Mind & Desire

I’ve been reflecting on a conversation that I had in class and where things sometimes go from there. So, this is a topic that I bring up quite frequently in certain of my classes, particularly the Intro to Philosophy or Foundations of Philosophy class, where we’re very interested in human nature, and I’ve got them reading ancient thinkers who are engaged in some deep thought about what is it that makes us the human animal as opposed to other animals.

And I think you probably already know the answer by rote: “Well, we are the rational animal.” That’s been there in Greek philosophy, and then it got carried forward into the Roman era, off, and the Middle Ages, and onward into Western modernity for a very, very long time. And the ancients were not dismissive of the intelligence or capacity to feel emotion, or other interesting traits of other animals. As a matter of fact, Aristotle talks about those sorts of things in the History of Animals and the Parts of Animals.

But one thing that you can say across the board is that there’s a sharp dividing line, sort of a threshold, if you like, between the rational, the logike, or the non-rational animals. And we’re above it, and every other animal is basically below it. We’re not completely alone up there. There are also the divinities or the gods. Now, they’re not animals as such, but they certainly are rational. So, we’ve got this nice distinction between the rational living things and the irrational or non-rational living things.

Anytime that I bring that up, and I’m asking people, well, you know, what makes us distinctively human as our kind of animal? They bring up all sorts of interesting matters. We usually wind up hitting on intelligence, or language, or matters like that. Things are not quite as clear-cut in our own time.

We’ll talk about, if you want to call them higher animals (I have no objection to using that language, I don’t think that it’s particularly speciesist or anything like that, although some people do). So you know, we talk about the whales and dolphins, we talk about the various apes and elephants, and the corvids among birds. It also appears there may be some other birds that do some pretty complex problem-solving. And, of course, there’s octopus as well, or octopodes, or however you’re supposed to pluralize octopus. People get quite worked up about that as well.

And we could also think about animals that are not quite as intelligent as those, but certainly do seem to have quite a bit going on, like cats and dogs, at least certain ones of them (because some dogs are particularly stupid, and so are some cats, but quite a few cats show some significant amount of intelligence of various sorts). Pigs would be another example. So, we don’t have to belabor this forever.

The point that I wanted to make is that maybe it isn’t a super sharp dividing line between the rational animal and the irrational animals. Maybe it’s more of a fuzzy boundary. I mean, we don’t want to say that a spider is somehow going to get considered to be in the realm of the rational animals, or even the, you know, social insects. We might want to say, well if there is intelligence going on there, it’s going on at the level of the colony and not the individual unit, the ant or bee or whatever of the particular colony.

But we want to say: yeah there’s a lack of sharpness there. It could be that some animals are quite empathetic. It could be that, maybe in the future, through more and more engagement with us, we find out that they do in fact possess more sophisticated language, or a mental map, or empathy across species, or all of these sorts of traits.

Now, what I wanted to talk about really in this particular situation is not all of that stuff, but rather a more general issue that I think is particularly important to put on people’s radar. So, we could look at the earlier idea as an oversimplified one, a sophisticated one, with some justification on the part of philosophers who did spend time observing animals and theorizing about them, but still oversimplified. It sets things into categories that are a little bit too neatly defined. They don’t seem to correspond all that well to the reality that we could observe if we’re being more observant and if we’re not, so to speak, imposing the categories ahead of time onto the phenomena.

Now, some people will want to swing to the other extreme and say: “Aha, so you see these categories are just arbitrary. They didn’t have any sort of basis. All the animals could potentially be the same. Who are we to pretend that the humans are unique in this respect?”

And I think that would be kind of silly, because, sure, we do observe some tool making and use for problem-solving on the part of some of these animals, and it’s interesting and certainly relevant to note that, but we don’t see them going beyond that, manufacturing tools that make tools, or, as far as we can tell, theorizing about tools. So, they may have some kind of technology, but it’s not like what we human beings have taken for granted for now, hundreds of thousands of years in primitive ways, and much more so in recent centuries as well.

And similarly with language. Yes, these animals that we’re talking about, for the most part, do communicate with each other, and in ways that are quite striking. I mean, the fact that crows can intergenerationally maintain memories of human beings who benefited or harmed crows who are now long dead, and they will keep helping them out or keep taking retaliation against them, that’s pretty fascinating, right? But crows are not, as far as we can tell, engaging in discussions about whether this is a good or bad practice to have, or coming up with mythologies about it that explain the origin of these things. And we could find out that they actually do that sort of thing, but it seems kind of unlikely and so we shouldn’t assume that, right?

So, long story short, we can say that there’s a greater complexity on the part of the human rational animal than there is on the part of, let’s call them other quasi-rational animals. And the quasi there, I don’t mean sort of halfway or just imitation. I mean, there’s something there, there’s some looseness to this concept of rational, as there actually is on the part of us human beings. That’s a topic for another time.

But what we have here is an incredibly complex set of overlapping classifications and inferences and ways in which we come to think about and observe and also interact with these various animals so that we can make interesting, theoretical, but also with practical implications, judgments about their rationality. And I think there’s quite a few other concepts that this can apply to. I think a lot of moral life consists in using similarly complex concepts where we don’t want to be overly schematic with it, even though it kind of feels good to be able to put things into their appropriate box and classify them.

And by the way, this classification and distinction thing that we do, that’s part of rationality. That’s, from early on, I would say that’s there right in Plato, being able to compound and divide, to be able to classify, that’s something that is really quite important. And, you know, perhaps these other animals also engage in that in more and more sophisticated ways.

That’s only a starting point. That is not the end point of philosophy, to be able to pigeonhole things and then say: “Aha, we’re done,” or even to pigeonhole things and then make inferences. Instead, I think that what we want to be able to do is to get more and more adept with and comfortable with holding these complex systems of ideas in our heads. And not trying to go to one extreme of everything’s got a classification, we pigeonhole everything, or to the other extreme of saying,:“See, it’s all rather ambiguous and who’s to say or anything like that.” Neither of those are particularly helpful for figuring out how to make our way in the world.

To go back to the animal thing, there are some important implications if it turns out that, for example, corvids and cetaceans are not rational in the same way that we are, and perhaps not to the same extent that we are, but they participate in it to some degree, then we probably have some obligations to them, we could say, not just in terms of counting them as sentient or rational, or whatever you want to say, but also in ethical terms, and those might need to be put into policies as well, as we’ve seen, for example, some places recognizing that the intelligence of octopus mean that we shouldn’t be fishing or hunting them and consuming them, right?

There are some important implications, or perhaps this has great implications for the practices of factory farming of animals that are a bit lower down, like pigs, but certainly seem to have quite a bit of intelligence. So, I think this is something really important, not just for, you know, thinking about animal rights and our consumption, but across the board. I suppose this does require some elaboration on my part. These are just some thoughts that I’m throwing out there, and I’m sure there’s other people who have adequately discussed this using other language, but I thought this could be something interesting for those who want to listen, and maybe it would provoke some reflection on your own part.

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As many of you know from seeing what I post on various platforms and social media, I’m a pretty frequent guest on a number of different podcasts and shows. In part because people tap me to learn about philosophy, and I like to think that I’m a fairly good conversationalist as well.

So, I was on one recently where I got asked a really interesting question about Stoicism, which I think can apply to a lot of other philosophical points of view—not just philosophies as ways of life, but more broadly speaking. And you might even say it could apply to other intentional ways of living or wisdom traditions, even religious traditions and communities.

The person asked me: “with Stoicism, is there one single principle or idea that I would say is the most important one, the most central one?” And I said, “No, I don’t think that’s the way it works.” And I think a lot of people get themselves into trouble assuming that is the way that Stoicism, or other philosophies, work.

So, here’s what my thoughts on that are. First of all, with Stoicism itself, the way I phrased it in the interview was: there’s a number of different ideas that we could say are top-tier ideas, or number one (however we want to rank them) meaning that they’re absolutely centrally important and acknowledged as being so by the various Stoic authors who we come across, or those who are summarizing accurately their points of view.

Living in accordance with nature would be one of those ideas. But Stoicism is not just living in accordance with nature, and then everything flowing from that.

Or virtue being the principal good. Notice I don’t say the only good, because the classic Stoic texts, except for a very few exceptions, don’t actually say that, although a lot of people try to summarize it that way. The Stoics think that the honestum or the kalon (those are Greek and Latin terms), that’s what the good is. And so that encompasses the virtues and what participates in the virtues, and if we look at Stoic texts, a few other things. Well, that’s a really important concept, too.

And we might even include something like the so-called “dichotomy of control,” which we find in Epictetus, but we also do find in Seneca and Cicero’s Latin, in terms of in nostra potestate, what’s in our power and what’s not. Those are three examples of things that are really quite important.

And we get statements every once in a while in a Stoic text that some people will take and run with as far as they can. I had one interlocutor at one point who was trying to argue with me that the absolutely most important thing in Stoicism was the right use of external impressions. He got that from a phrase in Epictetus. And yeah, that’s really important. I would say that might even be top-level as well.

But none of these by themselves is enough. And I like to say, and maybe you’ve heard this in other places, that in my view, Stoicism is sort of a constellation of a number of different, really rich, important concepts that interconnect with each other. And they can be isolated out artificially from each other, but they really have their fullest meaning in connection with each other. And we form this sort of network, if you like, or constellation in our mind as we study the texts and experiment and apply them and figure out what we’re doing.

And once we do that, we have a robust system of Stoicism in our minds. And there can be sort of secondary or second-level things that follow from these, or they might not be as quite important, or they could be a little culturally relative. For example, Musonius Rufus thinks that the way of life that’s most in accordance with nature is that of the farmer. And we could say, well, perhaps there was some justification for that back in ancient Roman times, but I don’t think that agribusiness of the present really answers to that, and there aren’t many people engaged in farming in the old-fashioned sense these days. So, perhaps there’s some cultural relativity there that we have to acknowledge.

But coming back to the main point, it would be kind of foolish, and I mean that in the full sense, it would be an embodiment of the vice of foolishness as opposed to the virtue of practical wisdom or prudence, to insist that Stoicism is fundamentally about, and flows from, just one of these key central ideas, and not equally from other key central ideas that have to be aligned with them.

And I think you could say the same thing for understanding Plato properly, or Aristotle, or any of the interesting virtue ethics of antiquity. I think we could say similar things about philosophy in general throughout the ages.

You can’t just say, “You know, Wittgenstein, that’s language games, that’s all that guy was really about. Once you get that basic concept down, you got it all.” Because even with that, in the texts that talk about language games, there’s also what he calls “forms of life.” And a good bit of Wittgenstein scholarship is focused on what’s the relation between these two things? (which is rather underdetermined in his text).

Or you can say, “You know, René Descartes found an Archimedean point for his philosophy: Cogito, ergo sum. With this, I can use a lever and move the earth.” Well, okay, so that’s important, and it’s pretty centrally important, but it’s not the only important idea in Descartes’ approach. Doubt is kind of important, too, right? And how far we can go with it, and the distinction between the mind and the body, that’s also pretty important. You see where I’m going with this, right?

We don’t want to befuddle ourselves by this rather intemperate intellectual desire to make things simpler than they are. Now, some people seem to have a hard time resisting that temptation, even after you point out to them several different things. One of which is that, listen this just is not in accordance with what we know about this philosophy, for example, Stoicism, that you’re trying to summarize and kind of take over and provide us with a facsimile of rather than the real deal.

The other thing is, this is not good for you as a thinker, as a mind, as a person, to be out of touch with the truth of what it is that you claim you actually are an adherent of. And then third, if other people listen to you on this, you’re going to be leading them astray. And so you bear some responsibility not just for your own buy-in, so to speak, but for making that buy-in public and then presenting it as if it’s the right way to go.

In a Christian context, you would call that “scandalizing,” right? Putting a stumbling block in somebody’s way. In a Stoic context, you might actually talk about it as placing an impediment or obstacle. And I think these are quite similar, although not exactly the same, concepts in these different, but sometimes connected, ways of approaching matters.

So, there’s good news and there’s bad news when it comes to this. The good news, if you look at it that way, is that you don’t have to try to come up with the one single most important principle out of a potential list of 10 or 5 or whatever it’s going to be, because that’s a flawed and foolish approach that is just going to get you into trouble.

So, if somebody’s trying to get you to do that, now, I’m not saying my interlocutor was, but I think there’s a lot of people out there who will do that; they’ll put you on the spot and say, “Tell me what the one thing that I need to know is”, you can say, “Well, it’s not that simple, and this is going to be a blind alley and lead you into failure, and you’re not going to understand what it is that we’re talking about here.” So, maybe that lifts a little bit of weight off of your shoulders, or helps you to have a little bit more confidence. So, that’s kind of good news.

The bad news is, and I don’t really think of it as bad news myself, but some people might interpret it that wa…

Earlier today, in one of the sites that I frequent pretty often, I saw something posted about Kafka that I thought wasn’t quite right. Although it was clearly reflective of what the author had to say about it, but it also struck me as something that’s a little bit either naive or hackneyed, and I wanted to say a bit more about my own response—or rather think a bit more about it. I’m intending down the line to do a bit of writing about it, so I thought I would hash out the ideas here.

So, you might be saying, “All right, what did this person say?” It has to do with his novel, The Trial, which I assume that many of you are familiar with. If you’re not, there’s a guy whose name is simply Joseph K., and he finds himself one day accused of a crime, and he spends nearly all of the novel trying to figure out what he’s actually guilty of and how to prove that he’s not actually guilty. And he tries all sorts of different remedies, you might say: he engages a lawyer, he tries bribing people, he even at one point meets, towards the end, with the prison chaplain. And nothing works. And at the very end of the novel, he is killed, and he says, “like a dog.”

So a lot of people have taken this as sort of a symbol for totalitarian regimes, or guilt, or whatever we want to make of it. And this person wrote, “The terrifying thing about Kafka’s The Trial isn’t being found guilty; it’s never finding out what you’re guilty of.” So notice that they’re saying being found guilty: not really that big of a problem. It’s bad, but it’s not terrifying. But not finding out what you’re guilty of while the sentence is passed on you, that’s the terrifying thing.

I think “terrifying” is probably a bit of an overreaction. It’s being dramatic for the sake of being dramatic, probably to get eyeballs, or responses, or clicks, or whatever. Maybe the person really feels that’s the right term, but I think there’s probably a lot of other ones that are more apt. And I leave it up to you to think about what you would say about that.

But there’s definitely something unsettling, something deeply wrong about being found guilty without knowing what your crime is. But I don’t think that’s actually the worst thing in the novel. And I myself responded with the following:

“Got to say, for me, neither of those are it. It’s instead making all those seemingly right, but ultimately fruitless efforts to get things back on track, only to find out they might have worked if you just knew and did something prior to them that, of course, you didn’t know.”

So to me, that’s really the essence of The Trial. And you could even say this extends to some of Kafka’s other short stories, or to his other big novel, The Castle, where you try something, and it’s unsuccessful. And why did you try it? It was the thing that was supposed to fix things, get things on track, remedy the problem. But of course, it fails, and it fails because the causality is more complicated than you realized, because you didn’t have enough information. And if you had just asked this person over here, they could have given you the right information, but in fact, you didn’t. But you also didn’t know that you should ask that person. Or maybe on some level you did, but you didn’t pay attention to it, or something was hidden, some factor in it.

So there’s always like a rational explanation, but you’re outside of that sphere of rationality, and so things turn out wrong, even though they’re going to keep on going on. Now, should we call that horror or terror, or anything quite so extreme? Maybe not. Maybe that’s the wrong term for it. It’s certainly something bad in the stories, and it’s bad when we encounter it in life.

So you might think perhaps about here in the United States dealing with medical insurance, where they’re denying your claim and telling you that because of a hospital stay, you owe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it might get worked out properly, but it might not. This is a big problem here in the United States. And the system is, so to speak, rigged against you, and you have to jump through all these hoops, and they’ll say, “Well, you should have done this back then,” and you’ll say, “Well, but I did the reasonable thing at the time,” and they’ll say, “Well, from your perspective, it looks like the reasonable thing, but that’s not the way the system works.”

And we could come up with all sorts of other examples of this, whether it’s education, or personal life, or the corporate world—pick whatever you like, we could uncover all sorts of interesting analogies to this. That, to me, is really the heart of the issue in Kafka’s stories. That is what makes them “Kafkaesque.” It’s not just being guilty of something and not knowing precisely what you’re guilty of, but just knowing the fact that you are guilty—that’s not enough to make it Kafkaesque. It’s not simply that there’s a bureaucracy that stands in the way and doesn’t seem to make sense; it’s rather this much more organized and even on some level rational structure, along with a causality that is partly natural and partly social, that you gain at best limited and all-too-late insights into. So you can’t make the causality work for you, even though you were led to believe that you could. To me, that’s sort of the essence of the “Kafkaesque” when people are invoking it.

Now, you could say, “Well, who made you the arbiter of that?” I’m not saying that I am the decider, and I’m even willing to grant that many people in the common use of Kafkaesque probably mean something much more superficial, but I do think that this should be a contender for the real problematic lying in Kafka’s works.

Now, I do want to say something else before I wrap up about an experience that I had the first time reading The Trial way back in college. And I remember exactly where I was: I was in the suite that I was living in, in the common space, sitting on the couch with the fluorescent light shining down from above, reading through the library edition of the novel that was bound and clearly had seen quite a bit of use. And I was struck by the scene in which Joseph K. goes to the law court and finds out that it is in the attic of a building. So he goes up the stairs and he goes to the law court—and I forget exactly who he learns this from—but it turns out that the law court exists as an institution diffused through all of these upper levels of the buildings within the city that he lives in. So it’s this vast, diffuse network of the mechanics of the legal apparatus at work, unsuspected, above all of us in that narrative universe, all the time. To me, that was a gut punch. That was horror—or to use the other person’s word, terror. And that, to me, is a much better candidate than just finding out that you’re guilty and not knowing what you’re guilty of, in part because it doesn’t just have to do with the individual; it is cosmological, you might say. You’re realizing something about the nature of the universe, or at least the human part of it that we inhabit, that makes it threatening and alien to you at the same time.

So, I don’t have any big philosophical message or theory here to impart other than what I’ve already said, but I thought it could be of interest to some of you if you’ve thought at all about what the Kafkaesque really means, or about this particular novel, The Trial, or how Kafka sets up his stories. And like I said, I’m trying to work my own thoughts out about this. Perhaps I’ll do some writing about it down the line that you can see and engage with. But if you have thoughts about this, you can go ahead and leave them as comments here, and that might actually promote a little bit of thinking on my part.

I recently had the occasion to reread (because I was going to produce videos on it) an essay among the many by Michel de Montaigne. And it’s from kind of late in his work. It’s called “On Repentance” or “On Repenting,” both of which are decent translations of Du Repentir.

I was struck by his reasoning, which he’s exposing to himself, but also to us, his readers, about why it is that he typically doesn’t feel this affect of repentance.

And before we jump into his reasons (which I find really interesting): so what is it to repent? It’s to feel like not only did you do something wrong in some sort of objective sense, like you didn’t choose the best solution to a problem, or you made a mistake, or you actually chose to do something that you knew was unjust or wrong in some other sense. It’s to feel bad about it as well. That’s an integral component.

And we have it showing up in both philosophical and religious literature very early on. In Greek, it is metanoia, which has this sense of taking your mind or your heart and changing it or turning it. So you realize you had something wrong. It might have seemed right to you at the time, or you might have given in to it, and now you don’t feel or think the same way as you did about something previously. And it bothers you. It makes you feel like you not only did the wrong thing, but maybe for the wrong reasons, or it’s a sign of flaws in your character, or it was a spot that becomes a stain, however you want to frame it.

So Montaigne is saying, “Listen, I don’t really experience that much.” And you could say, “Well, he must think he’s a really great guy. I mean, who could possibly not have anything to feel bad about? Only somebody who, either rightly or wrongly, thinks of themselves as not having made mistakes or being better than the average lot, being better than the rest of us.” And Montaigne doesn’t do that at all.

He actually tells us a couple really interesting things. One of them is that he actually does have a desire or wish that he could be much better than he is, but he doesn’t think that that’s actually repentance. And I think for a lot of people that might bring about repentance. They think, “Oh, I could be better than I am in a sort of theoretical or hypothetical sense. So therefore, I have a duty to be better than I am”. And: “Oh, I’ve let that duty down, and I should have made some other choices or some other commitments. Then I wouldn’t be the schlub that I currently am.”

Montaigne says, “Yeah, this isn’t repentance.” It would be just as silly for me to repent of it as it would be for me to grieve because I’m not an angel or even a Cato, right? He uses this example. He writes a whole essay about Cato the Younger, the possibly Stoic sage, certainly a culture hero for them, somebody Montaigne would have been very familiar with.

So to compare himself with Cato is to say, “Yeah, that guy’s really great. I’m not. I’m who I am. Maybe God could change me to make me be like Cato, but lacking some miracle like that, I’m going to be what I am.” And I can register the distance between myself and Cato, and I can register the fact that Cato is a much better person than I am, and yet not have to repent about it.

So that’s one interesting aspect. He also talks about, and he devotes a good bit of discussion to this, that he does acknowledge there are a number of mistakes that he’s made in the past, as well as plenty of successes. Some of those successes he was fortunate rather than say prudent, and there were plenty of cases where he made the best decision possible at the time and things still went haywire. They didn’t pan out.

And why is that? Well, because things are complicated. The world is a concatenation of many different causes that we don’t fully understand. We don’t even really understand ourselves all that adequately. You know: why do we have the motivations that we do? Why do we sometimes self-sabotage or get in our own way or pick the wrong course? Well, these things are tricky.

So the best that we can do is make a reasonably well-informed, decently organized, and in good-willed decision when we’re faced with things. Sometimes we have the leisure to ponder these matters for a while; sometimes we have to make decisions rather quickly. Montaigne says there’s plenty of things that I got wrong, I just don’t actually repent them. I may have a few regrets here and there, but regrets are not the same thing as repentance.

The other thing that he says that I found particularly striking in this was that he’s now an old man, and he’s recounting his more libertine days when he was easily turned by a pretty head or body, and pursued sexual pleasure guided by his desire, usually finding willing partners without too much difficulty, so he could indulge.

And he says the repentance that older people show, where they deplore their bad youth (and it could have been sex; it could have been drinking; it could have been gambling; it could have been whatever you want), he doesn’t really care for that, because he says: “You know what? In old age, all that’s really happened is the appetites have gotten weaker. It’s not like my faculty of reason, which is what it really would have taken to become a better person, has become stronger.” As a matter of fact, it might actually be weaker now because it has less opposition from the unruly appetites that have to be governed and reasoned with, you could say, by reason.

And so he says: “If I had the same appetites that I did when I was, we’ll say a kid (meaning a teenager, a twenty-something, maybe even a thirty-something), I’d probably still be doing the same stuff. I haven’t become temperate or chaste, because in order to be those things, I would have had to have changed my disposition. I just don’t have the appetite for going out and getting it on.”

So what I see in this, and what I find attractive in it, is an acknowledgment of who he is. Montaigne is not putting on any airs to be a better person than he is. I think that he was a decent person. Actually, I’m willing to call him good in many respects. But he didn’t need to try to make himself out to be better than he was. He wasn’t interested in self-deception or in trying to project something outwardly that he didn’t have. And what I like the most is he is willing to recognize the fact that there are other people who are indeed better than him, and that he could have been a better person, but just isn’t.

Now you might say, “Well, that’s not a good thing to recognize.” I think it is a good thing to recognize, and I like his attitude about it, which is that I’m not going to have great repentance about this. I can recognize the good and call it what it is without having to try to falsely make it my own. Would it have been better for him to have, I don’t know, had some great moment or period of repentance and totally amended his life? Yeah, perhaps.

And that’s a “perhaps,” right? There’s no guarantees in these sorts of things. But in point of fact, that isn’t what happened with him, even though he had tools, even though he had models, even though he had the leisure to think about matters at great length, as we know from his essays, but that isn’t what happened. And so as he’s looking back at his life, he can be realistic and content.

I’m not saying that everybody should be like that. I like the fact that Montaigne is like that. I’m not even sure that I myself want to emulate that, but there is something to me admirable about it.

And there’s a little paradox to close on. So, there’s something admirable about a man who confesses that he’s really not that good, could have been better, but is not going to repent over it. How can that be the case? Well, it is the case. So, the question that we have to ask is not the “how” of logical possibility, it’s not the defensive “How could this be the case?” that some people would throw out there, where it’s really a substitution for saying “This isn’t the case”. It’s rather an opportunity to think a bit more, to go a bit further than Montaigne himself did in his essay. And I think that would be something that he would be quite happy to find his readers doing.

I had an interesting exchange a little while back about an author whose works I really like, and who I went through a “reading jag” phase, you could say, where I was reading my way through as many of his works as I can get my hands on, and that was Graham Greene. Now, it was back in graduate school when I first got into his work, and it was not through one of his, you know, considered to be “best” novels. I’d heard his name, I picked up, I think it’s called A Gun for Sale, and it was really good! And I was like, “Oh, I’ve got to read more of this guy.”

So in any case, I had this exchange with somebody who was talking about how they were reading Graham Greene, and we got to talking about different circles that we moved in. And this guy was saying that typically, the people who like Graham Greene are going to be lapsed Catholics. And I thought, “Well, that’s a weird thing to say.” Although, you know, certainly that’s what I was when I was reading him; I’d left the church a long time before, actually back when I was in Catholic high school, and hadn’t come back at that time. But I really enjoyed Greene.

And Greene was one of those Catholic writers himself who winds up being a convert, and never is entirely at ease. He’s always got some controversies going on, the characters who are conflicted about that sort of thing. And so, we got into this conversation online, and I said, “You know, that’s not really my experience. I know a lot of practicing Catholics who like Graham Greene, I know a lot of atheists who like Graham Greene. I suppose that if you are a person of faith who’s struggling with faith, maybe Greene would be an interesting person for you to read, both in terms of his characters and in terms of his own viewpoints. But, you know, he’s not all that unique in that respect.”

And then I said (here’s where we’re actually going to get to the main point of this) something that I’ve said many times before in AMA sessions, and when I’m asked about these sorts of things: I like reading religious authors for whom being religious doesn’t simplify things. It actually makes things more complicated. And in some respects conflicted, but also rich. It reflects a world, a universe, a cosmos in which there’s greater depth and complexity than a nice, simple, straightforward one.

I think that there’s a lot of people who are religious in different ways for whom, we’ll just take Christianity, you know, meeting Jesus suddenly cleared up all of their doubts and gave them the rule of life that they’re going to follow and boxes that everything can fit into. They understand exactly who the sheep and the goats are, or the wheat and the chaff.

And when people say stuff like that, I’m usually a little bit suspicious of their epistemological stance, not least because in those Gospels, it’s not up to them to decide! We see so many cases where the person who we think is definitely going to be the good guy turns out not to be so, and vice versa, or mercy is shown to somebody who you wouldn’t expect is going to receive it. There are all sorts of paradoxical statements. And we’re cautioned in quite a few places about making absolute judgments as if we have a God’s-eye view.

Nonetheless, a lot of people, and not just in Christianity, but all sorts of religions, will say, “Oh, everything is now clear to me.” Usually what that results in is a kind of impoverished world.

And I’m actually going to draw upon another convert Catholic thinker whose conversion also made his life quite a bit more complicated: G.K. Chesterton. In his book Orthodoxy, which is a really great short little work, he talks about the insane person, the madman. And he says that the real problem with the madman is that his world actually is logically consistent, but it’s able to be so because it is impoverished. It is a world that, in certain respects, is too small.

So that’s a very interesting observation. He doesn’t say they’re wrong. He says that you can’t really deal with the madman without going into their crazy world. And I think this is the case for oversimplified worlds, not just in religion, but I think also in politics, I think in philosophy, I think in a lot of different areas of life. Which isn’t to say that some things aren’t black and white at times, or cut-and-dry as we say, but less things tend to be than we give them credit for.

So the notion in philosophy that you’re either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, or a rationalist or an empiricist, or an idealist or a materialist, if that’s really how you divide up the cosmos, your world is really too small, too shrunken-in on itself. It doesn’t have enough complexity and categories to it.

Now, coming back to religious thinkers, I said the people who I enjoy the most (and I think it’s worth coming back to that sense of enjoyment and what that actually looks like) are the ones for whom religion has actually made things more complex. Having God in the picture didn’t answer every single question, solve every doubt. Now there’s more on their shoulder, more weight, because they need to get things right, and maybe they feel a little bit out of their depth, but they also know where they can turn.

I will actually say, Anselm of Canterbury, who a lot of people frame as if he’s this arch-rationalist, mainly because they haven’t actually read his works, or they weren’t paying close enough attention, or they read in somebody else’s history of philosophy or Christian thought or theology that he’s a rationalist, they construe him that way. But he’s actually quite concerned about getting things right, and calling upon divine grace to help him use reason to figure out these matters that he says, “These are tricky! These are complicated! I’m not just going to give you some nice argument about why God became man and now problem solved, or whether God exists in the nature of God, or how you get out of the mire and abysses of sins that you’ve placed yourselves in.” No, he is really working things out in dramatic ways, even in his philosophical or theological treatises.

And then when we get to people like novelists, man, it gets even more tricky, more complicated! So I’ve already mentioned Graham Greene and G.K. Chesterton. Somebody else I would bring up is Flannery O’Connor. She writes amazing short stories, but she also writes some really interesting letters to people who wanted to consult her about various matters in life and religion, and she shows a real depth and understanding of the trickiness of things. And that’s what makes her work so valuable.

I’ll also say in philosophy, thinkers like Blaise Pascal or Søren Kierkegaard, I would also say Michel de Montaigne and Miguel de Unamuno, and other people like that who kind of waver back and forth and might not actually be committed religiously, but can take religion seriously enough to grapple with it, fit into that spectrum. In our own last century, I think Gabriel Marcel is a great representative of this (what do we want to call it?) tendency or secret fellowship of those who try to work out complicated matters in complicated ways.

Now, I said that I would talk a little bit about the enjoyment that comes with it. And it’s not the enjoyment of solving a puzzle, which I think is what a lot of people are looking for. You just complete the crossword or the word search and now you can hold it up and say, “Aha! I won!” That’s not the way it works in reading theology or philosophy or literature, or even history. Things are trickier, more complex than that. And I think there’s a different kind of enjoyment that comes with appreciating that, and trying to go part of the way along with people who are intelligent, but don’t think that they are of God-like intelligence, who are trying their best to make sense out of these different matters that they think really do matter.

So to come back to Graham Greene, I’m actually going to recommend one of his stories that manages to do this within a space of not too many pages, so you don’t have to read an entire novel. And it does so from the perspective of a narrator, ultimately, who is not religiously committed. Sort of like Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments are in the pseudonym of somebody who’s not religiously committed, but can kind of get what’s going on there.

It’s called “The Hint of an Explanation.” And I think it’s a really wonderful little story. You might say, “Well, just tell me the moral of it right away. Is it, well God exists? Or the Eucharist is where you meet Jesus?” It’s not that straightforward and simple. There’s like the title says a hint of an explanation, but not a full explanation. And it’s requiring you, the reader, to enter that world. You don’t actually have to be religiously committed to appreciate and to consider what’s happening within that narrative space, just like you don’t need to be a Platonist to enter into Plato’s dialogues and follow along with some of the ideas.

I think there’s a similar dynamic at work there that might give you pleasure, joy, but also perplexity, however you want to think about it. But it’s valuable to engage in that sort of reading.

So, I’ll draw this to a close here, these reflections. I might take this up at greater length down the line, but I think that’s probably enough to throw your way right now as something you might consider.

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Those of you who listen to me, or read my work, or watch me on YouTube or otherwise interact with me probably know that I teach occasionally, but not reliably you could say, for one of the local universities here in Milwaukee, Marquette University, which is a private Jesuit university. Although, the Jesuits really have very little role, and it’s more or less like most other places, other than having a chapel on campus and things like that.

Now, in the past they had a lot more demand for people to teach philosophy classes, but in recent years the core curriculum, and not just for philosophy, but for theology, for I believe history, certainly for writing and other things, has shrunk somewhat. So there’s less classes.In the past I could count on fairly steady teaching for them, and we’re now in sort of a dance where whenever they need me, they get in touch with me and say, “Hey, can you take these sections?” And then after that, perhaps I don’t teach for another year or two.

So, I got asked early on this summer, which is very unusual, to take on two sections of what they call Foundations of Philosophy. Now, that’s a fancy title for what’s basically an Intro to Philosophy class. It’s the one philosophy class that all of the students on campus are required to take, but it’s not very standardized. As a matter of fact, there is no common reading across the various sections.

There are a few requirements, like you need to teach either some Plato or some Aristotle (in my case, I teach both). You need to teach at least one bit of what they call the Catholic intellectual tradition, which is very wide, so that could include a lot of people. And there’s a few other requirements as well. I don’t know that anyone actually checks on these to make sure that they are being covered in the syllabus, so you’re sort of on the honor system.

And what I’ve done with the class in the past has typically been to have them read primary texts, which we go through fairly closely, and I give them a lot of my own resources: the videos that I create and the associated podcasts, handouts, lesson pages, and we talk about the texts in class. We look at certain sections, we discuss examples, how all of this might actually apply to their own life. And we spend a good bit of time on what you could call ethics, on the philosophy of the human person (or philosophical anthropology), on metaphysics, and on epistemology.

In a semester, we don’t really have too much time to get into too much else, but we look at how different philosophers approach these matters in sometimes very different ways, and sometimes in ways that are influenced by each other or responding to each other. And I try to have them come away with some things they can actually use in their own life, even metaphysical things, you know, like thinking about responsibility and whether their actions are really free and what would conduce to making them more free, all of those sorts of things.

So, oftentimes I’ve done a sort of general “Here’s some key ideas and thinkers and texts in philosophy.” But I also in recent years have been experimenting with a somewhat different structure and orientation to the class. It’s not one that’s completely new because I did this at Marist College with their Intro to Philosophy classes as well, and that is to focus on some classic and contemporary texts and thinkers that deal with, we’ll just say, love, friendship, sexual desire, and pleasure, and things like that, relationships in general.

And so they’ll read texts like Aristotle’s famous treatment of the three kinds of friendship in Nicomachean Ethics books 8 and 9, or Plato’s Symposium, but also some other really interesting things like some of Montaigne’s essays, some contemporary work on, say, sexual relations and desire and pleasure and consent. And so it changes from semester to semester what it is that I include in there, but it’s usually got some fairly consistent readings that I want to have them engage with.

And the reason I do that is because I think that this stuff can be very useful for them, and it’s good for them to know that there are resources that have been out there for, in some cases, over two millennia that they can draw upon and think more deeply about as their lives, which are, you know, just really starting out as adults, continue to proceed.

So that’s what I’ve decided to do this semester with both of those sections of Foundations of Philosophy. And I’m just in the very early processes right now of looking at the schedule and what we can feasibly do, and what I did in the past, and maybe want to add to or subtract from, or change around in order a little bit. That means for me also thinking about what I’m going to need to produce resources about for my students, and then for the broader public.

So, for example, I did get to producing videos on Montaigne and his views on relationships. I may actually incorporate some additional essays about those, which means then I need to produce some more, but I haven’t produced handouts on that, so I need to get cracking on that. But I also talked about Ninon de l’Enclos, a very interesting Epicurean early modern philosopher who has a lot to say about the relations between men and women, sexual pleasure and desire, how that fits into one’s life, and the question whether men and women can actually be genuine friends with each other or not, a big issue that people are still debating today. I never got around to producing material on her, in part because of my accident where I broke my hip last year. I was set to produce a whole series of videos and podcast chapters and never got around to it, but I think I probably will have my students reading those letters.

Now, why am I telling you all of this? Perhaps you might be interested in these topics yourself, and I’m considering putting together sort of a, what should we call it... rival course? Correlative course? Shadow course? Within Substack for my paid subscribers as a sort of perk that they get to follow along with, that would essentially cover a lot of the same ground as my academic course that will be going on in these two sections at Marquette.

Now, my students are always very interested in these texts, these thinkers, these topics. And when I say students, I’m talking about the academic students who are usually 18 to 20 years old in these classes. These are for freshmen and sophomores. Mostly interested in the topics, and by approaching these topics, they get interested then in the texts that talk about them, and the thinkers that wrote these texts as guides.

But I think that this would also be of great interest, perhaps even greater interest, to older students. And that’s just about anybody who is an adult, because we continue to face these matters throughout our lives, even going into our senior years, where perhaps we might not be as actively engaged in sex and romance, but certainly friendship can play a major role, and we have to think about the other things that go along with it, like loss and grief and the death of ourselves and those who we care about, particularly other family members.

So, these are some ideas I’m kicking around in my head. There’s a lot of stuff, you might say, jostling up against each other, and sooner or later I will put it into some sort of coherent form that will be reflected in an entire syllabus and course of studies, and then eventually take the shape of real, robust classes—whether just the academic classes or, as I’m considering, producing a class that would follow roughly along in Substack that people might find interesting to engage in, or valuable, or helpful for their own problems that they’re facing, or conundrums, or personal development, or however we want to put it.

So that is really what is on my mind today. I thought I would give you a little glimpse into my own thought process about how it is t…

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There’s a rather curious and, if you think it through adequately, can’t possibly be the case idea that gets pushed out there about Socrates as a historical character, as a philosopher, and as the object of Plato’s Dialogues that runs basically like this: “I, Socrates, don’t know anything except for the fact that I don’t know.”

And there’s a lot of different formulations, some of which you can find sort of close to what Socrates actually says in Plato’s Apology, which has less to do with knowing and more to do with whether he actually possesses wisdom or not. And then you can find all sorts of wild, crazy reinterpretations where people will assert that Socrates was wise precisely because he knew that he didn’t know anything, or things along those lines.

When you see somebody put that out there, you can probably bet that one of several things is happening. The most common one, I think, unfortunately in our internet-saturated age, is that they pick this up basically as a meme, from somewhere in the original sense of Richard Dawkins’ memes, not just like a visual presentation that’s supposed to be funny or catch your attention or something like that. And they didn’t really stop to think about it. Or if they did, their thinking was quite superficial. They responded to it saying, “Oh man, that’s cool. That’s deep.” But it’s just the illusion of depth, and perhaps even of coolness as well.

But we can put that aside for a moment. What’s important about that is it’s a response where people circulate around things that are meaningful, but meaning kind of removed from the context that it emerged from and deformed in the process.

Another possibility is that the person is advocating for something like an ideal of intellectual humility, but doesn’t really have any sort of solid understanding of what that would look like. They love this quip or quote or idea about Socrates because to them it seems to represent the ideal of a person who is intellectually humble, who doesn’t make claims to knowing things that they don’t know.

But again, they haven’t really thought it through very well because if they did, they would see some inherent paradoxes and problems in such a strong position as claiming that you don’t know anything at all except that you don’t know things. Or going even further, putting that forward as an ideal that other human beings ought to strive for, or validate, or think is better than other possible comportments.

There could be other things as well that perhaps are connected to these two ways of approaching it. A person might just be a grifter and liking to throw things out there about Socrates and hoping to hoodwink people. Or you might actually be advocating for intellectual humility because you just want everybody else to feel epistemologically challenged by relation to you.

What I want to do is consider whether or not this is an adequate characterization of Socrates. And I’m going to say as a reader and teacher of Plato for many years, definitely not. And to think a bit about why it would be bad for you to hold that this really is what Socrates was presenting or exemplifying for us.

So let’s start with the Apology itself, where this essentially originates from. Socrates has a friend who goes to the Oracle at Delphi and asks the kind of smart-ass question: “Is there anybody wiser than Socrates?” And the Oracle says no. So Socrates wonders, “What the hell does this mean? I don’t feel myself to be particularly wise. And I live in a culture where there are other people who are being presented as wise and do seem to think that they’re wise. I think that perhaps they are. So let me go and try to prove the oracle wrong,” which is already a weird thing to do. If the god says X is the case, you’re gonna try to disprove that X is the case as your way of showing that X is the case. That’s a little strange to begin with, but let’s put that aside.

So a lot of you know this story. He goes around to the politicians. He goes around to the poets. He goes around to the craftspeople. And he finds that they are not wise, at least in the respects that they are presenting themselves as being so. So the politicians don’t really know how to run society or who should be in charge or how to properly value the goods that are distributed in society, whatever it is that we want. The poets say all sorts of interesting things, but ultimately don’t really know what they’re talking about and can’t even adequately explain their own craft.

The craftspeople, on the other hand, as we find out, they are wise or they do know something, namely the discipline that they work in. So plumbers know how to plumb. Medical doctors know something about the art of medicine. Shoemakers, to use one of Socrates’ favorite examples, really do understand leather and how to work it into shoes. The trouble with them is that they typically don’t stay in their proverbial lane and act as if, because they’re knowledgeable about one area, they’re knowledgeable about another area, or more broadly speaking, all sorts of areas.

And Socrates says, “I went around and asked these people and learned these things.” Couldn’t you at that point say, “Well, he does know something, namely that the politicians don’t have wisdom”? Yes, indeed, trivially so. So to claim that Socrates were to say, “I don’t know anything except that I don’t know,” that’s complete nonsense.

And even within the Apology itself, it seems to be undermined by the very implications of what Socrates himself is doing. He’s taking a lot of things for granted as things that he has at least some measure of knowledge of. Now you could respond and say, well, Socrates, or at least Plato, makes an important distinction between believing in something or opinion (doxa) and actual knowledge (episteme), or the various Greek words that we use to signify knowing, like oida. And yes, that’s true.

So we could say Socrates, perhaps in a lot of cases where he is saying, “Well, we can rely on this,” or “We’ve figured this sort of thing out,” or “We know something in a vague sense,” maybe that’s just right opinion, sort of like what’s talked about in the Meno, also discussed in places like the Republic. But does that actually get you to the point where Socrates doesn’t genuinely know anything?

Not when we start reading through the dialogues more carefully and widely. We in fact see in many of the dialogues, including in the dialogues that don’t culminate in some sort of resolution, Socrates will say along the line and get his interlocutors to agree, “We know that X is the case.” It just won’t be about the particular object of the text.

So, for example, in the Meno, we don’t know what the definition of virtue is, but we do know that if we can’t say what the definition of virtue is, if we don’t have an adequate concept of it, then we can’t really say anything about whether it can be taught or not because we don’t know what we’re talking about, do we? And that’s knowing something.

But we also do know some things, again, just to take the Meno as an example. We know that certain things are virtues. Socrates doesn’t tell Meno magnanimity isn’t a virtue, wisdom isn’t a virtue, courage isn’t a virtue, justice isn’t a virtue. We know that those actually fit into virtue in some way. We just don’t fully understand what the single essence that connects all of them together is.

And if you read the Meno closely, you will see that Socrates will get Meno to agree that there’s even a sort of, whether you want to call it prioritization or hierarchy among the virtues, so that good actions based on some of the virtues actually require that we have two other important virtues: justice and prudence or wisdom. And that definitely seems to be something that Socrates takes to be knowledge. He doesn’t tell you that, but if you’re reading attentively, you see that actually happening.

And when we turn to othe…

As I was rereading a portion of David Hume’s Treatise on Human nature to prepare some video and podcast episodes for a class that I’m currently teaching, I ran across some passages that, I won’t attribute entirely to Hume because that would be quite silly, but I’m going to unpack using Hume, because he provides a great example of something that we might call a philosophical vice or misstep or error.

So what is this? I guess if we had to come up with a phrase for it so that we could easily identify instances, it would be thinking that your own capacity to imagine, or understand, or grasp something, is the final word on whether other human beings can do this or not.

The particular discussion that I have in mind is where Hume assures us that there is no such thing as a self in any real sense, that it’s really a fiction and a bundle of perceptions. And he’s got an argument for this, which is that if we seek inside of ourselves (notice that we can’t get away from the word entirely, but that’s not a big problem), we never find an impression that corresponds to the idea of the self.

So we can conceptualize or imagine a self, but we can never find any origin-point or evidence, or anything that we can look at and say “Aha! Here it is. And Hume explains this in a good bit of detail.

A bit later, he will say that there may be somebody who will nonetheless claim that they do indeed have a self and that they are aware of their self. And Hume says: listen, I just can’t get what they’re saying. And I don’t think that they actually get what they’re saying either. Now I’m paraphrasing him. I’m not reading directly from the text, but that’s essentially what he’s saying.

And I’m reminded another text that I’ve been doing work on recently, againbecause I’m teaching it in a class, Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat, where he insists in a pretty absolute way that there’s no way any of us human beings can possibly by use of our faculties, imagine or conceptualize what the subjective experience of being a bat would possibly be like, and yet nonetheless it does make sense to talk about facts having to do with bad-perceptions or bat experience.

So other people have pointed out to Nagel: Well, maybe we actually aren’t all as limited in our imaginative capacities as you’re claiming that we are. And it is kind of weird that somebody would indeed make such a universal claim for all human beings based on their own, we’ll say, experience. And I don’t just mean perceptual experience. I mean the experience of using our minds to think about things.

So if I can’t think of it, or I can’t conceive of it, or I can’t wrap my head around it, it therefore is nonsensical, or impossible, or pick whatever other adjective that you like. And to me, this isn’t something to condemn entirely because maybe there are cases where we do try to think things out and we realize that they’re absurd or they just can’t be the case.

How do we tell whether we’re on to something? We ask other people: Hey, how does this work for you? Can you wrap your head around it? And maybe they say that they can, but then they can’t adequately explain it to us, and we suspect that maybe they’re engaging in magical or wishful thinking, or just not thinking things through well enough.

So I’m not condemning or dismissing this out of hand altogether, but I do think we ought to be a little bit suspicious when a philosopher or somebody who’s philosophizing but isn’t actually a philosopher maybe even more the case when they say: Yeah, this simply can’t be, because I cannot make sense of it.

I’m reminded of a rhetorical technique that was used by analytic philosophers, at least when I was coming up in graduate school. They would give you kind of a confused look, when you would try to say something to them, make some sort of claim or advance an idea or an argument.

And here’s the catchphrase. They would say: I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about. Or: I simply can’t understand what you’re saying. And they would often say things like, this may make sense to you, but it makes no sense whatsoever to me. With the implication being: I’m the reasonable person, and you’re either a crackpot, or coming from some weird vector that I’m not going to entertain, or just not advanced enough in the study of philosophy. So I am the standard, so to speak. And you failed to meet the criterion, which is that what you’re saying could actually, with some difficulty, make sense to me. There’s many different variations on this.

And now why shouldn’t we take it for granted that people who do seem smarter than ourselves . . . I mean after all Hume has a whole book that he’s written, and many of us don’t. We’re intruding into his book, so to speak, and checking out the topics that he has given much thought to and decided to weigh in on, kind of like guests or interlopers. Maybe we’ve written a book, but it’s not exactly on what Hume is talking about, so we’re in a lower position.

That may be one model for how we understand what engaging another philosopher looks like, but that’s only one model out of many possibilities. The great irony is that Hume himself is somebody, like many philosophers, who has a great capacity to think about possibilities otherwise and raise them when he’s discussing other people’s contentions about things. And yet, in some areas, like whether or not we have a self, he simply can’t conceive of anything that would answer to what people have called the self.

And this is so common, not just in modern philosophy, but in late modern philosophy and even in earlier engagements in philosophy. So I think this is something well worth dwelling on. Again, we shouldn’t just dismiss any sort of first-person , “I understand” or “I don’t understand” claims out of hand. But we also shouldn’t automatically take them as if they are the last word on the topic. And perhaps they should lead us to, on occasion, speculate about: well, why doesn’t this person see things as possibly being otherwise?

And maybe another exercise, we could ask ourselves: what if they could see it as otherwise, this particular matter, and how would that fit into the rest of whatever system or structure or works and bundles of ideas that they have? That could be an interesting exercise on our own part to create a sort of dialogue within the philosopher’s works and thought.

So this has taken us pretty far afield, but I thought it could be an interesting set of reflections spurred by some of the people I’m currently studying and the approach that they take towards possibility, and conceivability or intelligibility.

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In one of my most recent interviews, I got a compliment that I’ve received several times, which I think is kind of telling. It doesn’t often come up when I’m having a conversation with somebody who is directly within, let’s call it, the world or discipline of philosophy But it does happen quite often when I’m talking with people from other fields. Most commonly it has come up when I’m interviewing an author who has not written a philosophy book, rather something that I think has philosophical depth, but is better classified as literature or something else within that spectrum.

I suspect that this has to do not just with the disciplines themselves or the discourses, but with the sorts of people and platforms on which somebody will typically get interviewed. And it does happen to me to some degree in philosophy as well. Not so much with people in philosophy interviewing me, but people coming in from the outside, from other areas such as entrepreneurship or the world of ideas more broadly speaking, where they’re trying to advocate for doing things like that in a very public way.

So let me tell you what the compliment in general tends to be. Obviously I’m putting together kind of a composite. It’s not verbatim from any one of the compliments. But it’s something like usually after the interview, in an email, or before we actually log off and stop recording. The person will say to me: You know, I really enjoyed this interview because you asked really good questions, and had follow ups that weren’t the sort of thing that I’m usually getting.

I’ve come now to ask another follow up myself when they say that sort of thing, like: Well, are you usually getting questions that are somewhat stereotypical or banal, like where do you get your ideas from? or what is your book about? Oftentimes they’ll also say to me one other thing as well, which is: I get the sense that you really closely and attentively read the book that I wrote.

So I think there’s something to unpack here, and it’s not something that I want to say philosophers are automatically good at. I think that it’s something where the sort of work that we do, the sort of things that we study, the texts, the discourses that we get in, although they have plenty of their own sorts of failings and what the French call a “professional deformation” of your mind or character. There are some things that philosophy-interested people, and I won’t just say people in academic philosophy, but people who are studying philosophy, often get quite good at.

I think one of those things is reading attentively, and correlating things together, and looking for when things make sense, and when they seem to be in contradiction. And then probing a bit to see whether the contradictions are apparent and are merely tensions which are often quite rich, or when there’s something really problematic there that you would want to push on.

Philosophers as opposed to other disciplines are probably geared on their own, and then within the discipline, to asking hard questions of other people and not being too squeamish about doing that sort of thing, which can be actually refreshing to people who don’t get that sort of treatment most of the time. That said, philosophers can sometimes be too adversarial, and maybe we’ll talk about that some other time, because I do want to come back to his main comment.

So these sorts of experiences and encounters show you there’s something going on, because the author, the interlocutor is responding in a spontaneous, unguarded, genuine way. And they’re comparing their experience with you, and the approach that you take, with the more common sorts of interactions that they’re having, which we could describe as, I don’t want to say simply superficial, as if everything else is superficial and philosophy is deep. That would be going way too far.

But we can talk about superficiality, or banality, or generic-ness, whatever we want to call it. You know, we could use the term basic that has become a pejorative in recent years. And all of these convey a sort of lack of fuller, deeper, richer engagement which was possible. If it wasn’t possible, nobody would actually miss it. But it is possible.

So somebody who is coming at a book an author a topic in a way that’s not just different from how other people are doing, but having been trained or practiced, however you want to put it, in digging deeper and seeing connections and asking questions and following up, is going to be able to do that more often, more reliably, more sustainably than others who might actually blunder their way into it or happen upon it from time to time.

And this has got me thinking that, you know, I’m I’m pretty fortunate in that I have spent the majority of my life at this point in time in the field of philosophy, either as an academic, as a student, as a professor, and an instructor. But also in all sorts of other ways that go beyond the academy and bring it into ordinary and real-life with the kind of people who aren’t necessarily going to college or even went to college, but can certainly can find value in the intellectual life in particular in philosophy and its myriad different subjects and approaches.

That’s fortunate on my part because I get to experience not depth or interest or richness all the time because there can be, you know, boring stuff within philosophy. If you’re doing academic things, you’ve got the activities of grading, which are not always mind-blowing. Or setting up a curriculum, which isn’t always a treat. But you get to do more of that than the person who doesn’t get access to that regularly. And I sort of take it for granted. But I forge how many people out there are, you might say, starved for something that they’re not even sure they have a taste for, a hunger for. They just know that they’re not getting everything that they want.

And so to come back to these experiences with authors in particular, but also with many other people, where they say that they really got something out of the interview, or conversation, or even just engagement. I think there’s a phenomena there that calls out to be explored in greater depth, but I don’t think can be easily turned into something like a full-blown theory. And we have to be very careful when we’re making these sorts of distinctions not to draw claims that are too generalized and sweeping about it. So I’m not sure exactly what I want to do with it, but I have a sense that there’s something important here that certainly goes beyond just my own personal anecdotes, that is well worth mulling over and exploring. And so I thought it would be great to share with you, and see whether perhaps some of you have similar experiences, or what you think ought to be made of this one.

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.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

Today I had an interesting conversation with a client and a practice you could say emerged out of it. A practice that I myself have been doing in certain circumstances that I’ll tell you about in just a few moments, which I thought would be useful for them as well. It’s probably best to begin by talking about the circumstances in which you would want to engage in this practice, and then I’ll tell you about it.

Quite a few of us wake up in the middle of the night, either because we had a bad dream, or because we’re getting up to use the bathroom, or get a drink of wate,r or we’ve got a body pain that maybe we need to see to or stretch, or something like that. As you get older, these sorts of things are more common, but sometimes we’re also woken up by our own active minds, perhaps worrying, being anxious, mulling over things.

I know that myself, even though I realized it was completely irrational, the night before the beginning of a new semester where I had classes particularly face-to-face classes, that I would be teaching to a new crop of students, even though I’d been teaching for quite a while, sometimes I would wake up and not be able to fall asleep, and it would undoubtedly be because I was anticipating this new situation that I was going to be in.

So I was talking with this person and they said that they have been waking up like that, not regularly, but off and on for a number of years in the middle of the night and then having some difficulty getting back to sleep. And I think this is very common, or at least we read that many people struggle with this sort of thing.

You’re now awake, you’re lying in bed and your mind is working and it keeps you from being able to drift back off into sleep. Why? Because there are emotions that are associated with what it is that you’re thinking about. And I won’t say that these are all necessarily what we would call negative emotions. But I will actually use a term that the Stoics preferred for the pathē, the emotions that are troubling. They called them, among other things, perturbationes.

And the singular for that is pertubatio. And it means something like being shaken up, being upset, being steered around. They talked about these emotions as being perhaps contrary to reason or disobedient to reason. And they’re things that we feel. And so why do we feel them?

Well, we could be thinking about the day that happened before or even the week and And it could be the totality of it or it could be a particular incident. And we’re ruminating on it and thinking: Oh, I should have done this instead of that. Or when I was in a conversation or a conflict with this person, I should have said this, or it wasn’t right for them to say that. Or we might even think about our own mistakes that we made, and feel embarrassed, or ashamed, or guilty about them.

So that is the aspect of the past, probably the immediate past. Although sometimes people wake up in the middle of the night and they’re troubled by something that they did or something that somebody did to them years and years ago. But it’s more common that it’s something fairly immediate.:

The other thing that people might be thinking about instead of the past is the future. What is coming up ahead? And it could be the day that is facing them and some of the challenges that they are anticipating running into. It could even be things that we think are going to be good, but we’re not quite entirely sure about and we could worry that things are not going to turn out the way that we want them to, even though we’re anticipating something that would be pleasant or even joyful the future could also just like the past extend off

Quite a ways we could be worried about our finances, worried about our job situation, worried about the economy as a whole, worried about our eventual demise. All sorts of things can figure into that. We can be concerned for people other than ourselves as well, both past and future oriented.

And you could even be focusing on the present. You could be thinking about: Well, what am I? What kind of person am I right now? Maybe you’re not entirely happy or content with who you are and how you evaluate yourself, and you think that you should be somewhat different than you actually are. That’s going to be upsetting to you. And that might keep you awake.

I myself have been woken up in the middle of the night with thoughts like these and tried to struggle against them. And there are some things that I have found useful. Usually it’s not going to be going into a detailed analysis about what I think and feel about the past, and untangling all the different threads that are tied together, and seeing which ones are true and which ones aren’t, are false, and which I’m not quite sure about, or looking to the problems ahead.

I suppose if I were better off perhaps, engaging in premeditatio malorum in the middle of the night would be helpful for me. But that’s usually not where I myself am, although I’m perfectly fine at doing that during the daytime. Instead, I will typically do one of several things.

I don’t do the proverbial visualization that they call counting sheep where I suppose you imagine sheep jumping over a fence. That’s usually how it’s done in cartoons. You count them and eventually in the act of counting you doze off. When I was a kid,I tried doing that, and I found it didn’t work for me, even though the adults suggested it.

What I do though is sometimes visualize myself as floating in a deep subterranean river that is cool, and I’m not drowning. As a matter of fact I don’t need to breathe, and I’m just being carried along by the current in a dark place. Sometimes that helps me slip off into sleep.

Another thing that’s similarly a visualization exercise I’ll do is I imagine my cat companion, Sassy, who we lost some years ago, but who I was very close with, cuddled up in my arms or lying against my back or putting her paw on me and rearranging my arms into the configuration that she wanted them in. She slept next to me nearly every night. And I imagine being with her and the good feelings that we had together, the love, the companionship. Eventually that helps me doze off. And it also has the added benefit of letting me keep her alive in my heart, which is an entirely different story.

But the other things that I actually find quite helpful for putting my mind on other objects than those worries about past, future, or present is to effectively create a new present in which my mind is examining something. And I do it myself with two kinds of literature.

I like to read a lot of speculative fiction, as probably quite a few of you know. So I will take a plot from something that I’ve been reading and kind of explore it. Get into all the nooks and crannies of it and think about what did happen, what didn’t happen, what could have happened, the different characters. and how they could interact. And before too long, I find myself drifting off to sleep because that takes a lot of brain work at a time when I’m not really up for all that much of it.

The other is I will also take philosophical texts and thinkers that I’ve engaged with before in the past, and I’ll bring to mind some things that they said that I found interesting and think my way through them.And similar to playing around with a plot, I’ll do, you might say, some variations on them.

So I might think about Aristotle and his conceptions of moral virtues, and the things that he said in the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics among other places, and then muse a bit about who actually has these, and circumstances in which they would be displayed, and what mitigating factors there might be in saying that somebody is virtuous, or just on the way, or self-controlled, or lacking self-control. or vicious. And again, before too long, my present has been occupied by some complex, coherent thoughts.

And I find that that enables me to get the rest that I know that my body and my mind actually need ,and it allows me to drift off and then wake up in the morning ready to do more thinking of different sorts. So I don’t know what you would call this practice, but it strikes me that it could be something quite useful for a lot of people. And I thought I would set down my own experience, and thoughts, and recommendations that you could easily, I think, turn into your own version of this.

And it doesn’t have to be literature and it doesn’t have to be philosophy. You could imagine, if you’re a gearhead, an engine, and how you would take it apart and put it back together. You could imagine, if you’re culinarily inclined, the steps in putting together and producing a dish. I think there’s a lot of different possibilities for this, but it could be quite helpful for a lot of people, and it’s using the mind that you’ve been given to put it in somewhat of a better condition.

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.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.