E202 - Donald Robertson: 2,400-Year-Old Stoic Wisdom To Conquer Your Ego & Live a Virtuous Life

**Donald Robertson** (0:00)
To know yourself is to understand that you are mortal, and to come to terms with it. What would you want your life to stand for? That's the ultimate goal of all ancient Greek philosophy. Ancient Greeks and Romans would wipe the floor with most contemporary thinkers. They were way ahead of their time. We have Seneca, Diogenes, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Socrates and Zeno.

**André Duqum** (0:24)
Let's do it.

**Donald Robertson** (0:25)
Yeah.

**André Duqum** (0:26)
So what does philosophy mean? There are so many rabbit holes I want to dive into. How do you think about death? What about love, anger, suffering and even virtue? What did the Stoics teach about all that?
Philosophers seem to be often born from an early injury.

**Donald Robertson** (0:42)
I lost my father and I turned to philosophy as a sort of substitute father figure.
I think that's what Marcus Aurelius did. Marcus lost his father when he was young and he struggled with his own anger. But he conquered his temper, using Stoicism as a way of coping with it. If we can really deal with anger, it might be the royal road to self-improvement. Stop arguing about what it means to be a good man, just be one.

**André Duqum** (1:13)
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself Podcast. Our guest today is one of the founding voices in the modern Stoicism movement, beautifully weaving ancient philosophy and modern psychology. He's written over nine books, like How to Think Like a Roman Emperor on Marcus Aurelius' life, How to Think Like Socrates, and he's also spent decades as a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist. And today's conversation is going to be exploring at start and then quickly going deeper with the oldest maxim, which is the ethos of this show. Donald Robertson, thank you so much for being here.

**Donald Robertson** (1:50)
Well, thank you for inviting me. I'm really looking forward to it.

**André Duqum** (1:54)
I thought we could start with the most obvious place to over 24 centuries ago, this maxim Know Thyself carved at the Temple of Delphi.

**Donald Robertson** (2:03)
Yeah.

**André Duqum** (2:04)
Tell me, tell me more.

**Donald Robertson** (2:06)
It really is a great place to start. And we were chatting earlier. I said, you know, if anybody is thinking about going to Greece, Delphi's like, I think it's a two or three hour drive from Athens, definitely go. It's one of the most amazing archaeological locations in the world.
It's like being in Lord of the Rings or something like that. The legend is that the god Apollo slayed a dragon there. And when I go there, I always feel like I kind of imagine that maybe he could have. It looks like someone could slay a dragon in this place. So it's a very magical place. And the ruins of the temple of Apollo are there. And famously, people from all over the Greek world used to go there.
Outside the temple, it had several sayings engraved. There were three that were particularly famous. The most famous was, Gnoth, I say out on, or know thyself. And you could say, I think Plutarch is who says, who was actually a priest, he was a philosopher and a historian. Plutarch was also a priest at Delphi. And he says the sayings at Delphi are very concise. Actually, we have a list of 147 sayings that come from Delphi. And almost all of them in Greek are two words.
They are compressed into two words. And Plutarch says, although these sayings are very concise, books many volumes long have been written about their meaning. So they are kind of like seeds, the seeds of philosophy in a sense. Definitely Know Thyself seems to have inspired the whole Socratic tradition. It's a theme that runs throughout classical philosophy. What does it mean?
Philosophers put different interpretations on it.
Socrates in the writings of Xenophon, so we have dialogues about Socrates from Plato, most famously. But we also have dialogues that were written by one of his other students, a Greek general called Xenophon. And Xenophon says that Socrates believed that Know Thyself meant understand your strengths and weaknesses. But he compares it to appraising a horse and checking out whether it's fat, checking its teeth and stuff like that. Like, we should understand who we are, what we're capable of if we're going to know ourselves. But Seneca and Plutarch, if I remember rightly, put another interpretation on it, which is kind of intriguing. They say that because you're entering the temple of Apollo, when you see these words, to know yourself is to know how you stand in relation to the gods. You're about to enter the presence of the god Apollo. So it's to understand that you are mortal. And so they compare know thyself to a memento mori. It's to understand your own mortality and to come to terms with it.