This Is Inseparable From Living a Good Life

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This is inseparable from living a good life. Courage is an obvious choice for being the most important of the four Stoic virtues. In fact, it was Aristotle who said that courage was the mother of all the rest. In a world that is scary, in a world that is hard, it is a brave thing to go out there and do what needs to be done.

Self discipline, or temperance, is another obvious choice for the most important virtue, because, well, you can't do anything without it. And as Aristotle pointed out, courage that isn't checked by temperance can quite easily veer into recklessness. Justice, Marx really said, is the source of all the other virtues. And the Stoics were quite clear that the point of philosophy, the point of life, is to direct a person towards doing what's right.

courage in service of injustice, discipline aimed at selfish ends, that's not what Marcus or Epictetus or Zeno would have called the good life. And then, of course, making the distinctions between these virtues, making sense of what the ancients said about them requires no small amount of wisdom. And it's this critical but I think too rare ability, discernment, is not something anyone is born with, and yet all the other virtues are born from it. And doesn't the development of this ability of wisdom require courage and discipline and justice? Of course it does.

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