PREVIEW-Episode 33: Montaigne: What Is the Purpose of Philosophy?

0:00 Seth: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the Itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store for unlimited access to our back catalog. You can become a pel citizen@priallyexaminedlife.com membership. Membership also includes access to discussion groups with other listeners, as well as ad free versions of current episodes and a host of other bonus content, all available from a single convenient feed that you can use with a variety of podcast apps.

0:41 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 33 is something like what is philosophy good for? With discussion of some essays by Michel de Montaigne from the late 16th century. For a link to online versions of these essays, discussion, and other information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmeier, cauterized in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:10 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan, suffering from kidney stones in Boston, Massachusetts.

1:16 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey, enjoying his whiskey in Annapolis, Maryland.

1:22 Wes: Are you really?

1:23 Dylan: Well, it's Montaigne, so I wish I had some whiskey.

1:27 Wes: Dan.

1:27 Dylan: Actually, probably Montaigne wouldn't be drinking whiskey because whiskey was basically grain alcohol at the time. So.

1:33 Mark: And just to clarify, Wes does not actually have kidney stones. Right. That's not. That's Montaigne's illness. Okay. We don't want to make people think that we're having true medical confessions here.

1:45 Wes: Yeah. If they don't get that reference, then God help them.

1:48 Mark: That means they didn't read it. That's all that means.

1:50 Wes: I didn't know. It didn't mean they didn't read the Wikipedia thing. They didn't read anything.

1:55 Mark: So they didn't read the essay on experience, one of the very last one that he wrote. Right.

2:02 Dylan: Also called on kidney stones. Right?

2:05 Mark: Yes. Where he complains basically.

2:06 Dylan: Yeah.

2:07 Mark: He bitches about his kidney stone, actually, just more brags about how well he holds up in light of his kidney

2:12 Dylan: stones, how they're not nearly as bad as he thought they would be as

2:16 Mark: other people's illnesses, even though he had actually.

2:20 Wes: So that essay is in the third book, which he wrote later on, but in between the first two books and that third book, he went out on a quest for a cure for his kidney stones. He spent like a year or two roaming around Europe, so he actually wrote a little travelogue that they published 200 years after his death. He doesn't mention that quest there. I don't think directly.

2:39 Dylan: Yeah, I didn't notice it.

2:41 Mark: I think that the travel log is called Kidneys Agogo or something like that. Is that right?

2:48 Wes: That should be called that.

2:49 Mark: And Seth was so energetic on the Heidegger thing. In fact, he's editing the whole episode that he didn't have time to do the reading on this. And since we had three people. Anyway, actually I designed this as a vacation for him since he has a new job and things. So there's nothing wrong with Seth. He's just hanging. Should we do the ground rules?

3:10 Seth: Sure.

3:10 Mark: To re familiarize our listeners. And Dylan, who has not been on for nearly a year with us. Right.

3:17 Dylan: Has it been that long?

3:18 Mark: Maybe it was like June. I don't know.

3:20 Dylan: It was pragmatism, Right?

3:22 Mark: Yes.

3:22 Dylan: Which seems somehow apt. Montaigne reminded me of that, actually.

3:25 Wes: Yeah, of course. Yeah.

3:27 Mark: The first rule is we should try to assume that our audience knows nothing about any of this. Number two, no fair name dropping. In lieu of making your point, don't say you would understand me if only you had read Frank Oz's treatise. C is for Cookie. That's good enough for me. A study in lowered expectations. Number three, we will be rigorous and exact in all that we say instead of just parodying the diseased language of the authors that we are reading. That rule. That formulation was designed for the Heidegger episode, but I didn't end up saying it on that one.

4:03 Wes: That's also aptune.

4:05 Mark: Unless you're gonna stop and quote Horace and Lucretius every two sentences, we're not gonna have any danger on this episode of sounding like Montaigne. The particular essays that we read were that to philosophize is to learn to die of the education of children, of cannibals, of solitude and of experience. And the one that we pretended we were going to read until the last minute when we said we weren't reading it, even though I stayed up late and read. The rest of it was Apology for Raymond, See Bond, which is about skepticism and is very famous. But we're not going to talk about that, at least in any detail. This was a really fun book to just leaf through. The one I have is the Complete Essays of Montaigne. And we are reading the Donald Frame translation. You guys have that same exact book. It's like 800 pages long.

4:53 Dylan: Yeah, I think it's actually, my understanding is sort of the standard. I mean, he sort of nailed it on the head as far as most people are concerned. For an English translation?

5:03 Wes: Yeah, yeah. There's another one that's popular by a guy named Screech that's relatively recent. Seriously?

5:10 Mark: The guy from Saved by the Belt?

5:13 Wes: That's right. He became a Montaigne scholar. That's right.

5:15 Mark: And kept his stage name.

5:17 Wes: The really, really old one that's available for free online is by Cotton, right?

5:22 Mark: Yes.

5:22 Wes: And it's probably somewhat unbearable to read.

5:25 Mark: No, I read the first couple of the essays in that before I got this one out of the Libra, and it was fine. It was still a very pleasant experience. This is a good book for you philosophy neophytes to just pick up and leaf through. There are so many essays in here, and a lot of them are like three pages long. And they're mostly. He's like a columnist. He's like a blogger.

5:45 Dylan: Yeah, that's true.

5:46 Mark: So they're mostly pretty pleasant. The Raymond Simon one is the longest one, and that is what, 175 pages or something with no breaks in it. The translator inserts some kind of chapter titles, himself within it, but it's just one long ramble. And a lot of these things tend to just be ramble, ramble, ramble. Oh, he switched to a different topic. Oh, he switched to a different topic again. Oh, just kind of wherever he feels like going.

6:10 Wes: I think he invented the word essay, the way he's using it, which means attempt. I think he's basically the. He's the first essayist and the first person to use that word in that way. Am I right about that?

6:21 Dylan: That's exactly right. I think. I mean, he's writing in 1580, right? That's a long time ago.

6:27 Wes: Yeah, he started in 15, so he retired when he was like, 38. Should we give a little bio here? Sure. So he was born in 1533, I think it was his grandfather or his great grandfather had made a fortune as a herring merchant, and I think they also had a winery. So he came from a very rich family. His father was a soldier, and then he was the mayor of Bordeaux for a while. His father had some strange ideas about education. So Montaigne, as he mentions in some of what we read, had a really interesting education as a child. For the first three years, he lived with a peasant family because his father wanted him to be exposed to the commoners and to experience, want and.

Yeah, all that stuff. And then he was put with a German tutor who couldn't speak French, but spoke German and Latin. And Montaigne's father hired servants who could speak Latin. And everyone was told that they have to speak Latin around Montaigne. And so he became a. It was one of his cradle languages, and he was an expert on Latin as a child. He was sent to some famous college and was very heavy on the classics and Latin back then, and he got through the whole curriculum by the time he was 13 and apparently intimidated some of the great Latinists of the time.

He was so good. It was. It was a bizarre thing. And despite what we read, he sort of craps all over that education.

7:45 Mark: Well, he says he doesn't remember it now as an adult, but so clearly he's, like, quoting all these people in Latin throughout all his essays.

7:52 Wes: So obviously it's really. Yeah, so it's like. Yeah, it's easy to say it's done you no good when it's over. But anyway, I think he was a courtier, and he managed his estate basically for most of his life. And then he decided he was going to retire. He put an inscription on one of his bookshelves when he retired, and it said, in the year of Christ, 1571, at the age of 38, on the last day of February, this birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, will still retire to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in common freedom from all cares, he will spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out, if the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat.

And he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility and leisure. And so that's when he begins writing the essays, basically, at our age, Mark. So there's hope.

8:42 Mark: Yep. Yep.

8:43 Wes: And he does that for, like. Yeah. So the first two books he publishes in 1580, like, nine years later. And then he's constantly updating them with. So when you see. When you read these translations, you'll see the abc. The B stuff, I think, is what he added in the margins to the 1580 version that was updated in 1588. And then there's another version in 1595, published by his adopted daughter. He met this writer and adopted her. Marie de Gournay is the C stuff. The stuff he put in the margins or, I don't know, remember exactly.

9:14 Mark: He did two rounds of revisions.

9:16 Wes: It's labeled.

9:17 Mark: But I didn't at least pay any attention to that at all. Even though they're like, oh, this is an early essay. We're in his Stoic period. And this is a middle essay in his skeptical period.

9:26 Wes: Right. Yeah, yeah.

9:27 Mark: Every single essay has been updated.

9:29 Wes: Yeah, the biographies did say something about he made friends with this famous poet. Poet who died. And that had a. When was that?

9:35 Mark: That was before he started.

9:36 Wes: That was before he started. So that had a profound effect on him.

9:39 Mark: Right. That he was used to burying his soul to this friend of his. And so the essays were his way of just externalizing his thoughts in the same way somebody at least is positing this.

9:50 Wes: Yeah. One other thing to mention when I talked about with the Kidney Stone quest, that's right after he published the first two books, he goes on that quest. And while he was doing that, he was. This I found really amusing. He was elected mayor in absentia without his knowledge in Bordeaux, like his father. So he goes back to Bordeaux and is mayor for a while and then does those updates and then ends up dying in 1592, partly from the kidney stones, apparently. And then I guess one other little margin note to add to all this is this. I guess he's widely regarded to be the guy who reignites the interest in skepticism.

And he's influential, possibly on Shakespeare, but definitely on Descartes. So Montaigne was reading people like Sextus Empiricus, these people who weren't very, very much read, I guess because he had all that Latin and Greek and he could do that. Especially the Apology for Raymond C. Bond where he brings up all those skeptical arguments. Apparently that's what influenced Descartes and led to this huge revival in skepticism and then led to modern philosophy.

10:49 Mark: I felt like I was communing with your soul, Wes. When I was, I read about Montaigne and I don't know, it was in the Wikipedia or something that various authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson was like, oh, it's like I wrote these. It's like they were just for me. But I felt like, no, it's just for you, Wes, Because all the things about. Don't be such a militant atheist. Our reason doesn't extend so far as to even prove a negative like that. And yeah, the useless is good. The contemplation for contemplation's sake. And if we never reach any solid conclusions about anything and just use it as food for our intellect, then that's a good way of thinking, thinking about philosophy.

11:38 Wes: And he's lazy. Yes, extremely lazy. Yeah, yeah, I thought of both of you guys reading it too, because of the large dose of pragmatism there as well. So that's interesting because you could call pragmatism anti skeptical in a way. Although in another sense pragmatism is just. Well, I don't know how to get at that. But it's an interesting mixture. It's skepticism, but it's not. Doesn't take them down a rationalist path, let's say. So for Descartes, you know, for typical hardcore skeptics, it can lend itself to rationalism. And for Montaigne it doesn't do that. He's just not interested in that level philosophically or so.

12:18 Mark: The skeptic he talks about the most is Pyrrho, who I've never read anything by or about really other than this, and talks about Pyrro as a guy who really thought that reason is useless and we shouldn't reach any solid conclusions. And so, in fact, in all of our daily affairs, we should walk around not taking sides in anything. In fact, we shouldn't let anything disturb our countenance, our calm demeanor, because that would be sort of acknowledging some fact, you know, that there's a dog bothering me. So even in reacting to dogs, you know, you should keep even keeled and kind of just. He says when he would start to say something, even if the person he talked to walked away, he had to just finish saying it because you shouldn't let things affect you, really.

13:02 Dylan: So keep your hand in the fire. Don't ever react to external stimulus at all.

13:09 Mark: Right. I think the context of that. I was wondering what Montaigne thought of virtue. So he has a very short article in here called On Virtue that actually doesn't talk a lot about virtue. It's just about anger and determination and things. But in any case, that seems like that might be where skepticism leads you if, like, we can't reach any solid conclusion. But Montaigne, skepticism is, like you were saying, is more of a pragmatic skepticism. Well, if we can't reach any metaphysical conclusions or we can't even really be sure about the matters that science claims to know things about, then it's not that you should just never take sides or whatever.

It's that you should kind of do what's natural and do what's easy. And it really comes down to the golden mean, right? Aristotle's ethics. I saw a lot in here of, oh, you know, if there's no reason to do too much of something or to avoid something completely, then just do it a moderate amount, kind of go with the customs of your land, even though you know that they're not any great rationalization for them. So it does end up being a very pragmatic point of view.

14:10 Dylan: I agree about that. And the one Thing, I couldn't decide quite whether he had all the moderation talk and the Aristotelian kind of be moderate in your stoicism, be moderate in your pleasure and all that stuff. But he also had a kind of natural law tendency almost, that everything that is natural is good. And it struck me, especially in the unexperienced part, in a funny kind of contrast with the kidney stone business, he wanted to say, well, you know, look, life is good and look on the bright side of things in some ways. But I've always wondered about the whole go with the natural thing argument, because, of course, nature causes kidney stones and heart attacks and bubonic plague and all that stuff is natural.

And I wondered how he would come down on that kind of thing, because in some ways, Descartes would turn to that skepticism as a way to cure man of nature. And he wants to appeal to nature as being a kind of maybe a balance or a mean in some respect, I guess.

15:14 Wes: Yeah. It's unclear because it seems like there are strong stoical elements, which is. In a way, it seems like he's just advocating retreating, you know, and that essay on solitude sort of reinforces that. But even this idea that you can just sort of ignore the world or use these sort of maxims, you know, I'm not affected by anything. And on the other hand, he seems to be advocating embracing it. So embrace the pain, for instance. On the one hand, it's the stoic solution, seems to be to sort of engage in some denial that pain really affects me, or something like that. And the alternative, maybe the naturalist solution as to the way he seems to almost savor it, or something like that. Maybe I'm not really making a real distinction there, but anyway, yeah, I mean,

15:56 Mark: he certainly says that a lot of this pretending to ignore pain and stuff is just. That is pretending. So part of his going with the natural and going with the flow is we are feeling creatures. There's only just so much we can do. If we're taken by pain, we're taken by pain.

16:10 Dylan: Yeah. And I guess there is that section in on experience. He wants to glorify the contemplative but also emphasize the corporeal. He has some quote from Seneca or somebody about the intrinsically physical nature of human beings that they go together.

16:27 Mark: Yeah. Didn't Nietzsche really like Montaigne? Yeah, and you could see a lot of that.

16:31 Wes: He said something like, thank God that such a man lived, or something like that. I forget which bio I saw the quote in. It was probably in the Wikipedia.

16:39 Mark: Yeah, I see a lot of in the way that Nietzsche has that form of naturalism, of glorifying our natural vigor and our energy and our physicality. Not to the elimination of the mental certainly. But given that philosophy is guilty historically of undervaluing the physical, it's worth going out of your way to make the point that this is something that we can't ignore, this is something that is part of the good life. And that if you are a self denier in some way, first of all, you're doing harm to yourself. And second, if you think you have some strong reason to be self denying, you're going to find that your reasons for that are pretty groundless as your reasons for most other things are.

17:18 Wes: Yeah, and just to go back to the Pyrrhonian influence here, I think Peronian skepticism was actually much more interesting and subtle. There are lots of skeptical arguments and you use them as sort of the medicine that leads you to suspend all judgment. At a theoretical level, you're allowed to have judgments. The Pyrrhonian skeptic calls it living by habit, which is what Montaigne I think is advocating. Consistent with the Pyrrhonian skeptic. It's just that when you live by habit, you don't say, oh, this is the way things are in themselves. And some of it even sounds like bracketing.

This is a quote from Pyrrho. By confining oneself to phenomena or objects as they appear, and by asserting nothing definite as to how they really are, one can escape the perplexities of life and attain an imperturbable peace of mind. So it's not that you don't have beliefs. I wrote something on the about Pirro and I used the same metaphor, but it's something like going to a football game. And yeah, you let yourself on the habitual, on the level of your passions, you let yourself identify with a team, get riled up, take it seriously. You don't take that seriously.

On a theoretical level, you don't say, yes, the packers are in themselves the best in the team. Right. It's just, you know, my fandom is purely accidental, but I'm still going to embrace it. So it's that sort of thing.

18:31 Mark: And I put that on a sign in bars of the game.

18:36 Wes: Oh yeah, you are.

18:37 Mark: You're right, you're purely accidental.

18:40 Wes: This is quite a Super bowl for you.

18:41 Mark: Yeah, I'm not actually gonna watch it, so sorry.

18:44 Wes: That's.

18:45 Mark: Yikes.

18:46 Wes: So yeah, so I think that emphasis on habit as the ethical Correlate of the bracketed. If you treat everything as appearance and the ethical version of that is this embrace of habit, I think you're in line with the Pyrrhonian skeptic. That sort of equanimity, which I think, and you know, I see that influence on Montaigne as well. I mean, he's trying to obtain this peace of mind through. Once I stop resisting the pain of the kidney stone and go with it, it's not so bad, that kind of thing.

19:12 Dylan: Yeah. Where do you think for Montaigne the acquiescence turns to the ambition? He admits to being a certain kind of laziness, but you know, a guy doesn't write books this long out of. Out of being lazy. He definitely has ambition, at least with self expression and reading and all kinds of other stuff. It's a kind of ambition that isn't turned towards conquering nature the way a typical Cartesian interpretation might be. But it's not stoetical in the sense of purely self focused. You know, he says he's trying to just understand himself, but it really has to do with an eye towards the outside world or also a looking at himself from a third person point of view, not from a purely internal point of view. I started wondering where that turns for him from being a stoic to being ambitious in some way.

20:05 Mark: I'm not sure I would equate natural curiosity, which is what he advocates. Like in the education of children article, he talks about really trying to instill in people the kind of curiosity that I think he has that not only being interested in these theoretical issues, but especially interested in people. He talks a lot about dinner parties and good conversation and hearing something from people's mouths and not only just reading them. And even when you do read things, you shouldn't be so wrapped up in the details of their theories and the specific events of history as to getting to know the characters of the authors in question, that that's such a gift that we have.

You know, he had a giant library in this mansion of his. You know, a lot of his time spent not writing was hanging out with these ancient figures. That all still seems on the level of the playful to me. You know, I wouldn't call it habitual, but I wouldn't call it ambitious either.

20:55 Dylan: Yeah, that sounds right. I guess I have to admit that while I was reading through this and hearing his self description and knowing a little bit about his biograph, I had to wonder a little bit about how much of this was a kind of a silver spooned Rich kid being able to do what he wants to do.

21:12 Mark: Yeah.

21:13 Dylan: You know, and sit around and talk with people. And on the one hand he has a pleasantly non aristocratic point of view. He has a certain kind of condescension of not buying into a lot of the trappings of his wealth. On the other hand, and there's a way in which he seems to be a bit oblivious to the notion of that he's a different kind of person than all the other people who work on his farm and stuff like that. He doesn't have the kind of ambition that aristocrat would have of building giant gardens and that kind of thing. But I wonder a little bit just about the privilege of his position and how well he acknowledges that.

21:51 Mark: I see mostly him individuating himself on the basis of how much intellectual life that he has. Not to brag about it, in fact, it's kind of a double edged sword. And this turns to our main question, what is philosophy good for? That sometimes he talks about, you know, I kind of think about things too much. I check in with the beggars that come to my door who seem happier than I am. And why is that? And this is the Nietzschean strain, that the people who reflect too much are crippled in some way, that they're cut off from their natural impulses that would keep them on the straight and narrow and it's very easy to lose your way.

But on the other hand, he talks about. Sometimes philosophy is about learning how to live well. And the implication being that if you don't do philosophy and you don't think that much, that you're just a crass rube who is being swept along by the ideas of your society. As a crass rube, you're still using your reason in that you're believing these unnatural things that have been passed down fourth hand from Aristotle and a million church fathers. So there's certainly some contempt there I sense in him as well.

22:56 Wes: Yeah. I think he thinks that there's an art to living and philosophy in proper measure has a place in helping you figure out that art. Right. But that once you get lofty. Well, he says at the end of that of experience, these transcendental humors frighten me like lofty, and inaccessible places. I love that these transcendental humors frighten me. Pascal, who's very influenced by Montaigne, said something very similar. The silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. But anyway, so I thought of Pascal there. I guess it's moderation in all things, including philosophy.

23:31 Mark: So he's the patron saint of this podcast, you know.

23:35 Wes: Yeah, exactly.

23:37 Mark: As I say that after I have forced myself to read 200 pages of Montaigne in fairly quick succession in a very immoderate manner, you know, I should

23:47 Wes: check in earlier and just say I'm not going to make it. But I always have a fucking ridiculous expectation like, oh yeah, I'm going to. I can still do. I can still get the whole Siban thing done in two days or one day.

23:57 Mark: I'm still glad to have done it. This was my introduction to Montaigne and in fact, I, rather than trying to then sit down and take notes on some of this, I find myself just like reading a couple more pages of this random essay. And this random essay, like there's so much good stuff in here. Also rambling, skimmable stuff. He's so non systematic that you can just. Oh, these 20 pages he's talking about how we're not any better than animals and telling a million stories about dogs and horses that he heard about from ancient Rome. Yeah, I can skim that. I got the point.

24:31 Dylan: He's like that uncle that you are listening to while sitting around the fire and you zone out for a while and come back and you didn't really miss anything. But he's really interesting to listen to at times.

24:47 Wes: I find it really absorbing actually.

24:49 Dylan: Well, this is the funny thing is that even in English translation, it's really amazing to read the language. But like Mark said, there are parts where you feel like, well, it's beautifully written, but I didn't really get much out of what he said in the sense of there are more poignant and dense and thoughtful parts to it, but it's all said really, really beautifully.

25:10 Wes: I think part of it is he'll take a point and he'll really beat you over the head with it. Right. With anecdote after anecdote. And if you're looking at it from the standpoint of distilling the main points out of it, yet you could take each essay and boil it down to a few sentences if you're in the mood to sort of read someone's diary.

25:27 Dylan: Oh, that's true.

25:28 Wes: It's a different.

25:29 Mark: Yeah, the fact that he brings in so many anecdotes and again, these quotes, it kind of amazes me. I mean, I guess anybody that quotes a lot of people verbatim, seemingly all the time amazes me because it's so not the way I think. Like I come away with Montaigne knowing his ideas. If I read enough of it or read about him. Then I'll, I'll have some quotes maybe that I could regurgitate at some point. But it's like every point he makes, does he research this beforehand? Does some of these essays come out that he was reading Plutarch and taking notes on Plutarch and like, oh, I like the way Plutarch talks about this.

I'll take, you know, I'll write an essay on that. Oh, I wonder if Pliny talks about that too. And so then it ends up being kind of just a hastily written research paper. But he has all these quotes ready to hand and anecdotes. Or is he really just so smart that he just accumulated all this stuff out of his library and discussing them with people over the years? And so when he finally gets around to talking about dogs, then, like he just happens to have 20 dog stories right there at his disposal.

26:26 Wes: What he actually did, he wrote the essay without the quotes.

26:28 Seth: And then he would Google

26:32 Wes: keywords and find, like, great crap to put in there. They had a more primitive Google back then. It was a little more laborious. It involved searching through volume after volume in his vast library.

26:47 Mark: It incited my thirst for reading some of these ancient Greeks and ancient Romans. I mean, particularly Romans.

26:54 Dylan: Yeah, he's all about the Romans, isn't he?

26:56 Mark: Yep.

26:57 Wes: Yeah. Even though he disses on. He quotes Cicero so much, but then he, when he talks about Cicero, he disses Cicero. So it's confusing.

27:03 Mark: Well, and he's talking about Socrates and then quotes Cicero. How you even know to look in Cicero for that particular thing?

27:10 Dylan: I suspect actually that it's not that he looked for these things, that he just read this stuff. And I suspect he had the kind of mind, it's not just that he grew up with Latin, but that he obviously had a kind of bear trap of a mind, you know, and just kept it all in his head. And he did sort of organize his thoughts. That is more like what you said, Mark, originally. That is, he would start thinking of something he had at his fingertips all kinds of anecdotes and maybe he had to go look up the details of some of it, but that's what he remembered. And also he was brought up at a time when memorization was a fantastical part of his education. So he would have memorized huge sections of the Aeneid and stuff like that. So it would just be in his head all the time.

28:00 Seth: Yep. Amazing.

28:01 Mark: I think we need to turn a little more to some of the specific textual points because we've now Made him out to be this guy which many see him as. As. Oh, he just has a very intuitive, natural picture. And once you kind of read enough of him to get that or hear enough about him, then you impose whatever you think is the most reasonable and intuitive and natural views on him. But I want to talk about this essay that to philosophize is to learn to die, which I think it's an extremely counterintuitive in some ways, or at least hard to achieve view of what our attitude towards our lives and death should be.

28:40 Wes: Yeah. You're supposed to have detached yourself from life enough that death isn't such a bad thing. Right.

28:45 Mark: Right. Don't start any projects that are so huge that you'd be upset if you were to die in the middle of it. Don't form relationships that are so intense that you would be upset to leave them. Like, really?

29:00 Seth: Yeah.

29:02 Wes: That sort of stoicism, I think is. You know. And he quotes a lot of Lucretius in this one. This is the very stoic one.

29:09 Dylan: One of the places that caught me on in this particular one is he says, it is uncertain where death awaits us. Let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint. There is nothing evil in life for the man who has thoroughly grasped the fact that to be deprived of life is not an evil. It's a kind of stoicism, but it's a kind of also. I don't want to say Buddhism. Right. But it's a kind of saying, letting go of attachment. Right. That you ought to understand that complete detachment is complete freedom.

29:52 Wes: Yeah. And it goes back to this whole ethical version of bracketing for new listeners. I'm referring back to our Husserl episode, but the idea of treating appearances as appearances rather than things in themselves, in which case you sort of deflate their importance a little bit and you have some sort of attachment. But it's not the kind of attachment that getting at your Buddhism thing, Dylan, that leads to suffering. Right. I guess the Buddhist is supposed to. The idea is to avoid suffering. And one of the things that leads to suffering is desire, is that it's. So maybe it's his sort of moderate intermediate attachment. Again, coming back to the idea of moderation. It's not this complete contempt. I mean, although he does use that word. Right. Contempt for the world is a sign of a true Christian.

30:37 Dylan: Well, yeah, but That's a criticism, right? He says our religion has no sure human foundation than contempt for life. And that, I thought was in the turn that he wants to make.

30:46 Wes: Oh, is that a criticism?

30:48 Dylan: I thought it was a criticism.

30:49 Mark: I think, again, this is the kind of thing that he thinks is just unrealistic. If you really have the view, oh, you know, my religion says that I'm going to be in a better place after I die.

30:58 Dylan: Yeah, exactly.

30:59 Mark: There's a story somewhere in here where a priest, and this is not even talking about a Christianity here, but just about some other older Greek sect expressed that. And the replyer just said, well, okay, go die right now. Like, if you don't go die right now, then you don't really believe what you're saying. So there are limits to the way that we even could believe such a thing. He says in one place that God makes death sort of hard enough that we don't seek it. That it. Like you were saying, it's moderation, that we. We shouldn't mind it when it comes, but we shouldn't be eager to jump to it either. In fact, he seems to. Yeah, I think he somewhere talks about suicide as being extremely. Just cowardly and inane.

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