An Interview with Massimo Pigliucci

This interview is with Massimo Pigliucci, who is K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at City College of New York, former board member of The Stoic Fellowship, and one of our favorite scholars in the Modern Stoicism movement.

He has written valuable books on practicing Stoicism, and this month’s interview comes from a recent dialogue with StoicDan and Joe Bullock at Orlando Stoics (some of the punctuation in the transcript is arbitrary, since speakers paused for a comma or period). Massimo is currently developing new content on Substack. To watch the full dialogue, subscribe to StoicDan’s YouTube channel.

SD = StoicDan (Organizer of Orlando Stoics)

JB = Joe Bullock

MP = Massimo Pigliucci

SD: The article that you published recently in Philosophy Now has such an interesting angle to it: talking about the virtues, not just the four virtues that we have in Stoicism (wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance) but also two additional virtues, and I like how you expanded that conversation there, but also talked about the origins of virtue, for example the word virtue comes from the Latin word ‘vir’, and then of course that links to the Greek word ‘arete’ which means excellence, and so let’s start with that; can you expand a little bit on that.

MP: First of all, thanks for having me tonight, I think this is going to be an interesting discussion. The first thing to understand about the concept of virtue is that it appears to be in fact universal, at least universal among so-called literate societies, that is societies that have writing, and therefore a record of written books and essays and stuff like that, research has not been done on that, in this respect, on non-leader societies as far as I know, at the least, but still that means a fairly large number of societies both historically and currently, and so the first thing that’s interesting is that everybody seems to have a concept of virtue or something like what we would call virtue, so it’s important to be clear about what exactly we mean by that and the Greco-Romans had a very specific definition, as you pointed out, of virtue, but I would say that we should probably start with the modern scientific understanding of what a virtue is.

Virtue is simply a behavioral disposition, a positive ethical behavioral disposition, so it’s a character trait. There’s been a discussion for some time, over the last 10 or 20 years in Psychology, whether even the word character, the concept of character, actually had any scientific basis, because some people started pointing out, on the basis of psychological research, that human beings respond dramatically different to the situation in the moment, and therefore some research seemed to indicate that there is no thing as character, that we are just very flexible, that we respond to whatever happens in the moment, depending on social cues, depending on circumstances, but I think things have settled down at this point, at least this is my reading of the literature, and it turns out that both sides of the debate had had some right on their side, it’s true that there are character traits in the sense that people, other things being equal, seem to behave more or less consistently in a certain direction, so when we say that my friend is generous, we what we mean is, that other things being equal, that that person acts in a generous fashion, so he devotes money or time or energy or resources to help other people, that is true, but it’s also true that anybody can act generously or ungenerously, depending on specific circumstances, there are environmental circumstances, social cues, and things like that, may dramatically alter how we behave especially if we’re not aware of those social cues.

Let me give you a classic example. A classic example is the so-called bystander effect, so this has been demonstrated by psychologists in a number of circumstances, but the typical setup is: you walk into a mall, and you [see] a person on the floor that is clearly in distress, and other people in a circle around that person, not doing anything, now you don’t know that this is actually a setup, nobody’s dying, both the person on the floor and the people in the circle actually are part of the experiment, but you don’t know that. How do you react? Well, typically people do not intervene; they just join the circle, and there may be a number of reasons for that, the most important one appears to be that people don’t want to do things that are not in-sync with the behavior of people that surround them. So you might be thinking: wait a minute, this guy seems in distress, but nobody else is doing anything, so maybe this is a joke, or maybe this is a setup, or maybe there’s a candid camera somewhere, I don’t want to be the first one to intervene.

Now if somebody does intervene, then everybody is much more likely to intervene. So this is a bystander effect, … that’s the science perspective, more or less. I mean, we can talk more about it, if people have questions, but that’s the basic idea… [Next,] what is the function of a human being? So under what circumstances I can say that a human being has arete? And there is where we get into the specifics of the Greco-Roman, and in fact, even more specifically the Stoic approach to virtue, because it turns out that different schools had a different answer to what was the proper function of a human being, just to mention two, the Epicureans thought that the proper function of a human being was to live a life of ataraxia, of tranquility, a mental tranquility, the Stoics on the other hand thought that the proper function of a human being is two-fold, one is to exercise reason, because we’re rational animals, and two is to be helpful to other people, because we’re social animals, and so to be virtuous, to have arete for a Stoic means to think clearly and to be pro-social, essentially. I’m gonna stop there because that was a long answer to your first question.

JB: I think that actually leads into the next question quite well: the additional two virtues that you talk about is the idea of humanity, humanity being defined as interpersonal strengths that involve lending to and befriending others, examples include love and kindness, and transcendence, the strength that forges connections to the larger world and thereby provide meaning, examples include gratitude, hope, and spirituality, so [could you] break these down a little bit. When people hear things like faith or spirituality, and what that may mean for people that are of non-religious beliefs, and how they these things may still apply.

MP: That’s a great question, so first of all, let’s step back for a second here, the two terms that you referring to, humanity and transcendence, are these two additional virtues that were discovered to be more or less universal, by research done by a group of psychologists a number of years ago. Katherine Dahlsgaard and her collaborators wrote a paper, published in the Review of General Psychology, called “Shared virtue: the convergence of valued human strengths across culture and history”, and what Dalhsgaard and her collaborators did, was to ask the question, okay, there is a lot of talk in the European Western tradition about virtue, not just the Stoics, not just the Greco-Roman, the Christians certainly also talk about the concept of virtue, but is this just the West? Is it just another Western thing, or is it something that actually other societies have, you know, recognized as well, and so what they did was to investigate the concept of and how many virtues people recognized, if they did, and how they define them across a number of traditions.

They included Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, obviously the Greco-Roman philosophies, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and what they found out was that, first of all, that all of these traditions recognized the notion of virtue, second, as you might expect, however, there is variety between these cultural variations, between these cultures, that is, some cultures emphasize some virtues over others, the number of virtues that different cultures recognize is different, etc. etc., but then they ask is there a core that is common to everybody, is there a basic stat, let’s say, virtues that is actually common either to everybody, or at least the majority the large majority of these cultures, and the answer is yes, and interestingly, the things that are common to all of those cultures are the four fundamental, four cardinal virtues, that the Stoics and the Greco-Romans recognize, so that’s practical wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, plus these other two that you just mentioned, transcendence and humanity.

That is interesting in and of itself, because it tells you that apparently all or most of the literate societies in the world have gravitated around the same core of character traits of behavioral dispositions, that are valued within those societies, so that’s the background to that terminology, now the two that we’re not familiar with, that is humanity and transcendence, are however, I argue [are] found in Stoicism, but the Stoics don’t call them virtues, so they are concepts that are part of Stoic theory and practice, they don’t fall into the four cardinal virtues, specifically I suggest that humanity encompasses, is not very different from the Stoic concept of cosmopolitanism, so the Stoics famously say, that just like the Cynics, they say that we should behave or we should regard other people as our sisters and brothers throughout the world, right? So, cosmopolitanism literally means being a citizen of the world, this is something that [the] origin is attributed depending on who you talk to, and which source you check, it’s either attributed to Socrates or Diogenes the Cynic, doesn’t matter, we know that it’s part of that tradition and the Stoics definitely made it a centerpiece of their philosophy, so I think that humanity includes or comprises the notion of cosmopolitanism.

The other one, transcendence, also can be interpreted in a number of ways, most of which as you pointed out do sound religious, but we’ll get there in a second, but one way to understand … the concept of transcendence, from the Stoic perspective, is this notion that the Stoics emphasized that we are interconnected, not just to other people, that’s cosmopolitanism, but to the cosmos at large, to the universe at large, so we are part and parcel of the universe, remember of course that for the ancient Stoics, the universe was a living organism and endowed with the famous logos, reason, and so we’re little bits and pieces of the cosmic universe, we literally function as parts or as cells of the cosmic organism, so that is a way of achieving transcendence, thinking in those terms, when Marcus Aurelius engages in what we today call “the view from above”, when he thinks about, you know, the vast span of space and time, and reminds himself that he’s a tiny little thing on a tiny little speck of the universe, who is going to live for a very short period of time, and therefore it should put things into perspective, that is a way to achieve or to practice the transcendence…

SD: Let’s change gears for a moment and talk about the young generations that we have now, entering humanity, you know, they have a phrase called “virtue signaling”, which kind of gives virtue a negative stigma there, but it does show that there’s something behind the curtain, virtue is something that still has a value, and I think that surveys are showing that the Millennials, for example, want to be virtuous in terms of improving society, and Gen Z wants to find purpose at work, so I’m wondering how do you think the younger generations can apply the virtues, and what about future generations where they have an increasingly chaotic life?

MP: I have a daughter who is 26, almost 27, the current generation is going to have their hands full, going on the next decade, two three decades, moving forward, because we’re leaving a mess to them, from a number of perspectives, yes, they’ll need to be virtuous, that’s for sure. I think we live in an environment, in a moment, in which every new generation seems to be completely, or it’s characterized as being completely different from the old ones, and a totally different situation, and so who knows what they’re going to do. I don’t believe that for a second.

If there is anything that the Greco-Roman tradition teaches us, is that nothing has changed much over the last 2,000 years or so, when it comes to human nature, of course our technology is completely different, our science is completely different, our understanding of the world is completely different, but human nature itself, the kinds of things that people want or are afraid of, kinds of things that people go after, or try to stay away from, they’re not really that different, which is why of course Stoicism and other Greco-Roman philosophies, or for that matter, Buddhism and Taoism, and Eastern Traditions are still so relevant today, they wouldn’t be if they didn’t have [something] useful to us today, so just let’s do a little thought experiment, imagine all of a sudden, somebody else knocks at this zoom door, and [we] find that Socrates has joined us, so he’s back from 2,400 years ago, and he’s now here, having this conversation.

I bet that Socrates would be absolutely stunned by what we’re doing here, he would say wait a minute, you guys live hundred and sometimes thousands of miles away, and you can talk to each other, and just looking at each other on this thing, that you call the screen, he would be absolutely stunned, because this technology is beyond comprehension of an ancient Greco-Roman, but then he would settle down, because he’s Socrates, and he would still listen to what we’re talking about, and he would say, oh wait a minute, I have something to say here, because this is not new stuff, this is stuff that I’ve actually thought about quite a bit, this is stuff that I actually can contribute, and I think the same is true for a number of the ancient traditions, so when we talk about the new generations, I think there is a danger of over-emphasizing the differences and the novelties, and not paying enough attention to the fact that they’re human beings, they want to have the same kinds of things, not the specifics, you know, the specifics of what they want, but the general idea is going to be actually still very similar, so what I would say to the new generations, is that they should pay attention to what people have done before, not just the generation immediately before them, going back in time, because why would you want to reinvent the wheel, why would you want to start from scratch and try to figure out how to live a good life, and how to deal with other people, and so on and so forth, when there are time-tested methods and approaches to do so.

JB: I want to talk about how to actually, and you’ve already touched upon it with the three disciplines in the spiritual exercises, but how do we practice virtue in our daily lives, because that’s sometimes, people often ask me, how do you actually implement these things, and I would tell them, basically, it’s a moral compass, and I’ll measure my day against these, these four cardinal virtues, so how would you actually incorporate the two additional virtues into your practice, and in addition to that, which discipline would they fall under, so we have discipline of desire, action, and assent, I was just thinking about it, it probably fall under the discipline of action?

MP: I would agree, if we want to put it in the framework that Epictetus laid out, the three disciplines of desire and aversion on the one end, action and then ascent, I think, you’re right, that they would fall under action, especially humanity. Transcendence, it’s more of a kind of an attitude toward things, than anything else, but still, it would fall under action as well. So, let’s talk about practice, yes, the Greco-Romans, as you know, often made two analogies between what they were doing, practical philosophy, let’s call it practical philosophy, on the one hand, and medicine on the other hand, or athletics. The two kinds of comparisons that come more often, if you read Epictetus’s Discourses or Seneca’s Letters, or a lot of other stuff, or even Epicurus, the comparisons are always either with medicine or with athletics.

So in the case of medicine, for instance, the comparison is that if you want to live a healthy life, you ought to know certain things about what makes for a healthy, I’m talking biologically healthy, physically healthy life, for a human being, so you need to know things about a little bit about human metabolism and human physiology, you need to know that certain foods are nutritious and they’re good for you, and other stuff is junk and not good for you, and certain things will bring up your cholesterol and give you a heart attack, and other things on the other hand will actually be good for your heart, that sort of stuff, so you need a little bit of theory, and then the practice consists in living according as much as possible to that theory, so if you know that fried foods are not good for you, then don’t eat them, if you know that exercise on a regular basis is good for you, then get out of the house at least once a day and go for a long walk, or for a run or something like that, so that’s how you practice preventive medicine, similarly with athletics.

If you go to the gym, for instance, the first thing you want to know is some theory, you want somebody to explain to you, what exactly you’re supposed to be doing, you should be taking care of your muscles, well you need to know something about human muscles, otherwise you just go randomly, and you’re probably going to hurt yourself, if you want to improve your aerobic capacity, the same thing, you need to know something about sport physiology, then you want somebody who explains to you the basics of how you do these things, you know this is a machine that does this, these are weights that do these other things, and here’s how you properly use them, so that you’re not going to hurt yourself, you’re not going to injure yourself, and then what do you do?

You don’t just walk out of the gym and say, “well now I know, now I’m done”, [instead] you need to go to the gym every day, if possible or at least several times a week, and just sweat it out, you just practice, in the sense of putting in a routine, building a routine, that puts into practice those the theory that you learned, so it’s the same thing we’re told by Epictetus or Epicurus or Seneca, it’s the same thing for practical philosophy, that is why the theory is important, but by itself doesn’t do anything, if we were just spending tonight, an hour, an hour and a half, talking about the virtues and then, tomorrow morning, we resume our behavior as jerks, then this has done nothing, this is a complete waste of time, this is just the hair splitting or logic chopping or whatever you want to call it, and both Epictetus and Seneca are very clear, that this is not the way to do it…

SD: Let’s think historically for a moment. I was fascinated by the aspect of your article that linked the different traditions together in terms of their virtues, that they share these things, and one of the things that’s fascinated our group over time is connecting the dots, what are the underpinnings of these things, I wanted to get your opinion on that moment in time the Greco-Roman period, Stoicism started about 300 BC, Daoism is supposedly 400 BC, Buddhism started about 500 BC, what was happening at that time in history that caused such profound ideas to be born?

MP: That is a very good question, and there is a lot of controversial research about that, because people have noticed that all of a sudden, across the planet, or at the very least across Eurasia, things started happening there, all of a sudden you have the origin of what we call philosophy, pretty much simultaneously in India, in China, in the Mediterranean Basin, in the Middle East, and so on and forth, so it’s like, whoa, what was going on there?

And you know, it’s hard to tell, because … you mentioned specific traditions and the timings of those traditions, and they’re very close, they’re really close, I mean there is basically 200 years or less between Buddhism, Daoism, and the Pre-Socratics, … who are almost simultaneous with the Buddhists. Stoicism comes a little later, but the Pre-Socratic, which we think of as the initiators of the western philosophical tradition, are a couple of centuries earlier, so they’re about the same time as the Buddhists. Now, one possibility is that there was cross-cultural fertilization going on, we do know that there were more extensive communications, there was more extensive contacts than we tend to believe, among some of these cultures, Alexander the Great went to India, and he had Pyrrho with him, one of the Hellenistic philosophers, the founder of Pyrrhonian skepticism, and he wasn’t even the only one, he had several other philosophers, and we know that Pyrrho met a weird-looking group of people, from the Greek perspective, called the gymnosophists, literally means naked wise men, and people have suggested that the gymnosophists were actually early Buddhists…

I’m not an expert on Buddhism, but my understanding is that the Buddhist tradition started to be written down only several centuries later, so we don’t have any written testimony of early Buddhism, there’s an oral tradition and then you can have a whole interesting discussion of how reliable the oral tradition is, in general, but it’s probably more reliable than most people think, but nevertheless there was no writing, so we don’t know for sure what the early Buddhists were actually thinking or saying, could it be that Pyrrho was influenced by the Buddhists? Yes, there’s one interesting, fascinating, but rather controversial book, called “Greek Buddha” that suggests exactly that possibility, that Pyrrho came back to Greece and that some of the ideas that we attribute to Pyrrhonism actually come from the early Buddhists, of course, it could have gone the other way around as well, since we don’t know what the early Buddhists were actually thinking, it’s very possible that Pyrrho influenced the early Buddhists, and more likely than not, since we know that cultural influences tend to go both ways, more likely than not, it was kind of a two-way exchange.

Not only that, the Greeks and the Romans knew of places beyond India as well, they knew of the existence of China, for instance, and in fact, there was trade between those regions. We have archaeological evidence of Roman coins found in China, so we know that some Romans made it all the way out to China, way before Marco Polo, …

JB: I want to come back to the two additional virtues that we’re proposing here, humanity and transcendence, because I think that this is such an important time to introduce these concepts, in particular, they really focus on the idea of building community, and how we interact with one another, and in a time where there’s a lot of loneliness, a lot of people are feel socially isolated, that this is something that can be beneficial to Stoicism going forward, and creating communities, but also seeing our role as human beings in the community, and how we can start to regularly think about reaching out and helping those that are in need, so [can you] comment on the idea of how it talks about a sense of our obligations to each other, but also how it can facilitate building communities overall?

MP: That’s a great point to make, we do live in, as they say, interesting times, which may or may not be a blessing, but we do live in a situation where on the one hand technology makes it more and more possible to connect with, I mean look at us, look at what’s happening [on this zoom call], normally, without this kind of technology, the only way for us to have this kind of conversation, was if we were all living either in New York City or in Florida, or whatever, so the technology is making it possible as never before, to connect with other people in a meaningful way.

Unfortunately, as you also know very well, the overwhelming majority of usage of social technologies tends to be destructive, you find a lot of bullying, you find a lot of fake news, … so just leave it to human beings to create a wonderful instrument and then completely waste its potential, of course the Stoics would say, it’s up to you how you use it, other people will make their judgments and arrive their conclusions, but if you do have the technology, you use it for whatever is good for you and make sense to you, and that is what we’re doing tonight, so the technology is there, and it is making possible for us to think in a more cosmopolitan fashion, to participate in a forum, where there’s more diversity, more than your circle of acquaintances, which may or may not represent the world at large. The second factor that I think makes the concept of humanity, but also the concept of transcendence I think crucial, is the big elephant in the room, I know this there’s still a good portion of the American public who doesn’t believe it, but we are experiencing dramatic climate change, and that means that the problems that we’re facing and the problem that we’re facing right now, especially what the next generation or two are going to face, are obviously global.

This isn’t a matter of, you know, we can stay in our little enclave and solve our little problems on our own, this is a global issue, this is something that is not going to be improved, or it’s not going to be dealt with unless we think globally, really think globally, and that means both cosmopolitanism, caring about people on the other side of the world, and transcendence, thinking about not just ourselves but beyond even the human, we are destroying ecosystems, we are causing the extinction of countless species, we basically, [in] this human Anthropocene, as it’s sometimes called, the current era of human action on the globe, is at this point, being responsible for a number of extinctions…

SD: Before we wrap up, Massimo, can you tell us about where we can find you on the web, where’s all your activity going on, and do you have an upcoming book you’d like to promote?

MP: I always have an upcoming book, but it’s a little too early, because I’m writing it now. So your first question, where people find me right, I’m not on most social media, I decided that on balance the standard social media are not good for the cosmopolis, and so I decided not to take part anymore, so you will not find me on Facebook or Twitter / X, whatever it’s called these days, however most of my writings, a lot of my writings are now published on SubStack, so if people want to find me on SubStack, the title of my newsletter is “Figs in Winter”, which Stoic practitioners should recognize as a reference to a bit of the Discourses… [also] I have a comprehensive website that is called MassimoPigliucci.org … and there, you’ll find links to all my books, the podcasts, the videos, the essays, everything.

I am actually co-authoring a book with my friend Greg Lopez and another friend Merith Kunz, who is sometimes known as the Stoic Mom, … the three of us are writing a book of practical Hellenistic philosophy, the provisional title is Beyond Stoicism, … essentially the idea is to take a look at a number of Hellenistic philosophies, I think we have nine, we’re thinking about a tenth one, and for each one of them, we go and look at one fundamental idea, and how to practice it. So, for instance, there’s a chapter in Stoicism, of course, and the fundamental idea is Epictetus’s fundamental rule of life, the dichotomy of control, some things are up to us, other things are not, … how to actually put it into practice, how do you actually practice that thing, then we look at Epicurus, we look at the two schools of Skeptics, both the Pyrrhonists, at the Academic Skeptics, we look at the Cynics, and several others, as I said we’re thinking now, we’re almost done with the book, it should be coming out hopefully by the end of 2024

SD: Thank you so much Massimo, this has been enlightening, and I do mean that literally, lot of great things you covered, also thank you Joe for helping with the questions. For those who may be watching this afterwards on YouTube, you can post some comments, what you think about what we covered in this dialogue tonight, and how philosophy affects your life.