Mind & Desire

It can be easy to get mistaken impressions or even erroneous entire accounts about what it is that a philosopher actually says in their writings, what their position on key topics are, what they thought and stood for.

A prime example of that, one that has been on my mind, is Rene Descartes. He is often referenced as a person who buys into what we call mind-body dualism, which is indeed part of his philosophical perspective. But is the idea that the mind and the body are entirely distinct substances, and that we are our minds and not our bodies, the sum of his views on matters? Not if we read attentively

When we read through the whole of his Meditations, all the way to the end, to the sixth meditation, we discover that the analogy of the mind and body being like a person in a vehicle (in this case a pilot or sailor in a ship) doesn’t actually express his point of view. We as minds are, in his view, much more closely connected (even mixed up) with our bodies than a sailor is with a ship, he says, and this connection ends up being quite important throughout that meditation.

In fact, he goes so far as to call the interconnection of mind and body a “unity”. This isn’t something he explains entirely to his own satisfaction in the meditations, and perhaps not even later on his his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth or the late work he writes, spurred by her questions and challenges, The Passions of the Soul. But that’s all right. It’s a tricky and complex philosophical problem, after all.

The ultimate point is - using Descartes’ views and writings as an example - that we really do need to go to the primary texts themselves, and not just read bits of them, but the whole. Certainly something doable in the case of a book as short as the Meditations on First Philosophy!

I’m currently teaching on 8-week online course on Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, so his philosophy is often on my mind. This goes especially for some of the key passages of the work that created an impression upon me during one reading or another.

Among them is his answer to a question raised in the second Meditation. He has determined that, even if there is an evil demon who turns all of his efforts to deceiving Descartes, he must exist if he is being deceived. And then the question naturally arises: “all right, then what am I?” And Descartes has a short answer to that. “I’m a thinking thing.” But what is that?

That’s a question that takes us deeper. A question answering which provides us with a much more substantive understanding of what it is that we are, at least as thinking beings. Descartes’ own answer lists off a number of different kinds of thinking, distinct types of mental activities. That is what he is, and that - at least to the extent that Descartes is correct - is what we ourselves are as well.

So, here’s a short episode setting out the passages where Descartes discusses these matters, and giving you a few of my own reflections on them as well!

Plato’s Crito is a short and dramatic dialogue. It starts out with just two interlocutors, Socrates and the Crito who the dialogue is named after. Socrates’ execution had been postponed due to a religious ritual, but now is slated to happen, and Crito has bribed the guards in preparation for spiriting Socrates away to a different Greek city. And then Socrates says: let’s think this through. . . .

In the process of addressing Crito’s arguments in favor of leaving, Socrates will do something rather unexpected. He introduces a new interlocutor, the Laws of Athens, and stages an imaginary dialogue in which those Laws accuse Socrates of injustice if he should violate them, and flee Athens.

Is this something that we could do with our own political communities’ laws in this late modern age? Would that make sense for us? What would it mean to personify and give voice, even intellect and argument to, whatever moral norms that might be analogous to these Laws? Those are just a few of the issues raised in this episode

While I was out at Wyoming Stoic Camp last month, in the course of one of our daily group activities, a younger participant expressed a worry that many of my academic students come in to classes with. “Aren’t we judging?” he asked. Now why is that a problem?

Somewhere this college student had gotten not just introduced, but likely inundated with a counterproductive and oversimplistic moral norm all too common in our society. He had been told that it’s bad or wrong to judge other people.

I tell my students in my classes, particularly ethics classes, that they ought to judge. The issue isn’t whether or not you judge, or whether it is bad to engage in judgements, but the quality and the accuracy of the judgements they make.

Matters get even more complicated when it is Stoicism that we are thinking about and trying to apply to our lives, because don’t the Stoic caution us against making judgements? Well. . . . it’s not quite that simple, and in this episode, I explain why that is the case.

I hope you enjoy listening to this little story and short reflections. Perhaps they might prove useful to you or those you care about!

I’ll be resuming examination of some of the key ideas in Plato’s dialogue the Crito here in the Mind and Desire podcast down the line. This coming week, however, I will be somewhere else, specifically Wyoming, where I am one of the guest speakers at the Wyoming Stoic Camp.l So I thought I’d take a little break and tell you a bit about what I expect I’ll be doing, the travel I’ll be undertaking there and back, and what I’m looking forward to.

So that’s the topic for the episode this time around. Less philosophical depth perhaps and more a little slice out of a reasonably philosophically-oriented life. I hope you find it interesting, and I’ll have a lot more to say about my experiences and observations once I’ve actually had the opportunity to have them!

One of the aspects of Platonic dialogues (which you might have noticed already, or this may be a bit new to you), one that I find very rewarding and even fascinating is the fact that there is so much being said. I won't even say between the lines, because it's right there in the lines, but typically the ones that we're not paying adequate attention to, because we think that they're just sort of there to advance the key arguments that we're interested in.

And the short dialogue, the Crito, is a prime example of this. I would say, just based on my own experience, that there's two main aspects of the work that most first-time, even second-time readers are going to focus on almost exclusively.

One of these, of course, is the interesting feature of the laws of Athens themselves coming in as characters and making accusations and arguments with Socrates. Now, how could you not be struck by that? It's a really cool idea, isn't it? And it kind of prefigures social contract theory, so people interested in political philosophy, focus in on that.

And then we have the entire question of whether Socrates should take the invitation that is being urged upon him by his friend Crito to leave Athens without permission, avoid his execution, and go somewhere else where he can live out a few more years being welcomed and celebrated.

There is more to this dialogue than that though. And so I'm gonna point out several interconnected features to you that you might've missed, or this might just be review for you, but it's always worth going back over these.

And I think that these are not just about this Platonic dialogue, but we can ask whether these should be applied within the scope of our own lives.

So the first one, Socrates tells Crito, I appreciate your warm feelings. That is, assuming that they have some justification. If not, the stronger they are, the harder they will be to deal with So let's consider whether we ought to follow your advice or not. You know, this is not a new idea of mine.

It has always been my nature never to accept advice from any of my friends unless reflection shows it is the best course that reason offers. I cannot abandon the principles which I used to hold in the past simply because this accident has happened to me. They seem to me to be much as they were, and I respect and regard the same principles now as before. So unless we can find better principles on this occasion, you can be quite sure that I shall not agree with you. Not even if the power of the people conjures up fresh hordes of bogeys to terrify our childish minds by subjecting us to chains and executions and confiscations of our property.

So what's going on in that passage? Notice there's a few points that he's making.

He tells us, tells Crito, that I've got a way of doing things that I have been carrying out consistently. And I can't just change that, abandon my principles, because I'm in a new situation, a scary situation perhaps. I'm going to get executed. I need to stick to them. Unless somebody can convince me of a better way of looking at things. So two different things going on there that mutually reinforce each other.

What does he say in the very next paragraph? He says, was it always right to argue that some opinion should be taken seriously but not others? Or was it always wrong? Perhaps it was right before the question of my death arose, but now we can see clearly it was a mistaken persistence in a point of view, which was really irresponsible nonsense.

So there's a couple different possibilities there. Maybe they were always right about that and they should stick with it. Or maybe they were always wrong Or maybe it's something that changes, depending on the situation that you're in. Or maybe it was wrong, but they couldn't see that it was wrong until Socrates was in this deadly situation, and now he can see that it was the wrong point of view.

So he tells Crito: I should very much like to inquire into this problem with your help and see whether the argument will appear in any different light to me now that I'm in this position or whether it will remain the same and whether we shall dismiss it or accept it. So they're going to reason together. They're going to think this through.

Socrates may be bringing a little bit more to the table than Crito does, or frankly, perhaps a lot more to the table.And here we get to the second key idea. He says that serious thinkers I believe have always held some such view as the one which I mentioned just now, that some of the opinions people entertain should be respected, others should not.

And he asks Crito don't you think this is a sound principle, and he says listen you're not going to be executed tomorrow - I mean you could die, but you're probably not going to, so you don't have to worry about that sort of thing, do you think that this is still a sound principle that one should not regard all the opinions people hold, but only some and not others? And Crito says, yeah, that's right. I agree with that.

So this leads us then to the third key idea. Whose opinions are good and whose opinions are bad? And Socrates is going to use a couple different terms, a couple different comparisons.

He's going to start out by saying, the opinions of the wise are good and the opinions of the foolish are bad. And Crito says, yes, that's quite right. And a little bit later, this is going to be the opinions of the one, the expert, and the opinions of the many, the multitude, the people.

Some people actually know what they're talking about. Other people talk more or less at random and can't provide you with good advice. They've got mistaken understandings, mixed up priorities. And if you listen to them, you're probably going to go wrong and do some damage.

And Socrates will bring up a couple different examples. One of them is athletic training. Should you listen to everybody? Should you take advice from any random person? Possibly the guy next to you using the weights? No, you should go to somebody who actually knows what they're doing, the trainer. Likewise, medical matters. Well, you could consult your cousin who thinks they know something about diet and viruses or medicine. You could just go to a doctor who actually has studied the matter.

And Socrates says we ought to regulate our actions and exercise and eating and drinking by the judgment of an instructor, not by the opinions of the rest of the public in the case of the trainer. Same thing with the doctor. And if you don't do that you're going to screw yourself up we might think about should you trust a financial planner or should you just listen to your cousin who suggests that bitcoin is the best thing you ought to be doing right about now

And this is going to bring us to the fourth really important point. This is the crux of it all. If we want our lives, our souls to be good, who should we be listening to?

Socrates says, tell me, Crito, we don't want to go through all the examples one by one. Does this apply as a general rule and above all to the sort of actions we're trying to decide about?

And notice he's going to talk about three different opposed paths. pairs of types of actions, just and unjust, honorable and dishonorable, good and bad.

Ought we to be guided and intimidated by the opinion of the many or by that of the one, assuming there is someone with expert knowledge? Is it true we ought to respect and fear this person more than all the rest put together and that if we do not follow his guidance, we will spoil and mutilate that part of ourselves which, as we used to say, is improved by right conduct and destroyed by wrong? Or is all of this nonsense?

And Crito says, no, I think it is true Socrates. Now these are things that Crito and Socrates do agree upon. Something that they have bought into before and they're not going to change. Crito, without changing these things, is not going to succeed in getting Socrates to leave with him breaking the laws of the city of Athens.

Now notice three really important thi…

One common tool that many of us in the field of philosophy make a lot of use out of, sometimes not acknowledging that we're doing so, is what you could call analogy or metaphor, or to use a term that I particularly like for it, similitude, which comes from the Latin simulitudo, meaning something like “likeness” or “likening,” showing how things are connected with each other, how they resemble each other. And in just a bit, I'm going to share with you one that I derived about 20 or so years ago.

It occurred to me a number of times while I was engaging not in philosophy, but taking a break in the day from doing philosophy and engaging in a different kind of activity, something that I had been doing since I was a little kid.

Now, I do have to make a bit of a proviso before we jump in and start looking at this analogy or similitude. You can only push a metaphor so far before it begins to break down. None of them are perfectly adequate. The map is not the territory or even indeed the other map necessarily if we want to mix metaphors a bit here.

I also should say that I'm not trying to make a connection between this activity and anyone whosoever at any given time in any given way engaging in something called philosophy. The field, the discipline, the literature of philosophy is very vast and quite tough to adequately, universally generalize about.

So take this for what it is, one way of representing what philosophical activity could be like and providing a few features that might get you thinking about how to do it well.

Any analogy, metaphor, or similitude is going to have two main sides. The side of the thing that is being used to compare and what it is being compared to.

The side of the thing that is being used to compare and what it is being compared to. So what we're making a comparison to is the practice of philosophy. What then is the other side? What is the activity that I'm saying is like the activity of philosophy in certain ways?

I grew up in the countryside, and part of that was here in southeastern Wisconsin. Part of that was also in northwestern Indiana on my larger family's land, my mother's family, the Lemrises, who have had land in that area for quite some time. My grandfather's generation actually retired there and built houses, so I was there for much of each summer and for holidays.

Growing up in the countryside, you spend a lot of time traveling around on trails and going through the woods and meadows and other sorts of terrain. And you pay attention, if you're smart, to what's around you. And so there's myriad interesting bushes and trees and other features like that, stones, leaves, flowers. Then in the summer, you have berries.

And the berries that we liked the best were not wild strawberries or blueberries. They were black raspberries, which grew in significant profusion in many of the places that I have resided in. And so what is a black raspberry? If you're not familiar with it, you can easily look it up and you'll see that it's a kind of conical sort of thing with a bunch of little fruits all stuck together with seeds inside of them. It's not actually black. It's a dark purple when it's ripe, but dark enough that we could call it black.

There are also red raspberries, which tend to be bigger. They're often cultivated. In fact, we had a vast hedge of them so wide that I had to cut a path down the middle when I was a kid and they grew near our garden. We would get so many that we would eat them until we got sick. There are also golden raspberries, which my great-uncle Hubert had cultivated, and those were a bit rarer. Black raspberries are one of the preeminent wild berry out there.

They don't need cultivation. They will grow on their own in wasteland, under trees, all over the place. And when you find them, it's really quite a catch because if you get a cluster of them and they're fully ripe, they're sweet, they're tart. They have a complex flavor to them. They're better than the red ones. I would say even better than the softer golden ones, depending on your taste.

So as a kid, we would pick these anywhere we went. We were on some sort of camping trip. We'd find some black raspberries. We were out at a park, we would go in the woods and look for black raspberries. We'd go in the woods behind our house and find black raspberries.

And this continued on when I went in the army. We had them in Bavaria. I would pick them there with some of the other troops that were similarly from the Midwest. When I was in college, we had a vast woods behind the college in which there were plenty of these growing and I would go out there and harvest them.

They couldn't find them in southern Illinois because it's black berries, not black raspberries that grow down there and choke them out. But, you know, it's kind of a similar process to picking those. And then when I lived in northwestern Indiana, after I finished graduate school, I would actually go out and spend a lot of time picking these. And I showed my children how to do so as well.

So enough of my back history. How is picking black raspberries remotely like doing philosophy? Well, let's think about what kind of philosophy I typically engage in and maybe many of you do as well. It involves reading texts and thinking about what it is that the thinker has put in front of us. And when you read a philosophical text, the very first time that you do it, you're not going to get everything.

It's not as if everything is available to you right on the surface, neatly organized so that you can harvest it and put it into your bucket and take it home for you. It's going to require a good bit more work. So here is where the analogy comes in and might be helpful.

When you're picking black raspberries, or for that matter, plenty of other fruit, you will see some of them on the surface, so to speak. So they're in plain sight.You can easily walk over there and pick them and put them into whatever you're using to store them for the time being. And if that's all you want to do, that's fine.

You'll leave an awful lot of the berries behind because at any given time, you're probably, from the vantage point that you're in, not going to be able to see most of them. And this is something that you learn from experience. I suppose somebody could tell you this and that would give you a bit of a leg up, but most of us learn this in a more implicit and experiential way.

So if you are a picker who has done this a number of times, you know what to look for, which is that things are not going to be readily evident to you on the surface right off the bat.

Instead, you've got to get in there. And this probably involves a little bit of discomfort because blackberry bushes have thorns on them. If you're not adequately prepared by wearing long sleeves or having toughened yourself up you're going to have a lot of cuts on your hands and arms and that won't feel all that good that may actually dissuade you from the activity at certain points but it never dissuaded me.

And what you find, you go for those first few clusters of ripe berries that are ready for the picking. Now you're closer to the bramble, the tangle of raspberry canes, which are a profusion. And not all of the plants there are going to be blackberries. There'll be other things in there as well. And here's where it's now up to you and your eyes, your brain, and your initiative.

If you really want to harvest the blackberries, not all of them, because you're probably never actually going to find all of them. You have to do some work and you have to be attentive. One of the things that you'll need to do is lift up and turn over some of the canes and the leaves that are concealing things. So as you get closer you can see more of the berries, but you've got to push, you've got to pull, you've got to do a bit of work you have to try to see through the foliage so that you can find these things

And as you're doing this, here's where it gets very, very interesting. As you move from one to the nex…

In this fourth episode, I discuss a key insight coming from Aristotle, discussed in his Nicomachean Ethics book 6, chapter 2, where he says that “choice may be called either thought related to desire or desire related to thought.” The term we translate as choice is prohairesis, and that denotes something much more complicated than just the term "choice" would seem to signify.

Today is the two-year anniversary of the death of an animal companion who was very close to me. She was a cat, and her name was Sassy, but like many beloved animals she wound up with a whole bunch of other names instead. But this isn't really about that! What I wanted to talk about were some reflections from Seneca, the great Stoic philosopher, about grieving and memory and friendship.

And this may seem a little incongruous to some, the fact that I'm going to use a cat as a prime example here, because you might say, ah, you know, they're just dumb animals. They're not human beings. They're not persons. And that's certainly true that they're not rational agents in the same degree as we are, but I think you can say that there's a lot more going on, at least in some animal life, than many philosophers, particularly in the past, accounted for. So they're not rational in the same way that we are, but they certainly do have and act on and show emotions and they have desires and they engage us. And we can form bonds with at least certain animals.

And that was the case for me and Sassy. She was the animal companion that I have been closest to in my entire life. We knew each other for 12 of her 19 and a half years and spent an awful lot of time together. She came to trust me as her whatever you want to call it companion. cat daddy, her person. And she'd even go around looking for me when I wasn't home and use a special little cry that my wife would sometimes try to record and would tell me about later on. So Sassy was very important to me and I was very important to Sassy.

Her end came as it typically does with a lot of older animals with not a complete steady decline except at the end, but she would decline a bit and then she would rally, but it was never quite as strong or high the rally compared to where she'd been before. And so what we observed were several years of slowly becoming less mobile, slowly having more troubles with her body. And towards the end, the decline was actually pretty quick.

I spent three days constantly with her, sleeping beside her, trying to get her to eat, helping her to use the litter box when she was still doing so. And in the end, just comforting her and holding her. So as far as animals go, she had a good death. She went out surrounded by people who loved her, comforting her, petting her, telling her that she was loved and was a good girl.

And then, as is so often the case with loss, you're left behind. And what do you do? Well, Seneca wrote about something like this to Lucilius, starting by saying, “I'm sorry your friend Flaccus has passed away, but I want you not to grieve excessively.

And he tells him, not grieving at all, that would be extraordinary and I'm not going to ask that of you. And then he gives him a number of bits of advice and rules and principles to use.

The one that I particularly like is where he tells his friend: “Let us try to make the memory of those who are gone a pleasant one. If the thought brings torment, one does not willingly return to it, and so here we are bound to feel abiding when the names of loved ones come to mind, but even this has its own pleasure."

And then he brings up his friend Attalus, who used to say about this: “the memory of friends who have died gives a pleasure like that of apples that are both tart and sweet, or like the pleasing acidity of an old wine. After a time, though, all that pains us is extinguished and only the pleasure remains.”

Seneca goes on and says: “if we're to believe him, thinking of friends safe and sound is cakes and honey, remembering those who have gone is bittersweet. Yet who would deny that sharp and even bitter flavors are sometimes to our taste?”

Seneca then says: “my experience is different. To me, the thought of friends who have died is sweet, even comforting. For when I had friends, I had them as one who would lose them. Now that I have lost them, I am as one who still has them.”

Now, that is a very interesting idea, is it not, that you can retain your connection to the lost, the missing, or the dead friend, the one who you feel affection towards and who felt affection towards you, goodwill, perhaps even love of some sort. Seneca is one of many philosophers over the years who have talked about keeping something of the other person within yourself through the function of memory.

Now the question is: How does it feel? Seneca is a good Stoic. He thinks that pain or trouble or grief is not a good thing in itself. It's actually a bad thing for us to feel, but it's also something that's quite natural for us to feel. And so he's not going to say don't try to feel or express any of it.

But when we're remembering those who we have lost, once the loss is past us, we don't always have to be grieving. We don't always have to feel bad or bereft or unhappy. We don't have to feel sad about them. We have the choice about what we're going to remember. And this is the thing that I really take from this letter, and I think perhaps it could be useful for anyone else who wants to apply it.

Attalus and Seneca, who is recalling him to mind and bringing him up as advice for his friend, Lachilius, are using, we could say, gustatory metaphors. They're talking about sweetness. They're talking about bitterness. They actually are also talking about acerbity or sourness and something that we can translate as roughness or austerity. And all of these are tastes that can go together.

And our memories metaphorically can be expressed as having these sorts of qualities or tendencies to them. So we can have a bitter memory. We can have a sweet memory. We can have a sour memory. We can have a salty memory, although Seneca doesn't use all of those terms here. And it's up to us what we want to focus on.

We can think about how unfortunate it is for us that we are deprived of the presence and the engagement with the person or the companion who we were so close to and enjoyed spending time with, or we can think about that time. We can think about that enjoyment. We can consider what it was that we loved about them.

There's nothing that says we can't keep on thinking about that and remembering that and turning it over in our mind. In the case of Sassy, there are myriad things that I think about. The walks that we took outside together here in Milwaukee, going outside in the yard together in Kingston, spending time curled up together, how she used to jump up in my lap and go to sleep or sometimes try to sample the food that I was eating.She was very food motivated, that cat.

And with anybody who we're involved with for a long time, we can call up similar memories and we can think about what was good in those. What did we feel joy in What did we desire and then find fulfilled as a desire? What did we go through together? What experiences did we share?

We exercise our faculty of memory, and this can be done in quite deliberate ways. This is incredibly powerful and liberating. And we can do this not just with people or companions who have passed away. We can do this with people who somehow got left behind in all of our travels or moves or who left us behind. Any of the things that are good in our memory, there's nothing that stands in the way other than our own ideas about it to keep us from calling them up and enjoying them.

So I find this very useful to think about, to remind myself of, to bring into my memory, you could say, if we want to get a little bit meta here.Maybe it will be equally useful for you.

The last thing that I'll say is one thing the Stoics consistently tell us about grief is that although we are going to grieve, we don't need to tell ourselves that the bad feelings that we have are the sign of whether we truly love the person or not. Those are two separate things. The love can go on long after the grief has worn itself out or we've set it aside.

In this second Episode of the Mind & Desire podcast, I kick things off by looking at one of the places philosophy can begin its activity. Epictetus the Stoic philosopher in his Discourses book 2, chapter 11, tells us two things about the beginning of philosophy."The beginning of philosophy with those who take it up as they should, and enter in, as it were, by the gate, is a consciousness of a man's own weakness and impotence with reference to the things of real consequence in life.""Behold the beginning of philosophy!—a recognition of the conflict between the opinions of men, and a search for the origin of that conflict, and a condemnation of mere opinion, coupled with scepticism regarding it, and a kind of investigation to determine whether the opinion is rightly held, together with the invention of a kind of standard of judgement."(these are from the Oldfather translation, which you can find here https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Epictetus,_the_Discourses_as_reported_by_Arrian,_the_Manual,_and_Fragments/Book_2/Chapter_11)