PREVIEW-Episode 25: Spinoza on Human Nature

0:00 Speaker: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. If you want more than one episode, you can become a PEL citizen at partiallyexaminedlife dot com membership.

0:25 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our primary question for episode 25 is what is human nature as communicated through Baruch Spinoza's the Ethics from 1677, books two through five. This is a continuation of our discussion from episode 24, which was largely about book one of the Ethics. So you should go listen to that first. My name is Mark Linsonmeier, kicking it from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:55 Seth: This is Seth Paskin rockin it in Austin, Texas.

1:00 Wes: This is Wes all one in Boston, Massachusetts.

1:06 Mark: Why is that funny every time?

1:08 Wes: Am I. Is that where I am? Yeah, that's right.

1:11 Mark: In last time we talked about Spinoza's conception of God, which is mostly what book one is about, where God is not a transcendent God. God is imminent. Really. All of nature is God. Everything you look at is God, right? Which sort of follows from the fact that God is everything. God is infinite. So therefore God is this piece of crap on my shoe and everything else. Some other things that sort of follow from. I mean, really, the rest of this I characterize as being about human nature. So the mind, body, relationship, what that means for how we get knowledge.

So he's, you know, kind of a typical rationalist, and then he spends a lot of time talking about the passions, the emotions. And once he set that up, then, well, that sort of gives a picture of human nature. Given that he said that we're all determined. Everything we do, everything we see, everything that is, is a direct emanation and necessary emanation from God's nature. So everything is predetermined. But still we have this. Once you set up this notion of the passions and by contrast, reason, we ended last time talking about these essences and how we know proofs of geometry and things like that.

So once he sets that up, he gives us kind of a formula for living an ethical life despite the fact that all of our actions are predetermined. It's more of a virtue ethics thing. Right? You can't just give us a rule and say, everybody follow this. So there's a psychology built in of, you know, how can you enable somebody to be ethical given that they're going to be motivated by their passions and just getting clear about what his metaethical views then are, given this thoroughgoing determinism. All right, we're starting on the mind and body, right?

2:39 Wes: Yeah. The very quick summary of it is that he talks about that the order of things is the same as the order of ideas, where you get this isomorphism between these two causally Waldoffs realms, where for every extended thing there's a corresponding thought, including, for instance, for a chair, there's a thought corresponding to a chair, but for a human body, there's a very complex set of thoughts corresponding to that which are also God's thoughts, but which. Which basically constitute our mind. And it's not that there are two types of substances in this case, mind and body. He's a monist in the sense that there's really just one set of things ultimately, but they are conceived of by these two different attributes.

3:30 Mark: Conceived of by us.

3:31 Wes: Yeah, well, the attributes are also. It gets complicated because those attributes belong to God. Right. Extension and thought. It's not merely that we've made them up. Exactly. But the point is that those two attributes really ultimately belong to this same more fundamental reality, you know, what's substantial, and it is one unified thing. So we get a kind of identity theory of Spinoza, which is, you know, has some similarities to, say, identity theorists today who say the brain is the same as the mind. But one distinction to make here is that for modern identity theorists often talk about one of those two things, brain or mind being sort of more fundamental.

So the brain causes mental states, for instance, or some people would want to say they're the same, but one's reducible to the other, but the matter is the thing that everything gets reduced to. And then the idealist would say, well, what seems to be material objects really just are mental. For Spinoza, that's not the case. Right. The thing that everything really reduces to is at a level below both the material and the mental. It's that unified whatever substance belongs to God, God dust, that underlies the different attributes of extension and thought.

4:46 Speaker: Right.

4:46 Mark: You were commenting last time that he kind of purposefully mixes together the ontological point with the epistemological point. That is, I don't know if you can say, you know, God in himself has these two attributes. Certainly we don't know if they're the only two attributes. In fact, he says they're.

5:02 Wes: Well, he says there must be infinite. Yeah.

5:04 Mark: Infinitely many attributes, but these are the ones that we can perceive. I mean, that sounds Almost Kantian.

5:10 Wes: It does, yeah.

5:11 Mark: That. That's our way of hooking up with the universe.

5:15 Wes: Yeah. And you can see why when we talk about these two causal orders. Right?

5:19 Seth: Yeah.

5:19 Wes: He needs to put together cause in the sense that we might think of causality in the hard sciences, say one phenomena causing another, one billiard ball hitting another and causing it to move. But then there's causality in the sense of explanation where one thing is explained by what causes it. So for any given thing, its essence consists of everything that explains it, where everything that explains it in the one realm of the thinking just is everything that causes, causes it in the realm of the extended. So those two things coincide as well because you have this coincidence at some more fundamental level of thought and extension. Then you can say that causality in the sense of things knocking up against each other and causality in the sense of why is this and how do I explain it? And giving a definition of things, those two things become the same at some level.

6:14 Mark: It's an associative view of mind that an idea leads to another idea which leads to another idea. But the way they do that is the same like as physical causation. Right. If you have want to understand why this book is there, then you think of what caused it to be there and think of what caused it to be. So the physical run of causality is the same as the way the ideas would run if you're thinking about it.

6:35 Wes: Yeah. And the ideas just run on their own little plane. Right. They're a completely sufficient little causal realm and of themselves. So if you want to say I went to the fridge for ice cream and then say why? And say I'm hungry, you get a little causal realm. You don't make references to what's extended there. You don't say, well, my body caused my mind to be hungry and blah blah blah. It's the sequence of ideas that has its own little explanatory causal integrity. And then on the other level, you just describe the machine where the body has certain states which will. When it reaches a certain homeostatic situation, it's going to tend to do this and blah blah, blah. And those two things don't jump back and forth in the Cartesian way. They simply remain separate aspects of one more fundamental unified thing.

7:23 Mark: But which explanation seems to make sense in a given circumstance depends on the motivation involved. And that's going to be very important for his ethics. So if I take a purpose of action because I've reasoned something out, I have a bunch of beliefs And I've determined this is the thing that I must do, then that's a very easy way to give a detailed causal account of that purely on the mental realm. Whereas if I just get an urge and I do something, he's going to say it's easier to give reasoning for that, I think, on the physical realm. Right. In fact, we don't even understand when we have emotions, when we get urges like this. Yeah, there's an idea that it's associated with it, but we don't really understand that emotion. We don't necessarily understand why we're having that urge or where it came from.

8:04 Wes: Well, he says there's an idea for every part of the body. Right. And yes, when we say there's an idea for chair, we don't just mean, hey, there's an idea in my mind that corresponds to chair, represents chair, even though that's possible. But the chair itself has an idea that hangs around with it in the same way that our mind represents our body. So it's a very panpsychic type of theory, I think, and where the chair has its own mind and that broader sense of mind. And then you could do that for every part of the body. So you could take an organ and say there's a representation of that organ, even though we're not aware of it,

8:40 Mark: but if we learn about it, then we become aware of it. Right. I mean, that's. So if I'm having a pain because I have a certain problem with my liver or something, then somehow, if I can learn about that, if I can become more educated about in other works, he recommends explicitly training in physiology and things like this, then. Well, it's not that the urge goes away or something, but at least I can see where it comes from. And whereas I might feel it as an emotional affliction, I'm being, you know, God is torturing me with this pain in my liver.

Once I have a medical understanding of where that's coming from, not only could I then take moves to physically treat it with some medicine or something. Of course. But even if I can't do that, I can separate out that feeling from the emotion that it might have given rise to in me, and I can then, as a stoic sort of bear through the pain and put it in perspective or something like that.

9:33 Speaker: Yeah.

9:34 Wes: Because the representation itself.

9:36 Speaker: Right.

9:36 Wes: Is just. It's what he calls confused or. Yep. And it's confused because it. Whatever's happening in your body. Well, I'm thinking now of representations that involve interactions with other bodies. So when we perceive things, so something causes a pain in the liver that's both a representation of the body of the liver and the thing that's doing it. So it's always this interaction and that causes a confusion. We're confused about whether we're representing something that's just of the body or the thing that's affecting the body. And what we do, when we do science is we help make those distinctions. We help make it clear what belongs to, you know, the thing that's causing and the thing that's being affected.

10:15 Mark: Yep.

10:16 Seth: You know, one of the things that I remember that I thought was interesting was there's a part in there where he talks about the idea of self knowledge, kind of reference to, I think, Cartesianism. But he talks about the ideas that we have of the body not corresponding to the complete picture that we can't ever have true self knowledge or complete self knowledge because we can't possibly ever understand or have ideas of all of the things that are happening when our body does something very routine. And this is similar to that conversation we had a couple of episodes ago where we talked about, your brain says, pick this thing up.

It doesn't say, okay, shoulder muscle move this way. And then bicep and tricep work together in this way to make this thing happen. Like things happen in our body that we do not consciously comprehend. But on Spinoza's model, there have to be ideas of those things, but those are ideas that we don't. We don't know.

11:11 Mark: They're not hanging around in our intellect.

11:14 Seth: Yes. So they're part of the causal chain, but somehow we are not. It's weird. We don't really have a language to use that makes sense, or our typical language that we talk about self awareness and consciousness doesn't really work in this context. You know, you can't say, we don't have this idea. We do have this idea. It's part of the causal chain. It's. It's reflective of the attribute being the, you know, an attribute of God. But we as modes of God. One of the aspects of our modality, if you will, is to not be aware of all of the attributes or ideas that make us up.

11:49 Mark: And he uses these spatial metaphors that it's like we're localized in fact, so. So he defines each of us. Does the idea of the individual mind is that of the individual body? Something like that. Which means, I mean, you can't actually doubt that you have a body for him. Like Descartes says, you can doubt that. No, no, no. But, you know, couple that with Descartes thought that the contents of our mind were all transparent to us. At least it sounds like he thought that sometimes. Whereas clearly for Spinoza, because the idea that our self corresponds to which is our body itself is actually made up of a whole lot of parts. And so consequently, the idea of the self is itself made up of more parts than we are conscious of. So we don't even. Our minds are not transparent to us because our bodies are not transparent to us.

12:35 Wes: Right. I mean, Descartes did have the clear and distinct versus fuzzy, yes, idea distinction, but because for him, the clearness and distinctness isn't something that you could be deceived about. Right. Whereas Descartes entertains being deceived about it by God.

12:49 Mark: I looked a little just over the past couple of days on his. On the improvement of the understanding, which is like over a decade earlier, and he specifically talks about in there how if it's a simple idea and I can see the whole thing, then it's not something I could be mistaken about, both in the ethics, in his epistemology part and in this. It's really evident that he's been reading the Theaetetus, the Plato reading that we talked about in another episode, because he's really concerned about false belief. How could false belief be possible? And, you know, given that things that we're completely aware of are all clear and distinct to us.

Well, it has to be, because there are multiple ideas being combined or ideas that we only have a part of or something like that. He uses geometric examples, like any rationalist mathematical examples, as key that we completely understand the concept of one plus one or something, and so we can't be wrong about that. But once you get into really crazy complexes of things, it's easy for some part of it to slip our mind and us be to be wrong about something.

13:46 Wes: The clearness and distinctness has to do with this thing for Spinoza, that all ideas are representative, right? They're all representations.

13:54 Mark: Perception is around book 2, 17. If the human body be affected in a way which involved the nature of any external body, the human mind will contemplate that external body as actually existing or as present until the human body be affected by an affect which excludes the existence or presence of the external body.

14:12 Wes: Right?

14:12 Mark: Just like he says, you know, our bodies are made up of all these pieces. He gives this model of perception and of memory that these physical objects actually affecting parts, you know, bumping into us through eyes, through nerve impulses, you can give more modern language behind it. It bumps into the fluid parts of our body and creates an impression which is very much like Plato talks about it. Or at least one of the things he considered. So here's in the middle of there. When external bodies so determine the fluid parts of the human body that they often strike upon the softer parts.

The fluid parts change the plane of the soft parts. And thence it happens that the fluid parts are reflected from the new planes In a direction different from that in which they used to be reflected. It's like individual neurons are being affected in some way Such that if a signal runs through them again, it will be deflected in, you know, in a corresponding way. And that also afterwards, when they strike against these new planes by their own spontaneous motion, they reflected in the same way as when they were impelled toward those planes by external bodies.

So, in other words, we can call up through memory, we can call up perceptions. And it's actually reproducing some of the physical activities that were going on there. Consequently, those fluid bodies produce an affection in the human body. While they keep up this reflex motion Similar to that produced by the presence of an external body. The mind, therefore, will think as before. That is to say, will again contemplate the external body as present. This will happen as often as the fluid parts of the human body strike against those planes by their own spontaneous motion.

So, in fact, the only reason imagination or memory is different from perception Is that there's some other perception that gets in the way. So that if I think of my mom right now, well, I'm also seeing this computer monitor in front of me. And clearly, unless my mom is not there. Whereas if I was in a sensory deprivation chamber. He doesn't use that term, of course. I forget how he describes it. But if you get in such a way that you're mad or you're isolated from other things and these ideas in your head will seem real because there's nothing.

There's no other ideas that are jumping forth. There's no other perceptions that are jumping forth and contradicting them.

16:10 Speaker: Right.

16:10 Wes: Which goes back to his whole confusion versus adequacy thing. There's always a level of certainty, but it's a matter of degrees. And then those degrees are brought on by the sort of competition of other ideas which overpower them. You know, we talked about that ontology of overpowering being very important.

16:29 Mark: I don't remember us talking about that.

16:31 Wes: Well, that's one of his first. Right. There's nothing which is simply can't Be overpowered. There's always something more powerful that can push it around. And that's important because that proves God

16:42 Mark: exists in the first place.

16:43 Seth: Right.

16:44 Mark: Is a way, one way of doing it.

16:45 Wes: Yeah. But then it's also, you know, we're going to get to this role that power plays in psychology and all that stuff. But the power here, it's a matter of the ways in which certain ideas, you know, as you said, the computer monitor, for instance, exclude other ideas. So it's not like any idea is clear or distinct or in and of itself. It's relational. So that's where the confusion, inadequacy thing comes about.

17:13 Mark: But the way we understand something, according to him, is by understanding its cause.

17:17 Wes: Right?

17:17 Mark: Right. The reason we can understand mathematics so well is because it is a very, very short causal chain. The fact that one plus one equals two proceeds from the essences, you know, of one which to understand those things, the fact that, you know, number is one of those things that can apply to everything. So it's like a universal concept in Kant sense. So those are the kind of things which we can know clearly and distinctly because they apply to everything. And they're in fact kind of implicit in our perception of any particular thing. And you could say the only thing that's prior to that, that causes that is God.

Right. That these are part of the essence of God directly. The same way he says, even though you might think this is strange if you just pay attention, we have a complete adequate idea of God because that adequate idea is in the same way in everything we perceive. Just like number or space or something. Because God is the grounding of everything there is to perceive in very concrete ways just the fact that this thing I see is in space while space is the attribute through which God shows himself. Even though it seems like a conceptual leap to say, oh, space is an attribute of this God.

I mean, that seems like that's one of the most incredible, unique things about his philosophies. He's saying this, but no, no, he's just saying that's clear and distinct. That's obvious when you think about it. And so God is a simple idea. Right. Because when we think of God, we don't have to think of a cause of God. We don't have to follow the causal chain any further. So we can completely understand the idea.

18:43 Wes: God is self. Self caused.

18:44 Mark: Exactly.

18:46 Wes: He be self explanatory. Can't just be a brute.

18:50 Seth: Right.

18:50 Wes: You know, unexplained thing himself. Yeah.

18:52 Mark: Whereas everything else you have to follow a Causal chain back and there's a chance of it getting distorted or not. Understanding where things come from and certainly the system of nature as a whole is not something we can understand in that way. There's way too much going on. That's the conflict for people is that, you know, in one sense the idea of an individual human, individual body, individual mind is just a species of the general mind which is part of the essence of God, right? Just like the essence of space is the essence of God, mind is the essence of God.

What could be simpler than our minds? Like it's just only one step removed from the conception of God. But as things play out adjacent, you might say, use this spatial metaphor to the idea of our self is all these other ideas that are floating around which correspond to different ways parts of our bodies have been affected. And those are confusing. If you trace the physical causation back, they're going to come from something external, right? That is bringing about my hunger or bringing about my lust or whatever it is. And that's a much harder thing to understand than this simple relationship of mind to God, according to him.

I see why you're having trouble with this clear and distinct thing here. Because he doesn't spend that much time on it here. He talks about it way at the end. So he has these three kinds of knowledge. The one we've talked about is the knowledge through perception which is going to give us these weird, inadequate ideas. Because, you know, it's something has bumped into part of us and left an impression on us. And so what we understand, some of that's from us, from our soft tissues, some of that's from the thing itself. And of course, even just the fact that it bumped into us doesn't mean we understand its whole nature.

It's just that one part of it bumped into us. So we really have an inadequate idea of what that thing was. And then the second type is understanding the clear and distinct ideas through reasoning, like analyzing geometry. The third type is this intuitive science, which he doesn't get into till the very end of the book. And that has to do with understanding how things are grounded in God. And the more we have of this intuitive science knowledge, the more joy we get, the more we understand our relationship to God, you know, and that's really the point of virtue.

Again, I'm not. I'm not understanding completely here the difference between the second type of knowledge, this understanding of clear and distinct ideas that you were talking to, and the third type of knowledge. If anything, I'm. I'm liable to try to combine them, I guess you can have knowledge through reason, you know, knowledge of mathematics without necessarily reflecting on the relationship to God. So what makes it intuitive science is you add this third component that you're hooking it up to God.

21:23 Wes: Yeah. The intellectual intuition of the essence of things under the aspect of eternity. That's the third kind.

21:30 Mark: Okay, so what's the second kind?

21:32 Wes: That's just scientific knowledge of the causes of things. Right. The first kind is just brute perception. The second kind is scientific knowledge where you generalize. And then the third kind is the intuitive knowledge. So the second kind is a knowledge of causes and things like that. What we would think of as science and maybe philosophy, I guess.

21:52 Speaker: Right.

21:53 Mark: I'm not remembering the second one as that. I thought it was something more to do with reason than to do with empirical science. And granted, he might just have not had the same notion of empirical science as we do. That these guys, when they thought about science, it was something that is grounded deductively.

22:10 Wes: Well, no, I mean, the empirical sciences are doing well at this point. It's not Right.

22:14 Mark: But the model of empirical science like that Newton had is not that we make these inductive generalizations from individual experiments. It's. No, we can come up with these universal laws by observation. Yes, but it's observation plus reason that lets us come up with these universal laws. So that's. I mean, that's the notion of science he has. It's not a strictly empirical discipline.

22:37 Wes: I don't think we would say it's strictly empirical. Yes, right. You're coming up with models to explain appearances. Those are often abstract models.

22:44 Mark: Sure.

22:45 Wes: Right.

22:46 Mark: Current philosophy of science would say these models are not just, you know, given by, you know, they're more. Oh, they're paradigms. And you can have different kinds of paradigms to represent things. They're theoretical infrastructure that we build. Whereas for the. At this point, the idea of science, which was very positivistic, is that this is the way of representing things. You can have a clear and distinct idea of the. Of gravity or something in the same way that you can of math. Am I misrepresenting that? I haven't read my Newton recently, but I think that's.

23:18 Wes: I don't know. The Principian Mathematica. He invents calculus, basically in it, but it's written in the manner of Euclid's elements. They're all geometrical proofs. Yeah. It's not like he said, we've observed that the inverse square law. He doesn't do that until as late as possible. Right. He wants to do as much a priori as he can. And then he does thought experiments where he shows that nothing but an inverse square law would work. Like with an inverse cube law, everything just spirals in. But still, you know, the scientific revolution is full strength. But I don't know, that's a complicated question of.

23:53 Mark: They've not made the hard distinction in the way Kant does between reason and experience.

23:59 Wes: Right. That's true.

24:00 Seth: Mark, I'm sorry, I'm misunderstanding here. Are you saying that Spinoza says there's three kinds of knowledge?

24:06 Wes: Yeah.

24:07 Seth: I thought there were only two, inadequate and adequate.

24:10 Wes: No, I mean, those are two levels of clearness and distinctness. But the three types of knowledge are just the chaotic, brute perception. And then what I'm calling scientific knowledge, or I think rationality is in there too. But it's also scientific, empirical knowledge that's ordered and made universal and. And made causal. And then the third kind would be this intuitive grasping of essences, which is kind of hard to figure out what that is. Exactly.

24:40 Mark: So it's in book two, proposition 40. Those ideas are also adequate, which follow in the mind from ideas which are adequate in it, which just says deduction works. But it's in the scholia 2. From what has been already said, it clearly appears that we perceive many things and form universal ideas from individual things represented by the senses to us in a mutilated and confused manner, without order to the intellectual. So the numbering here is confusing because he numbers them 1, 2, 3. But actually 1 and 2 are the first kind. So the first kind, which is the inadequate knowledge you were talking about, Seth, is knowledge from individual things represented by the senses to us in a mutilated, confused manner, without order to the intellect.

These perceptions, I have therefore been in the habit of calling knowledge from vague experience. Number two, which is actually, this is also still the first kind of knowledge from signs, as, for example, when we hear or read certain words, we recollect things and form certain ideas of them, through which ideas we imagine things. These two ways of looking at things I shall hereafter call knowledge of the first kind opinion or imagination. All right, here's the second one, which is number three here. From our possessing common notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things.

This I shall call reason and knowledge of the second kind. And he doesn't give any examples to this. Here he refers us back to Proposition 38 and 40. Right. 38 is about those things which are common to everything, which are equally in the Part and in the whole can only be adequately conceived. So that's why I was talking about notions like space and number being adequately conceived. And then 40 is the one we're reading now. Those ideas follow in the mind from ideas which are adequate in it. So it's really these things of pure reason is the second kind.

It's not things of science.

26:17 Wes: Wait, no, I don't follow that.

26:19 Mark: Actually I shouldn't say that. I should put in all the provisos that we were just discussing regarding Newton. You're saying from our possessing common notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things. So yes, those could be space, those could be geometry, the things that Kant would point to. But it could also be gravity. Right. If everything in space is subject to gravity, if everything in space subject to the physical laws, to inertia, those are also things that we can have adequate ideas of.

26:46 Wes: Yeah, I mean, where else would you put science?

26:48 Mark: Yeah, but you'd have to use information from the senses to actually see an individual instance of gravity being enacted.

26:56 Speaker: Right.

26:56 Mark: I dropped this thing. Well, maybe I really didn't drop that thing and I'm just mistaken about my perception of it. So that's really knowledge of the first kind. But it's the generalization from that which he's not going to say a general. Right. It's not a generalization, it's not induction, it's top down. It's that we can intuit.

27:11 Wes: I don't know if we can say whether or not he's saying this is induction or not induction. Because if you want a conte in parallel, you look at one as Kant's manifold, fragmentarily, confusedly, without order through our senses. And two is where I would think we get both the intuition, the ordering in space and time and the understanding. So you get all of that stuff and then three is what Kant would call reason. That's the parallel that I would make.

27:38 Mark: Clearly everything in this book, I think, except maybe the God stuff. But most of this book would be the second kind of knowledge, Right? That's why he's doing the pseudo geometry, which is obviously empirical. At the same time, when he's talking about the relationship between the different emotions, he's ordering our perceptions in a certain way. So that's still knowledge of the second kind.

27:56 Wes: You're right. I think basically Kant gets rid of three. Right. He says there's no intellectual intuition. And so what's combined in the second kind for Spinoza will get divided up and for Kant. And then he'll get rid of Spinoza's third kind. So, yeah, that's the rough correlation.

28:11 Mark: Here's the quote that he has here on the third kind. He says, besides these two kinds of knowledge, there's a third, as I shall hereafter show, which we shall call intuitive science. Is that what your translation says? Probably not.

28:21 Wes: No, I don't think so.

28:23 Mark: What is it?

28:23 Wes: He just calls it intuition.

28:24 Mark: Okay, intuition.

28:25 Wes: And Kant goes on and on about this intellectual intuition which he repudiates. Yes, one of the authors, he's thinking about.

28:33 Mark: This kind of knowing advances from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things. All this I will explain by one example. Let there be three numbers given, through which it is required to discover a fourth, which shall be to the third, as the second is to the first. A merchant does not hesitate to multiply the second and third together and divide the product by the first, either because he has not yet forgotten the things which he has heard without any demonstration from his schoolmaster, or because he has seen the truth of the rule with more simple numbers, or because of from the 19th proposition, the seventh book of Euclid, he understands the common property of all proportionals.

But with the simple numbers, there's no need of all this. If the numbers 1, 2 and 3, for instance, be given, everyone can see that the fourth propositional is 6, much more clearly than by any demonstration, because from the ratio.

29:16 Wes: Oh, wait, no, I think I'm right.

29:18 Mark: In which we see by one intuition that the first stands to the second, we conclude the fourth.

29:23 Wes: So the tradesman, the first thing we just have is habit, right? He just knows how to do something by habit.

29:28 Mark: The schoolmaster told him. Yes, that's the first kind of knowledge.

29:30 Wes: It's inadequate, so he doesn't really know why, he just knows how to do it.

29:35 Mark: And then the second kind, because he's seen the truth of the rule with the more simple numbers. So in other words, he uses reason.

29:40 Wes: Wait, is that the second?

29:41 Mark: That's the second kind. Right here.

29:43 Wes: No, no, no, no, no, no. The way my translation has it, he can do it either because he's gotten it from the master, or because he's made trial of it with the simple numbers. I was wondering if the paragraph that comes after is the third one. You know what I'm saying, what the simplest number is? Yeah, because that's where he talks about intuitive grasping.

30:01 Mark: Yeah, you're probably right. I think you're right.

30:03 Wes: No, but I'm unsure. I'm not. I think this is ambiguous, I think.

30:07 Mark: All right, well, we don't fully understand. We understand that he makes the difference between inadequate and adequate, like Seth was saying. But I think the key to this third kind, as he says he's going to defend later because certainly this example does not get clear, is seeing intuitively the relationship of the thing to God.

30:25 Wes: Yeah, so that was my first reading.

30:27 Mark: Whereas the second kind is all the rest of it includes both science, math, science at a high level, Newtonian coming up with the basic laws of nature,

30:36 Wes: science and math and probably philosophy as well. I don't know.

30:41 Mark: Yes. Yeah, you're right.

30:43 Wes: Don't know that philosophy would qualify as the third kind, since it's got to be intuitive grasping, which means not discursive, not simply reasoning through, not deducing, just getting it in one eidetic whole. Right.

30:58 Mark: So that's going to be kind of the key that once you can see your relationship, see that you as a mind are a subsection or a mode, I should say, of the mind of God, then that is awesome. It's, you know, it's a mystical experience. He doesn't say that you can live with your blessedness with this permanently on your mind or more or less.

31:16 Seth: Right.

31:16 Mark: If you're dedicated enough and good enough at mastering your emotions and you can keep this insight clearly in mind, this intuitive insight.

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