort of a higher plane. But he goes so deep into them, and he's so fascinated by them that it actually does become sort of an elevated work. But he's instead of looking up here at the heavens, he's looking down here or directly in the mirror at the person across from him and it's kind of remarkable how unexplored that territory was, at least accepting the Greeks and Romans.

Yes, and he wrote about it in that tradition. He was a great admirer of Flutarch especially and his interest in human life and behaviour, but he wrote about himself, his own experience in a way that was, seems much more modern and it's much more connected with, I mean, there was no such concept as psychology at that point, but in a way that's what it feels like when you're reading it, you feel like he's looking at his own behavior and that of others and being a kind of in-depth psychologist about it. But then just when he seems to be at his most profound, he'll go and say something about his digestive system and how how that's, you know, working a bit strangely or something. And then, but of course, that's important to him too, because he's one of the people that, one of the first really to write so much about the body and about bodily experience,

because we're not disembodied minds. We don't mostly experience ourselves as disembodied spirits or souls where, we're embodied creatures and the montane certainly gives you that. I mean, he gives you more of it than you want sometimes. Too much information, but yeah, he's that he writes on the few about that. Well, he's fully in touch with himself. So these things aren't off limits because they're human or sinful or gross. And yeah, maybe some of them we might say today, this is an overshare or a person with core boundaries, but he is interested in all the facets of human life.

In almost a Whitman-esque, like a Walt Whitman kind of approach where he's just in love with and fascinated by and celebrating the human form literally and figuratively. And like Whitman, he says, in effect, I mean, he doesn't say these words, he says, I contain multitudes, you know. I'm complicated. I mean, that's, that's montane, you know, not show all that line.

So important philosophical question for Monten, then is he playing with the cat or is the cat playing with him? If we had an answer to that, it would spoil the fun, wouldn't it really? Because that's he just he just asked that question, he just wonders about it. The question, I think the question that we have come to learn about cats, that he didn't really have as much sort of biological or anthropological information about. To me is, do we own the cat or does the cat own us, right? Like, did we domesticate the cat or did the cat and the dog domesticate us? Yeah, well, and I think, and this is not an area I'm expert in tall, but I

gather that there's been quite a bit of research into how dogs and humans, especially cats too, probably, but especially dogs and humans, how they co-evolved and you could almost say that they domesticated each other because it was a symbiotic relationship, really, isn't it? But because of that, we've actually changed our path of evolution, we've developed in a certain way because of that relationship being so important. That's as I understand it. I mean, this is not, yeah, I don't know anything about the details of that scientific research, but that's been my impression. Well, no, it's funny because it seems like such a silly question.

And then it actually brings up, it actually fundamentally changes your relationship with nature because you realize man is just an animal. And animals have relations with each other and co-evolve and have interdependencies. There's the bird that sits on the back of the rhinoceros, eating the bugs or whatever, and we understand that they're related to each other. Not one is not necessarily higher or lower than the other, but, but a human can, can so easily think that we're the center of the universe, that we're the special animal in the universe, and then you understand, oh, hey, the cat selected us and sees us as a tool to get what it wants.

Yeah. Well, actually, that's that that comes as no surprise to any cat owner or I use the word owner quite wrongly. Yes. Any any co-resign that cats, cats don't have owners. They have staff and that's like, you're there to serve the cat. That's very clear with cats. But yeah, I mean, I think actually Montaigne's line about

who knows if I'm playing with the cat or the cats playing with me is a very good example of that only connect idea. And it's exactly what Forster was talking about is look at things from as best you can from another point of view. Think about how the world looks to another consciousness. And the extraordinary thing for Montaigne writing in the 16th century was this leap into wondering how the world looked from a cat's point of view and being prepared to kind of shift that

center of consciousness between himself and the other creature looking back at him. And that is certainly what, you know, forced it was talking about in that, those lines for the Gifster, his character there. And couldn't you say this is also what he's doing in his essay on cannibals and his writings about the native peoples that were just being discovered in America at the time that he's writing, he's one of the first and one of the few. Unfortunately, Europeans who bothers to think who are these people, how do they think about the world, how are they operating? And now just France looked to them. So he reported on these two pinnum people when, you know, what did

the questions that they were asking about how things were done in France, like they were astonished that, you know, rich people would sit gorging themselves on food while the poor were begging and starving outside and they just couldn't that was that I mean exotic doesn't even begin to capture how they felt, according to, you know, what we know from Montagne about that conversation. That was so completely alien to them, you know, and and there was another question that they asked about having a boy king because the king of France at the time was a young boy and they were, that seemed very strange to them. So yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he was always fascinated by diversity, the diversity of opinions,

the diversity of cultural assumptions, of ways of doing things, and everything right down to hairstyles and, you know, what people in different cultures did. Yeah. Yeah, it only connects. It's sort of seeing those people as human beings, as opposed to, say, obstacles or targets for conversion or lower forms of human beings. There is, is that perfect?

But there is at least an interest or an empathy, a sense of human connectedness, that not only hopefully would make one less guilty and say committing atrocities, but also by thinking about what someone else thinks about you, you come to perhaps understand yourself better, for instance, hey, yeah, it is kind of ridiculous that there is a boy king in charge of all of us.

And is he really, you know, the vessel of God, et cetera? You know, by thinking about other people's questions about ourselves or the cat's perspective of us, we also get a better perspective of ourselves. Yeah, it's that, it's the gaze of another consciousness or the gaze of another being that yeah, yeah, and I mean it's interesting to be talking about Monten, you know, so much in in this conversation because he features a lot in in one not a lot, it's it's kind of a half a chapter, but then it's it's a book that covers masses of stuff so nobody gets much more It's, um, he features as a humanist in the role of a humanist in the new book, because I wanted to, although I had written so much about Montagne before in the book that's about him, I, um, I wanted to think about him specifically as a humanist, what, what parts of him are, are humanistic. And really, he was a figure who took the humanist tradition

as it had been up until that point, where it had been on the whole, quite reverential of the Latin and Greek classics and quite certainly very much interested in morality and education and forming the human character and all of these things. He takes all of that and also continues to write about such things, but he changes it into a much more questioning and open-ended and sometimes critical style of thought about it, and he asked difficult questions, and he turns things around all the

time. That's the thing that he's so good at, whether it's shifting between the cat's perspective and ours, or looking at some of the classical authors that the humanists had long been been so almost revering like, almost like gods, like Cicero, which is a particular, you know, the sort of idol. And him saying, well, actually some of Cicero is quite boring, you know, it's like, he's nothing but wind. But then he, you know, he was such a good classicist himself. He used these quotations, the book is full of quotations, but he's often turning it around and saying, oh, he'll quote something, and then of quotations, but he's often turning it around and saying, or he'll quote something and then he'll say, but wait a minute, you know, there's

another way of looking at it. There's another perspective on that. So he's quite a pivotal figure in the history of humanism, I think, because it's partly it, with Montaigne that we see the more classical focused humanist tradition starting to become a more personal thing, a more... he's not the first to do this, but asking a lot of questions and asking difficult questions and not taking things at face value. And of course, just also making it much more about what it's actually like to be a human being, what it feels like to be a human being, rather than it being more of a purely kind of literary,

cultural, moral matter, but it becomes much more human in a way with him. So it's kind of a turning point. One of the things I think is interesting in the book is you start with Terence, who we've been talking about, this sort of slave in Rome, who struggles, gets his freedom, becomes this beautiful writer, talks about what it means to be human. And then, basically, 2,000 years later, you're talking about Frederick Douglass, who's on the same journey,

whose humanity is not fully recognized, but then his ability to articulate, explain, convey his humanity not just through the written word, but as you know, he's a master of the medium of photography, understanding how to show himself as a person. Just how much the struggle of humanism has also been defined by people trying to get others to recognize their humanity, to be included in the definition of humanity. Yeah, yeah, that's very much the case with, and it's so powerful in Frederick Douglass reading his autobiography and also his speeches and other writings.

And he was a great speaker. He was using, you know, a lot that was many sources, but the classical tradition was very much, he was a master at it. Yeah, and you know, it is the people who sort of start to speak up, there's also, of course, women who were not regarded as fully human in effect. I mean, it's, you know, you say that. There's in the classical world, there's the great, the famous speech by Pericles in Athens at near the beginning of the war with Sparta, where he gives a speech at the funeral

of some of the people killed in Athens. And he says, he speaks about how wonderful it is to be an Athenian because, is free and there's this great freedom and there's a harmony both within individuals and in society and everybody's engaged in public life and and and then and he completely fails to mention that the enslaved people who make all this possible and he does mention women at the very end of it to say, of course, none of what I'm saying applies to you because a woman's only virtue is to be the least spoken about possible, whether in praise or in blame. And that's it, you know, that's kind of all I

get because, you know, whereas your fame, your name, is so important to the sort of free-born Athenian citizens who were male, a woman should never be spoken about. So there was this, the great virtues of women were to be silent and modest and chaste and, you know, I mean, it's all negative, it's all negative virtues. And so you get these voices a little bit, you know, I mean, it's all negative, it's negative virtues. And so you get these voices a little bit, you know, a few voices in the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries start to sort of of women start to question this. And by the time you get to the Enlightenment era, you've got Mary Walson craft saying actually all virtues are human virtues. And that includes whether it's their gender, you know, particular virtues which are developed by mothers in, you know,

looking after children, there might be differences in duties, you know, so that's a sort of interesting comparison that she's making between duties and virtues. But even if there are, it's all part of the whole picture of human virtues. And it's not a big positive set of virtues for men, and then this little negative set of virtues for women. So, and yeah, so it's very much a story of kind of expanding. That was actually the chapter where I particularly focus on that was the one that was gonna the chapter where I particularly focus on that was the one

that was going to be called expanding the circle. And I ended up calling it the human sphere, was this this great line from not from Mary Walson craft, but from Harriet Taylor Mill who lived later in the mid-19th century wrote this article in which she talked about, people talk about a proper sphere for women, meaning, you know, a sort of a sphere that's appropriate to them. But she says, no, it's the proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest of which they're capable. So it's the full sphere for all. And I thought that was such a great way of putting it, this sort of the full sphere that, so yeah, that became the human sphere.

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Download the Amazon music app today. I've always found it interesting Download the Amazon Music app today. I've always found it interesting. The Musoneus Rufus, he's the teacher of Epic Titus. He has this interesting essay or speech where he's talking about whether daughter should be taught philosophy and whether the virtues are the same for men and women. And he's sort of remarkably progressive on it, but speaking of what we've been talking about

about thinking about animals, he makes us analogy and he goes, look, you don't care whether your hunting dog is male or female. You care whether it catches what it's trying to catch. And he says, it doesn't matter if a horse is male or female, what matters is if it's fast. And his argument actually was that virtue was relatively genderless.

I think he would have liked this distinction that you mentioned earlier, which I want to read more about. This distinction between duties and virtues, right? Because the role we might play in society might be different because of a culture, because of our choice, because of our choice, because of, you know, the circumstances were born in. But courage is courage, justice is justice,

wisdom is wisdom and temperance is temperance. Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely. That's a very strong argument. And it kind of, it links to the idea, I mean, we're going to be going back to Montaigne again because, you know, he talked about each, well, he said, you know, each, it's translated as each man bears the entire form of the human condition, but of course, the meaning is, I think, each human, each individual bears the entire form of the human condition. At the same time as we're tremendously diverse, so those two ideas go together. Monty was fascinated by diversity, but he also said there's something the essential humanity

within us is the same for all. So each of us can represent for all. So each of us can represent to some extent the essentially human, which I think is a really interesting idea. And again, when it comes to men and women, Montan, you know, sometimes he can say things about women, which certainly wouldn't pass muster these days and do seem rather, you know, he had his failings. But then some of the time he says about women, you know, really if they didn't have such different education, different upbringing and much more limited upbringing, as it generally was, they wouldn't be any different from men in essentials.

I mean, it's, you know, if, so that's a kind of, you know, critical way of thinking about how we become what we are, because that also is part of the story, which various humanist writers started to look at is, and Frederick Douglass talked about this as well, is, you know, how our experience is in our upbringing and the things that we suffer change us and affect us and we develop through what happens to us. So it's important to look at that and to think about how

things could be different if so it's important, say, for the enslavers to think about how they the enslave us to think about how they assume that they have a perfect right to do it, but to live in that way. But they themselves would be very different if they hadn't had the privileges that they had. Why do you think we struggle with that so much? So first off, recognizing that there's not humans who deserve to be own other human beings, and then that you know, that commoners and the aristocrats are not different than each other

than that, you know, black and white, let's say, or male and female. And then even today, I mean, it's not like this struggle is over. We clearly have major problems as a society, recognizing the fundamental humanity of people who have different sexual orientations, people who perhaps don't identify, we were just talking about male or female, that whole

dichotomy is unfamiliar or insufficient for people all over the world, as obviously people or trans, why is it so hard for humans to accept or see or celebrate the humanity of other human beings? I can imagine various explanations that would be looking at our origins in small social groups that were sometimes competing with other social groups. And therefore, there's a tendency to look after the in-group and not to recognize the humanity of the out-group. I think there's historical reasons for that. I'm talking about going back into, as we were evolving to be the creatures that we are, but on a more sort of immediate level, I mean, I think there's a kind of imagination

that is needed to transcend, to ask questions of the received ideas that you grew up with to think about how the world would look to someone that else to different eyes. None of this, we're not born with any of that, but there's a lot that we're not born with in that we develop through our early lives and our communities and our education. And so those things are important. It's one of the many reasons why those things are important to us the thing. Yeah, you can so easily take your own world view for granted and assume you are the default, right?

I was writing about this the other day. You know, my entire life, the color nude, right? The color N U D E nude was just assumed to be the color of roughly my skin, right? Like we think of the color nude in America as like skin like yours and mine. But that's obviously not the color of millions, if not billions of people who are alive in the world.

And you just assume that's the way that it is and then the power structures reinforce your simple or unexamined assumption. And so it continues. And then when someone suggests otherwise, people feel threatened? Yeah, I mean, I guess there's always a, there's a painful part of a learning process when you're ex, it's exactly that expanding the circle, you know, it takes an effort of imagination, of thought, of challenging your own, especially if the situation, of course, is advantageous to oneself and your part of the privileged group rather than the non-privileged group. Yeah, all of that is a challenging process, but that's all the more a sign, I think, of how important it is. By the way, that colour-new nude, I've never heard of that. That must be an American

thing. Yeah, yeah, that's that's a new one to me. Yeah. Wow, I would imagine that that's been challenged recently because, yeah, it's obvious what the problem with that is. Yeah, like nude would be a color for garments. It would be a color for crayons. It would be a color for makeup, for instance. So like, you know, they would say this is the nude color, this is, this is the base color. And it's assuming that everyone is white, which of course they are not. Right. Well, yeah, I assume that that's the days of that phrase, a number, I should hope, because it is a very big problem with it. Yeah, interesting.

I mean, another one that is quite common, right? You walk into a room and you say, hey, you guys, right? And that assumes that everyone in the room is a guy and it's probably been a safe assumption for most of human history that in any work conversation, you guys was not just an appropriate but an accurate phrase. Yeah, I mean, that's, yeah, I think I read something just recently about that phrase and trying,

you know, people who are trying to get rid of it. Yeah, I never thought about it. It's funny. I mean, that phrase, I do, of course, we use it too, although I suppose it's an American one really, but we've picked it up. But yeah, and the movement is to try and get your or I grow up in Australia and Australia they say use. Quite often for that, for the plural, you instead of you guys, so there's lots of alternatives, quite like yous, I think, makes sense. Y'all might be, might be, might be, it's such a great, it's such a great word though. Yeah, y'all, I like that a lot. So, so as we wrap up one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, so I love how to live, I love this new book. I carry how to live in my bookstore here in Texas. I have a little bookstore. And you grew up in a bookstore and you've

worked in one, right? Yeah, yeah. My dad was a... Well, he's retired. He's still alive. He's retired for many, many years, but he is a bookseller who worked in university book shops and several different parts of the world. My mother's a librarian, so you know, you could see that I didn't have much hope of escaping the world of books. It's, it was everywhere. They always had books around everywhere. I mean, they were great readers. They are great library users, but buyers, I mean, the house was always full of books. And even when we spent quite a lot of time traveling,

even when we did, there were always heaps of books coming with us. So. How did growing up around book shape you? I, well, deeply, because I mean, I was lucky to have so many so many books around I didn't, I didn't know that it, like a lot of things, I didn't know that that's not how everybody lived, I mean I didn't think about it, but I started reading at an early age, I don't remember learning

how to read, I mean I just seem to have picked it up at some early point. And even before I could read, I had picture books. And in fact, my earliest memory, I think this is pretty much my earliest memory in life, was we were doing a trip around America on Greyhound buses, which was a great thing to do. In the 60s, you could get 99 days of unlimited travel for $99. So this was my, I was about three years old, even younger. And my earliest memory as a being on one of those buses

and having a book, a picture book, which was about these animals, you know, different abadger and hedgehog or something who stole a big red fire engine and then drove it away at toy one and it got out of control and they ended up in a thorn bush at the bottom of a sloping road and that was the drama. I just remember that book and sitting reading it on a Greyhound bus. So I think that says a lot about the role of books in my life and also travel. Where did you go in America on this trip?

Almost everywhere, really, because we, they wanted, my parents wanted to make the most of this, 99 days for 99 dollars. So we'd sometimes go on long rides just so that, you know, we'd have a night's sleep and then see somewhere and then go on to somewhere else or stay. I mean, we stayed in places in between. So covered a lot of territory, starting in, starting in that trip, which of course I don't remember because I was very small, but starting in Montreal, I think we started and then traveled down through the east coast and round through Texas

Your bookshop wasn't there yet at a point and California and then sort of weaving around a little bit through the Midwest and then back to New York and From there back to the UK Wow to New York and from there back to the UK. Wow. Yeah, my favorite story from the Stelix is Xeno, as a young man. He goes and he visits the Oracle at Delphi. And the Delphi says, you will become wise

when you begin to have conversations with the dead, which he doesn't fully understand. Until many years later, he's in a bookstore and he realizes that this is the conversation we can have with the dead. We can talk to the dead through the books we read. Exactly. Another figure that is in my new book

is, in fact, is in the first proper chapter after the introduction, is Petraak, 14th century absolute book maniac. Maybe the greatest book lover of all time. Yeah, arguably. I mean, really, you know, he, all manuscripts, of course, in those days, but he acquired them, copied them, transcribed them, edited them, and wrote a lot himself as well. And he was just sort of mad about books. But he also wrote a lot of letters, and he wrote a lot of letters to his friends, huge network of friends, often urging them to go out collecting books for him. But he also wrote letters addressed to his favorite authors of the ancient Roman of the past, Cicero being prime among them.

Where normally you would put your address, the place you were writing from, he put from the land of the living. So it was these were his letters addressed from the land of the living back to the land of the dead, from which he had had the words of these authors, you know, from the land of the dead to the land of the living. So it was, yeah, a wonderful idea, I think. That's really important because I think too often people see reading as a one-way conversation. And in fact, the great conversation as they call it is the interplay or the exchange between the author and the reader and then the reader and other readers. It should be a debate. And if you know this a handful of times in the book, you know, writing in the margins, but there's a handful of times in the book. You know, writing in the margins, underlining, you know,

that disagreeing, if you're not disagreeing with the people that you're reading, you're either reading the wrong books or you're not reading aggressively enough. Yeah, exactly. It's a, I think, maintain compared it to a tennis match. So it's like writer and reader are, you know, in a conversation, in an exchange.

Holly. And yeah. That's beautifully said. Although tennis didn't, wasn't the kindest game to the Montene family? No, it wasn't. No, and it was, it was the tennis at the time involved a very hard ball, I think. And his brother was hit in the head by a tennis ball while playing the Jodapum, you know, sort of tennis and felt fine at the time, but in fact it gave him a brain hemorrhage

and he just died suddenly, a day or so later, so it killed him. So yeah, it's amazing that Montagne would use a tennis metaphor to describe something then so nice as reading and writing. Yeah, that's the perfect place to close, the fatal tennis accident of the Montagne family. Yes, yes, I wasn't expecting to land up there, but that's the nature of a conversation, isn't it? Did it? It is. It's going to take you. Well Sarah, I love your books so much, and this has been a long time coming, and you can see I've put some miles on this galley of how to live over the years, and I think this new one is wonderful also, and thank you so much for writing them. Thank you very much, and thanks for talking to me.

I really enjoyed that. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.