Episódios
-
In the last week or so, I have been editing a number of Sadler's Lectures podcast episodes on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods book 2. And if you've been following my YouTube channel, then you're probably going to say, oh, I've seen those already. Well, yes, you've seen the videos, but what I do is take the sound files from the videos and And then I clean them up, take out all the filler words, long pauses, repetitions where I say the same word twice for some reason, just as I do for this Mind and Desire podcast. And it produces something a bit new.
And for me, it's kind of cool because when I'm shooting a video, I'm up there in front of the chalkboard. I've got my notes on the board. I've got the text in front of me. And I'm just presenting to the viewers that are going to be watching the video, whether they be my academic students or lifelong learners or fellow professors, whoever's going to be watching that stuff.
When I'm editing those videos into podcast episodes, I'm going back over the material again, or rather my presentation of the material to another person, and I'm here, hearing myself talk about the things that are important, interesting, worth taking into account, requiring some explanation from that text or that generally portion of the text that I am presenting on.
So for the roughly last week or so, that has been what I've been doing in podcast editing with this work, Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, which I like quite a bit. And I did an entire sequence in the past on book 1 of the work. which has to do with the Epicurean position on not just the gods and religion, but cosmology, the nature of the universe, all those sorts of things.
And book 2 takes us into the Stoic position, which Cicero takes a good bit more seriously than he does the Epicureans. As a matter of fact, pretty much everybody in antiquity who is not an Epicurean, you could say that they took Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic ideas more seriously, viewed them as more plausible than Epicurean ideas.
So Cicero himself is not committed to the Stoic views on these matters, but he can present them quite well. And he does so by placing them in the mouth of this guy, Balbus, who is a Stoic. And then he's going to criticize these ideas later on in the next book. So we're not getting a lot of critical examination, but we are getting a lot of exposition.
Now, why should we read this work? Well, if you're interested in Stoic cosmology, you obviously want to go to this work because it's one of the main source texts for that, in part because we've lost so much Stoic literature from that period. But there's another reason why somebody might check that out other than just enjoying Cicero or, you know, liking to read ancient texts.
And it's because it's, we could say, a underrated text in an area of philosophy that I do some work in and occasionally teach in, in which you may have some interest in as well, which we typically call the philosophy of religion. And this is an area of philosophy, a sub-discipline, if you like, where you can find textbooks and you can find all sorts of resources out there. You can find anthologies and reading lists.
And it's been around as, we could say, an official sub-discipline for, you know, over 200 years. I know Hegel certainly has his lectures on the philosophy of religion, and there might be some other people that I'm blanking on who also take a similar approach, where there's these traditional topics that are discussed by a number of earlier thinkers, and we look at what they have to say, and then we kind of go through it.
And in the present, what you're most likely going to find is a concentration on, you know, can we define religion? Are there other ways of characterizing what religion is, as opposed to other main areas of life or other disciplines? A lot of investigations into the nature of religious language, a preoccupation with arguments for and against the existence of God of all different sorts, issues of truth claims in religion and how we should adjudicate them, and whether it's possible to have more than one correct religion? Can we have religious pluralism? Those sorts of things tend to be what we focus on.
And I really like this text. I have been teaching it now for more than 20 years in philosophy of religion classes precisely because it is a text that is going to bring in alternate but not totally foreign perspectives that give people, who are a little bit too used to thinking about philosophy of religion primarily in terms of theism, usually understood as Christian theism, versus atheism as the main axis for understanding things.
So why would this text be interesting in that respect? Well, one reason is because it is dealing with religion as understood by different philosophical schools in antiquity. And these are pre-Christian schools. So Cicero is writing before this Jesus fellow shows up on the scene and people start following him and writing things about him, let alone, you know, developing into a movement that would have some traction and intellectual purchase and contributions within the larger Roman Empire.
So it's kind of cool to see that a lot of the issues that we see in the modern: period and in the late modern period, various theists, whether Christian of different denominations or deist, as well as then agnostics, skeptics of different sorts, and then atheists of different brands as well, all debating back and forth, we get to see these ideas, at least some of them, being discussed in a different context.
So for example, you'll often hear people talk about the problem of evil, or can you prove that the gods exist, or the ideas that we have of the divine, or whether there's anything like divine providential care for the universe. Well, these are all being discussed in those three books of Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, but they're being looked at by an Epicurean, a Stoic and a Skeptic. There was actually the possibility of having an Aristotelian, but he's not there so he doesn't get to participate
But what we get is very interesting because the Stoics are going to provide arguments for the existence of God and the gods, plural we could say. Capital-g God and lowercase-g gods. And a lot of these are going to look kind of similar to arguments that later theists are going to make we can identify arguments from design or what we call teleological arguments. We can identify arguments from effects, which we could call cosmological arguments. There aren't any ontological arguments at that time, but that's going to happen later on.
When we see an argument for the existence of, let's just say, the divine, to keep it rather generic, we can sometimes lose our focus and attend only to the argumentation and not where it's actually going. Because we're more focused on the polemics, on debate between people.
And what we really should be thinking about is, well, what kind of God or gods is this supposed to be proving the existence of if the arguments should happen to work? And here's where it gets really interesting. Because for the Stoics, we don't have a God who is outside of the universe, who created it or anything like that.
I mean, the closest that we get to that is the discussion of the ekpurosis, where the universe essentially gets consumed by fire or, strictly speaking, the kind of fire that ether is and God is still there. And then God starts everything up again. But that's as close as you're going to get. And even all the Stoics didn't necessarily accept that, as we find out in the book.
Instead, the Stoics are pantheists, strictly speaking. They believe that the cosmos itself is divine and is not just divine nature in a trivial way, but is the best thing there is. It is rational. It is intelligent. It is all good. It actually cares about us human beings and providentially orders things. And yet at the same time in this book, we're going to see a little tension because the world, the mundus, is also that same God. But then we have the heavens above where the gods also exist.
So the arguments, if you accept them, are leading you to a very different place than a say trinitarian god, or even the god of the deists who is still relatively speaking outside of space and time, when you see this. And so here's the upshot of this, especially for my students, is they find that their frame of reference gets shaken a bit. And that's the thing that I think is so cool about teaching these particular works.
It's also great, and here's where I'm going to close, sometimes you get religious people who have gotten the wrong message about philosophy and think that philosophy is hostile to religion and you'd better not do philosophy because the philosophers are basically all godless and they're going to lead you away from the true belief.
Well, you can find that even the Epicureans thought that there were gods. They were very different than what we think of as divine being or beings, but they believed in that. They weren't atheists, right? You could hedge and say, practically speaking, they were atheists, but now you're playing with words a little bit, rather than attending to what the text actually tells us.
The Stoics very, very clearly believed in God and the gods, the divine beings. And they thought that was really important for us humans to have the right ideas about. To avoid, for example, superstition, which is talked about in the work. A distinction is made between genuine religion and superstition.
And when you check these things out, you see that Christianity, at least, certainly absorbed a number of ideas and approaches from these ancient philosophies, that at least in the works of the Christian intellectuals who played such a massive role in the early, what we call patristic, period in forming the thought behind what we call Christianity as a religion.
So those are some reflections I've had on this experience of going back over the videos to turn them into podcasts on this really great work of Cicero, which I highly encourage all of you to check out if you have any interest whatsoever in the intersections between philosophy and religion.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
I just got back inside from taking a walk for about half an hour around the area that my office building is located in in Milwaukee. I wanted to step out in part because I hadn't been outside all day, and my office doesn't have any windows, so it's nice to get outside and feel the air on you, hear the sounds of the city, but also of nature.
And in my case, something else that's particularly refreshing, for both my eyes and I would say my soul, is seeing all the flowers that are still in bloom, while there's an opportunity to do so. If you follow me in social media, you've no doubt seen me posting from time to time as the season rolls from spring into summer and then into fall all the different flowers that I walk past and register. And I've got some musings about them that do have some philosophical import.
But before that, I'm going to kind of sketch the scene for you. So our office building is located on a short road that runs parallel to the Menominee River Canal. And the Menominee River is one of three significant rivers that flow through Milwaukee. They all will end up terminating in the Milwaukee River. There's the Milwaukee itself, the Menominee, and the Kinnickinnic. And then they all flow out together into Lake Michigan. And I'm fortunate in that I live and work close enough that I can walk to any of these if I want to.
But since I'm already there on the Menominee, I like to take a walk along what's called the Hank Aaron Trail, named after one of our great ball players, the Milwaukee Brewer Hank Aaron. The Hank Aaron trail goes for quite a ways. Some parts of it are simply spectacular. Others are just a path that you walk along. And the portion that we have here, before this massive company and building came in called Rite-Hite, was actually on the spectacular side. But it's still pretty good.
And it's nice to walk along the river, and to see the waves, the wildlife, there's a lot of birds, sometimes ducks, or geese, or seagulls, lots of chickadees, swallows, other sorts of birds. Occasionally there's some crows that live around there that I always enjoy seeing.
And there's a lot of pollinators, particularly honeybees, and various solitary bees and wasps, and a lot of bumblebees as well, which is a great sign for the health of the area. We get a lot of sulfur butterflies. Those are those beautiful little white and yellow butterflies that we used to actually call cabbage butterflies when we were young. We didn't know their proper name. And occasionally you'll see a monarch or some other butterfly as well.
This time of year, the cicadas are in full time living, mating, doing whatever it is that they do activity. Much of it is their singing, which isn't really singing. It's, I think, produced by rubbing their legs together, but it's very loud. And it's a sound that I associate with high summer and the end of summer, as we move into the beginning of the school year. And it's a sound that I particularly like and respond to.
I think many people don't enjoy hearing it, but for me, it's a bit of home. And in fact, since I lived far away from here in different regions for so long, to be back in a place that smells and sounds like what I am used to from my childhood, and teenage and early 20-something years, is really comforting on a deep level. So not every single day, but many days that I'm here in my office, I will get out and take a walk around.
And we're fortunate in that there's a lot of green space in this city, some of it in the form of parks. That's a relic of Milwaukee's socialist past, that we have a lot more parks than most American cities do, because the socialists who ran the city were dedicated to the idea that ordinary people should be able to enjoy nature. And subsequent political changes haven't really succeeded in closing down or privatizing our parks.
We also have, on the other side, a lot of empty space where things just grow. And because we have a lot of native wildflowers here and some non-native invasive species, there's a lot that you get to see as you walk through abandoned lots, or places that have just been allowed to go back to a kind of semi-natural, semi-urban state. And then there's things in between where people have deliberately replanted native plants. Sometimes along parking lots or along paths or things like that. And businesses seem to be, at least in certain areas, pretty cool with that.
So there's a lot of natural beauty to enjoy and appreciate. And in these walks, I get to see many different types of flowers and insects and birds and to hear both the sounds of the city and traffic, but also to hear the calling of the birds, or the murmur of the water, or the blowing of the wind, sometimes through the tree leaves, or through dried grasses and flowering plants and bushes.
I'm very thankful for that. And I do enjoy all four seasons of the year that we have here in southeastern Wisconsin. But I have to say that this is one of my favorite times of year, when there's still a lot of colorful flowers of different sorts to walk past and take in and to see the pollinators drawing nectar from trees. That's a aspect of natural beauty that I have been responding to since I was a child.
And as a matter of fact, a bit of trivia about me that I think very few people know is that when we had to take aptitude tests and figure out what sort of jobs we might want to have, way back when I was in high school, one of the professions that I seriously considered was florist. I never went any further with it, but I've always been taking in the beauty of blooms, and cutting flowers and making arrangements both for other people and for myself, and appreciating when other people do that well also.
So I mentioned that there would be some philosophical meat to this. And you could say that the appreciation of beauty is an aesthetic topic. And so we've already done a little bit of philosophizing on the way, even though we haven't mentioned Plato, or Augustine, or Kant, or any other person who writes about aesthetics.
But what I want to focus on is something a bit different, namely, the contingency of the sights that we get to see, meaning that they didn't have to be that way. It's possible that there could have been no flowers whatsoever, that the weather patterns could change, that we could have blights.
It could be that the kinds of flowers that we see would be replaced by other things, types of plants, maybe flowering, maybe not. It could be that the people who lived in this city didn't value natural beauty and just paved everything over instead, as indeed has happened in some places, or allowed it to turn into wasteland or desert without the rich profusion of that.
So every time that we're able to enjoy that, we're really enjoying something that we might call hyper-contingent. It's not just that one efficient cause brought all this about. There are myriad interlocking intersecting causes, some of which are of this season, some of which date back perhaps centuries, and many of which are entirely contingent themselves, not depending on big-picture things like laws of nature or the way that species evolve and express their being, but rather incredibly contingent things, like seeds having sprouted in this particular place or somebody volunteering to plant a certain flowering plant or even berry producing plant.
(There's some beautiful berries this time of year on various bushes that we can see before the birds come around and eat them all up.)
All of this could be very different than it is. And indeed in just a few days, some of the things that are flowering will have dried up and won't be flowering anymore. And some new blooms until we reach the end of the season will not take their place so much because they don't occupy the same space, but instead draw the eye away from what is dead to what is living.
And what is the proper response to this? I would say that thinking about things in this way, and you don't have to think about it constantly or very deeply, but thinking about things in this way opens up the possibility for some aesthetic and some emotional responses.
I think that joy is certainly one of them. Pleasure. Perhaps desire, drawing you on further into seeing them. It could be tinged with a bit of sadness or melancholy as you think about all the flowers past, and the fact that these flowers will be gone soon. Also, satisfaction as you think about how they are furnishing food for all of these wonderful pollinating creatures that are part of this vast world that we live in. One might even feel a sense of awe or wonder or gratitude for the possibility of walking along and running one's eyes and perhaps even reaching out and touching and smelling some of these flowering plants that are available to us, fortunately, for the short time that that we have them.
So I thought I would share this with you. It's not, I think, particularly profound reflections, but it might be something that at least some of you listeners resonate with and make you recall your own experiences of natural beauty or whatever it happens to be. Maybe flowers aren't your thing, but you like looking over a landscape or looking at a dry desert and watching long enough to see some of the signs of life in it.
Whatever it happens to be, I think that engagement with nature, in a kind of unprogrammed way, is something needed for us human beings. Sometimes people don't realize that, but it's usually because they haven't had the opportunity to experience it much, or they've forgotten about it or locked it away. But I think this is something quite important. And I'll just end these reflections with that.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
Estão a faltar episódios?
-
Just a little bit earlier today, I had a very interesting, although short, conversation that got me thinking about something that could be turned into a decent analogy for philosophical study. And it wasn't directly about philosophy.
It was actually about taking different routes, whether you stay on the interstate highways, which are pretty quicker, more direct in many cases, but also kind of boring, even mind numbing to drive on. And the alternative is to take what we often call the scenic route, where you're driving through towns and perhaps you don't have as many lanes, but it's more interesting to drive in and to look around at as you are making your path.
And here's how the conversation went. Somebody was talking about driving up to Door County, which is a pretty ritzy and well-known vacation spot here in southern Wisconsin. It's actually past Green Bay. If you've ever seen the map of Wisconsin, you're going up that little finger that comes off. And it's very much, in my point of view, like Montauk and other parts of Long Island in in New York where the Hamptons are out there. It's really for rich people and the people who hold jobs out there working for rich people. That's the way Door County is.
And so it's got kind of a reputation of being there for the rich people in Wisconsin and then people coming up from Chicago to go there. Just like Long Island, the Hamptons in Long Island has the reputation of being there for people who who come down from Connecticut or drive from other parts of New York and they've got the money to go out there.
Anyway, they were talking about going up to Door County and what's the best way to go. So you can take the interstate for a good ways. Or you can get off the interstate, and take a more interesting and probably a lot more stimulating drive that gets you to see a lot more of the local foliage (it can be very nice during fall when the colors are all turning on the trees). But you also might go close to Lake Michigan, or drive through some scenic towns, and see some cool stuff.
So where am I going with this? I think you can probably guess. This is a philosophy focused podcast, so it's going to have something to do with studying philosophy. And I think that there's a great case to be made for spending the time to take the more interesting but time-consuming route.
I think a lot of people get themselves into, I won't say trouble, but they save time, but they also waste time by not going into the detours, the backwaters, the smaller routes that you're not quite sure exactly what you're getting into. And they think that they're being more efficient in learning philosophy by only focusing on what other people have told them is the most important stuff, or even taking shortcuts like, you know, having AIs summarize information for you, which we could probably do an entire discussion of covering why that's actually a terrible idea if your goal is to learn anything, not just in philosophy, but in history, in English, in the humanities in general. Probably not even great for doing stuff in the sciences either.
Anyway, back to the main topic. So I got to thinking about when I was doing my first full-time gig where I was, as many of you know, teaching up in Michigan City in Indiana, almost on the border of Michigan, at Indiana State Prison. And if I took the interstate, I had about an hour commute, but the interstate was very, very boring. And even with books on CD, I kind of got tired of that after a while.
And I would take that up in the morning to make sure I was there on time. But then coming home, I would often take state highways.So, for example, I might take 231, and go south a good ways, and get to see some cool stuff and go over some interesting bridges and go through some towns. Or I might take Highway 20 or Highway 12, which would roughly parallel the interstate that I was on. But there was a lot more to see, especially on 12. And it would take you longer, but it was more enjoyable and stimulating.
So what would the equivalent of that be in philosophy? So imagine that you're going to read Plato's Republic. You could easily say: “OK, I just want the bare bones of this. I don't want to dilly dally over some of these discussions, which to me seem a little bit off topic. I just want the argument or I just want the key ideas.”
Well, you can certainly do that. I mean, it's a free country. You can do anything you want with your reading. But are you really getting what you want out of it? You may not even suspect what you're missing if you're skipping over too many of the interesting features. If you're unwilling to go down side routes, into alleys where you're not sure what's there, or take a route and linger with Socrates as he seems to go off on a big digression, or even go into myth or something along those lines, you don't really know what you're missing out on.
I suppose you could have something like the guidebook where a great commentator could say: “Well, make sure that you read this part. You may be tempted to skip over it, but it's really the equivalent of a Michelin star restaurant. You have to stop in.”
Helpful for some people, I guess, if you think that you need somebody with some prestige to tell you: “Oh you have to stop here” or “You need to check this out”. But those of us who have enough judgment, or common sense, or whatever you want to say, experience perhaps, to know that much of the time we just need to explore, we need to see what's actually there for ourselves, and that might be the way to go.
And I think if you need somebody like me, who's not quite as prestigious as the people who write the big commentaries and get published with big academic presses, but you know, presumably knows a little bit about philosophy and its study. If you need somebody like me to say to you: “Hey, when you're reading Thomas Hobbes, don't just jump to the stuff about the state of nature. Read the stuff in the book one of Leviathan, where he's talking about words being counters for things and the different kinds of passions, even though it seems a little bit off-topic, or digressions, or a waste of time. It's pretty cool stuff, and it actually turns out to be quite interesting and important.
Or, I mean, Aristotle's prone to all sorts of digressions, as is Seneca. I mean it's almost endemic in ancient philosophy, I would say. But you could always check it out for yourself. I'm not saying you have to go down every single bywater and investigate, because who's got the time for that? But sometimes you probably do want to take, I won't say “the road less traveled”, invoking the Robert Frost poem, but one that certainly doesn't have quite as wide of a path, and doesn't seem to have quite as many people traveling that same way as you.
That could turn out to be quite interesting. And there are so many things. that you would discover along the way that you might not find in a guidebook, or in Yelp, or whatever else the equivalent is for these sources that we use for deciding what's worth actually digging into, spending time with, going to see and checking out. There's often a lot of things along the way that you just have to run across.
So I think that this is, of course, an analogy, a metaphor. Is this supposed to be something that you can use in every single circumstance? No, you have to have some good judgment about how to interpret and apply this. But I think this might be a very useful reminder for some people out there, about what they could be depriving themselves of, if they're only studying what turns out to be the equivalent of staying on the interstate highway, as they're working their way through philosophical texts and thinkers.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
I had an interesting exchange today on Twitter with somebody who direct messaged me, and they were talking about starting the Half Hour Hegel series, which, if you don't know, that is a video series that I published. And it took me about nine years of work to see it through, in part because it had roughly 370 or so videos, each one focused on anywhere from one to four paragraphs from Hegel's Phenomenology, which is viewed as one of the more difficult works of Western philosophy. And there's good reasons for that, which we don't have to go into right here.
So this person was enthusiastic about starting the series, and that's understandable. I think that a lot of people have the impression that, sort of like with Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Benedict Spinoza's Ethics, the Phenomenology of Spirit is a text that if you're really serious about studying philosophy, you have to dive into and work your way through at some point, and so better sooner than later, which is actually not the case in several different ways. But again, sort of a side topic.
So he was looking forward to going through the series. And another thing that he said is that when he'd finished the series, then he'd write me again. So I wrote him back and I said, well, I'll see you in a year or two, because there are, again, 370 plus half hour videos. And they are complicated stuff because Hegel is a complicated thinker, and so the explanation of it is not going to be simple either.
I use my chalkboard. I draw diagrams. I unpack Hegel's German at certain points, and talk about examples of what he's saying to illustrate it, since he doesn't really give you many examples. So deciding to embark on that that's kind of a big thing, i's a major commitment, you might say, of one's thought and time.
In any case, I wrote him back and said, all right, I will see you in a year or two. And then he wrote me back and he said, no, no, you'll see me sooner than that. And what he wrote following that quip, which is rather optimistic, was the part that I'm going to be responding to here. So I'm paraphrasing what he said, because I don't have it verbatim in front of me.
He was saying that he's using AI to scrape the videos, and what he means by that is go to the transcripts of the videos, which are probably decent but are going to get a lot of the German words wrong, and probably mix up some other things. And he would have an AI essentially summarize and bullet point things out for him, as he worked his way through Hegel's phenomenology. And he wanted to know whether I would update the transcripts so that the AI would function better.
I wrote him back and I said, this is a terrible idea. This is something that I think we could apply more broadly. It could be taking AI to try to work your way through any important philosophical text, for example, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, or even better, his Metaphysics, or Plato's Republic, or one of his later dialogues like The Statesman, or Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods.We could go on and on and on.
If you're relying on an AI to do some of the work for you, you are really cheating yourself and you're also setting yourself up for going wrong in a number of ways. It's sort of like as if you had decided, for whatever reason, could be that you think you're not smart, smart enough. It could be that you think you'll save yourself some time, whatever it happens to be. It's like deciding you're only going to read secondary literature about particular philosophers and that that will be good enough for you. You will never actually do the work, set aside the time, devote your mind to readings the text that the thinker actually wrote.
And if you do that, it's pretty much guaranteed that you are going to miss out on some important stuff within the text. I don't think that you could even take, for example, Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and rely solely upon a secondary work to give you everything that's going on there. You actually do need to read the text yourself.
Using AI strikes me as an even more thoughtless and foolish way to try to effectively cut corners. So there's a number of reasons why that's the case. And this person seems to be involved in AI in some respect. So I imagine that he's probably already aware of some of these issues. But the fact that he wants to apply this to Hegel's phenomenology shows me that perhaps he doesn't take those issues seriously.
So what would the problems be? Well, first of all, there are what they call hallucinations, which is just a fancy word, probably an ill-chosen one, for just making stuff up that isn't true and may be completely imaginary, let's say.
And imaginary there is being used as a metaphor because artificial intelligence, which itself is a metaphor, it's not actually intelligent, doesn't have an imagination. But if we understand imagination is like thinking up something that doesn't actually have reality by taking components of things and smooshing them together or modifying them. Okay, imagination works. So AIs will just make stuff up. Sometimes if you call them on it, they'll actually admit it and say, oh, I'm sorry, let me see if I can fix that. And then they'll go on to make something else up.
For example, when I asked ChatGPT a while back about the books that I had written, it gave me one book that I actually have written, which is my main book that's out there. And then it attributed six other books to me, five of which were real books that some of my colleagues have written, and it lied and said that I wrote those books. One of the books was completely fictional. Fictional in the sense not that it's a book of fiction. It's a book that doesn't exist.
So just imagine what would happen if you're feeding in Hegel's phenomenology and my commentary on it, all the crazy crap that it's going to come up with and say, yeah, this is what's going on here. It could make up anything you want. And unless you actually know Hegel, you won't know that you're getting duped by something that you chose to put your trust in.
Another big problem is going to be superficiality of interpretation. So the way that these large language models work is they've scoured a vast amount of data that was available there on the internet, and hopefully they haven't started scouring other AI-generated data, which is a whole other problem that we can talk about somewhere else. But what they've done essentially is take what was available out there, and you could say that it's in many respects kind of lowest common denominator stuff.
So there's a lot of crappy takes on hegel out there a lot of misinformed takes. I'll just give you one great example. Hegel in the Phenomenology does not use a thesis-antithesis-synthesis approach to things.As a matter of fact he actually criticizes a schematicism of that sort at various points in the Phenomenology. However, a lot of the people out there who have written things on Hegel over the years, including on a lot of websites and other videos and podcasts, have been replicating this wrongheaded approach to Hegel's thought and work.
So you can guarantee that the AI is going to be working off of that stuff ,and is going to feed you erroneous material, and it's going to get things wrong. And again if you don't know Hegel you don't know what you don't know, namely that this thing is giving you bad information generated from many other people's bad information.
The third thing is that AI leads to a kind of flattening of matters. It doesn't think. It doesn't have intelligence. It doesn't learn. It doesn't do any of these sorts of things, which would be problematic already with a lot of philosophers. But when you're looking at somebody like Hegel, within whose work the very problem of thinking itself is being thematized in a way that's supposed to draw you, the reader, in and get you thinking along with, but also against Hegel himself at different points. well, the AI is totally going to lose the thread and (let's say it was intelligent) wouldn't be able to grasp where it's getting things wrong.
But it's not even intelligent. And it's rather foolish to think that it's going to give you an accurate take on something so complex, so convoluted as the movements of thought going on in Hegel's Phenomenology. Even I, a commentator on Hegel, couldn't actually film every single day that I got up there in front of the chalkboard to do it because sometimes I would lose the train of thought myself, somebody who had been studying Hegel for 20 years by the time that I started that project. So an AI is going to be totally out of its depth, and it's not going to tell you that it's out of its depth.
So long story short, I told this person, this is a terrible idea. I don't think that you should do this. If you're going to study Hegel, actually study Hegel. Feel free to use the videos as a resource, but this is a counterproductive way to go, you may think that you're actually helping yourself, but you're getting in your own way.
And then I capped it by saying, listen, if you're committed to this sort of using AI to essentially substitute for the work that's involved in understanding a complex classic work of philosophy, don't contact me again, because there wouldn't be any point in having a conversation. I don't know where it's going to go. Ididn't get a response after that. Perhaps they got discouraged, or perhaps they thought oh this guy's just a Luddite or some fuddy-duddy who doesn't understand AI like somebody smart and hip like I do
And frankly, it doesn't really matter what his response is unless it's something like, yeah, I see that this would be a real mistake to go down this path. I don't foresee any useful conversation with somebody who has effectively deluded themselves, probably in conjunction with a lot of other people helping them with that delusion. sharing it, replicating it within their little teams, there wouldn't be much point in continuing a discussion.
So that's where we'll leave the topic for the time being. Ultimately, the big point here is if you're going to use AI, there are some legitimate uses for it, but it's not going to help you study philosophy effectively. It might help you as a complete beginner to get some starting points, much like Wikipedia has in the past, or reading secondary literature. But you really have to be on your guard against getting misled and thinking that you actually know things that you don't, that when you go to the text you'll unfortunately (or actually fortunately for you) find out that they got wrong, and you've had wrong because you trusted a source that prudence would have told you not to place such reliance upon.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
Last week, I spent three days at a local conference, and it's one that I typically go to every year and occasionally present at (I think I've done three or four talks there over the last 10 or so years), and it's held at Marquette University and called the Aristotle and Aristotelian Tradition Conference.
The theme changes from year to year, so you get different people and different kinds of papers and discussions at each of the conferences, depending on what the theme is and how it ties in with the kind of work that people are doing.
So this year, it was about Aristotle and his predecessors, meaning Aristotle's own discussions, treatments, criticisms, interpretations of people, not just including Plato, his old teacher, but all of these other philosophers that had come before him. And you can find discussions about that sort of thing, for example, in Metaphysics book 1, where he tells us what all these different philosophers thought about the causes of and why they didn't have the four-cause schema that he did, but were on the way to developing it.
Or you can look in other works. For example, there's some references in the Nicomachean Ethics to other people's viewpoints on things. And we don't have to belabor that point. Suffice it to say that Aristotle is very interested in what other people had to say, and he's also equally interested in in taking what's useful or right or even just half developed in their works and incorporating it into his own larger, fairly systematic perspective on matters, but stripping away the things that he thought were off base and saying, at least at certain points in his works, why he thought they were off base.
Now, it's Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, so it doesn't just include attention to Aristotle himself, but also to later thinkers, some of whom are also writing in Greek, some of whom are in various other places, you know Arabic writers on Aristotle, some works from the middle ages. I don't think there was anything on contemporary aristotelianism but i might have missed that because I had to miss a few of the sessions.
In any case, why am I talking about this conference here?
I had the luxury of not having to present any of my own work. I actually had a thought about what I might propose as a topic. It would have been a little bit out of the usual extent of this, which is much more focused on logic and metaphysics and matters like that, I would have focused on Aristotle and his engagements with predecessors in what we call the ethico-political works, which include the Ethics and the Politics, but also the Rhetoric and the Poetics, and a few other works of those sorts.
So I didn't get a proposal together. And the good news about that was I didn't have to present anything. I could just sit back and see what other people had to say. And that was quite enjoyable. Sometimes I could go up to them afterwards or even in the session, ask questions. And I could also see what other people were interested in asking about or even debating about. And this is what you do at a good academic conference.It's one reason why we have this sort of, let's say genre or format or arrangement for doing that sort of thing.
You might wonder, well, what would I get out of going to an academic conference? And with some of them, it might not be very good at all! Maybe you don't get any good discussion with anybody or you're kind of shut out because it turns out to be a gathering of people who all know each other. But in many cases, it's pretty cool to go because you meet up with other people who share a few things in common with him.
So one of them is an interest in something that is probably pretty uncommon. If you meet up with somebody else who routinely reads Aristotle and wants to talk about metaphysical views on, say, causality or the principle of non-contradiction or the nature of the heavens or whatever, anything like that, that is a very, very small amount of people. You could say it's like a weird, tiny fandom, right?
But it's not just fandom, because people who are interested in these things are putting in the time and effort to study them because they think there's something not just interesting, but potentially useful there, something worth knowing about and talking about. And here's another thing that you share in common with them. They're willing to write papers that very few people in the grand scheme of things are ever going to read, let alone read attentively, let alone read. give them useful feedback and responses about.
So they're not just willing to write that. They're willing to travel, to hang out for three days with other people. They're willing to, to some degree, dress up when they're presenting and take what other people have to say about it seriously, and then perhaps go out for dinner later or meet together and discuss it over lunch. So these are quite often very important ways in which people get stimulation.
And it kind of takes me back. Many of you probably know my first full-time teaching position was at Indiana State Prison. And I was teaching for Ball State University in a four-year degree program. But aside from the other professors in the prison program, and there was only one of them who actually taught any philosophy classes, you wouldn't get a lot of what we call peer interaction. I mean, the students were pretty good on the whole, interested, older, so a bit more mature. Very motivated, at least at a certain point, to learn and discuss and get as much as they could out of their education. but they didn't have access to the kinds of materials that we did because of the prison regime.
And typically they were working on their bachelor's. So they weren't people who had done graduate work on Aristotle, or Hegel, or Maurice Blondel, or pick whoever else it happens to be. You do want — most people, I would say if you're an academic — you do want to engage with other people who are not just on your level in terms of their background and preparation and education and research, but who have a similar level of interest in what it is that you're focused on.
And so for me, I mean, you do get some good interaction through reading other people and you can correspond by email or (we didn't have social media back then) but nowadays you could do it in social media. But there's something about actually being in the same space, the same place, the same conversation as other people that is quite valuable.
And I think this is something that many people out there are quite starved for, have this deep desire. I think it's something much more important common and widespread among human beings who are interesting people, because they're interested in interesting things. And so those of you who are listening to this may recognize yourself in there.
Even if you don't have a background academically in philosophy and you came to it kind of late, you might say to yourself, yeah, this is something that I wish I could get more of. And so academic conferences and do satisfy that desire to some degree. They're often more intense, but we could think about other venues in which this can happen.
For example, something that I was fortunate to be invited to participate in just last year, Stoic Camp out in Wyoming, where a bunch of people, some of whom are academics, but many, most of whom are are not, and are from all sorts of walks of life, but are interested in Stoicism, get together way out in the wilderness at a camp and hang out and, you know, do camp things like eating meals together and taking hikes and bonfires, but also intensively study, and talk about, and practice this philosophy as a way of life together for some time.
And you get to know people as you're doing this and I think that's quite valuable it's quite enjoyable it's something that has a lot of dimensions to recommend it so I thought I would talk a little bit here about what it's like to participate in an academic conference.
I think now that I've said it, this is actually a very small subset of a much larger set of ways in which we engage each other about things that matter to us, and really have some substance and depth to them, so they can be explored and shared in common.
And I think that's probably where I'll end. You can think about that yourself, whether you crave, need, desire those sorts of engagements or whether you do just fine without that and what the reason for yourself happens to be for being disposed one way in this matter or in the other direction.
Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
Today I had an interesting conversation that in many respects was a repeat of a number of other conversations I've had in the past where there's a theme that comes up over and over again having to do with philosophy, but not just philosophy in the abstract. Particularly philosophy, we could say in its great thinkers, the ones who form a sort of canon in Western philosophy.
And that canon actually needs to be rather deep and broad and diverse. Otherwise, it's not really a canon. It's just kind of a little bit of a club that people like to hang out in. It would include people that come to mind like Plato and Aristotle and David Hume and Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant. But it should also include a whole host of thinkers from ancient, medieval, early modern, late modern philosophy. Probably it should be so extensive that any one given person would look at the list and say, oh wow, here's somebody on here who I haven't actually read, but maybe they're worth checking out.
Now coming back to the conversation, the thematic involved is that somebody says, wow, I didn't know that this kind of thought with its particular useful application was actually out there, or I didn't know that these thinkers who I've heard about actually had these really cool and interesting and potentially useful things to say.
In the case of the person I was talking with today, they were coming from a background where they'd had one philosophy class in college, and it was a formal logic class, so they didn't really learn much about any particular thinker or delve into texts. And they'd recently become aware of at least with certain philosophers just how much they had to offer and they were thinking: well why didn't I get this in the course of my education, particularly in high school, and then in college, and then in professional studies later on
Why wasn't anybody introducing me to, for example, what Aristotle has to say about having decent conversations with people by using something that gets called dialectic. There are a lot of other ways in which this sort of thing can arise as well.
It's very common if you did study philosophy, but you did so in a way what we call analytic philosophical tradition department, that you're probably not going to get much deep reading of texts and thinkers, because analytics typically don't read an awful lot. They like to stick to small portions of texts. The more that they actually, like for example, Robert Brandom, pay attention to thinkers and their works as a whole, the less analytic they tend to be over time. So the general tendency is to say, we just want the arguments. We just want the gist of it. Don't bother to read all of Bentham or Kant or whoever it's going to be.
You might think that on the other side of the so-called analytic continental divide: that it would be a bit better. But what we see, unfortunately, happening there, as well as in departments and programs that share a similar kind of approach and canon, for example English departments that are really into, say, Derrida and all of his successors, what we see instead is they don't spend much time on the pre-19th century thinkers unless that's the flavor of the day.
And they're going to read certain things and highlight those but you won't go to a department like that and get a really solid introduction to Plato or Aristotle, let alone somebody like Cicero or Plutarch or Augustine or any of these other thinkers.
If you know much about the current landscape of philosophy, then you'll say, okay well, if you didn't get it from going to a place which really doesn't do philosophy much at all, or in an analytic department or a continental department, well, I know where you'll get this sort of stuff, and you'll get it good. It'll be in some sort of school that either specializes in history of philosophy or takes a kind of classical Great Books approach. And you'd think that would be the case.
However, even there, what you find is it's pretty hit or miss because a lot of the places that bill themselves as providing a classical education don't really do much of that. They may teach some Aristotle, but usually in a way that goes against the very spirit of Aristotle's texts, which are all about, you know, inquiry and thinking through issues. They often will treat Aristotle as if he's just a precursor to Thomas Aquinas, or he's articulated these wonderful principles once and for all, and they ignore the, let's call it, dialectical aspects of Aristotle's own texts.
And we could say the same about people reading Cicero or Plato or Augustine. Thomas Aquinas is particularly subject to that sort of treatment. So there's a lot of ways that one can go and then later on find out by actually reading the texts of philosophers just how much they missed out on. It can come from a lot of different backgrounds in this respect.
And interestingly, what I've observed with this is that there's an entire spectrum running from irritation and frustration on one end all the way up to rage on the other end. And what is this spectrum? Well, this is the continuum of the broad emotion of anger. where we have sort of a low-grade thing on one side, frustration, and we have full-blown anger beyond anger, rage, fury on the other hand, and everything in between.
And ironically, if you want to know about that, well, there's all sorts of great philosophical resources on that in the Western tradition. You probably heard me talk about quite a few of them. Aristotle is one of the thinkers who does, in fact, tell us an awful lot about that emotion. Seneca would be another one. He wrote an entire book on anger. And one of the common elements to the philosophical treatments of anger is that there's a realization it's a complex emotion and it arises out of the perception that some sort of wrong has been done to you or to others.
Somebody or something that you care about or feel responsible for or identify with. And that wrong is unjust. It shouldn't have happened. And so you desire to respond in some way that would set this right by punishing, by retaliating. And that's what anger at its core really involves. There's more to it than that.
We don't have to worry about the other elements because what we're really interested in here is that emotion so often arising in relation to realizing that what you studied is didn't actually give you what you see you could have gotten, what you should have gotten, right? There is an ought, a moral obligation there that you feel has been violated in some way.
And especially if you paid for that education, you would be rightly thinking, I paid all this money. Why didn't I get what they should have provided me with? And quite often, the answer is they didn't know any better than you. Those people who were teaching you, who were setting up the curriculum, they probably were themselves fairly ignorant and in an unphilosophical way, relying uncritically on what other people had to say about where you would actually go to find the cool stuff that now you're discovering.
And what we see all too often, I think this is quite surprising to people who imagine that philosophers are all these hyper-rational people, which indeed they're not. What we see happening is a replication of a vicious circle. So we'll take an example in continental philosophy. Why would you read Aristotle?
You know that he's committed to a substance, metaphysics, and an ethics that focuses on virtue. We know that these sorts of concepts have been used in ways that go against human dignity, or are logocentric and phallocentric, or not rhizomatic enough, or pick whatever flavor of the day you've got for the cool kids ideas that are being bandied about.
So we don't need to actually read Aristotle. It's enough that we criticize him and then move on to the more interesting stuff that we're going to talk about and what happens we have generations of people who don't actually know what's there in Aristotle's works
This could equally happen in a great books program where people have far too narrow conceptions about what Aristotle is teaching and what his method is and ideas like that. And they just transmit that to their students in a dogmatic fashion.
The remedy for this is pretty straightforward and simple. You got to actually read the texts and see what's in there. And until you do that, you really don't know, do you? And if an expert claims that they know exactly what's in those texts, but they haven't read them recently, you should probably be a little bit suspicious of that self-proclaimed or proclaimed by many others expert.
In the end, the remedy is not to get angry and say there ought to be a law, we ought to change things. It's much lower level. You can change it for yourself. You can find other people who are, in fact, reading these thinkers and texts and talking about the important issues. And if you want to incorporate any of those insights into your own life and thinking, there is literally nothing stopping you except the demand on your own part that somebody else go along on the journey with you.
Somebody who probably is invested in going on a different journey. So this is a topic I probably need to do some writing about because I've been thinking about it for quite a long time. Having encountered this sort of realization and then reaction on the part of so many of the people I have talked to over the years.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
Today I was doing a little bit of writing about a class that I'm going to be teaching for the second time, which is called Stoicism and the Cardinal Virtues. And one of the things that I was mentioning as I was writing about this class, trying to get people interested in signing up for it and taking it along with me, is the fact that when it comes to virtue, the four cardinal virtues, the subordinate virtues that each of those four cardinal virtues encompasses or includes, what we don't have is any one single Stoic text where you're going to get a comprehensive overview of that.
Instead, what we have is a set of different discussions spread throughout a whole bunch of different thinkers, a whole bunch of texts, many of which are actually by Stoics, some of which are by people like Cicero who are not themselves Stoics but know a lot about it, communicate a good bit about it, and find certain aspects of the Stoic point of view rather attractive.
What we have to do is take these many different discussions, which, by the way, are in two different languages, ancient Greek, Latin, right? And we have to do a lot of connecting the dots, correlating what one person says with what another person says, catching allusions that are being made, for example, in Epictetus, who talks about a number of these different subordinate virtues without mentioning the cardinal virtues by name. We have to piece together a fairly systematic doctrine.
And what we're doing there is what I for about 20 years or so have come to call “philosophical detective work”. That's my own phrase. Nobody else is required to use it. You're not going to be able to look it up in an online dictionary or a website and have people say, oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. It's just a useful term that I have been providing people with for a number of years, probably a little bit ambiguous, maybe misleading or inexact in what they make of it so that they can understand the kind of work that I and certain other philosophers do.
And I say certain other philosophers because there are other philosophers who I see doing this, particularly people working in the history of philosophy, but not restricted to that. But I also say certain other philosophers because we're probably in the minority when it comes to the contemporary philosophy world where other people are taking different approaches.
If you look at my academic writings and even some of my popular writings, you'll see me doing this in my own way with a lot of different thinkers. So, for example, when it comes to Aristotle, I’m somebody who delves into particular topics and reads across a number of different texts where Aristotle is discussing that.
On anger, for example, I will bring in the Rhetoric and the two Ethics, the Nicomachean and Eudamian, the Politics, and any other text that I think is particularly relevant for what it is that I'm discussing, which might be the Topics, might be the De Anima, might even be the Poetics for that matter.
When I'm working on Thomas Hobbes, okay, there I'm mostly using Leviathan, but I'm ranging throughout the first two books of the work and I'm connecting together discussions rather than saying, oh, I'm only going to look at this particular chapter. I am going to bring in all sorts of things to try to illuminate the topic that I'm interested in.
If I'm writing about Jeremy Bentham, well, I obviously will be engaging with his most important and most often excerpted work, which is the introduction to the principles of morality and legislation. But I'll also bring in things from other works by him as well, and I'll be ranging over the whole of that big, thick, and oftentimes boring, but also quite interesting book.
So when it comes to the Stoics on the virtues, I am looking at not just what Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, these three late Stoics, have to say, but also what we find in Cicero's works or in Musonius Rufus's lectures or in the summaries of Stoic doctrine that we have in Diogenes Laertes and in Arius Didymus and other texts as well, because what I'm going to be doing is putting together a comprehensive picture as best as I can of what it is that these people, these really deep and systematic thinkers, wanted to tell us about these interesting, complicated phenomena.
In this case, what we call the virtues, but I might also be looking at an emotion or something else, a philosophy of action, motivations that people have. And in order to do this kind of work, there is a important prerequisite that I think a lot of philosophers don't want to engage in and don't see the usefulness of — perhaps were never even introduced to as an important way of doing philosophy — and that is to read widely and attentively and note connections between things.
If, for example, you want to know what St. Anselm's ideas about something that he talks about are, you have to read not just the most famous book where there's a chapter on that. You actually have to read around history.in his works, and probably not just read particular treatises, but also look at his letters to other people if there's anything relevant in there, or at the life of St. Anselm, or even texts like the Dicta Anselmi, which hasn't even been translated into English,and you might find useful stuff even in his Prayers and Meditations.
It's when you do that, when you actually engage with a thinker and their body of work, not just in a very pragmatic way, saying I'm interested in Anselm's ontological argument, so I'm only going to read Proslogion 2,or maybe 2 to 4, and the response to Gaunillo. But you say I want to see what he makes of other arguments in his works. In particular, since the Prosologian is supposed to be kind of a condensation of the many arguments of the Monologion, maybe you got to read that. But you probably also have to read through his works looking for other instances of “that than which nothing greater can be thought”, which you will find as a catchphrase used in other works, if you actually go to them and you read them.
If you don't do that, then unless you are fortunate enough to read somebody else who is doing that kind of work and they put it down in their own books or articles, you won't even suspect what you're missing. And that is where I think the vast majority of people who study education and teach and talk about and produce resources on philosophy actually are.
By contrast, if you really want to know a thinker well, you need to read a lot of the stuff that they've written. So it's not enough to understand Rene Descartes. just to read his Discourse on Method and the Meditations. You probably also want to read the Objections and Replies to the Meditations, but you also want to read letters that the guy wrote and some of his other works, and then you get a much fuller sense of what his project is and what he's doing and what positions he actually develops and holds and defends on particular matters.
I don't actually know how I wound up doing this other than being interested in reading as much as I could of particular authors and then seeing the interconnections between ideas and arguments and distinctions and other elements of philosophy spread across their works. But early on in my development as, I would say, a graduate student and then as a young professor, that's what I was tending to do in my academic articles and book chapters. And I think I even did some of that with my students in my classes and with colleagues, for example, at conferences saying, you know if you check out this, this person is also saying this about the topic.
And that has become one of my main approaches to understanding philosophical thinkers and movements over time. I imagine that many of my peers find what I do differently, either confusing or frustrating. They don't understand why there's so many allusions to other works when it seems like we could make things a lot simpler. But I'm not interested in simplifying.
I'm interested in doing justice to the complexity and depth and richness of the thought that we're lucky enough to have access to under the names of these interesting thinkers. And so that's what I call philosophical detective work. I'm not saying that anybody else necessarily has to do it. or that it's even the best way to study philosophy or teach it or talk about it. But I think it's a viable way of working at it, and it's one that is rather respectful of the great thinkers who so generously contributed their works to us.
And so those are some reflections for today. I don't really know what you ought to make of them, but I thought I would share it with you and you can tell me what your own views or experiences are when it comes to this approach.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
I had an interesting but short conversation today in Facebook that I'm going to use as sort of a launching point for thinking about some bigger picture issues having to do with how you study philosophy, particularly if you're doing it on your own, if you're somebody who can't do it full time in a school with the guidance of professors (which, by the way, is probably a bit overrated. It's kind of a grab bag. But that's a conversation for another time.)
So this person was commenting on a post that I made, where I was linking to the piece that I wrote last night about Alasdair MacIntyre and some of my memories of interactions with him that, to me, revealed a kind of character that I've talked about before in this podcast, specifically with MacIntyre. So I don't need to go over any of that again.
The person probably expressed themselves poorly because what they were asking for is something that I'm asked for an awful lot in comments and emails and AMAs. Which is: tell me what works of a philosopher are most important or essential for me to begin with.
But what this person added to it that kind of set me thinking in a certain line (perhaps wrongly) was: “I don't want to waste time or effort.” And I thought, you know, there's a couple things wrong with this.
One is that if you're just beginning in philosophy or really in any field, you don't know enough to be able to say where you're wasting time or effort. As a matter of fact, this is something that MacIntyre has drawn upon an awful lot in his work as an analogy for moral theory, to learning how to play an instrument, or learning how to work with a crew on a fishing boat, or learning how to do some sort of handicraft like pottery, and anything along those lines,
You don't know enough at the start, even though you may feel that you do, to be able to say what's a waste of your time or effort and what isn't. It's up to people who know a bit better than you, if you're lucky enough to have them there personally. who can say: Well, here's what you need to do. I understand that you don't really like playing scales and doing these drills on the flute or the piano or whatever it is, but you really do need to do this if you want to progress.
If you want to be able to fish with us, first you've got to learn how to stand on a boat and not fall over when the waves hit, and then you've got to learn how to work with the netting, and how to tell certain signs about the water, and we could go on and on and on. You get the point. I don't need to belabor that any further.
So there's that part going on, the you don't know enough to know what you don't know, which I may talk about somewhere else, because I think that's actually very important. People get themselves into all sorts of trouble and predicaments and emotional conundrums because they're working off of insufficient information. And they draw conclusions from it about what they ought to do.
And this is where you actually do waste time and effort going down blind alleys, so to speak, or getting yourself stuck in a cul-de-sac somewhere. And then you got to come out and redo it.
The other thing that I was perhaps wrongly reading into it, because I said to the person, you know, that's not the sort of attitude that you want to bring to philosophical works, is this notion that you can divide works up into those that are actually worth your time and effort and those which are a waste of it.
Now, there are definitely some books out there that either in general for most people or for a particular person, given where they currently are, would be kind of a waste of their time and effort relative to something else. I don't suggest that people dive right away in the beginning of their philosophical studies into Hegel's Phenomenology or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Spinoza's Ethics or any of these other texts that people take as kind of pinnacles and must-reads. Again, another topic for another time.
And it would be kind of a waste of time, relatively speaking again, to say: Well, I'm going to plow my way through Kant's first critique, and I'll just do that rather than reading other things where you might make a little bit more progress. I can certainly understand that notion.
But the idea that philosophical texts in general, particularly with somebody like MacIntyre, where his writing is pretty accessible, deliberately so, and he touches on many interesting and important topics, weaving them together well, there really isn't anything that would be a waste of your time to read or to study or to reread and go back to.
And I think we can say that for a lot of philosophers, even if you're reading something that's very challenging and makes reference to a lot of other thinkers that you haven't probably studied before, like say Aristotle's Metaphysics, it's not a waste of your time for you to be reading that, particularly given all the other things that we do that, at least in comparison to reading philosophy, do turn out to be kind of wastes of time.
You know, scrolling on our phones, watching television shows that we probably won't remember a year from now, composing emails about all sorts of topics to people who probably aren't going to read them. You know, we could compare those things and say, yeah, that's kind of a waste of time. You know, maybe not. Again, who's to say what actually constitutes a waste of time? It's always going to be in comparison to something else that you could be spending your time upon.
So as we went back and forth in conversation, it emerged that this person was probably underrating their own capacities for reading and understanding and study, which is a very common set of ideas that people impose on themselves and labor under when it comes to philosophy and not just philosophy, but other fields as well.
They say, oh, I'm just not very good at this. I'm not intellectual. I'm not very smart. And, you know, if you approach things with that attitude, you create could then say: Well, I don't want to waste my time studying something that's far beyond me that I'm just not ready for. And that would actually make some sense.
But again, with McIntyre, I don't think there's an awful lot where a decently educated and well-motivated person who does want to understand what he's saying would pick up a book and just not be able to make any sense of it whatsoever, and wouldn't be able to make some progress, any more than I think that's the case with reading Plato's dialogues (granted some are much more difficult than others, and you might be a little confused at first with all the variety of perspectives going on). But it's worth plowing away at
And so here is the broader general point. I'm not saying that nobody ever wastes their time or effort studying particular works of philosophy, but I will say, and here's a claim that I'm making, that for nearly all of us, our default should not be heading in with this attitude of, “I don't want to waste my time and effort.”
It should be rather, well, I've got some time and effort to spare, and I could be wasting it on things that are very trivial, but I'm choosing to devote it to something that I think is going to have a better yield, a better payoff. a better return on investment. And I don't really know that that's the case, but I've seen that it has been the case for other people.
And not just in the last five years, like some fly-by-night personal development program. “If it worked for me, it can work for you. Sign up for my coaching package” kind of nonsense. It's been working for people studying philosophy for thousands of years with some of these texts.
Now, granted, MacIntyre's stuff is much more recent, since the guy just finished up with his life last week. But when hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people have read somebody and said, Hey, there's something here worth studying. Maybe that can be a sign that, since you're talking not just about bestseller lists or beach reading or things that make it on to daytime talk shows, but actual intellectual work that you can take that as an index. There's really something there, that if you don't hold yourself back and act as if it's up to the text to show to you that it's worth your time and effort, but you actually invest the time and effort, you will likely (not guaranteed, but likely) see it pay off.
And so I think that this worried attitude that some people bring to their studies, what am I going to get out of this? That's the wrong question early on. First, you actually have to do the “out of this”. Well, you've got to go in first, and then you can figure out what is going to happen when you come out.
So those are a few reflections about an interesting exchange that perhaps I misinterpreted, but I certainly got some mileage out of thinking about it. Maybe it's helpful for you to hear these words yourself, and if it steers anybody away from a counterproductive attitude towards studying philosophical text, then it did a decent job at what it was supposed to do.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
I saw a very interesting discussion in Stoicism Reddit today, and it was titled, “What Do You Think Are the Flaws of Stoicism?” It drew a lot of discussion, much of which I think was fairly decent. And I got to thinking about this, and I realized that what we have here is a topic where we probably want to make some distinctions and explore things a good bit because we use this term flaws or we could say blind spots or things that can be criticized.
There's all sorts of stuff like that that we can bring up. And I think a lot of people take them as basically all the same thing and having the same implication. If there's a flaw, well, then there's something wrong with Stoicism. And some things that might appear to be flaws at first could actually turn out either not to be flaws, to be based on mistaken assumptions, or they're the sorts of things where you can say, well yeah, this is a flaw in a sense, but it's not one we really care about that much. It doesn't shake the system, so to speak.
And so there's a number of different ways of criticism that I want to put out there for you and have you see the differences between them.
So I want to begin by talking about criticisms that can be made and the fact that a lot of the criticisms that people will make in the present are are actually criticisms that people have made of the Stoics either around their own time or a little bit later or later on in the modern period or perhaps even in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. So a lot of people effectively reinvent wheels by coming up with what they think to be new, unique criticisms, but maybe they were actually made already by Plutarch, who has a whole book called On Stoic Self-Contradictions, or by Friedrich Nietzsche, who has a lot to say about the Stoics, much of which is not particularly well-focused as it turns out. Or you know, we could pick whoever else we want.
And one thing that we should be aware of is that for a lot of the criticisms that people do have of the Stoics, there's already responses to those in the Stoic texts that we are fortunate enough to have. We don't even have to defer them and say, oh well, that was covered in Chrysippus' book that we don't have. No, in the Epictetus, the Seneca, the Musonius Rufus, Arius Didymus, Marcus Aurelius, these different thinkers, we can often find things where we're like, yeah I mean, people say this, and here's what Epictetus actually says about this very case, or Seneca says in response to this very case.
So we don't expect everybody to have read everything, but quite a few criticisms are not good criticisms if they've already been satisfactorily addressed by the Stoics. Now, it might well turn out that somebody diagnoses a flaw and makes a criticism of something that's genuinely new that hasn't been said before. I think that can happen. And I don't think necessarily that the Stoics did get everything right. We'll come back to that in just a bit.
Another common criticism that gets made is that the Stoic body of work is not available to us in its entirety. And as a of what was originally available. You know, we don't have any full writings from the early and middle Stoics. And we don't even have all of what Arian wrote down of Epictetus's teachings. The Discourses was supposedly eight books. We only have four of them. And then, you know, the stuff that's in the Enchiridion and possibly the fragments, because some of those are kind of sketchy. So yeah, that's a real issue.
And when it comes to Stoic physics and Stoic logic, so their cosmology, their religious views, their logic, their epistemology, we've lost a lot. We do have a lot of Stoic ethics, probably enough, I would say, although it'd always be nice to have more, wouldn't it? And can you really fault the Stoics for not having somehow preserved their own works? I mean, we can say this about a lot of ancient schools of philosophy, some of which we have nothing by except secondhand in other people's works. So I don't think that's really a valid criticism or pointing out a flaw.
But there is something that's kind of connected to that that we could say might be kind of a flaw. And this would be the Stoics not having responses to later and very different perspectives. You know, what if an Existentialist wanted to criticize a Stoic?Well, assuming that the Existentialist actually got the Stoics right, which is a big assumption, well perhaps there could be something to that. Maybe they do expose flaws or gaps or blind spots in Stoic doctrines.
I don't think that the worries about the Stoics not knowing enough about 20th century and 21st century culture, like for example, the existence of the internet and mobile technology and cell phones and dating apps and stuff like that, that doesn't strike me as a very valid criticism because what we can find in the Stoic texts, they don't obviously speak about those things directly because Seneca doesn't know about cell phones. Epictetus doesn't know about dating. But the things that they say understood rightly are applicable to those matters. That's why we do workshops on that and write articles about that.
Another common thing that has to do with the Stoics being stuck in the past is the criticism that their worldview and assumptions on a moral level are actually deficient because, for example, they accepted the institution of slavery, which we all know is bad. And you know, I'm willing to say that slavery is bad. I'm also willing to point out that every single civilization that we see in ancient times that proceeded past a certain level of development had something like slavery, and that it didn't completely go away. We still have some places in the world where slavery is being practiced and defended.
So it doesn't strike me as a really valid criticism, particularly when we go to the texts and we see that Epictetus and Seneca have an awful lot to say about how you ought to be as a free person treating slaves. And you should reflect on the fact that you could be in their situation so easily if some things had just gone a slightly bit different or that the slave is a rational being like yourself. So you should treat them not as a slave, but as an employee or a family member. And we could go on and on and on with similar sorts of examples
Another thing that people sometimes will view as a flaw, and here we're not looking at the past, we're looking at the present, is they look at current proponents or practitioners of Stoicism and they say: Wow you don't live up to what it is that you say you're all about. You are inconsistent. There's contradictions. You fail. And interestingly, guess who already addressed this?
Seneca in, if I'm remembering right, On the Happy Life. He says, and he's not just talking about the Stoics. He's actually talking about Socrates and Aristotle and Plato. He talks about people in his own time who say, Oh these philosophers, they don't actually live up fully to their own doctrine. So therefore, none of it's any good.
And he says, listen, all you need to be worried about at your current pretty bad state is whether they've gotten further along the path to virtue than you. You don't need to be criticizing them for not being legendary sages. You just need to quit being less of a screw up yourself. And these people have given you some tools that are helpful for that. And I think that's a perfectly valid response in the present.
So I don't see those as really flaws myself. It just means that people fail and they often don't live up to their values or their plans and intentions. And we see that in every aspect of life, not just in applying philosophy. Does this mean that I have now successfully defended the Stoics from every one of their possible critics? No, not at all.
And as a matter of fact, I don't agree with the Stoics entirely myself on every point. If I did, then I would be a Stoic and not an eclectic, which is what I tell everybody that I am, drawing on multiple and sometimes incompatible, at least on certain points, philosophical traditions that I hopefully understand fairly well, well enough to bring them together in a life that's not completely screwed up. So there's some things where I don't buy the Stoic line, and I'm willing to say that there could be flaws in Stoicism.
As a matter of fact even people who were attracted to it in ancient times like Cicero, look at how he begins his Stoic paradoxes. He says you guys have got some good ethical philosophy but man are you bad at presenting it, because you don't pay adequate attention to rhetoric like the Aristotelians do. Let me show you how it's done, buddies! And that's what he does in his Stoic Paradoxes.
So I think we can say that there's flaws, but there's fewer flaws than many people take there to be. Or we'll simply say this. There are fewer things that hold up to scrutiny when we actually look at them carefully and the assumptions behind them, and we go to the Stoic texts to see if there's any answers to them.
There's fewer of those that turn out to be genuine flaws than one might at first imagine. And I think that's often going to be the case for any philosophical thinker or perspective or school that people have been reading and talking about for quite a long time. People caricature René Descartes. A lot of the answers or addresses of their criticisms are right there just in other parts of Descartes that they didn't read and similarly for many other thinkers.
So that's all that I have to say about this. Hopefully this is a useful set of reflections for you.
Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
Today in a tutorial session, I had a client ask me about the criterion of truth and about different perspectives or theories on what makes something true or false. And at the start, I said, well, we probably probably want to think in the plural.
Because if we're understanding criterion in the singular, to be what it is that we can use as an index for something being true or the opposite being false, or perhaps even not knowing which it is, then since we do have multiple theoretical perspectives on truth articulated in the history of philosophy, many of which are not known to quite a few people, including those who write about theories of truth.
Since this is the case, we need to talk in the plural, because there isn't just one conception of truth out there that everybody knows. buys into, accepts, uses references. And I think one natural place to begin is with the sort of thing that you'll find if you go online and look up truth in encyclopedias of philosophy, or on various websites, or you might find in an Intro to Philosophy textbook, or when you Google it and videos or podcasts come up where somebody claims that they're providing you with the three basic theories or five basic theories or something like that.
So usually there are three that show up over and over again, and sometimes they're well explained and sometimes they're not one of them is called the correspondence theory of truth another is usually called the coherence theory of truth and then the other one is usually also called the pragmatic theory of truth but you can find some outliers in the use of the language.
And the idea behind the correspondence theory of truth is that what we're looking for is correspondence, or to use Thomas Aquinas' term from earlier on, adequation between how things are in reality or in being, and our mental representations of those or our thoughts about them, or our linguistic you could say representations or expressions of those things.
I think this is actually a useful idea. It does cover a lot of ground. We can say when I give you a proposition which happens to be true right now such as I am holding a full cup of coffee, which is indeed the case, and you're thinking about it or you're hearing it, well, that's a true statement. It'll stop being a true statement once I've drank the coffee, or if I spill it or whatever else changes that condition.
And, you know, this works for quite a few things.: This is what we mean by true or false. If I tell you I have a million dollars in the bank that I will be happy to send you if you just find forward me a little bit of money, say $2,000, so that I can access this money and then get it to you, and I will do so out of gratitude.
I think many of you recognize the internet scams that set things up that way. Those are probably all false statements, right? We can say, what makes them false? Well, I'm not describing things as they really are.
So then we have the coherence theory of truth. And the idea there, this is often associated with people like Hegel or the Hegelians, is that what makes propositions true or thoughts true is not just corresponding to isolated bits of reality, but rather how they all cohere together in something like a system. There are no contradictions between them, or at least no important contradictions. And this can actually be quite useful as sort of a supplement, you could say, to the correspondence theory of truth.
And then another one that often gets talked about is the pragmatic theory of truth. I would say that, you know, this has been around longer than the term pragmatism has, although pragmatic is an earlier term. You see, for example, Kant actually using it. So the idea is typically associated with people like William James or John Dewey, people that we call pragmatists.
And it's often boiled down to truth is what works for a person. So, you know, you could see a lot of possibility for abuse in this. And it's not an adequate representation of, say, William James's position as he articulates it. But it's good enough for now, right?
So we can talk about other theories that are out there that have been recently named, you know, a semantic theory of truth, deflationary. But those are basically just things that philosophers, mostly analytic philosophers, think in terms of.
But there's actually a much richer and earlier history that I would like to mention. And this is what I told my client. And this is what I think is. You might be interested in as well there are conceptions of truth that are not adequately captured or expressed by these other named theories and they're associated with pretty important philosophers throughout philosophies history
So I'm not going to begin at the beginning. Instead, I'm going to start with somebody who this client and I have talked about quite a bit, and I think this may have been motivating the discussion and his question from the start.
So Kierkegaard has this notion of truth as subjectivity. Now, he's not saying that all truth is subjective or anything like that, but there are some important truths that we can only grasp subjectively and through commitment, perhaps even through passion, maybe the highest passion of faith, right?
So this is a different notion of of truth at play there. And it doesn't mean that we have to throw everything out and say, this is the only one that matters, because that's not what Kierkegaard is doing.
This client is quite interested in existentialist thought. So if you know your existentialism and you are used to talking in terms of truth, then Heidegger's truth as alētheia, which is a Greek term meaning something like unconcealing or uncovering. But it is the standard term for truth, and used as a noun, as an adjective. So Heidegger has a conception that doesn't fit in well with these standard theories either. But I think it's actually communicating something quite useful to us
Now going backwards in time, somebody who I do a lot of work on is Anselm of Canterbury, and he actually has quite a few thoughts about the nature of truth, veritas in Latin. And he's got a whole dialogue on it which is really important but very infrequently read by the people who want to talk about truth. Because in it not only does he discuss what's clearly a correspondence theory of truth with respect to our thoughts and our words and the realities that they're supposed to express, but he also talks about truth in the will and truth in everything.
So this is a differing conception. He will also discuss truth in the being of things and God as truth. So here we have a much more robust conception of truth than what we're typically getting. And I'd like to throw us even further back. And I'm just kind of picking a bunch of people. This is not a survey of every single philosopher and what they've had to say about truth.
But if you think about Aristotle, if you've ever read the Nicomachean Ethics, book six, where he's talking about what we often call the intellectual virtues, these are states or habits, hexeis, that allow us to attain truth in different kinds of matters. And Aristotle will talk about practical truth, truth that has to do with actions, somewhat like what Anselm was talking about, probably along the lines of what Kierkegaard is also implying, and our desires are right. The way in which he defines practical truth is not just having intellectual matters right but also having the right, rightly oriented let's say desires, a desire in the very broadest sense orexis
So I brought up these four as examples of important philosophical figures who really thought a lot about the nature of truth and have a lot to contribute that the let's call it standard fair literature often shows an ignorance of or a disengagement with that I think is quite important.
And what's the upshot of this? There is no one single conception of truth that is truly the only one. We actually need these to form a sort of composite picture of what it means to be true. And we need to use different conceptions or criteria of of truth in different kinds of situations. And I don't think that there is one single overarching perspective that we can draw all of these into.
But I also don't think that it makes everything up for grabs either. We don't have to be pessimists about that. So this is something that I was leading my client through. I thought it could be interesting for those of you who listen to this to learn about and reflect upon. And so there you go.
Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
Over roughly the last week, I've been producing a set of new core concept videos on two main works of Plutarch, and I've been doing that as resources for my academic students enrolled at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in a class that's called Philosophy, Mindfulness, and Life, which is exploring philosophies as ways of life.
So we look at texts that not only give you sort of frameworks, but also useful practices, or as Martha Nussbaum calls them (and I'm bringing this up because this really is the best term in this case) therapeutic arguments. And that's what Plutarch is providing in On Tranquility of Mind, and to a lesser extent in his work How A Person Can Become Consciousness of Their Progress in virtue.
So today I shot several videos on his work On Tranquility of Mind, and one particular line of reasoning that I think might be really interesting to not just talk about and explore. But think about how it applies to our own life, and mindsets and the outcome of our thinking about matters has to do with.
So here's the term that I actually used for the title of the video, desiring or trying to do everything. Nobody can do everything. There's that old saying, you can't have it all. And by have it all, they mean that you not only can't have possession of everything, but you can't apply yourself to do everything at a very high level in life.
As a matter of fact, if you think about it, there's probably far more things that you cannot do at any given point in time, or even over the course of your entire life, than the things that you can do. So you always kind of have to make some choices, decide priorities. But that doesn't mean that we can't feel like or desire to do it all, especially if we've been getting wrongheaded ideas about this from other people, which would include the people we grow up with and we're surrounded with or our friend group.
But I would say that social media has probably contributed to this problem because we have a much greater possibility of comparing ourselves to the at least superficial appearance of the lives of others. And we also get exposed to a much wider variety of possible things to think we ought to be involved with. So I think this is a really helpful discussion.
He gives you examples like he says, not only do people demand to be at the same time rich, and learned, and physically strong, and convivial spirits, and pleasant company, and friends of kings, and rulers of cities. So that's seven different things right there that you're probably never going to combine in one person.But adding to that, unless they shall also have dogs and horses and quails and roosters that can win prizes, they are disconsolate.
And he brings up an example of Dionysus, who was one of the greatest tyrants of his age in Syracuse and Sicily, but he couldn't sing verses better than a poet named Philixenus, and he couldn't get the better of Plato in dialectic, so he was very angry about this. He felt like somehow life is letting him down, and he actually sent Philoxenos into the stone quarries basically to die,and he sold Plato off into slavery. And that's the wrong way to go about things.
So how do we get into this problem? Well, he starts out by saying that it's a matter of having expectations that are too high and aiming at things that are too great. Then when we fail, we blame our destiny and our fortune instead of our own foolishness. And what's the root of this?
Well, he says that it is self-love, which is philautia in Greek. And this makes people desirous of being the first all the time. So that's philoprotos, desiring being number one, we would say, and to be victorious or to be successful in everything. And this is a term philonikos that the Greeks use quite a bit. They took philonikia, this desire for winnings, for superiority, for surpassing others, as a fairly basic human desire. And I think they're probably right about that. People really do enjoy feeling like they've won in some sort of way.
And by not managing this well and being realistic about it, we get ourselves into all sorts of trouble. And Plutarch points out, well, he's got a lot of considerations, but the one that I think is actually the best here is even among the gods, the different gods have different powers, different functions, different domains. But if we think about human beings, no human being can actually combine all these things in one person.
And he brings up, interestingly, the legendary Stoic sage who supposedly could do this. And he says, this is liable to discourage people, including people who are attracted to Stoicism, because they look at this ideal and they're like, oh man, I fall short of that. My life sucks. So this is a real recipe for making your life unhappy by having wrongheaded ideas.
Not only is it impossible to Just to have it all. But there's another deeper reason why that's the case. And it's quite simple. Some of the things that you're trying to combine in one person's life are actually incompatible with each other. They rule each other out.
So he uses a couple interesting examples. If you're going to do training in rhetoric or mathematics, or for that matter, philosophy, that requires a fairly quiet life and some free time. But if you want to be involved in political or the active life, the social life, and attain the friendship of important people, you can't do that without hard work and full occupation of your time.
Likewise, if you want to spend a lot of time on your body, making it really strong and vigorous, you're probably going to make the soul work. And so you can't do everything all at once. They interfere with each other. He also talks about making money. If you want to devote your life to making lots of money, well, that's really cool. That increases your wealth. But if you want to make progress in philosophy, you probably need to make making money a pretty low priority.
So if you're going to try to combine these ways of life with each other, you're not actually going to be successful because they're not compatible with each other. It's going to go on and give some additional advice along these lines and lots of examples. You can go to the text and read it. As a matter of fact, I highly encourage you to do that.
He's going to finish up by talking about something really interesting. So there's this line that in English translation, it's a great line by itself, but I think if you can read it in the Greek, it's got a lot of other resonances to it. So he tells us that when we're trying to actually have it all, what we end up doing is slandering ourselves. We wind up being displeased and we despise ourselves as living an incomplete and trivial life.
So slandering ourselves is a translation of the Greek term soukophantomen. And it's the word that we get sycophant from, basically a butt kisser, somebody who is kissing up to other people. But it also has a really important meaning. Second meaning in ancient Greek, a sycophant was also somebody who would report other people to the authorities to try to get in good with the authorities or maybe even make some money from them. So a narc, a snitch, as we call them in American English.
Why is this interesting to note? Well, you're snitching on yourself when you are being that kind of sycophant. So you're telling somebody, yourself, I guess, the world, other people, that your life isn't a good life.
Being displeased, that's a decent enough translation of akharistomen. And another way you could translate that, because it's coming from a Greek term that means both joy and gratitude, is being ungrateful about the life that you live.
And then this despising, that's kataphronumen. And that is also translatable as have contempt, look down upon. Literally, it combines the terms for downward and for thinking about. And so we look at our own life and we despise it as being needy, missing something, endeus. And a telos so what's being translated as trivial there a better way of translating it would be not having a proper goal to it and thereby being trivial so that's what happens to us if we let these unrealistic ideas about being able to have it all or that we should try to have it all.
And I think that we're probably at greater risk in our current society, perhaps, than they were in ancient times for cultivating these desires because we hear these messages coming from all sorts of directions and we see people being presented as if they actually do have it all when they don't. If we looked closely at their lives, we would see that they're not the perfect combinations of everything good, that their social media account or their publicists or whoever else is presenting them as.
So I think this is a really great passage. I think it would be good for us to keep this in mind when we feel down about not being good at something or not succeeding in some area of our life. We can look at what we actually are good at or successful in to whatever measure we have that and say, that's probably as good as it's going to get for me. And that is good enough, not just for me as a person, but for me as a human being who can't possibly do it all. And if we do that, we're going to have a much more content and happy and tranquil life.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
Today I'm in the middle of processing some thoughts and feelings about somebody who died quite a long time ago, and I only found out about it yesterday.
So you may have seen the piece that I published a little over a year ago, A Tale of Two Philosophy Teachers, which was about two of the people that I had in high school who taught philosophy classes. One was called a philosophy class. It was intro to philosophy. And that wasn't very good at all. And the other was actually a Sacraments class, but it was taught by a guy who decided to teach us philosophy and to teach in a philosophical way. And that was very, very good.
You may have heard me talking about them in other places as well, because sometimes people ask me in interviews and video channels or podcasts or stuff like that. How did you get started in philosophy? Did you have it in high school? And I tell the story.
So I posted yesterday or rather reposted the piece that I'd written. And I included a little bit of a call to action as I was putting it in social media saying, you know, I never was able to track down this person who was a substitute teacher just for one semester, came from Seattle. I don't know where he went after that. His name was Mr. Lorenzo, but I don't know his first name.
And I never had any success in talking to people from my high school, who he was, where he went to, whether he was still around, because they didn't keep records about that sort of thing, not from what was happening in the 1980s. And so anyway, I put it out there.
And one of the people who I know from high school who has now become a friend, but was actually like my bitterest rival back in high school (there's a whole story that could be told there), he wrote me in LinkedIn and he said Oh I know that guy. I didn't even realize that this now friend was in the class, but I guess he was and it probably happened during our junior year.
And he said Yeah that was Perry Lorenzo. And I've thought about him a lot. And by the way, here is an article about him. He was pretty important out there in Seattle, and he died in 2009. And he was involved with all sorts of matters. He taught at a high school. He also taught in a college or a university. He was involved with the opera and all sorts of other interesting things about him. But he died only 51 years old in 2009.
And it looks like from the story that he came out to spend that semester with us and told us about Seattle at the time. He had had this Augustinian conversion, as he called it, which was part of why he was teaching us about St. Augustine. And in order to teach us about Augustine, he had to also teach us about Aristotle and Plato and Manichaeism and some psychology stuff as well.
So, it looks like he went back to Seattle after that one semester with us and went on to have a really great teaching career. Apparently he was quite gifted. He was very devoted to the life of the mind, to the Catholic and classical intellectual traditions. He was heavily involved in the arts and apparently an all-around great guy.
So it's very interesting me to read this because I got to know him, at least to the degree that a teenager who's bright but troubled and in somebody's class with somebody who's probably only 10 years older than him and is engaging in discussion within the classroom can get to actually know somebody.
I got to know him as somebody who was a genuinely well-motivated teacher, and not all the teachers were like that. As a matter of fact I would say less than half of them at my high school were people who I would say had that sort of mindset. I think a lot of them saw us as pains in their rear to process and get through and they wanted to not be bothered with things.
But this guy was genuinely interested in ideas. And if it wasn't for him, there's a good likelihood that maybe I would not have followed along the career trajectory that I did because I'd had an Intro to Philosophy class. It was pretty bad. It was dry, boring, dull. The teacher wasn't very good. Or maybe I wasn't up for it, but I think actually he wasn't very good!
And then the next year I had this guy, Perry Lorenzo, and he taught the class in an eminently philosophical way. He was like...Listen, we're getting rid of this textbook. I'm going to put stuff up on the board. We're going to discuss things. Don't worry about what's on the test. I'll just give you some essay tests and make you write some papers. The other students groaned and complained because they were all college prep kids who wanted to have, what do I need to do to get an A in this class? And they weren't very interested in learning, I would say.
But I found it fascinating. And that was my real introduction to the field of philosophy being done by somebody who clearly embodied philosophy, but philosophy in a broad sense, not in a narrow academic sense. Philosophy as what we nowadays call philosophy as a way of life. He made a big mark on me, on my soul because of that. So then later on, when I went to college and actually had the opportunity to study philosophy, looking down the list of possible majors, I saw it and I was like, well, this is pretty cool stuff. So maybe I should study this.
And, you know, I've thought about him a lot over the years. I'm Kind of saddened to discover, first of all, that he died so young. I'm now older. I'm 54 years old. He died at only 51 years old of cancer. So a life really cut short. I find that to be a source of sadness. And it looks like his community and his partner lost somebody whose life was vibrant and dynamic and rich and was contributing to many other people. So a great loss to him, a great loss to his community.
And had I been more on the ball, maybe I could have been in touch with him years and years ago and actually told him, Hey, you made a big difference. You made an impact in my life, and I'd like to thank you for that. And that opportunity is gone. I mean, I can certainly think of him as having a soul that has survived death and think good thoughts about him and say prayers for him and all those sorts of things.
But it's not the same as being able to at least send a letter that somebody is going to read or look them in the eyes or talk to them on the phone and say, You don't realize this, but you did something really good for me. And because of that, for other people as well who are affected by my work in philosophy for some sort of good.
So I've got kind of mixed feelings. There's a sense of joy in finding out who this person was and what a good life in so many different ways he not only had, but chose and built for himself and not just for himself, but many other people whose lives were positively affected by him. And there's sadness for the lost opportunities and the fact that he's gone.
I think I took it for granted that he was probably still out there somewhere and there could be time to track him down, although I had no idea how I might actually do that. It's also surprising that somebody who I've known for all these years had all that information right there at his fingertips. I'm guessing many of myother classmates did as well and could have perhaps clued me into it
So I'm going to do some writing about this in the near future, and I wanted to use this as an opportunity to maybe talk about it and in the process, clarify my thoughts while they're still fresh in my mind and my heart. And to share a little bit with those of you who listen to this.
Maybe there's a warning there. Reach out to people. Get the information about them while you have the opportunity. It could be a good idea. But it might also not be directly applicable to your own life. You might look at it as I'm giving you a little bit of a glimpse into a person who was important for me becoming a philosopher and maybe even the kind of philosopher I've become.
And if you're positively impacted by that, and odds are if you're listening to this, you probably are one of those people, then you can think of him as somebody who played a role in that. So that's probably enough for me to say about this at this point. And I'll just post this and see what people make of it. I'm going to continue thinking about what I want to say in a written form later on this week or weekend.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
I think that at this point, a number of you have heard me talk at one point or another about Alasdair MacIntyre, the Scottish philosopher who wound up doing a lot of his work over here in the United States. And you may or may not know that about 20 years ago, I actually got to meet him because I participated in what was called the Erasmus Institute Faculty Fellowship in the summer of 2005, hosted by the Erasmus Institute at Notre Dame University. And that was kind of a big honor. I'll tell you a little bit about the story of how I got in there in just a moment.
But a little bit of lead up before I get into that. So as I was walking to the office today, I was thinking about MacIntyre. And I'm not exactly sure why this came up, perhaps because I was thinking about Gabriel Marcel, another important philosopher from France in the 20th century, somebody who I particularly like. Maybe down the line, I'll tell you a bit more about him and why I like his work and teach it and keep going back to it. And I was thinking about this conversation that I had with MacIntyre in his office at Notre Dame.
This was in the fall of months after the fellowship had finished up, and I was mentioning to him how his work engaged with a lot of the same themes that Gabriel Marcel's work did, but that I'd never seen him actually write about Marcel. And I was also thinking about how McIntyre reacted to that and what was going on in that meeting. So I'll come back to that in just a moment. I'll tell you first about this fellowship.
I was at that time three years out of graduate school. I had defended my dissertation on Maurice Blondel. I was doing some research work on this big project that eventually culminated in my first book, Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France. And so that tells you what that book was about.
And I was also teaching at Indiana State Prison. We had to cover the entire philosophy and religious studies curriculum because it was a four year bachelor's degree program. And I was one of two people in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies who taught there. The other guy who taught there, he was only there part time. I was there full time. So I was pretty busy, but still quite interested in the various fields that I was researching and writing in and pursuing, doing a lot of work also on Anselm of Canterbury, some work on Aristotle, some on Hobbes. So you can say I was spread out over a number of different places.
I had encountered Alasdair MacIntyre's work back in graduate school, in part because one of his books - it was either After Virtue or Whose Justice, Which Rationality - was in our value fields reading list for our preliminary examination. And I'd heard good things about his stuff, so I started reading him back then. I read both of those books as well as some other stuff as well. And I very much liked the approach to the history of ideas that he was sketching out. He seemed a rather down-to-earth sort of author, but I didn't know anything about the guy himself.
So I saw an advertisement to apply for this summer fellowship. And it was a really interesting one. The title of the fellowship was Practical Rationality: Rational Decision Theory, Aristotelian Thomism, and Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. And I thought, whoa, that actually could be quite good. The opportunity to get to study for two intensive weeks at Notre Dame with Alasdair MacIntyre would have been attractive enough. But as it so happened, I had a background, as I read through the description, in all three of these areas.
Now, if you know MacIntyre, you know that he likes to set up triads of different, let's call them approaches, movements, he uses the word traditions, within moral or even epistemological theory and compare and contrast them with each other, try to bring them into dialogue with each other. So I thought wow this would be really great! I could see this guy at work and I would have something to contribute to the conversation.
So I wrote up the application and sent it off and then i got a letter back in the mail saying hey you're in You're one of 12 people. Here's the list of the other people. And it was very funny because as I was reading down this list, I realized that I was by far the most junior of scholars involved in this. And I was not at any sort of prestigious university like most of these people were. So I was really looking forward to it.
I think it happened either in June or July. I drove out to Notre Dame bringing my computer with me and some books and some other things as well. And I went to this seminar where we began the morning having breakfast together. MacIntyre wasn't at breakfast, but all the rest of us were. And then we would meet in a seminar room for an intensive three-hour session with him where he would do some lecturing. We'd do a lot of discussion and present some ideas, and then we would break for lunch, come back for the afternoon, have another intensive session. Then we would have dinner, and then we were on our own,
So I would spend a lot of my alone time over in the Hesburgh Library working on this project of mine, and I also got to present some of that project while I was there, because each one of us in the second week had to sort of present what we were doing. So I looked at the Christian philosophy debate and current Christian philosophy in terms of traditions in a Macintyrian way, and he actually surprised me giving me a manuscript afterwards of his own translation of one of the texts that I was translating and said that I could compare his translation with mine if I wanted to.
It was a wonderful experience. There was a lot of really interesting discussion going on. And then it came to an end. One of the things that all of the other people were doing at that time, and I didn't do at that time, because I lived only an hour and a half from Notre Dame, so I could basically go there anytime I wanted to, was to have a one-on-one session with MacIntyre over in his office talking through some of these ideas that they wanted to propose. And so I said, well, I'll just meet with you down the line. And later on we emailed and that was how this came about.
So in, I want to say, October, because it was already starting to get kind of cool, I drove out to Notre Dame and I parked and walked over to his office and he met me there and he said, let's go up and have a chat and then we'll go to lunch. And if you want, you can come to one of my classes and see how that goes.So we did exactly that. And the chat was very interesting because, as it turned out, I found out how I actually got into this rather prestigious fellowship program.
A significant part of it was the fact that he was interested in my prison teaching and wanted to talk about what that's like, what the prisoners were like, what they were interested in, how scholarship could inform prison teaching. And he also wanted to know about this guy who he hadn't read, Maurice Blondel, who I'd done my dissertation on, and whether there was anything in his works that might be worthwhile for MacIntyre himself to engage with.
Now, remember, too, that MacIntyre, at the time that we were meeting up like this, would have been probably in his late 70s and certainly could have retired if he wanted to, was not in the best of health, but he was still very, very committed to doing the kind of work that he had been doing for decades, a really intensive philosophical dialogue and engagement with other ways of thinking to see what you can take from them for whatever became in his work an Aristotelian-Thomist framework.
So when I brought up Gabriel Marcel, MacIntyre knew who he was, but admitted to me that he really hadn't read him. And I think what that meant is he probably had, but decades back and then had forgotten about it. And I said, well, you know, there's a lot of similar ideas in in your work and his work, and I think it would be, in fact, quite productive for you to check him out. And so he said, yeah, okay, that makes sense. I will definitely check him out.
And to me, that was kind of an interesting surprise, but a confirmation of the type of person that I had gotten to know him to be, which is somebody who really walks the walk, not just in virtue ethics, rather than just talking the talk, but also with his commitment to inquiry. If there was something out there that somebody whose opinion he valued and apparently he valued mine in this respect, thought he should check out, he would go and do the groundwork, even though he didn't have to, even though he had a million other things to do. And that made a huge impression on me.
I will say that over the years, MacIntyre and I have not been in a lot of contact with each other we sort of lost touch although i could tell you stories about the 10 years that followed after that where he did give me some interesting ideas and guidance and acted in a very friendly way to me writing letters of recommendation telling me that the work I was doing down at Fayetteville State University although rather onerous was important for the students who were there.
He made a big impression on me as a young scholar and young philosopher. And I'm very grateful for having crossed paths and having had dialogue with him. on that because it's, in some respects, not the diametric opposite of what you see in so many academic professionals, but it certainly is something quite different from it, a genuine personal connection that I think for some of us can be quite important.
So I thought I would share that story with you about a scholar who certainly could have sat on his laurels, but deliberately refused to do so in ways that I got to see myself in my engagements with him.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
This is episode number 30 of the Mind & Desire podcast, and since you know it's kind of a nice round number, perhaps a bit of a milestone, I put a chat for my Substack subscribers to participate in saying: Hey! What topics do you think would be good for a episode that commemorates the getting to a certain point in the podcast?
And I only had a few takers, but one of them is particularly good. It was from Andrew Parker, who said: “Kindness. Kindness in our interpersonal interactions, educating through kindness, proliferation of kindness through social media.”
So I'm not going to do exactly that, but the topic here will in fact be kindness, and it's connected to some things that I am often thinking about, both in terms of Stoic philosophy and ancient philosophy more generally, and the class that I'm teaching on friendship in ancient philosophy, but also in my ethics classes more broadly.
Because this is indeed a topic that ordinary people would say, well, this is important for ethics. We should be kind, at least in certain circumstances, and there's something wrong if we're not. And then there's some ethicists who will say, well, no, kindness isn't really that important. It's something else instead.
And I also think about reasons why myself personally and other people might hold themselves back from exhibiting kindness in some circumstances where they have the opportunity to do so. What are the obstacles for that?
So the first thing that I want to say, coming back to ancient philosophy, is that people sometimes say: Oh you know - wisdom, justice, temperance, courage - these cardinal virtues not just for the Stoics but also for the Platonists, for the Epicureans. . . I don't understand why you left kindness or some other synonyms for that off the list. This seems kind of an oversight. Is ancient ethics not about being good to other people or only being good in certain ways?
And the answer is: Well no. You actually have to look at what they say in their texts, and you see that they are very interested in kindness. And I'll give you a couple book recommendations.
One of them is by this guy, Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, who's willing to draw on a lot of people. He's got an entire book called On Benefits. And benefits are things that you do for another person, something good that you do to or for them. He wrote an entire work on this in which he stressed how important of a portion of life this is, that our lives would be kind of lacking without other people giving it to us and without us giving it to them.
I'll also mention Marcus Tullius Cicero, who I think all of you know I'm a huge fan of. He has a book called On Duties where he is providing his own interpretation of Stoic ethics. And in the very first book, very early on, he talks about our nature and how the virtues come out of that.
So this is something that's really important for ancient philosophers, and that runs through the Middle Ages, that runs through early modern philosophy, and you just got to know where to look.
So I mentioned there are synonyms being used, and this might help you wrap your head around it a little bit more. So beneficence, when you see people talking about that, or generosity, that's another key thing that's connected to it. Sometimes generosity, by the way, there's an older translation, liberality. If you're reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, older translations will talk about being “liberal”. What that means is actually giving things to other people when they need it, when it's a good thing to do, what we call generosity.
And, you know, we could talk about affection for other people. We could talk about all sorts of other things. Goodwill. These are all, you could say, not exactly the same thing, but like a bundle of closely related dispositions that are connected with actions that we exhibit to other people.
So, Andrew brought up two interesting things, the idea of educating through kindness, and then proliferation of kindness. I do want to say a little bit about both of those. So, we do educate through kindness, and as typically happens when we're educating, we're not just educating about one thing, we're also educating often on a higher level. Saying: this is important. This is something that you should pay attention to. This is something that you should incorporate into your mindset, your life, your character.
So when we are kind to other people and we're doing it to them, we are showing them that we care about them, that we're willing to treat them as a person. We're viewing them as worthy of kindness. And maybe they don't even know that, right? If they've been treated badly by other people, sometimes doing kindness, people could be suspicious. Why are you being so nice to me?
And we also educate ourselves, and maybe we could say more about that some other time. But I think even more importantly, we educate the people who are looking on that: Hey, this is the way to behave. This is how human beings treat each other. And likewise when we're showing, coldness, cruelty, unkindness to other people, we're sending a message to other people as well. It's okay to treat people like this. So I think that's an important aspect.
And then the proliferation of kindness. I don't really see it as connected with social media, although you certainly could try to do that. A lot of people view social media as a realm of unkindness, but I think kindness can proliferate. When you are good to people, that creates a kind of situation of possible openness for them, where maybe they can be more receptive. They can take a chance and be good to other people. Sometimes they pay it forward, as we say. So I think that's an important topic, too.
There's a lot of things that also can get in the way of us being kind. They can make us reluctant or afraid, or there could be other emotions that we feel as well. It's hard to be kind, for example, when we're angry. But there's four that I think a lot of people run into. And some of these can be framed in terms of philosophy.
I mentioned earlier that some ethicists later on in the 20th century, for example, they've actually said: Well, you can't expect people to be kind. Ethics is really about the rules or principles that we can impose on everybody universally. And you can't make people feel a certain thing, because if they don't feel it then you're saying they're a bad person.
Or they'll say: Listen, doing the right thing or justice, following through on moral obligations that's all you can actually expect of people. Kindness is something, as they'll say, supererogatory. Now that's a nice fancy term for, you could say, going above and beyond what is required or expected. But then, a lot of other people have rightly said: Well no, we want a world in which people are kind.
Even Immanuel Kant in his groundwork for the metaphysics of morals says, well, you don't have to be benevolent to other people, but would you actually want to live in a world where nobody's good to anybody else? No, you can't even consistently will that. And we could go on and on from there.
So I think that one of the big obstacles is this: Justice is all you can demand of me. And I think a proper response to that is: Well yeah, you should be just. And there may be some cases where justice is all you can do, but that doesn't rule out being kind, generous, beneficent, caring towards other people, does it? No, they're not contradictory to each other.
And If you want to say that kindness is supererogatory, it goes above and beyond: Well, fine. What's wrong with that? Do you just want to do the bare minimum for people? Or would you like to be the kind of person who does, in fact, go beyond that?
And then a second issue that arises, I think a big concern with people, and I actually saw this come up in my ancient philosophers on friendship class. Well, if we're supposed to be good to other people, won't I be exhausted? You know, I'm a limited being. I have this like obligation to be good to everybody. How am I possibly going to live that out?
And I don't think that you do have to be good to everybody. It's impossible, and expecting the impossible of people is not actually good guidance, or ethics, or counsel, or anything like that. So if you are feeling this demand that somehow you have to give and give and give and give, you might want to actually ask yourself, where does that come from? And is that what genuine kindness actually looks like? Or is that kind of an aberration of it? And do you want to live with that?
A third thing that I think holds people back very often from being kind to others is the fear or the feeling, and it might be based on a good bit of experience, that your kindness that you exhibit will essentially be wasted, that it won't do any real lasting good that it'll just kind of disappear.
So think about if you have somebody who's very, very needy in your life, and you do and you do and you do for them, but they never seem to be satisfied with it. You could very easily say, it kind of doesn't matter what I do in a case like that. They'll never be satisfied. And that would be a reasonable place to say: Okay, I'm probably not going to just keep throwing my kindness down a well in this case, but that's not the norm.
And even if you're kind to a stranger that you'll never see again, or you're kind to somebody as they're dying, right? They're not going to return your kindness in any way. It isn't wasted because as Seneca points out to us in his work On Benefits, the good thing that you're doing, it still is, even if it doesn't land in the right way, even if the person doesn't receive it with the proper spirit, even if they instead actually turn around and bite you or something like that.
And then the fourth thing that I think is really important, particularly in our age where we have all of these people counseling, you have to have a mindset, you have to have a feeling, you have to do this and that. You don't actually have to feel loving or kind or generous or beneficent towards a person to do something good for them to show them a kindness. You don't have to be in a great mood to smile at somebody who you meet.
Now, of course, you don't want to be a complete masked-up faker or something like that. But there's a difference between feeling something and then choosing to do something. A lot of loving another person in a relationship is doing things that are loving to them, even if you're not feeling particularly loving at the time. And I think a lot of people worry about being sort of hypocrites. But if you weigh on the one hand your worries and feelings about this and on the other hand the good, however limited, that you're doing by being kind to another person, well, I think that your worries probably should take a back seat in that case.
So I think these are definitely not the only issues or worries or concerns that people have about kindness that might get in the way. But I think those are four big ones. And so if you're running into those, maybe this helps people. motivate you, get over the obstacle or the hump that they've placed in the way. It is really important to be kind.
There are many different ways we can be kind. A lot of it is placed in our own hands and our own judgment and discretion about how we want to be kind, when we want to be kind, in what ways we want to be kind. And even if the other person doesn't reciprocate or notice or even turns around and throws it back in our face, you've still done a good thing by being kind to them.
I'll leave off there, celebrate with me this 30th episode. We got a lot more to come, hopefully down the line. And thanks to Andrew Parker for his own little beneficence in giving me a great topic to sink my teeth into and hopefully convey a little bit of wisdom, not coming from me, but from mostly ancient philosophers who have a lot to teach us on the topic.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
I spent a good bit of my time today and yesterday, and probably will spend a good bit of tomorrow as well, putting together my notes and a handout for a presentation that I'll be giving in an online conference coming up, which has to do with anger from psychological and philosophical and other perspectives.
And I've been allotted 15 minutes to talk about the topic that I have, you could say, signed up for, and that is early Christian thinkers on anger. This is something that I have talked about quite a bit and presented about in a variety of formats in the past, but never with this sort of brevity. The closest that I've come to it was a guest sermon that I was invited to give at a Unitarian Universalist church many years ago. And I think I got around 20 minutes for that.
And it's a somewhat different question. You could say that I'll be presenting to here, which includes fellow philosophers, psychotherapists and people who aren't necessarily sold on the usefulness of looking at religious thinkers. So I've got to set it up in a rather different way. I have to skip over an awful lot because when we say early Christian thinkers, I mean people from the second century all the way well into the fifth century. And as it turns out, there's a lot of them to begin with.
And there's a lot that they have to say about the emotion of anger. Some of them even have entire chapters of treatises or homilies or letters that are all about anger. And you might say, well, why is that the case? So this leads me into the topic that I really want to talk about. All of that was basically pretext.
Some of you may know that in the past, one of my big areas of research, and I actually published an entire book about it, was the topic of Christian philosophy, the book that I published 14 years ago at this point was about a particular debate that took place in the 1930s, largely between French-speaking philosophers, but it touched on the long, long history of the interactions between Christianity and philosophy broadly construed in a number of different thinkers.
So we talked about some of the ancient texts, philosophers who thought that there was something to this new religion, some of them were actually converts to it, but who had a philosophical background as well. At the time that I was working on that book, Pierre Hadot and his explicit phrase “philosophy as a way of life” weren't really that much on my horizon. I'd heard about him. There were other people who were talking about him, but I hadn't read him at the time. Subsequently, I have read quite a few of his works, including Philosophy as a Way of Life.
And interestingly, he has an entire chapter of that book devoted to, here's the chapter title, “Spiritual Exercises and Christian Philosophy.” And he is not a Christian himself, I think, but he's certainly attracted to all modes of thought in which you have what he calls “spiritual exercises”. We often call these “philosophical practices”. Michel Foucault called these “technologies of the self”. Other people have called them by different names, but they're all basically the same thing.
And one of the things that I'm going to talk about in my presentation that I think is really, really fascinating (so this is what I want to share with you today) is Hadot points out that philosophies were around as ways of intentional living for hundreds of years before Christianity emerges on the scene, and develops into a community and cultural force within the ancient world.
And so a lot of these early Christian writers are pretty conversant with Platonic, Stoic, Aristotelian, Skeptic, Epicurean, Cynic philosophy, as well as others, and they know about philosophical practices because they actually advocate them and discuss them. One of the things that Hadot thinks is particularly distinctive to this new movement of thought, Christianity, is that there are a number of passages from their religious texts, from the scriptures.
And by the way, as a side note, what we think of as the Bible was not formed as such as at the time that a lot of these people are writing, ta biblia is plural and means the books. And it wasn't completely agreed upon until the late 4th century, which books were in, which books were out. And books generally didn't mean something bound together in one single volume, but actually a bunch of books that you carried around with you, often in the form of scrolls. So a very, very different conception of what you would read and reference.
And they would do a lot of reading, but they'd also do a lot of memorizing and meditating upon passages. So here's what Hadot says. There are certain passages that that they took as being really, really important, whether from the earlier Hebrew scriptures that Christians will then call the Old Testament, or from the newer scriptures, the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Book of Acts, and actually even things that are no longer within the canon, like some of the letters of the very early bishops.
They would connect together spiritual exercises or philosophical practices with particular scriptural passages, and the goal was to bring them into a sort of fruitful connection to each other. How does this bear out in terms of anger?
I will just give you one really, really prime example that almost all of the heavy hitters in this early movement of Christian thought are going to reference, and that is a particular set of passages from what we nowadays call the Sermon on the Mount, which is found in the Gospel of Matthew. This is really important stuff for early Christians because this is conveying teachings from the guy himself, Jesus, the Christ or anointed one who they come to see as God incarnate.
And what does Jesus teach? Well, a bunch of different things in the Sermon on the Mount. It's a very rich text, but there is a very important set of passages discussing anger, where Jesus is going to say to them, “the law says to you, you shall not kill, but I say to you,” and then he's going to give three sort of injunctions.
The person who is angry with his brother - and some of the manuscripts say without cause, and others don't - is going to get into one level of trouble, you could say. It's being condemned as something bad.
And then there's this second one, anyone who says “Rache” to their brother, and that's a bad thing to say, is going to have a higher level of condemnation and punishment. And then finally, anyone who says “you fool” is going to be threatened with hellfire.
And this was an important passage. You could say it was a puzzling, enigmatic passage that drew people in and made them say, well, what is actually going on here? So they were drawn into thinking about and explaining things. What is meant by this? What the significance of it is. And you know, there's an increasing level of seriousness. And the idea there is that somehow by engaging in this emotion and the actions that come out of it, you are doing something that is bad for yourself but also bad for the other person. You're not literally murdering them, but you're doing something similar.
And there are some follow-up verses as well when it talks about not bringing a gift to the altar and expecting it to be accepted. if your brother or sister has something against you, you've got to go get reconciled with them and you should try to settle things with other people.
So, this ties in with all sorts of conceptions that are coming from philosophy, but being used to explain this set of verses that early Christians thought were quite revelatory and important. There are many others as well that you can find throughout, you know, he book of Proverbs or Sirach (sometimes also called Ecclesiastes). And even in the Psalms, we have letters from Paul, you know, James as well, where there are verses about anger.
And what they did, these early Christian thinkers, is they used those not in the way that people do these days as proof texts where they say: “Well see, here's the answer. It's in the Bible.” Now we don't have to think anymore. No, it worked the other way. These were, you could say, fertilizers of human rational thought. And that's one way to use religious writings to employ them to encourage people's thinking, deepening their thoughts, engaging in ongoing discussion, connecting things together. And that is eminently philosophical.
It might not be recognized as philosophy. And some people might say, oh well, you violated some sort of norm of philosophizing by bringing in a passage from a religious text. Now, that itself is something that would be a huge assumption that you probably want to look at. If you find that attractive, you want to wonder where you got that idea from and whether all philosophers buy into it. And the answer is No. But what we're going to find is that there's a number of really interesting insights that even if you don't buy into Christianity at all, even if you have negative feelings against it, you could read and and get something out of it. You could, so to speak, secularize and find it to be productive.
So that's a little bit about what I'm going to be talking about. I think there's many other instances, and this ties in, as I mentioned, with this notion of Christian philosophy that got set out by a number of the members of this Christian philosophy debate in the 1930s. The idea is that revelation can be productive when human reason takes it in and and works on it using its own powers, so to speak, and deriving something from it. I think there's many instances of this.
And by the way, it's not confined just to Christianity. You could do this as earlier Jewish thinkers were doing, like Philo of Alexandria with the Torah or other writings. You could do this with Buddhism, you could do this with Hinduism, but we don't need to belabor the point. So that's a bit about what I'm going to be doing in just a matter of days and the kind of work that I'm doing to prepare for it and the thoughts that are going into my mindset and the one I'll share with others in this conference during my 15 minutes that they'll give me.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
I had an interesting, you might say, joking exchange, but only partly tongue-in-cheek with somebody on Twitter today, and it's very emblematic of a sort of mindset that I see quite a few people slip into.
And the exchange was about the current state of academia and how everybody in it has abandoned truth and justice as values. And now they're all schemers or grifters or pick whatever else you want. And this is a kind of common complaint that you see about institutions or societies and their capacities to corrupt and co-opt us when it comes to our values and the formation of our character and moral action.
I've seen analogous statements made over decades by a lot of people who say things like, well, if you're living under capitalism, you're always living off of somebody's misery, so none of the actions that you do can ever truly be good. And I've always been suspicious of these totalizing, what should we call them, accusations laments general criticisms that we see being made because in point of fact something that is a very common even ubiquitous aspect of our experience if we're paying attention is that at least some of the things that we do seem to matter.
And I'm not saying that they matter in the long run in the sense of having lasting effects that can't be in some way undone or undermined or exploited or even turned against us in some way. I'll acknowledge that that's all true. Anything that we do can go bad in some way or at least just be neutralized but the mistaken line of reasoning that a lot of people fall into which then I think you can say leads to mistaken feelings or affects or moods is this notion that if you can show that there's a vulnerability, a contingency to things that seem good not being so in the long run, that maybe the consequences of our actions that we intend, they don't pay out, or pick any other way of conceptualizing this that you want.
Basically, the idea is that we're within a bad institution or a bad system where people don't have the right mindset, where there are perverse incentives, where the good that you do could be harnessed for bad in some way that you really can't do anything good. And again, I think this goes against the experience that many of us do have in our lives, something that we should trust, but not 100%, that we do see that the things that we choose, that we advocate for, that we make possible, do bear some fruit at some time of goodness.
So I want to come back to academia. And I will say that it's not as if there was ever a wonderful golden age the way that some people want to portray it, where everybody in the academy was all about truth and justice and the furthering of their discipline and expanding of human knowledge. The schools have been beset by all sorts of other motivations on the part of people who partake in them for as long as I've ever been involved in them. And if we look at literature, we can see that that's the case as well.
You see people who are essentially driven by careerism, looking to step up the next rung of the ladder, writing books that don't need to be written, blocking other people so that they can be the important person, whether it's as an administrator or as a scholar or as a teacher, whatever it is that you've got.
Even people involved in creating new institutions within the institutions or engaging in advocacy work, right? There's a lot of turf warrior mindsets going on and people could want to be the sage on the stage and have everybody thinking they're smart and cool. You could also, I suppose, be in it for the money in most academic institutions in the United States.
That may have been a good bet at one time. It sure as hell hasn't been from the time that I was in graduate school in the 1990s onward, when the job markets were already getting pretty bad and salaries were going down and academic work became more and more precarious to where we are today. So people can have all sorts of motivations.
And, you know, the idea of the college or university should be run like a business that's been around since I was a student that is corrosive, just as much as when hospitals that are supposed to have the ends of taking care of their patients and alleviating pain and helping people to practice good preventative care get worse. absorbed into hospital groups, which then are bought out by companies that are primarily interested in shareholder value and not in the ends that it's supposed to serve, we could come up with all sorts of other analogous cases.
But none of that means that while you have your own range of freedom within these institutions, that you can't actually do the right thing. Now, you may have somebody looking over your shoulder. You may have policies put in place that seem dehumanizing, that are exploitative of students or patients or customers or whatever it's going to be. But that doesn't take away your own capacity to choose.
And I see a lot of people who give in to a kind of despair unnecessarily where they say, well, there's nothing that I can do. So I hate it, but I need to make a living.I need to hold on to my position. And if I were to leave, maybe somebody even worse would take over somebody who isn't bothered by this sort of thing.
None of that is entirely illegitimate, but it doesn't have to be the mindset that decides what you're going to do. You can adopt a number of other possible ways of doing things. You could be like Socrates, for example. who recounts the story of when his city had been taken over by the oligarchs, and he was told that he needed to go get somebody who, you know, after he brought them in, would probably be executed unjustly by these 30 tyrants. Socrates just didn't say anything, and he went home. He didn't find the guy. He was like, well, I guess if they're going to kill me, they're going to kill me, but I will do what I'm going to do. That's an option. right?
You just keep doing the things that you think you ought to do and you might get fired. You might get attacked in various ways, but you can also like just not make a explicit stand and do the things that nobody's actually told you you can't do and keep on doing those good things. And you can still appeal to whatever better instincts people have. You can sometimes embarrass the people who are in charge.
If you're getting a lot of heat from administrators about how you're supposed to be doing things to your students that you don't really want to do and your students don't like, you could shame them. in certain ways and you can drag your heels and not do them well so I don't buy this notion that unless you can produce lasting change at the top none of the things that we do down at our low level where the proverbial rubber hits the road really matter or accomplish any good and I will say this to bring it to a close.
We don't actually know most of the time what lasting good we're doing by the work that we do with other people or with material items or with animals or anything like that. And it's a mistake, I would say, to assume that we have something like a God's eye view where we know when we do something precisely what its long-term effect is going to be. We just try to do our best.
And I think that, you know, some people will not do their best and they'll say that they're doing their best, but most of us are trying our best, even if we're not giving 100% all the time, even if we're just giving 80%, I think that's great. That's better than 0%. And we should just keep on with what it is that we're doing, even if we feel like it's unsuccessful or futile or counterproductive, because in most cases we don't actually know.
Now that would be very different if you were, I don't know, designing some piece of technology and you know that it's going to be used for terrible evil that's that's a different kind of case than what we're talking about in academia, or if you're working in a hospital group, or you're working for an insurance company, or you're working in a government position, or any other thing like that.
So these are just a few reflections, and I guess I'll sum them up by saying that that motto of fighting the good fight — It doesn't matter so much whether we're getting the support from above or the opposite of support. We can still choose to do what we know to be right or what we even just think and suspect to be right in a probabilistic way, even if other people from outside are saying, oh, there's no point to that. Or our colleagues and co-workers who are burnt out and jaded try to tell us that it's not going to matter.
That's up to us. That is a choice that we get to make. So that's what I do in my practice. And I hope that maybe hearing this, if you're wavering, can help you to say, yeah, I'm going to do that as well.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
I am planning on teaching a class on Plato's dialogues, at least certain of them, before too long. And so I've kind of got Plato on the brain, you might say. And I've been thinking for quite a long time about how to productively read platonic dialogues, whether you're doing so for a class or just your own edification and personal development and study. And I've got a few ideas that I'd like to share with you.
And I don't claim to be some sort of high-level Plato expert who's got all of the answers about this. There are definitely people I'm going to criticize, at least in their approaches, who can certainly claim a much higher status as far as Plato scholarship than I can, but maybe you'll find this interesting or helpful or even just provocative of thought.
So I think a lot of people lose sight of the fact that Plato did, in fact, write dialogues, and he did so by choice. We know that he also taught in his academy, and perhaps there's notes out there that we'll someday find or something along those lines. And there are some letters that scholars to some degree disagree about the authenticity of, but I'm not worried about that particularly myself.
We do have all of these dialogues. And there are some of those, by the way, where scholarship has gotten to the point where they say, I don't think this one is actually by Plato or it's dubious. And there's a lot of other stuff that we could go into. For example, which dialogues are early or middle or late? And that's that's a whole other topic that I'm not going to worry too much about at this point.
What I do want to say once again, however, is that they are dialogues for the most part. You could say, well, the Apology is more of a speech with a little bit of cross-examination dialogue built into it. Quite a few of the dialogues contain long passages where Socrates is advancing the discussion and and saying, doesn't it appear to you this way? And Glaucon will say, yes, indeed, Socrates, continue. But there's more than that to being dialogical.
One of the things that you're going to notice is that Socrates, or in many cases, other interlocutors in these dialogues, are not just putting forth their own point of view and saying, there you go, that's my account. They're challenging each other. Sometimes they're actually framing something like a dialogue within their own discourse that appears to be a monologue.
A great example of this is in the Crito, where Socrates brings in a character or rather set of characters who are not there, could be there, hypothetically, the laws of the city of Athens. And he stages a little bit of an argument back and forth between him and these laws that are going to accuse him of doing wrong to them. Or we might think as well about the Symposium where Socrates first engages in his typical back and forth with Agathon whose house he is a guest at and shows that Agathon's very nicely crafted speech doesn't reveal that Agathon actually understands love or virtue or the other topics that he's talking about, but then brings in another character and we're not even sure if she truly existed or not. Diotima, the wise woman from whom Socrates, according to himself, learned everything that he knows about love.
So dialogue is really, really central to this. And you might say, well, who cares? I mean, we have plays, we have other sorts of things that are dialogue, but this is philosophical dialogue. There's not an awful lot of action going on, but there's an awful lot of thinking, exchange of ideas, sparring back and forth, sometimes jokes, all sorts of those types of discourse.
There's a number of approaches that people have traditionally taken. And when I say traditionally, I mean, you know, not just back in ancient times, but also in the 20th century as well. Long enough that they've become established ways of looking at these things.
So one way of getting something out of Plato, but also making sure that you don't get much more than that, is to focus primarily on arguments. And this is typical of analytic philosophy. And that can be quite helpful at times to say, are these arguments that are being advanced any good? Where are their weak points? Where could we say that there's an assumption being made that could be questionable? Are they actually valid?
That's a nice approach. But if all you're doing is focusing on arguments, you're probably missing not only half, but I would say probably three quarters of what is actually happening in the dialogue. So it can be useful to focus in and say, what is the argument actually being advanced here by Socrates or by one of his other interlocutors? But we want more than that.
And another way of thinking about it is focusing in on what we could call doctrines, right? Or theses or things like that. What claims are being advanced and how should we understand those? And we may understand them in terms of the arguments that are being provided, but we may also understand them in terms of what we could call accounts.
And by the way, the term that's used in Greek, logos, which if you know anything about ancient Greek, you know, this is a pretty slippery, ambiguous term. It can mean argument. It can also mean account. It can mean a whole bunch of different things, a speech, a lie at some points in certain works. And so there's a lot of scope here for thinking about how what we do with words is actually helping us to understand ideas and reality.
So somebody might talk about Plato's doctrine of the forms, and they have some idea of what that is, and they may even read across multiple dialogues to get a sense of what the doctrine genuinely is that Plato is trying to convey. Bad news is, when it comes to a lot of his important doctrines, the dialogues don't always neatly map onto each other, and we have to do a good bit of thinking work in order to get out of them what it is that we want.
Now, some people have taken a very different tack and focused on what we call the dramatic elements of the dialogues, and that can be quite important. Oftentimes, along with that goes a sort of esotericism that myself, I find very unattractive because it involves people saying, I've got the hidden knowledge that all you dummies don't. And I'm pretty suspicious of people who make those sorts of claims.
But sometimes saying, well, what is actually going on here? That can be quite helpful. So that leads me into something that's a bit more positive. And I've got a few, we could say, not negative so much, pointers, but just a few things to keep in mind that might be helpful for you.
So characters matter, and character matters. A little bit of a pun there on my part. When we have a character like Thrasymachus or Callicles in the Republic or in the Gorgias, people who are advancing a certain kind of might makes right philosophy. It's reflected in the way that they talk. It's reflected in the stances they take and how they interact with say, Socrates or other people.
There are other characters in the dialogues who are also saying things and they're saying them not just in terms of the content, but the way that they're talking. And it's reflective of the kind of person who they are. And so I think that's important to be attentive to that.
Another thing is who's the main character in most of the dialogues, though not all of them, especially later ones, Socrates of course. And a lot of people approach the dialogues with an idea of Socrates already in mind, especially Socrates, the guy who knows that he knows nothing. And, you know, he does say that he's not sure that he has wisdom. He questions people, but he doesn't actually affirm that he knows absolutely nothing at all. And if he did, that would go against so many things that he actually does say in the dialogue.
So there's no substitute for reading the actual text and getting an idea of who the Socrates guy was by seeing how he interacts with people as well. He asks questions. He calls the person themselves as a witness rather than allowing them to push off the responsibility of justifying their points of view by quoting a poet or some other person or proverb or something like that.
And he's very interested not so much in hearing speeches, but in actual dialogue with people. And he'll model how Plato thinks we should engage in dialogue. And if we're paying close attention, if we're not even reading between the lines, but just being attentive, we will find out there's all sorts of things that Socrates actually knows.
And he will signify that to you sometimes by saying, well, don't we know that X, Y, Z? And then the interlocutor will say, yes, in fact, we do know that. Or we've at least attained this much in our discourse. We haven't actually managed to define what we're looking for. I think a lot of people, because their eyes are too much on the proverbial prize, they lose sight of all the other things that we learn along the way.
The other thing that I want to close with. If you do read platonic dialogues and you're paying close attention to them, you are going to notice that not only will some of the other characters make bad arguments and claims that can't really stand up and provide accounts that don't always completely make sense, but Socrates himself will sometimes do that as well.
And you could ask, why would Plato put words in the mouth of his friend, mentor, the person who is the emblem of philosophy itself? Why would he do that in his well-crafted dialogues? And there's a number of answers that we could give to this. I'm only going to suggest one here right now, but perhaps we'll explore this more in a future episode or in some some writings about this.
I think Plato wants you to realize when you see that that there's a problem there and for you to use your brain your mind to identify what's wrong with the reasoning And if you do that, you might not just say, oh, well, it's all bad. Throw it all away. You might say, I wonder how this could be qualified. I wonder how this account or argument could be improved. I wonder how this could be made more consistent. And doing that is actually thinking on your part, I'm convinced that that is part of what Plato calls dialectic, which is so absolutely irreplaceably important in the development, not only of you as an intellectual being, but also as a moral being.
So those are some reflections on Plato's dialogues. Perhaps they might be useful for you. Hopefully they are. If not, then maybe you'll like something else that I talk about with respect to Plato down the line.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
As many of you listeners know, I teach classes both in traditional academic settings, in institutions that, you know, have a kind of formalized approach to education, and I do those face-to-face and online. And I also teach, in the Study with Sadler Academy, online classes and seminars to a much wider variety of people, in part because I open it up. You don't have to be enrolled in a particular school in order to take classes. And I also make them a good bit more affordable. Now, that's a totally different topic.
Where am I going with this? So I had something interesting come up in both a seminar that I was teaching this last weekend, specifically on Stoic philosophy, and it's something that is coming up pretty frequently in the two classes that I'm teaching this semester, one of which is focused directly on the emotion of anger and looking at it from avariety of different perspectives, many of which are drawn from ancient philosophy, and another class which is explicitly about what we call philosophy as a way of life.
And so what I'm going to talk about are what we call practices or spiritual exercises. There's a variety of different names for these. And I've talked about this a little bit before in the past. So what I want to bring up today is something that I ended up, I've been thinking about it for quite a while with respect to my academic classes. I brought up in a response to a question that I was asked in the Stoicism seminar.
So it had to do with, well, how do we actually apply this philosophical stuff if we don't already have practices outlined for us? Because, you know, when it comes to a lot of matters, the Stoics really stand out, at least with the literature that we have of them, in providing us with a lot of explicit practices.
So when Epictetus will say: When you're in this kind of situation, have ready at hand these thoughts. That's a practice. Or when he says: “You're encountering this sort of problem, do this.” Or: “Think about this every once in a while.” And Seneca has a lot of these as well. So does Marcus Aurelius. And we could go on and on.
So what do we do when we're thinking about matters about which the philosophers have a lot to contribute, a lot of theory, a lot of exploration, but they don't actually advise us to do this or that as a practice. A prime example of this would be Aristotle and his predecessor Plato's discussions about the emotion of anger, which are kind of scattered across their texts.
With Plato, we get a good bit of discussion of this part of ourselves called thumos, which is the part that gets angry in Republic book four and in other parts of the Republic. Then we get a lot of other partial discussions of anger in other dialogues like the Gorgias or Protagoras or Euthyphro, and there's some really useful stuff in there
With Aristotle we get a more systematic, and we could even say scientific examination, of anger. But it's still scattered across multiple texts, so you have to do some correlating it if you want to say, well, here's the theory. And it's nice to have the theory, but we could easily say, sure, it's great to have a viewpoint on it. But what do I actually do with this?
And there's a very simple answer to that, namely that you take the ideas and then you have to exercise a little bit of thought on your own part about how could these actually be applied? And in some cases, it's pretty straightforward. It's very low hanging fruit, so to speak. So I'll give you a couple examples.
Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, he has this great line that you actually see used by other people who aren't Aristotelians, where he says it's easy to get angry. Anybody can do that. But getting angry with the right person for the right reason at the right time in the right way for the right amount of time, that is not easy and not everybody can do that. And there will be a couple other rights, or as one should in Greek dei is the terminology there, that we could bring up as well.
Now, that's great. You can say, aha, so we have a way of understanding whether anger felt by a particular person or exhibited by them is good or bad, virtuous or vicious. And that leads to making ethical judgments, but you could also use this for anger management. And how would you do that? Well, you would say to yourself or to somebody else, when you actually start getting irritated, am I or are you getting angry with the right person? You just think about that.
And merely turning your attention to that question and seriously asking yourself that question, not just giving yourself a pass. Obviously, I'm angry at the right person. I don't get angry at the wrong people. But, you know, actually questioning yourself. Maybe I am angry at the wrong person in this case. That can help you to manage your anger.
And you could go further with it. You could ask yourself, well, what is going on with me? That I'm transferring my anger from somebody who perhaps I should be angry with or the person who at least is making me angry to somebody else instead and maybe deflecting it or using them as a scapegoat or however you want to conceive of it. See, you've got a practice there and you could do this with all those other rights as well.
Am I expressing my anger in the right way? I know i'm angry, but should I be saying these sorts of things to these people? Or is this going to be damaging to the relationship that I claim to value with them? Or is anger leading me to do or say things that are morally dishonorable or shameful? Those are questions you can ask. And that's a philosophical practice.
I'll give you another example coming from Plato in the Euthyphro, he very very helpfully tells us that the matters about which human beings and gods, in their own relationships and communities, disagree about with each other, and as a result either hate or get angry with each other over, are not questions that can be easily resolved. Like matters of mathematics where you can get it wrong, and then say let's do the operation or sum again, and see who's got the right answer.
Instead they have to do with what we call moral values. In ancient Greek thought, something you see in Plato, and Aristotle, and the Stoics, and so many others, they distinguished between modalities like the good and the bad, or the just and the unjust, or the honorable and the shameful (also translatable as beautiful and ugly, or fair and foul), the useful and the harmful, and a number of other things as well.
These are the things that we often do disagree about, you know, what they are, how they apply. And when people get these wrong in our eyes, we often get angry with them and they get angry with us. So if we know that we're heading into a situation where we are going to have that sort of disagreement, disagreement about those kinds of matters, we can say to ourselves, aha, I've got to watch getting angry, because this is exactly the sort of thing that does tend to make people angry with each other.
So you notice what we've done there. This is some creative application of ideas that are taken from a philosopher. It doesn't take an awful lot to be able to extrapolate from the theory to the actual practice. And I think that in a lot of cases, this is exactly not just what we can do, but what we should do whenever we don't have a number of already outlined practices. So perhaps that's of some use to you.
I know that I do it a lot. People will often ask me, oh, what are your favorite stoic practices that you do every day? And I'll often say, I don't actually have a lot of them because I get myself into situations. And then I've been doing it so long that I think about, well, what is the stuff that I need to apply to here, and that works for me. Whereas other people might need things to be a lot more structured
If you actually do know the theory, turning it into practice is something that shouldn't be all that difficult. And if it is, well perhaps you want to look at why that's the case but if it isn't you can say aha i'm on the right track here and this is exactly what we should do with theories and practices.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
If you follow me on social media, you no doubt saw me posting a kind of funny meme about a workaholic. It actually shows a guy in heavy plate armor, and I suppose this is from some video game setting, as some people have pointed out. The caption of it is the part that we're really interested in, and it shows him with his head in his arms saying “workaholics when they run out of workahol”.
And, you know, the point there is, of course, humorous. There is no such thing as workahol, but we could think of that as something like a disposition, some part of ourselves that maybe we started out with not by genetics or anything like that, but definitely from our environment.
I certainly saw my father and my mother working quite hard, although they both knew how to enjoy themselves and take time off as well. And I saw this from childhood onward. I also grew up in a time when being productive and devoting yourself to things was often praised and rewarded. And I also realized that if you do want to get big projects done, you have to, as the expression goes, strike while the iron is hot. Oftentimes that means striking while you have the energy to do something.
So am I a workaholic? Well, by some estimates, I certainly could be considered to be so. But I also like to think that as time has gone on and I've slowed down a bit, as has my wife, who's around the same age as me, we're both in our 50s, as energy levels decline inevitably, as illnesses happen, I've learned how to back off a bit.
More importantly than that, the part that I think so many people find very challenging, it's not just about reducing your workload or deferring timelines and deadlines. It's about your mindset. You have to learn how to eventually become okay with things that you intended to do, that you may have even planned or committed to do, quite publicly, not getting done on the timeline that you want them done, and perhaps in some cases, not at all.
One prime example of that, and this was admittedly based in a bit of, I'm not even going to call it wishful thinking, because I don't know what I was thinking when I said that this would happen. The Half-Hour Hegel project that a lot of people know me for, it's a series of what ended up being 376 half-hour videos going through all of Hegel's Phenomenology, and it's been a useful thing for many people.
Somehow, I believed when I first started the project that it would only take me, you know, two, maybe three or four years to do. And I suppose if I'd kept at it assiduously and never took any time off and cranked out eight videos a month, maybe that could have happened. But as it turned out, you know, lots of things happen, illnesses, other projects, things that I needed to do with my wife or kids, the death of dogs and cats, and all of those sorts of matters. And so even when I was getting my quota of six videos done per month, which wasn't every single month, it ended up taking me nine years to see the entire project through. In that case, I can say I did in fact finish it up.
But there have been many cases where something just got stalled and I didn't finish the project that I had intended, or where I said I was going to do something and just never got around to it. A lot of the books that I have sitting, waiting to be reviewed in my Dr. Sadler's Honest Reviews series are like that. They date back to 2018, 2019, and And I've read them and I just haven't gotten around to creating the videos.
Now, how should we view that sort of thing? Do you beat yourself up about it and get down upon yourself and say, what a loser I am. I should have gotten this accomplished. Certainly that can be a motivator early on when you're not getting things done. But after you've had quite a few of these opposite of successes, which you can call failures if you want to — I would actually say running up on the shoals of life — after you've had enough of them, you come to realize that it's not sustainable to get on your own case and get down on yourself for each of these things that you didn't actually pull off. That you need to be a bit more forgiving while at the same time not forgiving, cutting yourself so much slack that you don't end up accomplishing things and you live, so to speak, just in a dream world where you daydream about what you might have accomplished.
So why is this on my mind? Well, for the last, now I would say three weeks or so, I have been dealing with a number of different symptoms. And so has my wife, some of which could be attributed to a flu, you know, sinus issues, headaches, fatigue, muscle pain, sometimes chills.
Eventually, we got to the point where we said, well, I think we're going to have to go in and see a doctor. So we drove in together to urgent care only to get checked out and then hear the verdict. Well, there's not much we can do for you. There's a lot of viruses going around. This doesn't appear to be bacterial, so no antibiotics would be helpful. We don't know what you've actually got, but clearly you can get some work done. So you can't be that badly off. Get some more rest. Make sure you stay very hydrated. Take some painkillers over the counter and eventually you'll be right as rain
So now i'm starting to feel better, but for you know about three weeks what I was finding is that I would get fatigued fairly quickly. So by around three or four o'clock in the afternoon I couldn't get much of anything done. I would come home, take a nap, get up, have some dinner, think that I was going to do some work that night, be too tiredm and either go to bed early or take a bath and go to bed and start again the next day. In the morning, I would not be feeling great, but I could be productive.And then my productivity level would decline as the day went on.
And I found myself getting further and further behind, which if you've experienced that, it can be quite frustrating, especially when you know that people are expecting things from you, perhaps even depending on you to get things done. That's the case if you're teaching. That's the case if you've got important projects going on. That's the case when you've made commitments to clients and colleagues that certain things were going to happen.
So it requires a kind of mental shift. And I'm fortunate in that I have a partner in Andi, my wife, who is similarly driven, but also has similar challenges and who can say to me, hey you've done enough for the day. Your productivity shouldn't come before your health or whatever else it's going to be. Take it easy. Because I know that she won't tell me to take it easy too often. And I do the same for her. So this is a form of mutual support, you could say.
But what ends up happening is that some things have to be put on hold. And prioritization becomes very important. One of the temptations that I tend to face is sticking with things that are easier and more attractive to me as projects and deferring the things that I really should do, but I'd prefer not to. When I run out of energy, then those things go onto the back burner. They wind up on the to-do list for the next day. And that's not a good thing because eventually your to-do list gets longer and longer and it has a higher proportion of the things that you weren't really that happy to do, at least at the time, which then can affect your mood as well.
Sometimes the answer to that is just to wipe the slate clean altogether. Other times, maybe you have to do the, as one of my colleagues and friends calls it, eat your broccoli first and then you get your steak and dessert. I actually like broccoli, so that metaphor doesn't work for me as well, but apparently he's not so interested in vegetables, but really does like steak and dessert. So you rearrange your schedule so that you're getting to the tasks that you didn't originally want to do.
Now, I'm not offering some sort of here's the program to make sense out of your life and rearrange everything to your benefit here in this podcast. I'm more setting out an experience, and a problem, and hints of a solution that I'm reflecting upon here as I tell you about the this. But I think this is actually something that can be quite helpful for a lot of people, and here's where I'll end this.
A lot of people look at what I'm doing from the outside, and they say wow you're so productive. You get so much done. How do you do it? And my answer is two parts. Ine of them is I don't have a system as such, but I do have a number of habits that I've built up over the years that are helpful for me. I'm pretty good at prioritizing and also at making myself do things that I don't particularly want to do at the moment.
But the other part of it is from the outside, it looks like I'm very productive, like I manage my time extraordinarily well and get a lot done. But that is an outside view and it isn't the complete reality of what is happening on the inside. My house, if we want to use this as a sort of metaphor is just as messy and cluttered as is yours. You're just not seeing it because my yard looks very clean and orderly, and there's a lot of things in it waiting for other people to come and take, but if you were to step inside you might be a little bit surprised. Now, not a hoarder situation, not super gross or messy, but certainly not what you would necessarily expect. And I think saying that might be helpful for some people to hear.
I think I'll probably talk about this elsewhere because there's a lot to be said. But the most we can do is trying our best. And at some points in our life, our best isn't going to be the same best as it was in an earlier time. Now that may change as well. Sometimes things are cumulative. So our best could be even better than it was before.
But part of the process of aging, and right now I'm solidly in middle age, is to begin to recognize where you have to accept limitations. So I will end with that, and I look forward to seeing what people have to say about that.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe -
After I've gotten up in the morning, one of the things that I typically do is check for memories in my Facebook account, because I've been posting things in there since 2009 when I got on Facebook. Quite often the memories are interesting or telling or they bring up something that I'd entirely forgotten about. And that was kind of the case for a memory from yesterday, which has to do with what we could call my origin story as a public philosopher on YouTube.
So if you've been following me for a very long time or you've heard me in interviews, you know that I originally got started uploading videos not in my own channel, but in an institutional channel at the place that I was teaching called Fayetteville State University down in North Carolina. And they were from my last semester teaching there in 2011.
I was teaching four sections of critical thinking, which was a typical load for that place. We didn't have a philosophy program, and critical thinking was a required class for all students in the university, so we taught a lot of sections.
And I thought that I would start video recording using a flip cam, and what you call a spider tripod, a little tripod that you can arrange things. I would put it down on a desk and just start it at the beginning of class, turn it off at the end of class. Occasionally it would get bumped by a student and you would see students walking past it. But for the most part, it would take in the entire desk, chalkboard, and me giving a lecture. And it would pick up the sound from students asking questions or making comments quite well.
I've told the story a number of times how my then fiancée, now wife Andi was absolutely instrumental in getting me to try it out and she said what do you have to lose you can record the lectures could be a useful resource for your students. And if you don't like them, you can always get rid of them later on.
So I was originally - as I found out, I'd totally forgotten about this - I was originally planning on taking the video recordings and uploading the files into the course management system, which was called Blackboard. It's still around today. And I found that Blackboard at that time, at least, it might be able to now just could not handle long video files. You couldn't upload them into it effectively. So there wouldn't be any useful playback for my students.
So we started having to think, OK, where can they actually go? I thought about uploading them into a personal YouTube channel. But back then, YouTube first was only allowing you to upload videos that were 10 minutes long and then 15 minutes and then 20 minutes. So if you look at old videos from about 15 years, even 13 years back, quite often what you would see is that they're broken up into chunks.
The exception was if you had an institutional account. So Fayetteville State University had an institutional account, and that's where those critical thinking videos actually live. It's kind of a fluke because I don't think that I would have thought to upload them as a resource for the general public who is interested in critical thinking, let alone my class and the way that I work.
This was very fortuitous because what ends up happening, again, you may know this from me talking about it elsewhere, when I first started putting videos out, these critical thinking videos, and then later when I moved to Marist College and I was teaching Introduction to Philosophy and Ethics every semester and then occasionally some other classes like Religion in American Culture or Worldviews and Values.
With all of these classes and all of the videos that were recorded in them using lecture capture. Very low production. The sound quality isn't good. The lighting is not optimal. There's all sorts of weird interruptions, pauses. It's not scripted or anything like that. People really liked it.
There were a lot of responses that I got in comments that were, for me, quite telling and rather affirming of what it was that I was doing. It gave me the idea that maybe this is actually a good thing to do because I thought, nah, nobody's going to watch my stuff. I'm, you know, kind of an unknown, a nobody teaching at these places, not very well-known high-tier institutions.
And there were videos out from, for example, Shelley Kagan teaching his course about death at Yale University, if I remember right. And those were getting lots and lots of views. And I was like, ah, people aren't going to watch my stuff. But people did. And they said a lot of interesting things.
The number one thing that motivated me was people who were thanking me and saying, I'm in a critical thinking class, or later on I'm in an intro class or an ethics class or something, and this video that you recorded is really helpful for me because my instructor doesn't explain things, or isn't a very good teacher and you know refuses to help us out with understanding the concepts, the material, the arguments. And so you saved my grade or you've allowed me to understand things.
And I thought, yeah, that's actually quite helpful. That's wonderful that somebody who is not getting what they're paying for and should be getting from their instructor is at least getting it somewhere from somebody else.
Another kind of comment that I got that was, again, very, I'll use the word affirming, were from people who said, I really like watching these videos because it is like being in a classroom again, and I had to drop out of college. Or I wasn't able to go to college because I have to work for a living, or my life situation doesn't allow it. Or I went to college, did graduate. I'm now working somewhere and I miss it. So, you know, that was kind of a cool thing.
And video of that sort, just like videos of people, I suppose, whitewater rafting. You've done it before. You watch somebody else doing it and you're like, oh man, that's really cool. I remember when I did that or sledding or knitting or whatever it might be, right? So that was another good sort of comment.
And over time, I got a lot of other types of comments as well. People asking questions, wanting to go a little bit further into depth, requesting videos of different sorts that led me down other paths. But when I think about where it all got started, the initial impulse did in fact come from my wife who was pushing me to just try it out. Because I can be a bit conservative and curmudgeonly when it comes to trying out new things, maybe less so now than I was when I was 40 years old.
Isn't that funny to think about that? That 14 years has made such a profound difference when it comes to openness and willingness to experiment. So she was the one who got me to actually start recording. But then we had this bottleneck, this problem. How do you actually put it out there?
And I didn't intend to try to acquire an audience online. I was thinking just in terms of my students and the fact that the course management system that we had, which probably should have been better and would have accommodated me if it had been, and then I might have left those videos in there, and never reached anyone outside of the places where I was teaching unless somebody convinced me to actually put them on YouTube.
If that had been the case, then I think my career would be very different. YouTube allowed me to reach a worldwide audience. My videos have been viewed millions of times by people of all different ages, with all sorts of different motivations, sharing them with each other.
And, you know, not everybody likes them, I suppose, but it seems like at least most of the people who do watch them find them of some value and recommend them to other people. And if it hadn't been for that one circumstance, perhaps none of that would have happened.
So it's a great example of what we call contingency in life, or as the ancients like to call it, the role of fortune or chance. And I'm going to close here by bringing up something that perhaps I'll talk about a little bit more in another podcast, because it is a topic that deserves a lot more attention.
Recently, I've been rereading Cicero's work on the ends for a variety of different projects, and I teach portions of it. And there's a lot of discussions in there about the degree to which we have control over the kind of life that we live.
Is it going to be a good life? Well, how do we conceive of the good life? What is the goal or the end of human existence? And there's a lot of different candidates out there. You may be familiar with the genre of literature that says, let's survey everybody's viewpoints on this. For example, in Cicero's work, but also in Augustine's City of God, and Boethius we find similar discussions happening where people want to survey it.
Theophrastus who was a both friend and follower of Aristotle, and who is you know pretty consistently Aristotelian in the books that we have of him, he's sort of following in his footsteps. He appears to have thought that fortune plays a more significant role in our happiness than do a lot of other ancient philosophers. And I'm not going to say that he's actually completely correct about that.
But I will say that I've developed a much stronger appreciation for the many different ways in which factors have to come together in order for things that matter to our lives to really work out.
And I could give you the example as well of how Andi and I wound up being together, connecting through Facebook, or rather reconnecting after not being in contact for time decades, because you know that we met in high school, but we didn't date in high school. She actually dated my archrival and then we lost track of each other. And then we crossed paths again in the mid 1990s and lost track of each other.
And then in 2009, at the very end of the year,I sent a Facebook request because now she was being suggested because we had that old boyfriend of hers as a mutual friend in common on Facebook. And she accepted. And within a couple months through writing to each other, we fell in love and decided that we wanted to get married. All of that is a matter of chance or fortune.
You could also look at it if you want to as providential. If you think that there is some mind who's organizing things behind the scenes, which certainly could be the case. But so many things in our lives turn out to be rather fortuitous, contingent. And we probably should develop a healthy appreciation for the fact that it is so possible in so many ways for things to go quite differently than the story that we actually know and remember.
So here's where I'll stop with these reflections. Perhaps I'll follow these out a little bit more in some subsequent podcast episodes.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe - Mostrar mais
