Episode 5: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. My name is Mark Linsenmayer, currently situated in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:19 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:21 Wes: This is Wes Owen in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:24 Mark: The topic for episode five is what should we be like looking at Aristotle's nicomachean ethics books 1 and 2? Listen to our other episodes and get online versions of the reading we discussed. Check out partiallyexaminedlife.com and now may I present the ground rules for our discussion to be revised for future episodes contingent upon our whims. Let's do this in a call and response format. May we? First of all, we don't assume that our audience knows what

0:53 Seth: anything about our subject matter.

0:55 Mark: Yes. And then there will be no gratuitous

0:58 Wes: name wooding, draw

1:03 Seth: dropping, name drop ing.

1:06 Mark: Yes. We're interested in ideas, not with fetishizing a bunch of dead philosophers. If you have a point to make, just make it. You can't say, you know, you'll understand what I mean if you go read Bertrand Russell's why I'm Not a Good Philosopher. And the third one, we shall be rigorous and exact in all that we

1:21 Wes: say, except when doing otherwise would be more entertaining.

1:26 Unknown speaker: Sweet.

1:28 Mark: All right, so that's all the preparation we've done for this week, Right. Actually, I gotta say, to give some opening remarks about our spiritual journey. So I know I had said a few episodes back that, you know, this was the first philosophy I'd read in a while, and it was kind of hard going. Well, this was still kind of hard going. Nicomachean ethics is not the most exciting text as they go. But I was reading other things in the past two weeks since we recorded the last one. Besides Aristotle, some of them were chasing down possible topics that we could write about, reading little bits of things on the web.

But I also read the majority of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu to see if that would be appropriate. I probably is not for reasons we can talk about at some other time. But we. We should do something Eastern, maybe the Chuang Tzu, which I remember liking better than Lao Tzu at the time. I just like to say Tao Te Ching. And I started reading ahead a little. So we're gonna do Leibniz next time. So I started the monadology that we're gonna be reading and then ended up just like skipping around and reading random bits of the best of Leibniz. Leibniz. Super cool writing that I was reading and kind of enjoying this, certainly liking the skipping around parts.

I also got out of the library since we talked last time about Bob Solomon, the UT professor, recently deceased expert on existentialism and stuff, who I've been listening some lectures by. Got his the Beginning of At least Spirituality for the Skeptic, subtitled the Thoughtful Love of Life. So it's trying to come up with a version of spirituality that's entirely naturalistic. So really talking about Hegel's notion of Geist and Nietzsche's notion of spirit and those kind of things and see whether some of the things that we associate with religion, that spiritual attitude is compatible with, you know, hyper rationality and love of science and all that kind of stuff.

So, you know, I haven't gotten far enough into it to give a judgment on the book itself, but the style, you know, it really shows that you can be very clear without being nitpicky, without being an analytic philosopher that has to present everything in syllogisms and fake math. You can present things in an everyday conversational style and yet still have clarity and depth. Anybody else? How was your reading experience for this week?

3:47 Seth: I currently am kind of a little bit fascinated with the concept of being a fan, particularly a fan of a professional football franchise or any sporting team. I am a Washington Redskins fan down here in Austin, which is predominantly Dallas Cowboys territory, And it occurs to me that it occurred to me I was just kind of curious about the idea that people would root for a team like, say, the Detroit Lions, who have just been terrible, you know, for the better half of the century, and yet their fans continue to be fans and, you know, realizing that being a fan of a team is not something you can consciously choose to some extent.

So anyway, I bought a book by a sports writer, True Believers is the book. Joe Queenan, I think is the name of the author. So I read that. And then I also have decided to learn more about the theory and practice of football. So I read Phil Simms book, Sunday Morning Quarterback, and I'm currently reading a technical coach's book on offensive line techniques.

5:00 Wes: Nice.

5:00 Mark: Wow.

5:02 Seth: So, yeah.

5:04 Mark: Will this eventually involve praxis? Well, actually, playing some football?

5:11 Seth: No. I think if there's any praxis that comes out of any of this, it'll be motivated by the stirring Performance of the U.S. men's soccer team in South Africa for the Confederations Cup. And maybe I'll go join in another adult soccer league. But the last time I did that when I was like 31 or 32, I tore a Tendon in my ankle. I might be a little too old to play soccer, but that being said, you know, I have been going to the gym and working out so perhaps I could stand up to the rigors of the sport.

5:41 Mark: Don't they have like a old person soccer? Yeah, but use your walkers and stuff.

5:49 Seth: The bottom line is no matter who your competition is, ultimately it's still your 40 year old ass on those ankles that you were born with and there's nothing you can do about that.

6:01 Mark: Well, I do remember actually one of the audiobooks that I've been listening to is Dune. I hadn't listened to that in a long time and I do remember something about the enormously fat guy using like little rocket things, his waist so that he doesn't have to support his own weight.

6:15 Seth: So you were listening to the audiobook of Dune?

6:18 Mark: I was. So that I just listened to it a little bit at a time, like as an ipod thing.

6:24 Seth: So you know how people like to say, like, well there's only two kinds of people, you know, you're this or you're this. And there's three kinds of people. There's those who like the David lynch version of Dune as a movie, those who do the Sci Fi Channel somewhat miniseries, the Eastern European actors version, and then those people who don't like Dune whatsoever under any circumstances. Which category would you fall into?

6:51 Mark: I would put myself into the imagined extended cut of the David lynch one.

6:56 Seth: Excellent.

6:56 Mark: My only major problem with the David lynch one is that because I remember seeing it right after I read it the first time that it suddenly skipped like 300 pages out of necessity. But then I heard that there were just hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage shot and it was all like disappeared or destroyed in a fire or something. So I will just imagine how cool it would have been if they added all that silly stuff back in because I thought the visuals were great and the casting was great and yeah, it's David lynch and he has kind of a goofy style. But that's okay, it was a goofy book.

7:26 Seth: You know, he also, in addition to all the sequels that he wrote, his son, along with some other authors after his death, wrote numerous other sequels and prequels, most of which I have read as well.

7:42 Mark: Actually, that's why I was listening to this again, because I was gonna approach

7:45 Seth: some of that and no, by the way, this has absolutely nothing to do with this week's reading.

7:50 Mark: That's okay. Well actually I believe that we can look at Paul Muad'Dib as the Aristotelian virtuous man, for instance, he killed somebody with a knife, but he didn't like it. There you go.

8:09 Seth: And that makes him virtuous.

8:11 Mark: And he could see all places at the same, all times at the same time, at the same moment and become one with the universe. That would also be according to.

8:20 Wes: Tell me about your home world. Usul. Tell me about your home world.

8:27 Seth: My brother's coming.

8:29 Mark: He would be. He would be able to know, looking at, at a woman for the first time, like, is this. Is this a one night stand or is this somebody I'm gonna, you know, be with forever? Because he had limited precognition. I think that would be. Aristotle would approve.

8:43 Seth: Well, wasn't he also a Christ figure? So if Aristotle's virtuous man was Christ, who by the way, was in many ways intemperate, not temperate. He might have been just. But he was intemperate in some cases.

8:55 Mark: So we're edging toward the topic. That's very cool

9:01 Seth: from a prose perspective. Aristotle's style, I mean, I don't even know sometimes if it's appropriate to describe somebody's style when they're in translation. Right.

9:13 Wes: Also keep in mind that these were notes that were edited by other people from his talking.

9:19 Seth: But I mean, comparatively speaking, and by comparative, I mean compared to Plato, I think it's pretty readable. The points are pretty easy to get to. Stringing them all together in order to make sense of them can be a little more difficult. But there'll be points that come out of it that make sense. And then when you put it all together, trying to get from A to B was a bit of a challenge. But the good news from my perspective is, you know, when you think about the first two books together, as much talking as he does, there's really just, you know, a couple of key points that he's trying to get across and we can kind of outline what those are and then, you know, move from

9:57 Mark: there just to give some historical background for those of you that have forgotten or didn't know. So Aristotle, old ancient Greek guy, student of Plato, and this Nicomachean ethics, among other things, was just central for the entire thought of the Middle Ages, even though he was a pagan, the Christian church under Augustine, St Thomas, Aquinas, all the scholastics just took Aristotle and ran with it and made a little Christian version of that. And so a lot of the approach to ethics in particular, which doesn't make explicit reference to do whatever God says or something that was right at the center of this massive thought that our Current ethics has evolved from Somebody want to give the short version of what happens in these two books?

10:42 Wes: Go ahead, Seth.

10:43 Seth: Okay, so Aristotle is concerned in these two short books to talk about the good. And when he says the good, he makes a point of saying that he's not talking about some abstract concept, but he means specifically the good of essentially being a human being. So if you think in terms of the purpose of shipbuilding is to build a vessel that floats on water, the purpose of medicine is to get health. So what he wants to know is what is the purpose, or the function, as he calls it, of being human? And he's setting out to determine that, but he's doing it in such a way where he's saying, look, we're not going to be all abstract here and try to come up with the absolute 100% without question and without qualification, correct answer.

We're going to talk about this insofar as we're capable of talking about it, and we're going to try to solve the problem. So in short, what he says is that the activity that most makes sense of this whole process, or the function of being human being, is what he calls political science, that that's the inquiry, namely the science of how human beings should function together in society and that individuals, their goal or their purpose in life is happiness. So the function of being a human being is happiness in the same way that the function of medicine is health.

The function of economics is the creation of wealth. The function of shipbuilding is building a vessel. And then he says, okay, well, what does that mean? To be happy is to be virtuous. And to be virtuous is. This is kind of a stretch, but it's basically to kind of always do the right thing in the right place at the right time in the right measure to the right people. It's essentially being virtuous is doing the virtuous thing, the appropriate thing?

12:48 Mark: If we want a poorly loaded word, yes, how do we determine what the appropriate thing is?

12:54 Seth: Well, that merits a longer discussion. I'm just trying to summarize here that essentially what he's trying to get at is he's trying to say, look, moral virtue, intellectual virtue, being virtuous is a measured, rational approach to the world. And a virtuous person is somebody who does virtuous things. The way that you learn how to do virtuous things is you are taught them or you practice them over and over again. And this idea of the right thing with the right person, the right time, is where we get the idea of the golden mean. So he talks about being not too excessive. No excess and no defect. So it's basically taking the middle course. And if you've ever heard the term, you know, the law of the golden mean or the rule of the golden mean, it comes from this. Is that good enough as a summary?

13:45 Mark: Yeah, yeah. The easiest way to understand what he's talking about is just to give an example of the kind of thing. So he thinks there's a certain amount of standard, for instance, on how brave you should be.

13:57 Wes: Right.

13:57 Mark: You should not be so brave as to be foolhardy, but you should not be a coward either. Or how angry should you get when you encounter injustice? Should you be fuming mad so that you lose control of your bowels? No. Should you not react at all like you're a cold fish? No. There's an appropriate level of anger, even. And he has this sort of. For everything.

14:20 Seth: Yes. He seems to think that there are. That it's natural to look for examples of this in society. And people who you judge to be virtuous, you will find this trait in them, that they are very measured in the way that they. They never get too upset, but they're upset enough and so on. Just as Mark described.

14:37 Wes: Yeah. I think going back to the structure of the argument, because. Because we went from this idea of happiness or this is what Aristotle does. First we start talking about happiness, and then before we know it, we're talking about specific virtues like courage. I think one thing that's helpful is to. Aristotle talks about virtue. I think in the English it may have connotations, which it didn't in the ancient Greek. The Greek word is arete, and it means excellence. And so he's talking about good. Or an excellent horse is a, say, racehorse that runs really quickly.

And that's its function. A hand has a function. It's to grasp things. And when it's doing it really well, then it has that virtue. So one of the places to examine is this movement from the idea that things like a hand has a function to the idea that human beings have a function, because I'm not sure if that's clear. And then the other part of this is his talk of what it means to be specifically human or what the human function is, which he thinks has to do with being rational or an activity coming from a rational principle. And then I think the third step is this talk about specific virtues, which I think it's a confusing step from the second to third step.

15:53 Mark: Okay, well, let's go through those. Last time we talked About Camus, an existentialist. The point of existentialism is that people don't have functions. We're just here. There's no meaning written into the world that says you are this kind of person and have to do this kind of thing. And there's a certain kind of way that will make you excellent, and then anything else will be a failure in that respect. No, we set our own values. People are useless.

16:18 Wes: Well, let's start with what we think a function is for. You know, so we could say the function of a fork is to eat with. We could talk about things which we know have a function in the sense that they were designed with intention by human beings to do things. And then this sort of. The use of that as an analogy in biology to say the eye's function is seeing and then an even higher level of that, which is to say human beings have a function. It's clear to say what the function of a fork is. But we're talking about its function for us, and we made it for that function. It doesn't mean anything to say it has that function in general. Right, the function. There's no function of a fork apart from the needs of human beings. But is there a function of an eye? Or is that. Should that analogy not have been extended to the eye? And then we can talk about the human being.

17:11 Seth: You know, he says basically that every action, pursuit, inquiry, art, has an end. It aims at some end. And some things are ends in themselves, and some are ends for the sake of something else. So he uses as an example, bridal making is an activity that is designed to create this piece of equipment for horse riding, but it's really part of a larger art of riding or horse production or something along those lines. Right. And what he wants to say is that the activities that human beings undertake, even when it's not producing an object like that.

So, for example, exercise or study or art are all activities that have an end. And he wants to know, are those ends in themselves, or do those somehow contribute to the overall activity of being a human being? And he says, hypothetically, or I guess, sort of intuitively or whatever the term is, we'd like to think that if there is such a purpose or an end to being a human being, that it would be kind of the final end that all this other stuff would sort of somehow roll up to. So he's kind of assuming it because he says, look, practically speaking, most people think that that's the case.

So I'm just trying to flesh out what it means he's not here trying to justify whether or not it's actually the case. I think he actually says at one point, hey, I'm not here to have an argument with you. I'm just trying to make sense of this concept that kind of is already out there on the table.

18:50 Wes: Yeah. I think he's not out to justify. So, for instance, you won't see any justification of the specific virtues. He's not out to say, here's why courage is something that is excellent for a human being. He never says that. But I think this argument about function, which I think is at the core of this understanding of ethics, and I still think it's puzzling because we've moved from the function, again, as in something having to do with human aims and ends, to something that I think when we talk about the function of a human being, it's more analogous to the case of the eye, because it's not like human beings are like forks for the gods.

Right. We can. So they don't have functions in that sense. You know, there's no intelligent design here. We have to think about them as having functions apart from the intention of any being exterior to human beings. Right. I think in an intuitive sense, saying an eye has a function. I think it's hard to get around saying that. We want to say that an I is an ordered, structured thing and that when it's not working, it's dysfunctional or it's broken, someone's blind, for instance. But again, I just wanted to get at this sense of what function means in the sense and to the extent to which it's applicable to the.

To the ethical.

20:07 Mark: Well, for the eye, it's sort of functional in two senses, in that it serves the greater whole. Right.

20:12 Wes: Yeah.

20:13 Mark: If we're dead, then it doesn't matter if our eye is working or not. You know, an eye growing independently in a jar is not. It's not too useful. But at the same time, it also has its internal purposefulness. That is, if it gets injured, it will try to heal itself. Obviously, it works in conjunction with other parts of the body. It's the body as a whole. It's doing this, and that's enabling it. But, you know, you can look at it in the growth of cells from the zygote and say, oh, there's a purposefulness. Look, they're setting themselves up according to this recipe. They're trying to make an eye.

20:48 Wes: Yeah.

20:49 Mark: And we talk like that, even though we know that, you know, if you're a materialist biologist, you don't really think that there's intentions going on, but it's still, it's, it's a handy shorthand to say that the purpose of the cells coming together in this way is to make an eye that will enable seeing. So yeah, we could talk about a whole organism in the same way. Right. That we tend toward being a healthy, strong organism and we're getting sick in some way physically or maybe there's something wrong with our brains or something. Then we recognize that there's a deficiency there. It's a self regulatory system. So when we cut ourselves, then the cellular processes try to heal up our bruises and even, you know, make parts of the brain. If a part of the brain is injured, then, you know, other parts of the brain will start fulfilling some of the same functions in some cases.

21:37 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a, that's a great point, Mark. I Just one thing we should point out is that Aristotle says that there isn't a natural tendency towards virtue for human virtue. I thought he said there is that and not quoted. No, I think because basically it's taught. There's no.

21:56 Seth: What he says is intellectual virtue you get through education, moral virtue, your nature is to receive moral virtue, but that you perfect it by practice.

22:08 Wes: Habit.

22:08 Seth: Yeah.

22:09 Wes: Taught in the sense of you're raised in a good family and it's analogous to teaching. Yeah, it's not. You learn it in school with books. But without the influences of the family and society, there would be no natural. So for instance, an eye will repair itself or an oak tree. When Aristotle talks about nature, he means that so a table is artificial because a table isn't just going to sprout more tables naturally or if you cut off its legs, it's not going to regenerate. There's no natural tendency. It involves human work. But an eye will work in and of itself to stay functional.

And an oak tree will naturally grow out of a seed and so on and so forth. But a human being won't naturally become virtuous without lots and lots of social intervention. In fact, he makes a point of saying, for instance, his audience for this is people who were raised with good habits. Because there's no point in talking about these things with people who aren't, haven't already been acculturated in some sense. But he takes pains to distinguish that from a natural tendency.

23:13 Mark: Well, that's getting at the question I asked before. You know, how does, how do we know that these things are virtues in the first place? And he does say, like you guys were saying, that he's not making an argument, he's not building these virtues from the ground up. He's starting with what the wise and the many. Think now that unlike geometry or something where you could start with some basic principles and build a whole system here, we start with intuitions, we start with current social beliefs, and we try to work back toward basic principles.

And then once we have the basic principles, then we can try to be consistent about all the individual judgments. Which is actually a very modern way of looking at ethics. And I think one that is, you know, even though I said that Aristotle's the foundation for all this medieval thought, you know, it seems there's, there's a lot of moral history that, you know, is, is much more like Descartes project of trying to get a fundamental assumption of fundamental, you know, the good is bringing the most happiness for the most people most of the time or whatever, and then building everything from that instead of this.

No, we have. We just need to start with the fast and loose moral prescriptions that are already floating out there and see if we can get, see something systematic in them.

24:29 Wes: Yeah, and by the way, the reference for that moral virtues do not arise in us by nature is the beginning of chapter one of book two. But yeah, Mark, I think you're, you're right about that. It's, it's. He's just going to bring all his cultural baggage, let's say, or assumptions about. These are sort of the, you know, he makes a point of saying, look, there are a lot of premises here that courage is a virtue is one of those premises. It's not something that you're going to prove.

25:00 Mark: Yeah, it's. The term now is methodological conservatism, which is certainly something that you could criticize him for that, you know, you can read Aristotle as giving a pretty good picture of, you know, a refined version of what the ancient Greeks already thought about morality. He's not doing something revolutionary. Whereas somebody like, you know, going back to Socrates seemed to think that it's very possible, in fact likely that the massive cultural notions surrounding something like justice are bunk and we really need to brush all those away and dig deep to find some certain basic principles that we get sort of from reason itself, if there is such a thing, and from that derive everything that we should be doing. And probably with this kind of radical project, you're going to end up with something startlingly different than what is approved by the culture today.

25:59 Wes: With, with what will you get something

26:01 Mark: radically different if you have a sort of Cartesian project or, you know, where you try to get rid of all of your moral assumptions and start with, you know, what is the basic thing. So maybe if you're.

26:12 Wes: Well, it's. But it's. Sorry.

26:15 Mark: Oh, go ahead. I mean, I was just a make. I was going to make up a straw man about some fake fictional religious figure that said I need to do just exactly what the Bible says. And, you know, screw what my regular moral intuitions say. I need to start just with the Ten Commandments and build on that. And, and that kind of person might end up doing some very wacky stuff,

26:34 Wes: although it's conceivable you might start with all your assumptions and end up getting contradictions. And then so, and I think that's part of what the Socratic method was meant to be. You start with your opinions. You start with the things which are accepted. And, you know, I don't, in this case, of course, I don't think Aristotle thinks he's going to reach any contradictions. And of course, there are different conceptions of virtue out there or, I'm sorry, happiness, where happiness is just say, let's say, maximizing your pleasure. And one of the points he makes is that he's not going to entirely discard that view or other views.

He's going to try and reconcile them. In other words, there's a point to saying that pleasure is important to happiness. It is important, but there are all these other elements as well. It makes me wonder if, is this a conceptual analysis or what's going on here and what's the point if, if there's nothing new being derived?

27:40 Seth: I think there is something new, or at least he thinks there's something new. I mean, the read I got off of this was that he was saying something to the effect of, look, I'm really interested in understanding the science of politics and the science of human beings, if you will. So we have this political science that's aiming at the highest good, which is the happiness of the city or the state or the social group. And then we have individuals who are concerned about their own happiness. And we say that if somebody is happy, they're living well and doing well.

But what does that mean? Does that mean. Does that mean maximizing your pleasure? Does that mean being wealthy? Does that mean receiving honor? And it's very much a pragmatic discussion, you know, almost, almost after the style of Socrates, where it's like, you would say that happiness is living well, would you not, Mark? Well, yes, I would. Well, what does happiness mean to you? Is it Pleasure? Well, yeah, I guess it is pleasure, but what about this? Right? So he's, he's kind of working through these things and he's saying, you know, the majority pursue the pleasure principle, but clearly that's, that's not going to be satisfactory.

Honor seems a little superficial. He's just doing it in a much more sort of, if these are truly, you know, notes and what have you, it's a much more sort of casual style, you know, he says, I'm not going to even entertain the pursuit of money, which is not an end in itself. And he's, you know, he says, I want to talk about the universal good. And then he does this whole. Yeah, sorry, no, he just does this whole thing where he talks about Plato's, you know, form of the good. And he says, I'm not here to kind of justify some empty concept that isn't going to be of any use to anybody or get bogged down in all these details about this.

The bottom line is this, we do things and they have ends. There are reasons that we do them. Sometimes we do them just for themselves and sometimes we do them for some other purpose. It would be interesting to know if there's one final good, one final end for all of our activity and striving and that if we knew that, I think it would enrich what we do on a day to day basis.

30:07 Wes: But if we're going to ask ourselves what the best life is, what it means to live well, and we come to this conclusion that it's activity in accordance with virtue. It seems to me that you, if you're going to conduct that exercise, you need to be able to have an argument for why it's not pleasure, for instance. But you know, and I think that that was Socrates or Plato's approach, right? You want to make an argument about why. Plato makes an argument at length about why pleasure is not, you know, what the ethical is, or why justice isn't determined by might makes.

Right. In this case we get the assertion that, say, health, wealth and other things, they are ends, they are goods, but they are for the sake of something else, which is well being. How do we know whether to accept that? Or is this just going to come down to a matter of intuition? Or what if someone comes along and says, well, no, it is pleasure, that's all there is. And this idea of well being is just made up. What do you say to someone like that?

31:07 Mark: Yeah, it's got to be just based on the intuitions and the practices of people that we respect already, which of course, implies that we have some reason for respecting these people. We have, you know, since relying on our intuition. So it's just comes back to current practices and intuitions.

31:24 Wes: Yeah. And I. So it seems to me, just from what you guys have been saying that this is sort of a backwards engineering. Then we're taking those intuitions and backward engineering them to give some explanations of what's behind, let's say, all our existing assumption about virtue.

31:42 Seth: Yeah. I would caution against using the term intuition. I think the overriding context of this discussion for him is the political and the social. So I think he's, you know, I think he's explicitly in some cases and implicitly in others, drawing on what is either considered general consensus or was stated by thinkers who were known and respected. There's a little passage where he actually talks specifically about venerated people whose ideas may be partially or even wholly correct. There's a little passage, I don't remember exactly where it is, which are which,

32:28 Wes: many of which are in disagreement with each other.

32:30 Seth: Yeah.

32:31 Wes: So his task, and he says this in the same passage, is to try and reconcile them to some extent. And that reconciliation comes about by subordinating all of those different explanations to a higher end.

32:48 Mark: Yep. Which is, well, being a good element of Aristotle's general method, that he assumes that people's strong opinions on something, you know, especially if they're well thought out opinions that is thought out with time and care and tested by experience, there's going to be something right about them.

33:06 Wes: Yeah.

33:06 Mark: So the best thing you can do is just to figure out, review all these wise people or you know, things that are commonly accepted. He says let's consult the wise and the many often and, and do a synthesis report. Yeah, exactly. Try to find the commonalities. You know, what are people focusing? What, what examples do they have in mind when they're coming up with this general theory? Maybe they're right about the specific example, but they're not right about the general theory. Maybe they don't. Right, they don't see the, all the implications of, of what they're saying.

So that that makes sense. I like that. And I think also, you know, this again, this methodological conservatism, you know, where are you going to start? Do you really want to throw away all of your, I'll, I'll use the modern term moral intuitions, but you know, and start from scratch and possibly come up with something exceedingly dangerous. Like that's when you, when you say, ah, everything that everybody thinks now is all is all pablum. I discount that. They're all stupid, really. We should be serving the spider gods or, you know, we should be promoting the German state.

34:12 Wes: Yeah. And I still can't help thinking about, say, some kid coming to Plato saying everyone knows that justice is might makes right and that, you know, and you can see that these sort of opinions do float around and gain a lot of currency, you know, know today as well as in ancient Greek, especially among spoiled rich kids, which is what Socrates ran around dealing with some of them or with their elders. So Plato is willing to give a long argument about why might doesn't make right. But is it right to say that Aristotle says, ah, this person just wasn't habituated correctly and it's pointless to try and convince them and knowledge isn't going to help them anyway.

34:53 Mark: I want to tie this back to your talk of teleology, although you did not use that $9 word there, which is this purposefulness that's built into things. So the teleology of the eye is to grow into an. Is to grow into an eye. But in the teleology of people, I mean, we talked about that.

35:10 Wes: Or the purpose of the eye is to see.

35:12 Mark: Sure, sure. Is to.

35:13 Wes: But the growth is. It's, it's, it has a nature to

35:16 Mark: have a certain structure that will enable seeing.

35:19 Seth: Yes.

35:20 Mark: And so people, you can talk about that in a. That seems to work biologically in the same way. But we were questioning whether that made any sense when you talked about people's actual intentions and actions. Well, that's what he wants to do. He wants to, instead of asking, he wants to look at what people's actions, as Seth was saying, actually aim at and see if we can come up with. So it's not really just consulting our intuitions, consulting the way that we act in different situations, and especially for people who are thoughtful or wise, you know, so let's just look at how their actions aim and see if we can come up with these principles. And that's where he comes up with the virtues. Right. Or comes with our nature.

36:05 Wes: Well, where does he come up with the virtues?

36:07 Mark: Well, maybe we should, we should say a little more about what he thinks human nature actually boils down to. So he has this teleological concept and says, yeah, okay, people grow just like plants. But since that's not specific to people, let's not call that the purpose of people. And people, you know, see and are active, but that's common with other animals. So that's not really the purpose of people. It has to be something that's special to people. And you can see how much contempt I have for this particular line of argument. And so that's where he comes up with, we're the rational animal, right? That's the thing that's special about us. So that must be our purpose. That's our special thing. That's what. What our actions, you know, as distinguished from the animals aim at.

36:52 Wes: Just to, mark, throw this in. It's not that the purpose is to be rational. It's that there will be a rational principle involved in our purpose. So it's not the purpose of a plant to grow, for instance, but you might expect the function of a plant to have something to do with that physical growth. And the idea is, of course, to find whatever it is, whatever property it is of human beings that distinguishes them from plants and animals. And that's the rational. So the idea is that the work something does with regard to its function will have something to do with the distinguishing property, a unique property that that organism or tool or whatever has.

37:33 Seth: Yeah, I agree with Wes on this one, Mark. He says specifically that, you know, the function is to act or to be active in accordance with this rational principle. Because one of the points he does make very, very strongly is sitting around and thinking about shit is not being a good human being. Like, acting.

37:51 Mark: Sure.

37:51 Seth: Acting is being a good human being. You have to be active and actually do things. There's a nice little point there where he says, you know, at the Olympic Games, it's not the most beautiful and the strongest that are crowned, but those who compete. Which I thought was amazing. But let me throw out one thing just related to the discussion about what we can take for granted and kind of what he's working off of. If he came at this a different way and said, look, do you agree that the purpose of shipbuilding is to create a vessel that floats? He said, yeah.

He says, and do you agree that there are good shipbuilders and not so good shipbuilders? And you say, yeah, I'd agree with that. Then you could say, okay, well, what makes a good shipbuilder versus an average shipbuilder or a bad shipbuilder? And so I think he's kind of operating on the same principle here with respect to human beings, where he's basically saying, there are people that we think of as being good. And when we say somebody is a good person, we typically say they're virtuous. So what is it about those people that makes them different than all the other?

Tom Dick And Harry's. Okay, well, let's think about that. Right. And if you. If you kind of operate out of that principle, you don't really need to justify and come up with a foundation and a bunch of first principles to kind of explain what you're doing. You're kind of working within the confines of. Okay, well, it's socially accepted that we have these meaningful concepts about good and not good. But what does that actually mean? Sorry, I just wanted to throw that out.

39:27 Mark: So does the virtues tie back to the teleology or not? That is.

39:30 Wes: I don't think so. So you get to the point of saying activity in accordance with virtue. Where, by the way, when he talks about virtues, he does point out that he's talking about character traits, global dispositions. But these virtues and activity in accordance with them, all you get is the bare idea of one state or another which has something to do with a rational principle having to do with the function of being human. There's not going to be any derivation from that to specific virtues. And I don't think there is a way.

40:03 Seth: I don't. I'm not so sure about that. I'm not so sure about that.

40:07 Wes: I mean, it's not done in this task.

40:09 Mark: He doesn't lay it out. No, but I think you can draw especially. We haven't talked since the introduction about the golden mean. Go back to growth and strength. Animals have that. Or that one of the excellences of different animals is that they're fast, that they can see well. Well, you know, we still have all those excellences too. And you can think of some of his examples. Well, if I'm too angry, then I can't think. Well, I won't make the right decisions. I'm not going to be using my capacities in the best possible way. If I'm not angry enough, if I see something bad that's happening for me, somebody's torturing a cat, and I'm not appalled in some way by that, then I'm not going to be brought to action such that my virtues, my strength and my courage and things are going to be applied in the appropriate way. I can feel like.

40:56 Wes: But you've already assumed strength and courage are virtues in that.

41:00 Mark: Yeah, but strength, well, strength in particular, that seems to be one that grows out of this teleological concept in the same way that you can talk about, you know, animal strength. Of course, a strong animal is. Is a better example of a strong wolf, is a better wolf than a wussy wolf. Right, That's. That's Just comes out of his concept of this teleology. And it does make sense. Like if you, okay, if you feed the animal better, it's going to be stronger. Like, it's like the animal's body is trying to be the ideal wolf is trying to be strong and fast and see, well, and, and if it falls short of that, well, there could be a lot of reasons for that.

But, you know, some of it is because maybe it didn't have the right upbringing. It didn't. It wasn't allowed to run around and get exercise and get the right diet and that kind of stuff. And so I think he thinks a lot of, you know, by analogy, a lot of these. Yes, okay. A lot of the things that humans are going to be concerned with have more to do with the area of the mental. But in the same way. So if we weren't educated, if we weren't given the time to exercise our imaginations, to reflect upon moral situations in practical ways, to see examples of well, functioning human beings, then we too are going to fail to achieve this teleological goals of excellence.

42:14 Seth: One way that we might think about it is if you go towards the end of book two and he's talking about the situations where you can't have a virtuous mean. There's some things you can't do appropriately or well that it's just they're always

42:31 Mark: bad or what have you the right amount of spitefulness.

42:35 Seth: Yes, exactly. But in essence, in that context, courage is the temperate mean between cowardice and foolhardiness. Right? It's just a word that describes the state of being just and temperate in a certain set of circumstances. And insofar as this temperance or this virtuous mean is what he's trying to get at, then they kind of do follow. Even if our concept of virtues are really just words that describe doing the virtuous thing in a particular context, this

43:09 Wes: is where the rational principle comes in, right? This idea that rational means falling in the middle. But we have to ask ourselves, is it any activity that we're going to apply the temperance test to, or are the specific activities that we should focus on? So in other words, we already have to decide that, and we'll think of courage and cowardice, this continuum where courage is in the middle, cowardice at one end and foolhardiness at another. I think once you've already decided that this character trait is within the domain of human excellence, then it does make sense to apply the idea of the mean.

But you already have to have decided that it's within the domain of human excellence. In other words, there are activities which aren't really relevant to human excellence or virtue. There are a whole slew of them. So we have a very specific list of activities and the character states that correspond to them. So, for instance, being a good horseback rider isn't relevant to the function of being a human being. And there are all kinds of specific virtues that go into being a good horseback rider. Let's say, having your form down empirically, we know as a standpoint of an art, we know the kinds of things that are going to go into being a good horseback rider because we have an idea of what it means to fail as a horseback rider.

Person falls off this, that and see the connection between having certain horseback riding related virtues and staying on the horse and being able to go fast and so on and so forth. But there we have a very concrete empirical phenomenon that we can see the clear connections between virtues and then the overall activity. In the case of the function of being a human being, the question is, I think it becomes a lot less clear how we decide which sorts of activities are relevant to the human function. It's clear what activities are relevant to the horseback riding function.

I think it's less clear what activities are relevant to the human human function.

45:12 Mark: Is it less clear to us as readers or less clear to him?

45:14 Wes: Less clear? Absolutely.

45:18 Seth: I would guess that if you pinned him down on it, he would be very clear about a lot of things. And again, I think it has a lot to do with the social.

45:25 Wes: What reason can you give? The courage is important to the function of being a human being.

45:32 Mark: You think that they follow from the teleology of being a human being, which is not an answer, but it's just something that we try, if our wits are about us, to be brave and yet not get killed. Right. Because that is what enables us to accomplish our goals most. And he talks about courage. I skimmed some of the sections after the ones we read where he talks about specific virtues. He talks about courage really as being most. What he's talking about when we're talking about courage in battle. So if you're faced with a disease, that's a different kind of courage. So you could see how being courageous will get you the maximum benefit out of this situation. That if you're in a battle and. And you run away, well, you lose. If you're in a battle and you are foolhardy and run into when you have no chance of winning, you're. You'll die.

46:15 Wes: So courage that assumes that winning and is a good and losing isn't.

46:19 Mark: Well, it's what we are trying to accomplish. That's why it says it comes out of this theology, this built in purposefulness, whatever it is that we are already trying to do. We analyze those actions and see what would enable us to do those.

46:31 Wes: I absolutely agree with you. You have to find those tendencies which are innate. And. But my point is that what those tendencies are I don't think is that clear. So in the case of an eye, for instance, the function of the eye is seeing. Well, that's clear in the sense that there's a very complex structure to the eye. And more often than not it does see. And when it stops seeing, we find something wrong with that mechanism in most cases is humming along in human beings. I don't think it's the case that more often than not we witness the human being humming along, doing its thing in the same way the eye does. We have to think in terms of what those innate tendencies are. But what I'm saying is that it's not clear to me how we establish what those tendencies are.

47:19 Seth: So, Wes, I agree with you in the abstract that if you just take this completely 100% on the face of it as a theoretical treatise, that is unclear. It's unclear what the innate function of being a human being is. But my assumption in reading this is that Aristotle has a very particular set of things in mind based on the social context that he's working in and that living at a time when you had a city state that was at war with other nations and city states and a certain set of civic virtues that included and Greek virtues like beauty and strength and all of these other things. I think he's assuming those things in the same way that he's assuming some of the other things about the fact that happiness is the end and all that.

48:09 Mark: Yep.

48:10 Wes: So my question though is why someone like Plato didn't assume that. Plato seemed to assume that people were running around deluded and acting like assholes. And his goal was to go out and point them to the error of their ways, to their, let's say, original sin.

48:25 Mark: I thought Plato was even Plato was even more so that. Didn't Plato believe people never knowingly choose the wrong thing so that it really is built into us to do the right thing. It's just that we get so easily confused.

48:38 Wes: Problem is, but most people don't. And that's the whole point of going and talking to them and showing them how ridiculous their assumptions are, whether they're Athenian generals or young Kids or this or that.

48:51 Mark: Well, that still says that the right thing is sort of innate within us. We just have to figure out how to dig it out.

48:55 Wes: Right? I absolutely agree with you, Mark. And what I'm saying is that Aristotle's account is the same in that sense. There are those innate tendencies. What I'm saying is that you're not going to get from the first part of our reading this idea of those innate tendencies to the second part, what those tendencies are.

49:16 Seth: I agree with you. Sort of, again, if you take sort of a more abstract reading of the text. But if I look at Aristotle as kind of a pragmatic apologist for the current state of things, then it makes perfect sense to me if I just assume that Aristotle is trying to explain what's going on in front of him in the city state, and he's basically saying, I'd really like to see more virtuous people. There's too few of them. So if I could figure out a way to tell people, this is how you.

49:51 Wes: How do we benefit? How does one benefit from a reading like this? As far as living well goes, if he's an apologist, is there something pragmatic to be gained from reading it or.

50:03 Seth: Yeah, I would. I would put it this way. I would say suppose I'm a person who's either trying to become more virtuous or not acting virtuously enough, and I need to be corrected. And somebody. And I say, well, what is the right thing to do? What's virtue? How do I become a better person? And Socrates questions me into dizzying uncertainty. And Plato gives me some very abstract things that ultimately are unsatisfying or don't have any content to them, so that I can't actually get any prescribed action. Or I have to become some kind of dictatorial fascist. And Aristotle says, well, the way you're going to become a better person is by doing good things. And I said, well, what are good things? And he says, okay, here's the name of a guy who's a really good guy, and he does a lot of the right stuff. Go watch what he does. Go watch what he does. Talk to him.

51:02 Wes: The word intuition is screaming out of you.

51:05 Seth: I'm just telling you. I'm telling you what I'm getting out of it. But it sounds like he's saying, you know, he's trying to make a case for this paragon or some sort of theory of ethical learning and teaching that relates to basically, okay, by consensus, we all think person X is a good person. So watch what they do, kind of learn how they do things, ask them questions, and then when you go out, try to emulate how they do things, and you'll become a better person over time. And, you know, he has that whole

51:37 Wes: long discussion about how do you do that in. In modern day America. Do you think the consensus about what a good person is would be. I think the adequate. Would you go to the right wing friends or your left wing friends?

51:48 Mark: I think Barack Obama is admirable. So I'm gonna start smoking.

51:52 Seth: Well, he is the great soul man. Yes. It's not about being admirable. No. Listen, do I think this is a viable approach? Maybe, maybe not. I mean, one of the, you know, one of the faults that I remember writing a paper about, Wes, is this idea that, you know, the idea that you want to, like, what would Jesus do? But, like, Jesus was a great man, but he's like the last guy that you want to be trying to imitate because you'll never live up to it. Right. I mean, you want to have the right kind of role models.

52:24 Wes: Yeah.

52:26 Seth: And when you.

52:27 Mark: Jesus would pull fishes out of his ass. Well, God damn it, I can't.

52:32 Seth: You know, I use that example. I use this example pretty often. He goes in, right. And he destroys all the idols in the temple. Okay. How do I use that as a model for behavior? I don't really know. And some people think they can. Right. And I suppose these are the people that, you know, picket abortion clinics and destroy personal property and, you know, go and burn down buildings because they think, you know, they're idolatry, but, you know, you're not Jesus. And then, you know, you take somebody else, like saints. Saints who are long suffering or what have you. Right. And those are not good role models either. You know, nobody. Gandhi was a great person. I don't think anybody would deny that. But is he really a role model for how to become a virtuous person?

53:19 Mark: We learned shorthand that virtue ethics is about. We don't ask, what action should I perform? We should ask what kind of person should I be? And we come up with an idea that, well, we pick a model like Jesus or like this guy that looks. Seems really respectable in town or whatever, but really when we pick that person, we're picking them on the basis of some particular abstract virtues. Right. Some particular aspect of what this person does, not about the person as a whole. So, yeah. So I admire Barack Obama, but I'm not going to start smoking if I say I want to be like Jesus.

I have something Specific in mind, like Jesus is giving nature. Jesus's insight into, you know, know, thinking carefully about moral situations. I'm, I don't necessarily have this global picture of what this person was. I mean, Jesus in particular is just a huge cipher that any, any the people who think this way aren't probably the, the highest level biblical scholars that know exactly, you know, based on textual evidence what Jesus would have done in this situation probably don't have the temple, the, the busting up the idols in the temple in mind at all that they're thinking.

You know, it just becomes a cipher for everything Christianity has taught all these different ideals and commandments. So I guess it's the same thing that we're, we're looking at. We're not just, oh, there's some guy here, that's who you should emulate. It's, I picked out this guy because I already had some virtues in mind and this guy emulates that. And my pointing him out to you is a good way of communicating that.

54:46 Wes: There are a lot of different ways you can live your life. And suppose I'm living a life of complete hedonism. And on one level I think of that as my function and I think I'm relatively happy or as happy as any human being can be. And one day I discover a different and higher level pleasure and let's say helping people. Maybe it's volunteering for a homeless shelter or something like that. And I become aware of that, that there's a different, there's something that's more relevant to my well being. In other words, that pleasure, that, that hedonistic life.

55:28 Mark: I think you're just getting at wisdom, right? That you're not going to find somebody who is doing these selfless things and then suddenly grows an awareness and says screw all that. It tends to go only in one direction. And that's how you can tell that, oh, okay, this person you've, you've in becoming more selfless in this way have achieved a greater insight. And so we can look at that

55:52 Wes: as a virtue, sort of supporting the Aristotelian view that you would never find the hedonist and convince him that working in the homeless center was the virtuous thing to do. He would have to happen upon that himself. Or, you know, maybe, you know, as Aristotle suggests, you'd have to go even farther back and he'd have to have the right habits instilled in him from infancy. You either have to say those people haven't had the right habits instilled in them and don't and just don't know better they're a lost cause. Or you have to say that there may be some way to bring them into the fold. But I don't see any way to do that. I don't see any way to say yes, current or selflessness or courage or whatever is your function when they think their function is something else entirely and that's all they've ever experienced.

56:43 Mark: Right. It's not, it's not argumentative.

56:45 Wes: That's what I'm saying.

56:48 Mark: Sure. That come from the intuitions of the wise and deep contemplation on these things. And I don't think it can convince.

56:57 Wes: It doesn't come from knowledge. It comes from. You have to have done it to know that it's the right thing. And so that's why you have to get that habituation as a kid. And you would never, you would never derive it abstractly. The, the chance for this, this to be a pragmatic project in the sense of turning people away from their sins is. I don't, I don't see that. I think, I guess Aristotle explicitly states that too. So it's not something to expect from it, but.

57:28 Mark: Right. He says that young people shouldn't even bother studying ethics because they're just going to be too incontinent and go with their feelings anyway and not worth talking to them. Well, isn't this, we haven't talked about this move from. So the goal of everybody's action implicitly is happiness, that they're doing what they think will make them happy or what actually makes them happier. They're doing something, the ultimate purpose of which is to make them happy. And then, but then he goes says the next step. So it's acting virtuous that will make you happy in this way. I mean, does this seem to be another way of stating what you've already been talking about that. How do we, how do we tell. You know, we look at people whether they're happy or not and then judge the virtues based on that.

58:13 Wes: We're talking about eudaimonia, happiness. Or we could also say well being. It's really. It's about working well. Right. If we're talking about function, we talk about, hey, the eye is working correctly, it's working well, the human being is working well. But then there's this little slip into well being which has these subjective connotations. Subjective in the sense of there's this qualitative state that we all know as well being. So we've gone beyond the analogy of the Eye or of the horse. It's clear what it means for an eye to work well. And it doesn't involve the experience of.

Doesn't involve me asking myself, what is it like to be an eye? The working well has nothing to do with the subjective state in the eye. When we ask what it hey, is the human being working well? Is it fulfilling its function? Well, suddenly we're not merely talking about this function. We're not talking about something like an eye. We suddenly have to talk about a subjective state of well being. So we have to move from working well in the sense that the eye works well to the subjective state of well being.

59:27 Mark: Well, there are elements that are verifiable by a third person or objective in the sense and the same ones. Did you live a long time? Were you pursuing habits that would not just ruin you in some physical or mental way? And that's something that you could, okay, so you might have thought you were living the good life, but you burned yourself out on too much LSD and, you know, died in a bathtub at age 22. So that probably was not the, not the right way to go. We don't have to just ask you, was this the fulfilling life? We can, we can have some sort of third person well verifiability of that, don't you think? I mean, I think that's kind of what he has in mind.

1:00:08 Wes: Some people might want to burnout early. I'm not saying that we need to figure out which subjective state is better. I'm just saying that we have to get into this state of well being as a subjective state, which we wouldn't have to do with any other other of those activities that Aristotle mentioned.

1:00:27 Mark: You know, I'm not totally sure about this, given his take on the fundamentally political character of people, that it's not just how good our lives seems to us, but how we come off to everyone else. So sort of a midway example between the, the person who's making bridles or something, the horseback rider, and a human in general is like a poet, a songwriter, that a lot of what you know. Was your poetry successful? Well, to some extent. I mean, the poet is the best one to say that, but it's also how people react to the poetry, you know. So does is this poetry, you know, objectively successful insofar as it is an object? That means it's being viewed by multiple people. And if everybody agrees, yeah, that was pretty awesome, then all right, well, that's what, that's what to shoot for next time.

1:01:17 Wes: So if my if society takes a hedonistic turn, then hedonism is suddenly the my function.

1:01:24 Mark: It just means being a good citizen is one of our functions, that if other people find you pleasant to be around, then you're succeeding. You're fulfilling your function as a social animal in a way that you're not if you're a total hedonistic bastard.

1:01:38 Wes: Should we be avoiding the word happiness with all its connotations?

1:01:42 Seth: Well, he makes a point of saying that happiness, he says we kind of say that, but what is it? It's kind of an empty concept. I mean, he. And this part of the purpose of the text is to try to define what that actually means. So if you feel like it's a loaded term, I'm okay with that.

1:01:58 Wes: You don't think we're talking about a feeling in part, talking about a subjective state with happiness or.

1:02:04 Seth: Yes, we are talking about a subjective state.

1:02:07 Mark: If I think chiefly, but go ahead.

1:02:09 Seth: Well, if I had to do a search and replace on terms like I could plug in their contentment or something along those lines would make sense to me.

1:02:19 Mark: He has that discussion, that discussion of Solon that. Who it is, quote, that you can't judge someone happy until they're dead. And even as things that happen to your descendants can. Can affect whether we should judge you after the fact to have had a happy life.

1:02:34 Wes: Right.

1:02:34 Mark: So if. If you just incurred a lot of gambling debts and you were okay and you died right before they were collected, and then your. Your kids get the shit beaten out of them by the. The loan sharks collecting for the debts. This is exactly the example that he uses.

1:02:49 Wes: Now I'm confused by what we mean by happiness.

1:02:52 Seth: Now you got me confused too.

1:02:54 Mark: It's the judgment is. I mean, it's. Eudaimonia is the Greek term which is the good life. Can we judge whether you have lived the good life or not? And I think that's. That English term has the proper connotations that it's, you know, very much subjective. Were you happy at the time? But the good life doesn't have to involve constant happiness, constant pleasure. There could be a lot of strain, there could be a lot of challenge. You might even, you know, enter in some glorious contest and burn out in a blaze of glory. You know, it doesn't necessarily have to be happiness in the sense of contentment, but yet.

And, and you could even talk about the good life, you know, after the. After the fact. You know, again, if what you did ended up being entirely parasitic on other people and your descendants completely. I mean, Immediately pay for the indulgence that you gave yourself, we would probably say after the fact. Yeah, okay. You are not living the good life.

1:03:49 Seth: I don't think there's room in this concept, in Aristotle's concept for blazing out in a flaming out in a blaze of glory, or being like a Picasso or Hemingway, as long as you blaze

1:04:02 Mark: according to the golden mean.

1:04:03 Seth: I don't think he can. I mean, it's just, you know, you can't be. It seems to me that this is a very, very restrictive concept of virtue that's very tied to the idea of good citizenship, as Mark mentioned. And, you know, there's really no room for fringe elements. I don't think there's any way. I don't think there's any way to ration.

1:04:27 Wes: No anarchists allowed.

1:04:28 Mark: I think that's a. That's a very big criticism of this.

1:04:32 Seth: But to some extent, if I was to try to apply this and say this is the way we should think about civic virtue, is that like whatever kind of a freak you are or artist or whatever, you know, we should do some kind of a job when we're raising kids in the society to get them to at least acknowledge a certain amount of civic virtue and common, you know, common human interaction and what have you. And then if they go off and they're extreme in their behaviors, we've at least habituated them so that they don't, you know, they don't cause irreparable harm to others or not vote or, you know, not do whatever it is that, you know, not serve in the military, whatever it is we want them to do. But I just don't. It's like, this makes a lot of sense to me in a very narrow and in a very narrow context.

1:05:25 Mark: Yeah. And I think that's. You're hitting right at that qualifier that talking about as a good citizenship instead of a good person is exactly the problem with this whole teleological idea of humanity and us having a purpose in the first place. That that's. I agree with the existentialists that we don't have a purpose. There are lots of kinds of excellences that we could pursue, and some of them are very excessive excellences and would require you to be, you know, so Mark Mozart, for instance, you know, I would say a brilliant, admirable human being.

That is admirable. And this is a person that I admire that I would not mind being kind of like. But if you've seen the movie Amadeus, you know, he was a pain in the ass. He was not A good citizen. Well, it's at least among the possible kind of cool choices. I obviously would not if I could have that kind of talent, would I, would I, would I take some of the bad stuff that went with it? Maybe. I just think there's no, there's no objective way of deciding between these that I agree with the existentialists.

1:06:32 Wes: It sounds to me like what you're saying is consistent with the idea of these innate tendencies, but it sounds like they could vary so much from person to person. Are we getting towards saying that what's relevant to happiness or well being isn't what's common to all people? Perhaps essence or human nature, that it's, that it's radically particular and Mozart's happy life isn't going to look anything like. Isn't going to have anything necessarily in common with someone else's, I think more

1:06:59 Mark: than just a one dimensional happiness for the same person. It's not that like there's a person, a particular way that I could have a happy life, but that might be different than the way you could have a happy life. I think it's just that we are all radically free in such that, you know, we could, we could do any number of spectacular.

1:07:15 Wes: We don't share a function of some kind.

1:07:18 Mark: I don't know if we, we. I like that you said we share tendencies. We share. Yeah, we could, we could talk together and reflect on things that we both find pleasurable or both find ultimately fulfilling and gain something out of that. And we might come to the conclusion that somebody like, like Jim Morrison, you know, was, was in fact kind of foolish. Like maybe if he had grown older he would have, or same with Mozart, would have realized that some of these other things are, are pretty great as well, having a nice calm family life or whatever. But I don't know, it just seems, it seems moralizing, seems a little judgmental just to maybe reverse what I was just saying.

I guess I actually do agree that we would find a lot in common if we discuss what we think the good life is. And a lot of that comes down to. I already said I totally buy this analogy of function in terms of physical health, that we are organisms, we're animals like anybody else. And yeah, you're a superior animal if you're in good shape and are not going to die so fast. Okay, that's something we all agree with. Maybe it would be a good idea to aim at. Can we say you had the good life even though you didn't have that? Well, maybe that's true as Well, I just don't think it's as one dimensional as that, but it's sure we can call it.

I don't know if I'd want to use the term virtue, but it's something that is a built in purpose in us that there's some reward in fulfilling. And I think there's a lot of those in terms of our mentality as well. So the health of this soul, as Aristotle would put it, health is a

1:08:53 Wes: great way to try and understand this because I think in a lot of ways Nicomachean ethics is a psychological treatise. And it's, you know, you could call it moral psychology, just talking about virtues and dispositions and character traits. You know, arguably we're talking about something that approaches psychological health.

1:09:14 Seth: Well, I'm not so sure about that, Wes. I mean, one of the things that he emphasizes over and again is this idea of activity. And it's the basis for the analogy between the art and the practice. Everything is about making something or doing something that has a purpose and an end. It's all about activity. And so when he's talking about what is the end goal of the. Of human activity? Not what's the, you know, what's the function of man in the abstract? Like what's your purpose here on earth? And in the end, it's what is the end of all of this running around and talking and building and screeching and birthing and that we do.

1:09:57 Wes: Happiness. It's happiness, which I'm arguing could be interpreted psychologically.

1:10:01 Seth: You know, I think it's inextricably bound up that social concept for him. There is no way to separate the idea of the activity, of being a human being from social activity.

1:10:14 Wes: Yeah, I think unfortunately that's not spelled out this reading. But I think regardless, even if the social is essential to it, it doesn't mean that the virtues are still individual states. He calls character traits. To talk about character, the activity comes out of that right. To have those virtuous dispositions doesn't make you virtuous and it doesn't make you happy.

1:10:33 Seth: There's a quote I have down here. The agent must be in a certain condition when he does them in the first place. He must have knowledge, must choose them for their own sake, and it must proceed from a firm and unchanging character. That's how you're just. Is that you have to do the right thing. You have to know that you're doing the right thing. You have to make the conscious choice. So in other words, if you were just naturally the kind of person who did the right thing, but you weren't self reflective at all. That wouldn't be sufficient. Or if you were doing it, but you were a loose and changeable character. Character, you know, that.

1:11:08 Mark: That whim.

1:11:10 Seth: Yes, that. That would not be acceptable either. So this, this idea of the character is this just and temperate character, which then again is just like you say, it's articulated in all these different ways by these virtues.

1:11:22 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:11:23 Mark: And this is a common way of questioning Aristotle, because a primary way that we think of morality in common terms is the division between selfishness on the one hand and. And selflessness. Whereas this has built in. It doesn't even feel the need to make that distinction so much. Because if you are doing what is ultimately going to make you happy, then that also ends up serving the body politic.

1:11:48 Seth: Yes, it has to be that way. If what makes you happy is victimizing other people or being self indulgent, that somehow for Aristotle, that you're not happy

1:12:02 Mark: or you're just raised wrong and so the wrong things are giving you pleasure.

1:12:07 Wes: But we're still talking about subjective states in the individual, despite all these relations to the social. By the way, it's book two, chapter five, where he tries to say what virtue is in the sense of what it is in the soul that you would call virtue. And he distinguishes passions, faculties and states of character. And he chooses these states of character in the end because it's the thing that we don't have by nature.

1:12:35 Mark: I'm just impressed that you felt the need to bring it up at all when I even in my episode description announcing the upcoming reading on the blog, gave that as an example, as the silliest, most technical point. No, I don't, silly.

1:12:49 Wes: Because it's important in the sense of talking about these broader dispositions, this sort of schema in the soul, or I would say psyche with these sort of schema or. Or let's say structures that lead to repetitive habitual actions.

1:13:04 Mark: So psyche is the Greek word for soul that he uses here, right? Yeah, yeah, well, and just to think that his conception of mind, of psyche is very much like our conception mind,

1:13:15 Wes: by the way, because a plant has a soul as well.

1:13:17 Mark: Right. So it's kind of like analogous to the conception of body that we were familiar with. You know, the body having tendencies, having, you know, it heals itself, that it has purposes built in. Well, the soul is just the less obviously material part, but otherwise seems to have behaved in very much the same way.

1:13:36 Wes: And once you start talking about health with respect to psyche as opposed to body. It seems to me we're approaching concept of virtue.

1:13:45 Mark: Well, I, I do think that again, the social aspect is pretty central. So when I'm. I'm just skipping ahead to his discussions of the actual virtues, which are not really in the part that we read, but just picking semi randomly in the middle of book four, it's 4.53 like he has. Here's just a random quote. His attitude to giving and receiving benefits. This is the virtuous person. It's the sort of person who does good but is ashamed when he receives it. For doing good is proper to the superior person and receiving it to the inferior, he returns more good than he's received.

For in this way the original giver will be repaid and will also have incurred a new debt to him and will be the beneficiary. So this is, it's again sort of saying that what makes you happy is what's going to make everybody else happy. And so we don't have to distinguish between these things. So we're not talking about purely psychological health. And in fact, that particular example is. There's nothing about psychological health involved in that at all. It was just that, you know, everybody else is going to get what they feel like they deserve.

You're going to get what you feel like you deserve. You're going to, you know, have a debt owed to you. It's just going to be good for everybody all around. So do. It's just a very social pragmatic.

1:14:58 Wes: Despite that, you're still talking about a state of character then.

1:15:01 Mark: A state of character that will know how to do that kind of stuff and make those judgments.

1:15:07 Seth: Right?

1:15:07 Mark: Because knowing when you've given too much or it's being sensitive to these things like that seems to be a lot of the psychological.

1:15:15 Wes: These things are all subordinate though, to the concept of happiness. It's not just obligation.

1:15:20 Mark: Happiness is not this individual psychological feeling of pleasure. It's this overall state that you've led the good life. Which means for Aristotle, that you are locked into social relationships that promoted the whole. In fact.

1:15:34 Wes: Well, that it's not pleasure doesn't mean it's not psychological in some of its aspects.

1:15:39 Mark: Some of its aspects. You would not want to reduce it to psychology. Either he's going to say that you could talk about the whole thing in terms of psychology because that's going to be exactly the same as what's doing good for everybody else, or that you have to talk about it in a balance that ultimately these things are all Interrelated. So there might be, you know, a number of things that are virtuous that you'd be very hard pressed to interpret that like, oh, that makes me more psychologically healthy to, you know, give the right amount to charity. I'm not sure I see that. But the social part is part of happiness. Not to say that doing good socially is a cause of your personal happiness, but that his notion of the good life involves a social benefit. It does not just involve you. You could not be happy just by yourself.

1:16:26 Wes: The psyche is fundamentally social. That it's one doesn't mean it's not the other.

1:16:30 Seth: Yep.

1:16:31 Wes: Seth, you've been typing away.

1:16:33 Seth: I've been multitasking and responding to people on our discussion topics on our Facebook.

1:16:39 Mark: What?

1:16:40 Seth: Our Facebook discussion board, the Partially Examined Life on Facebook.

1:16:47 Mark: Tell me more about this fabulous resource.

1:16:51 Seth: Well, in addition to posting topics such as what the latest episodes are and explaining what bot attacks are on our IP address for downloading, there's also a discussion board where people can provide ideas for episodes and comment on episodes that they've listened to. And we have one particular active poster right now to whom I have responded. But I also was kind of simultaneously in my head, trying to, I guess, understand what's at stake with determining whether or not we're talking about happiness being psychological or not. I agree with Wes that happiness is kind of the result of doing. Of being virtuous for its own sake. And I think you can characterize that as a mental state. But he seems to also talk separately about being pleasant and, you know, things being pleasant.

1:18:02 Mark: See, now I'm looking on the discussion board at where Seth was responding to. What would Camus think about David Carradine's death? And this is all wanting me to relate this. So what would Aristotle think about. We're talking about Aristotle on Michael Jackson. A great man. He'll be remembered in the annals of musical history. But yet even the immediate obnoxious media eulogies are pointing out his weirdness in excess as much as his accomplishments. Would he be great according to Aristotle or no?

1:18:37 Seth: Who? Michael Jackson.

1:18:39 Mark: Sure.

1:18:39 Wes: Definitely not.

1:18:40 Seth: Definitely not.

1:18:41 Wes: Great musician. Not great human being. Tragic. Tragic human being.

1:18:46 Seth: Talk about a guy who was, like, out of balance. I mean, if you think about the golden mean or the virtue as the mean being somehow imbalance about things, that guy was way out of balance.

1:18:57 Mark: What's the correct number of llamas? Not too many llamas. Not too few llamas. The exact number of llamas.

1:19:04 Wes: He had llamas.

1:19:05 Mark: Did you not know that he had llamas?

1:19:08 Wes: No, I mean, he had a lot

1:19:09 Seth: of giraffes and llamas and stuff.

1:19:13 Wes: Didn't keep track of the whole menagerie.

1:19:15 Seth: I put sleeping in the same bed with children who are not your own as one of those. There is no median for this sort of thing.

1:19:24 Wes: What's wrong with love?

1:19:26 Seth: Yeah. Also anybody who needs to change their physical appearance like that. Yes.

1:19:33 Mark: But here's somebody that say, Nietzsche might think was pretty cool.

1:19:38 Seth: Michael Jackson, he.

1:19:40 Mark: He made his life an art, an art of. Of excess, maybe. Let's just imagine that he did it all intentionally, with a master plan and was not just victimized by his early celebrity, which is probably what happened, but that if he was actually reflective enough to, you know, do this all intentionally and sort of the equivalent of Kurt Cobain going out in a blaze of glory or whatever, that this is just how he sculpted his life to be unique and unforgettable. And that's what greatness is about.

1:20:09 Seth: I think if Nietzsche wasn't a misogynist, he'd be more likely to call out Madonna as an example, a positive example, than Michael Jackson.

1:20:16 Mark: Sure. Anything to add, anybody on this line? There's only one thing that I remember saying. This is actually in the section right after we read. So in book three. It's all about, well, what counts as a voluntary action versus an involuntary action. So even though he just wants to qualify that being virtuous is not just a matter of doing virtuous things and knowing you're doing virtuous things, but making decisions, conscious, willing decisions to do virtuous things. He's already said that. Well, virtuous people will tend to do virtuous things.

So it seems like, well, if you've gotten yourself into some habits where you're just used to being a slime ball, you're used to not considering others feelings, for instance, then it will be very natural, in fact, it will be very hard, maybe even practically impossible for you to pay attention to others needs as much as you should be, you know, right today if you just decide, wow, I should be paying attention to others needs. I'm Scrooge. Scrooge has just discovered the meaning of Christmas. And so he's going to suddenly start being polite and giving to everybody.

Well, Aristotle's going to say it's going to be a little difficult. You've established yourself in some, in some bad habits. So it sounds like you're helpless. You couldn't, you can't actually choose the right thing in all, in all cases. Aristotle still wants to say, that's your fault. You got yourself into those habits in the first place. You created the character that you have by doing shitty things for so long. And so even if you want to change your mind right now and do nice things, the fact that you're not able to do so consistently is your damn fault.

1:21:42 Seth: Wait a second. So there's a. There's a very, very nice section where he says a state of character arises out of, like, activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind, blah, blah, blah. It makes no small difference then whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth. It makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference. It might be your fault, but if you're screwed as a kid, if you have a poor upbringing. He makes it sound like he's saying, you really don't have much of a chance, which is actually how he ends this thing.

There's a great little piece at the end. I love the way the way it ends where he says, moral virtue is the mean. To be able to do this, finding this medium path, it is no easy task to be good for in everything. It is no easy task to find the middle, to do this, the right person, the right extent at the right time, the right motive in the right way. That is not for everyone, not, nor is it easy. Wherefore, goodness is both rare and laudable and noble. It's like, okay, so we go through this whole thing where he's trying to tell us that this is the way we should do things, but, you know, actually it's really hard, and there aren't that many people that do it.

And most likely, if you didn't have a really good or at least moderately decent upbringing as a kid, you don't have a shot in hell. Okay, then, you know, it's, yeah, well, and where do we go from here?

1:23:06 Mark: That does give us a very unchristian take on virtue versus blame, on blame and responsibility, in that if virtue is so rare and to be lauded, well, that's the primary thing we're shooting for. It's not so much like the Christian philosophies of Thou shalt not and condemning people who fall short because, wow, we just all fall short. It's going to be really hard not to fall short. So we can pity the people. I mean, it's still their fault in some ways in that they could start as soon as they become aware of these things, they could start training themselves to be better and maybe they'd eventually be able to overcome their upbringing. He doesn't, I don't think tells us either way about that. Certainly it's difficult. If you start with a good upbringing, you can still screw yourself up, clearly. And you should be blamed for that.

1:23:53 Wes: Well, is it blame?

1:23:54 Mark: He doesn't use the word blame. He doesn't use these Christian words. He says that will still count that as voluntary. You are free.

1:24:02 Wes: Right. Voluntary.

1:24:03 Mark: Even if you are not at the moment free to choose the right thing because you're just not going to choose the right thing because that's. You see the wrong thing is desirable. Well, you're the one that got that. This notion of what you see as desirable is to some extent your fault. And it's a matter of the habits that you've ingrained into yourself. So, for instance, if you're intemperate, if you're just used to being lazy and eating as much as you feel like eating, to gluttony and things, there was some point, even if you were sort of raised.

1:24:37 Wes: I take all this really personally, by the way.

1:24:39 Mark: I gotta say. I mean, I. I feel like I should not even be reading this book because I am so. I have so little willpower and I'm so intemperate compared to what he's. He's saying. I feel like I've not been, you know, I get berated in my home on a general basis. Oh, yeah. When you were growing up, your parents never made you do as many chores as you should, so you don't have that work ethic. That's my son telling me that.

1:25:02 Seth: But don't you.

1:25:08 Wes: That's great.

1:25:08 Seth: But don't you think he's kind of saying that this lack of goodness or the fact that goodness and virtue is so rare that that's somewhat lamentable and that part. Part of this was maybe going to be motivation for claiming something about the need for some sort of political or social reform where society should try to do what it can. Political philosophy or political theory or whatever should do what it can to try to engender more virtue in the citizens and not make it so difficult.

1:25:40 Mark: Yeah. Have you read anybody read the Politics such that they remember it?

1:25:44 Unknown speaker: No.

1:25:45 Mark: Well, I mean, he certainly hints at that in here and says that, yeah, that's really what the political is all about. And that's. We'll get into more specific. People criticize the Nicomachean ethics that it doesn't have as many specific guides to action. Well, you have to get into politics to reading the politics. Supposedly this is what the intro to one of my editions of the Nicomachean Ethics said to get that level of specificity. So you're entirely right that these are indivisible, that the politics is just ethics writ large.

1:26:16 Seth: I did not read a ton of Aristotle when we were in school. I read a lot more Plato than Aristotle. And I remember, you know, always contrasting the two. Thinking in terms of Plato was so much more philosophical and Aristotle was so much more sort of pragmatic and scientific and less interesting and boring and, you know, plain Plato had. Was more poetic and all these things that I. And I think now I would be very interested to sort of pick up Aristotle again and see if maybe in my gray years here, if I'm not more sympathetic to his point of view than to Plato's.

1:26:59 Wes: Yeah, I always thought he got a bad rap on that.

1:27:01 Mark: Well, he is tedious. I mean, if I look ahead in the Nicomachean ethics and how much he's dwelling on these, just systematically going through each of the virtues and the variations of the virtues and sort of consider, like, it's all. It's all very sensible, you know, in terms of making the system that he's come up with consistent. And you can see how it's, you know, almost Talmudic in the way it's trying to figure out some practical guides for action based on reasoned considerations of our apprehension of these virtues. But it's still. Well, I would not read that for pleasure. I think a good skim is. It's just fine.

1:27:41 Seth: Maybe. Maybe what I was saying was I should check out the politics because the metaphysics is the same way as you described, Mark. It's like, oh, it's a grind so long, so. So dry.

1:27:53 Mark: So I took an ancient philosophy with Hankinson at ut, get all Jim Hankinson. You guys weren't in there with me, but there were a couple, you know, actual, like, ancient scholar guys in there, and they. And the professor just spent the entire time nitpicking the translation. Yes. Okay. It is illuminating to talk about how psyche is his word for mind and how that doesn't mean exactly the same as soul and what you know, and that prevents the major misunderstandings, but, oh, my God, I don't want to live like that. Like, just dwelling on.

1:28:23 Wes: That's why I got out of ancient. It's so nitpicky and scholarly. And even when they're not talking about the translation, it's still nitpicky and scholarly.

1:28:32 Mark: It's like, well, and that's how it's not an accident. That seems to be how Aristotle, for one writes that when you get into the longer of the Plato and more technical the Plato dialogues, you encounter the same thing, right? Not to that extent, I don't think.

1:28:46 Wes: Even with, say, pre Socratics, they'll have a fragment from one guy and then they'll be. They'll have one fragment from one guy and nothing else. Nothing. They discovered it on a pot or something, a shard. And paper after paper after paper will be written on what the entire system of so and so's philosophy must have been based on this sentence.

1:29:09 Mark: Well, and how he is described in. In other people's writings, how Aristotle refers to him. Let's do a whole episode like on. On Thales, known for saying. Who's known for saying everything is water.

1:29:24 Wes: Well, there's good things there.

1:29:26 Seth: Well, Thales at least was a significant enough figure. It is amazing though that there are people who make their careers and they're like known as the expert in like Alcmaeon of Croton. And then you go and you realize that there's only like four words that have ever been recovered, you know, by that guy.

1:29:45 Wes: I'm actually getting an anxiety. Bringing me back to my University of Texas day.

1:29:50 Seth: Oh, man. Yeah, I went through this whole exercise too, all the German I read with Heidegger. And it was the same thing where, oh well, the English doesn't have the ability to articulate the concepts. And Heidegger was very big about how powerful. Of course, Greek was better than German. Right. For Heidegger. But German had its own second best power. Oh God, I bought into all that stuff.

1:30:19 Mark: You just need to shove all the words and English together. Then, then you have German words.

1:30:25 Seth: Yeah, but the question is, how do you then, you know, it's, it's not as elegant, Right. When you have Das dad des Dasein, where you can hyphenate the dasein. Right. And then in English it comes across. It's like the there of their being. It's kind of not quite as poetic, doesn't quite. And the thing that people do is they go, well, what you don't understand is that the early 20th century German reader would pick up, would pick up these, you know, intuitions that the word would have these connotations for this person. And I'm kind of like, okay, first off, nobody read these guys. Nobody read heidegger. No early 20th century Germans read Heidegger, you know, and secondly, anybody who would have a common sense or, you know, notion of that word would not be Reading either. They'd be as weird, screwed up, you know, university hacks just like he was.

1:31:20 Mark: I think we're going to change the intro of this podcast to be exposing the deep, dark secrets of academic philosophy to the masses. Power to the people.

1:31:33 Seth: Actually, the idea of doing a podcast where you just debunk, just debunk sort of assumptions and myths around philosophers might actually be kind of fun. You know, I noticed that, like, my homepage is Yahoo, you know, and they're always like popping up these little, like, what not to eat, you know, and those sorts of things. Maybe that could be like 50 myths about famous philosophers and philosophical ideas in 20 minutes. We'd just be like, boom, boom, boom, boom.

1:32:08 Mark: Wasn't Aristotle from Persia? There's a myth right there. We're debunking that.

1:32:14 Seth: We could do it McLaughlin Group style. Do you guys remember that show, the McLaughlin Group?

1:32:18 Wes: Yeah. Aristotle, good or bad?

1:32:20 Mark: All right, well, let's do our closing.

1:32:21 Wes: Let's do that.

1:32:21 Mark: Do you have any closing thoughts, Seth, on Aristotle? I think we've got enough time here.

1:32:28 Seth: Closing thoughts on Aristotle. Kind of like the social aspect or the political social aspect. Seems like the kind of guy you could sit around and have a meaningful and useful conversation with over some tea.

1:32:44 Mark: But no hemlock, please.

1:32:47 Seth: But prose style could use a little work.

1:32:51 Mark: Wes.

1:32:52 Wes: My interest was in this whole idea of function and what we mean by. Or what he means by eudaimonia and happiness and how we get from those ideas to some specific concept of the good life.

1:33:06 Mark: Well, my take when I was originally reading this was, okay, the first part is like this system building bullshit. The second part is the golden mean. And the golden mean is. Okay, that's pretty reasonable. We didn't get into the subtleties of this that I like the fact that he was reflecting what counts as the gold mean can be different for different people. How much are you supposed to eat? Well, if you're an athlete training up for the marathon, you would eat more than a layabout, you know, so the mean is in relation to you and your capacities and the practical advice he gave.

So, you know, we're trying to determine which side the mean always seems more opposite to one side than the other. So there's some people that work too hard. There's some people that are just lazy. Well, the gold mean is working just the right amount. If you want to figure out how to apply that to your life, look at which side you tend toward. Are you an overworker or are you a lazy ass? Well, I'm a Lazy ass. So I should. I should. I should go as far as I can the other way and try to be an overworker. And I'll probably end up at about the. The golden mean.

That seems very sensible advice.

1:34:09 Seth: Yeah.

1:34:09 Wes: This is why I don't like the gold.

1:34:11 Seth: Maybe we. Yeah, maybe we need to take that. We should talk about this stuff. Not too much, not too little.

1:34:17 Wes: Oh, good ending. Good segue to the end.

1:34:21 Mark: I think there should be just the right amount of meta commentary on the podcast. And not too much, not too little.

1:34:27 Wes: It's the Goldilocks principle.

1:34:29 Mark: So that when you stumble upon the golden mean, you should eat it all or break it or have bears find you in it. Taking the Goldilocks principle literally.

1:34:39 Seth: Literally. It's breaking and entering. One was too hot, one was too cold, one was just right. But they all three belong to somebody else.

1:34:46 Wes: You would find some ethical problem in that.

1:34:48 Seth: I would. Even though the question about whether or not bears can own property is. I guess.

1:34:53 Mark: And you notice how it broke down when it got to the chairs? Like what? One chair was like, too high, but the other one was too wide or some crap. Like, I've read it a couple different ways and none of them make that much sense. Like, how could a chair be.

1:35:06 Wes: Read it in the original German that

1:35:09 Mark: a chair for the mama bear is somehow too low for her or too, you know, whatever. It's the smallest one.

1:35:16 Wes: I don't even think I've ever read it.

1:35:17 Mark: Oh, you are not a parent yet. I've read 1400 versions of that story involving every kind of different image animal. You know, Goldilocks doesn't have to be a human. Goldilocks can be a pig among bears or some whatever bullshit Richard Scarry version of that. And that's a good ending. Good night to everybody. I just want to remind you all to look at our website, partiallyexaminedlife.com and our discussion boards. Why you should sign up for this on itunes. If you want to be up for next time, you should look at the website and look at our link to what we're talking about next, which in this case is Leibniz's Monadology. Getting into our first hardcore metaphysics reading. And I invite you all to listen to the pretty music. Good night.

1:36:26 Unknown speaker: She was more like a pretty queen. I said, I don't mind but what do you mean? I am the one dance on the floor in the ground she said, I am the one who dance on the floor on the floor in the ground. People always told me, be careful what you do don't go around breaking young girls heart and mother always told me Be careful who you love be careful what you do Cause the life becomes a true love Jes not good am I alone she's just a girl who claims that I am the one but the kid is not my son she says that I am the one but the kid is not my son. Three days and 49 night slows on her side you can stand she's a man Crystals and plans on the floor

1:38:02 Mark: around

1:38:05 Unknown speaker: so take my st and ris Just remember to always think twice don't think twice Twice she told me baby that's a threats she looked at me and showed up Baby cries eyes were like mine don't dance on the FL around. Breaking your girl's falls she came stood right by me the smell of. But the king is not my son she claims that I am the one but she is lady's not my son. Baby Jean is not my love She's a dog who claims that I am the one but the kid is not my son she claims that I am the one but the kid it is. This. Billy jeans nothing my love Billy jeans nothing my love Billy Jean is not my my lover Billy Jean is not my lover Billy Je. Is not my love.

1:40:51 Wes: My love.

1:41:07 Unknown speaker: But the kid is not my son.