Episode 120: A History of “Will” with Guest Eva Brann

0:08 Dylan: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast by some guys who were, one point, set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 120 is something like, what does it mean to Will?

0:20 Unknown speaker: Something.

0:21 Dylan: And we have Eva Brann here to talk about her book, An Inquiry into the Rise of Will's Power and an attempt to undo it. This is Dylan Casey in Annapolis, Maryland.

0:31 Mark: This is Mark. This is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:33 Unknown speaker: This is Seth Paskin in San Antonio, Texas.

0:35 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:38 Eva: Eva Brann in Annapolis, Maryland.

0:41 Dylan: Eva, it's great to have you back on the podcast very much. Eva and I are here in Annapolis recording again, and we had you on last time to talk about Heraclitus and your book about his Fragments, a fan

0:55 Mark: favorite episode that is like the first one that we point them to.

0:58 Dylan: It's one of our most downloaded episodes.

1:00 Eva: Oh, yeah, I'm flattered, I guess.

1:04 Dylan: We've been reading a number of books about Will, and the Question of Will is pretty topical in the free will debates. And you had this book. It's not your most recent book, but it's one that you came out with not too long ago.

1:18 Mark: Yeah, 2014.

1:20 Dylan: That's not very long ago.

1:20 Eva: No time enough to write another book.

1:24 Mark: Does the writing overlap, Eva?

1:26 Eva: No, I've got a policy that a couple of weeks before I think I'm finished, I start the next one. Otherwise I go into decline.

1:35 Mark: So how long did it take you to get through all the information for this book?

1:38 Eva: This one? A couple years, I guess.

1:40 Dylan: Yeah, I remember you talking about it back in 2011. So it was a long project.

1:45 Mark: It was a long project and it's monumental. So it's largely a historical overview. You sort of get to your own position at the end, but your own position ends up being pretty much, look what Aquinas said and what some of the other people that I said nice things about said. And you don't go into much additional detail about that. But the section on Augustine, one of the ones that we picked out for us all to read, you're diving into four different books to get at all the different things he has to say about Will, giving us a much rounder picture than we will get ourselves when we go through the Confessions soon.

2:11 Dylan: For instance, when Eva and I were talking about it earlier, I characterized it largely as a kind of genealogy of

2:18 Eva: Will that struck me as just right. It had two separate births, Augustine being one and Aquinas the other.

2:26 Dylan: You start off the book almost apologetically saying, well, so this is sort of what I think. And then going through the historical coverage and then at the end saying a lot more about what your position is.

2:36 Eva: It's partly a pretense not to know at the beginning and then to work your way to a grand conclusion. It always begins with a conclusion.

2:45 Dylan: Yes.

2:46 Eva: Pretense is that it's an inquiry.

2:48 Dylan: Maybe you could talk for a minute

2:50 Eva: about just the title, Unwilling with a hyphen. I'm unwilling means I don't want to. And to be unwilling means to be against something, but there happens to be used. I found it, oddly enough, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the poetess. You're not supposed to say poetess, but she was a woman. She uses it as undoing the will to unwill. So unwilling could be the activity of undoing the will. And I conceived of this book as giving that a try.

3:26 Dylan: Maybe as a way of beginning with the end, you could sketch the basic arc of your argument.

3:31 Eva: Yeah.

3:31 Mark: In particular, what's objectionable about the will and what proposing in contrast to it is.

3:36 Eva: I guess I have to come to that. In antiquity, say, among the earlier Greek philosophers, the great ones, Plato and Aristotle, even though some of the terms they use are sometimes translated as will, there's nothing like the will that Augustine discovers and that Thomas works out. So I begin by claiming that the will is an invention. Then Augustine is the first one to think of the will in the way that I think we should unwill, namely as a clenched fist, activity or ability or power. Thomas has a kinder and gentler notion of the will as being desire that is rational.

So either rational desire or desiring reason. So there are two grand traditions, one of which is more or less lost, and that's the Thomist tradition. And the clenched fist one is really the one that wins out at the end of the book. I conclude that it would be wise to undo the will to a certain extent. Not in a clenched fist sort of way, but in a relaxed sort of way. And I think as we go, that will become clearer.

4:51 Mark: One of the connections that you made in the book to a philosopher that we've covered in the past that I think made this very clear was the one to Heidegger. Heidegger's concern with technology just has to do with some sort of overall attitude of dominance, that everything that I encounter, I don't even really see it in itself. I just consider it as a tool for my action. And that with that goes a lot of society's ills. And you even connect that near the end of your book, and some of this was my reading into it, based on the fact that I know that you don't use email and wrote the book out in longhand. But the resistance to technological change, not whole hog. Not that you live on a farm and eschew modern conveniences, but don't want to put a lot of mental time into figuring out new things if that's going to distract from what's really important in life.

5:36 Eva: It isn't really resistance. It's mild disinclination, more or less.

5:41 Mark: It's paying attention to those inclinations and not trying to. The clenched fist type of will goes along with any attempt, Christian attempts, other attempts like that, even anti Christian attempts like Nietzsche's, to remake yourself in some radical way, in some strong way. I will, through the force of will, make myself into a new kind of being. And that seems to be what you are, that it's much better to be relaxed and curious and paying attention to things as they are in themselves. So Heidegger puts it as let the being be. Although I understand that you even reject Heidegger's take on that as sort of too passive, that. No, we need some active engagement.

6:15 Eva: Yeah. Lest anyone think that Heidegger plays a positive role in this, he plays, to my mind, a most terrible role in it. In the first instance, his way of giving up the will is to give it over to the Fuhrer. That was his Nazi period. And there are speeches in which he actually speaks of giving over one's will to the leader. Then later on when he's over that, he has a theory of letting go, but he runs into terrible trouble because he can't find a way to let go without willing that. In other words, the question is, when you're letting go, isn't that an act of the will? And he has no solution to that. So Heidegger is not my hero. But you mentioned Augustine and Nietzsche, and they are really central in very different ways. Shall I say something about that?

7:04 Unknown speaker: Please.

7:05 Eva: Augustine really discovers the will. He discovers it as a power of perversity and in particular as a power of resisting God and even more as a power of trying to be God. In other words, the notion of becoming in the divinity of exercising the will to dominate, that's his great discovery of the will. And this is a will that is primarily a will to resist and a will to dominate. The great question for him is, why did God give us a will of that sort? And then the discussion of his book on free will is concerned with how can we be free unless we have the ability to resist God in order to be sinful?

And it becomes very complicated and very interesting. With Nietzsche, it's a different kind of problem. Nietzsche thinks of the will as being an affect which is not anybody's affect. It's a kind of cosmic affect. That is to say, it's a passion or an emotion, but it's not an emotion which belongs to you or me. It's an emotion which is beneath everything, and we are simply instances of it. So there the problem is what a will can be that isn't any particular human being's will, what a cosmic will can. I think that's enough pontificating about that.

8:29 Unknown speaker: Dylan, you used the term genealogy earlier to describe what Eva's done in the book, and I think that's a really great term. The one distinction I would make is, if you're thinking of genealogy the way that Foucault uses it, what Eva actually does as part of her genealogy is she points out that we have conflicting and oftentimes misunderstood notions of what we mean when we use the term will, and that different thinkers use the term differently and don't necessarily acknowledge the difference in how they use it versus how it's used in some of the people that they engage with.

And I think that's a key point, is that we're talking as if we're talking about one thing, but one of the outcomes of the book is the idea that there's kind of these key notions that underline the will versus free will and those sorts of things, but that it's almost as though we have to come to a consensus about what we mean when we say it. Otherwise we are just doing genealogy or a history in order to get to the point where she's going to provide her solution.

9:26 Mark: And I like that at the end you represent all the figures and say, well, at least this should show that there's no simple phenomenology of will. It's not like Descartes. I just look inside myself and there's the will. And that that is just clearly messed up.

9:40 Eva: Yeah, that seems to be exactly right. The other human features that I've been interested in, the imagination, time negation, there's a kind of general agreement, at least about what they are and how one finds them. That is to say, what the appearances are. When it comes to the will, there's simply no agreement about anything, whether it is a passion, a power, a faculty, a mood, what it does, whether it actually moves anything, or whether it's an epiphenomenon or an illusion, you name it. There is no unanimity, no general agreement. And I took this as a hopeful fact. If there's something which is so elusive, then it ought to be something we can, if we think we ought to tone it down, at least if not get rid of it.

10:30 Unknown speaker: Right.

10:30 Mark: That it was a peripheral phenomenological occurrence, that there are times, of course, when there's something that you think is right and your passions are pulling you in a different way and you're having to exert willpower to do the right thing. So that's a report of will showing up in everyday experience. But that's not the same as every you make a decision, you feel the will moving, or I move my arm and I feel the will moving. That's a gross expansion of the term beyond that very specialized, necessary role that it plays in first person psychology.

10:57 Eva: That's exactly right. And that was one of the most interesting developments. Thomas Aquinas, who I've already said was a sort of mainstay of this inquiry, has a very extended description of the will as an activity or power of many parts of many phases, as a long term sort of engagement. And what people currently think of mostly as well, namely decision making, that's only a tiny part of it. It's one moment and an extended activity. When it comes to modern will experiments, they all take the will to be a moment of choice or decision. Just one moment, decide whether to flex your wrist. To me, that has very little to do with the will. And the experiments that go with that kind of inquiry into choice or decision don't seem to me to say anything

11:55 Dylan: about the will, because they're at best addressing one individual aspect, one individual aspect,

12:02 Eva: namely that of choosing. But in the grand tradition, will is not primarily a matter of choice. It's a matter of what is called traditionally appetite, that is to say, of passion, of love, and of deliberating or thinking about what it is one ought to love. And then it's never fundamentally free because it's directed by its object. That is to say, love is supposed to be directed toward a good object. Of course, in the Christian tradition, that's God. But from that point of view, will is by its very nature not free because it reaches toward the good.

12:39 Dylan: So I think there's a couple different things going on there that it might be worth going a little more carefully through, sections that we chose to read and sort of say a little bit more about them.

12:50 Mark: Can we just, in summary, say that the sections of the book that we all agreed to look at were the preface where you set out. Here's what I'm going to do. Chapter one before Will, where it talks about just what you were saying, that Socrates, as portrayed by Plato and Aristotle, don't seem to have this notion of the will. Then chapter 2C on Augustine, chapter 3A on Thomas Aquinas, chapter 6A on linguistics we can get to later. And then the conclusion. So that's just a little slice of the book is what we chose. There were other chapters, as you alluded to, on Nietzsche, there was one on Schopenhauer. Those guys are both brought up just as bugaboos as people that have this weird transpersonal notion and many other figures.

13:28 Eva: What I labored over hardest and longest were the contemporary neuroscientific notions of the world, which is very lacking subject. We'll see if we get through that.

13:38 Mark: Yes. We can always have you address things. And since we've covered a number of these issues in past episodes, and you actually summarize wonderfully in your conclusion all the chapters that you went through, I almost felt like what I didn't need to get all those quotes from Augustine. You just gave a perfectly nice two paragraph summary of your point there. So I think there's a lot more that we can bring in or have you talk about as the conversation permits.

14:01 Eva: There may be moments when I can't resist bringing in some of the experiments.

14:08 Unknown speaker: Please.

14:08 Mark: Yeah, it's fine. So Augustine, right, Is what we're gonna ask.

14:11 Eva: Yes.

14:12 Unknown speaker: Can I make a request before we get there?

14:14 Dylan: Please do.

14:14 Eva: Yeah.

14:15 Unknown speaker: Can you guys just do a quick. And I'm talking about the Greek speakers you mentioned briefly earlier, Eva, that the Greek word that's usually translated as will doesn't really have that connotation. And in the book you make a point to say that the whole idea of a will, period, but certainly in its modern sense, doesn't even come up until the Stoics. And even then it's kind of subconscious or hidden and it's not until it's made explicit by Augustine. So I just would like you to summarize briefly why it is that in Aristotle and Socrates there isn't really a notion of the will in the way that you.

14:45 Eva: Yeah. When you ask why it is, you mean what, in their way of seeing things, prevents the will from arising.

14:52 Unknown speaker: Yes.

14:52 Eva: Yeah. The best example is, to my mind, Socrates. For Socrates, there is no daylight, so to speak, between wanting and doing, between thinking that something ought to be done, that is wanting to do it and doing it. The will is usually thought of as being applied. That's called willpower, right? When you decide that something ought to be, and then the will kicks in and that makes you do it. And if you don't have any willpower, then you say, that's what I ought to have done, but it's not I was able to do. For Socrates to understand something thoroughly and deeply, to have inquired into it, to know how it is fundamentally and at bottom is to be immediately ready to act accordingly and without any contortions, without any pain.

And the best example of that is the way that he presents himself at his trial. There's never any sign that he had a hard deciding what to do. He decided that he was not going to be quieted, that he wasn't going to leave Athens, and he died. Well, I guess the right word is serenely, because from knowledge to virtue, there is no gap. You know what is right to do it, you do it. In other words, there's no room for will there or no need for it.

16:22 Dylan: In that notion, you would understand willpower is acting against some inclination in yourself or some weakness as a weakness. But is there no notion of willpower against essentially external weakness, like the will of a soldier in the sense of overcoming his own fear in the sense of courage. But in doing something very hard, whether it be physically or politically, you have no disagreement with yourself about whether or not it ought to be done. But you're trying to activate some kind of external that requires willpower on yourself. You keep trying to do it.

17:01 Eva: That's what I'm saying is not part of Socrates mental furniture to know really and truly what courage is. And there's a dialogue in which that's worked out. Is it no way different from being courageous? Well, of course it's different insofar as the one is thinking and the other one's acting. But there's no missing link between the two. Willpower becomes necessary if there is some sort of gap between what I know I ought to do and what I can bring myself to do.

17:34 Dylan: But what you're describing makes it sound like Socrates would never ever be discouraged constitutionally. And so that is probably right. Okay.

17:44 Eva: And we never meet him in that frame of mind. Now, I'm not saying this is the real Socrates. I'm saying this is the Platonic Socrates.

17:52 Dylan: Sure.

17:52 Eva: Okay.

17:53 Wes: Isn't this just a question of what we think of as moral? So, for instance, the two conceptions of morality, one in which we will ourselves to do something against our inclinations, it's a different picture of morality in which you're simply habituated into wanting to do the things that are good, as opposed to willing, the good in conflict with other inclinations. The inclinations line up with the will. So it's not a question of whether Socrates was ever discouraged. It's a question of whether what we think of as ethical or virtuous action consists.

Willing, as Eva points out, has so many different meanings. And that's part of the inherent problem, right? Because on the one hand, at its most basic level, willing is just a lot like desiring. And in many languages, saying, I want to do something and I will do something. There's no distinction in language between those two things. And in a way, I think Schopenhauer talks about the will. You know, I think he gets more specific. But there are many times in Schopenhauer when the will sounds a lot like desire and seems synonymous with the will.

18:49 Eva: It's assertiveness. Yes.

18:51 Wes: But on the other hand, the will, in a sense, even in folk psychology, I'm just getting at two different folk meanings of willing. The will is precisely what goes against desire. I'm going to do this. And that's the willpower aspect that you're getting at. So there's inherent contradiction even in everyday usage. On the one hand, there's the desire element, and then the other hand, there's the contradicting desire aspect. I'm going to do it despite what I want to do aspect of it.

19:14 Eva: Are you still talking about Schopenhauer here?

19:17 Wes: Well, I was just using Schopenhauer as an example of someone who often speaks about the will as if it's synonymous with desire. Although he is careful, he talks about willing as what it feels like to actually do something. It's the subjective correlate of action, he is careful to say, well, willing is not simply the desire that comes before action, it's something joined to action in the moment. But when he's careful, he talks that way. When he's not careful, he talks about willing as if it's synonymous with desiring. So, for instance, aesthetic experience, in the sense that it helps you withdraw from willing, helps you withdraw from desire.

19:54 Eva: The will, for Schopenhauer, is, first of all a transhuman kind of being. In fact, it's very hard to say what kind of thing it is. So what is at the foundation of the world as it represents itself to us or as we represent it to ourselves is willing. And that willing is, I think, fundamentally self assertion, and it is wild and bloody and egotistical self assertion.

20:30 Wes: Well, he speaks about it as a striving.

20:32 Eva: Right, it's a striving, but it's a striving that has no mercy. And when it is objectified, that's to say specified in human beings, it is painful and destructive. The interesting thing to me about Schopenhauer is he's the first philosopher that I know of who regards the world in a hopelessly pessimistic way. In other words, the world is a terrible place, except insofar as we can suppress, willing. And he thinks that one way to do that is to sublimate it into art, particularly music, and finally, actually to go into a kind of nirvana state,

21:25 Wes: if one can do that, a state without desire. I mean, I think the suffering part of it is what I've been calling the desire.

21:30 Eva: A state without desire, but above all without striving. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Rousseau before him. These are three philosophers whose interesting characteristic to me is that they bring into the cosmos a will that is not a human will, a transhuman, superhuman will, a foundational will. And I have to say that I do not understand what I'm reading. I think to some degree, but I cannot make sense of it. I don't understand what a will that is not a subject's will, somebody's will can be. The danger in such a will is that if you build a philosophy on it, and this is true, incidentally, we didn't read Rousseau, but he's in some way fundamental here.

Rousseau has a notion of a will that is no one's will in particular. He calls it the general will. Nietzsche has a notion of a will that is at the foundation of all human excellence and particularly the ability to be in command. Well, it never takes very long before someone decides that they are truly the incarnation of this will. And at that moment you have some sort of political totalitarianism. So that seems to me of all the appearances of the will, the most dangerous and the one most to be resisted, as the will is defined in Rousseau, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

23:13 Mark: Well, and you're giving us a good example of the way in which philosophy interacts with culture, right? That part of a genealogy here is not just how one brilliant thinker read other brilliant thinkers before them. It's actually most of these brilliant thinkers think that they're coming up with most of this from scratch. Of course, Nietzsche cribbed very self consciously from Schopenhauer, and there are lots of connections like that, but still they're reacting on the things that are floating around in the culture. And so the question is, whatever subtleties might have gone into Schopenhauer's account of will such that you say, oh come on, if you're a good reading of Schopenhauer, there's no way you would think that that leads to totalitarianism.

It still can be a historical fact that these things, as they permeate into the culture have in a very predictable way these negative consequences.

24:01 Wes: I don't think so. German nationalism was a problem while Nietzsche was writing. And Nietzsche rails against German nationalism in a way. Much of his polemic is directed against precisely that point of view that he was misused later. I don't see that as a historical influence on the development of German nationalism. It was a countercurrent that was ironically co opted to justify it after the fact.

24:22 Unknown speaker: I think that's what Mark is saying, that it's predictable in the way that certain types of ideas will get co opted for totalitarian and ideological purposes. There are some ideas that lend themselves more to that kind of co option.

24:36 Eva: It seems to me that it's perfectly true that Nietzsche borrows, one might say, shamelessly from Schopenhauer. But of course he does it the way all these borrowings are done, namely by distancing himself from what he sees in Schopenhauer and taking the same thing in a different mode. So that it's hard to try to find a political consequence in Schopenhauer. But in Nietzsche that becomes a very, very big problem. There are people who hold Nietzsche in some way responsible for what happened in the 20th century. And it seems to me there's a point in that if you write utterly charming prose, which he does, and you win a whole nation's heart. And in what you're saying there is a worship of commanding willfulness and of the fact that this is a rare phenomenon and only very few people are called to it. You're asking for totalitarianism, so it seems to me, I expect to hear objections to that.

25:46 Wes: I mean, I don't want to get us on a derail this conversation. So I think the weakest part of Nietzsche is the elitism, but I don't see that as the main current of his argument.

25:58 Dylan: Part of the question is, even if it isn't part of Nietzsche's own main current of his argument is the way in which it gets co opted so hard to understand.

26:13 Wes: That's a historical question. And I don't think many historians agree with you that Nietzsche was a huge influence in the development of German nationalism when it was already around. And he was railing against it.

26:23 Eva: Yeah. It isn't so much a question of nationalism. You're absolutely right that Nietzsche was a great opponent of vulgar nationalism. It's more about the question whether the will to power, which is after all his term, is located in certain human beings whom to resist is to resist the most fundamental way things are. And it's very hard to erase that in nature.

26:52 Wes: Right. But I think the central argument is in a way a lot like Schopenhauer's, except it stops short of religion. It's an argument for sublimation, for this sort of synthesis of artist and philosopher. I think what Nietzsche is railing against in a way is it's the same thing that Freud is objecting to later as well. It's the perniciousness of what happens when you suppress instinct less than the valorization of will. I see him as objecting to the hypocrisy of pretending that we can be will less creatures. And he may be wrong about that. And then he wants to find a solution to that. I see the solution more having to do with the role of the artist in society as opposed to especially in his later writing. There's lots of elitist, incendiary stuff, but I don't see it as the main thrust.

27:38 Mark: Well, and it's a very felicitous. The Walter Kaufmann genial Nietzsche that we favor in our own discussions goes very well with the goal that you set out yourself, Eva, at the end of the book of this curiosity and joy and stuff. But I thought that it was instructive in what is the genealogy and what's going on in this book here. Genealogies are not about intelligent philosophers learning, taking the best out of the previous philosophers and adding to them. They're about sort of mistakes.

28:06 Eva: Right.

28:06 Mark: Think about the master slave story that Nietzsche tells about slave morality taking over master morality. It's about disparate individuals who don't even really fully understand each other, evolving ideas over time. So it's a sociological account, and I don't even think you can confuse a genealogical account with a historical account. The question is not, not did Nietzsche's idea of the will actually influence German nationalism, but do we see in the idea of a transpersonal will with a focus on greatness and domination, whether it's domination over yourself, domination over others, a natural superiority. Do we see in that the seeds? Right. So she's giving a hermeneutic look at history. It's not necessarily what led to what as a historical events, but how can we look at these patterns of ideas such that she can highlight the things she wants to highlight and it leads to the desired point.

28:58 Wes: Yeah, I'm just saying that Nietzsche, for Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, I think the will is actually a problem and not a solution. It's a problematic thing that human beings have to figure out how to deal with ultimately.

29:08 Eva: Could you say what the problem is?

29:10 Wes: The problem is if everything is ultimately will to power, then how you live your life without constant conflict and suffering.

29:19 Eva: Yeah, not with yourself suffering, but particularly imposing suffering on others, which for Nietzsche is a very important aspect of the commanding will. But look, if you say that this is an unsolved problem, then Nietzsche altogether is an unsolved problem. By the way, I would agree with that. I mean, is that what you're saying?

29:40 Wes: I'm saying that Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are actually quite similar. The will is a problem and their solution has to do with. For Schopenhauer, it's this withdrawal from the will through art on the one hand, or religion on the other. Nietzsche is trying to solve the same problem. He's modifying the Schopenhauerian solution to that because he doesn't think that this withdrawal from will is actually possible and he thinks it's sort of hypocritical that religion, for instance, involves a hypocritical pretense to withdraw from the will. So for instance, aesthetic experience for Nietzsche, the gay science makes this very clear.

He's critical of this idea that it involves simply withdrawing from the will. It's a way of giving expression to the will, especially giving expression to instinct. I think it actually squares with this general question, Eva, that you're asking, because I think you're asking for a solution as well. And I think will is problematic in some sense and the unwilling approach is one solution to that.

30:31 Eva: So when you speak of the will as a problem, see, to me that has two meanings and I kept wondering which one you were putting first. Do you mean that how to deal with the will as a problem, or do you mean that what the will is, is the problem in both Schopenhauer and nature?

30:51 Wes: I think the problem is the sense in which it can be a source of suffering in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, a

30:58 Eva: source of so how to deal with it?

31:00 Wes: Nihilism as a last ditch attempt at meaningfulness, as an attempt at meaningfulness in life gone wrong.

31:06 Eva: What about this way of looking at it? It how to deal with the will is a problem that follows from the fact that they've established the kind of will that you have to deal with now. Isn't the real problem the introduction of such a will into philosophy and into popular thinking?

31:29 Wes: So you're thinking of the willpower version of the will, or the Augustinian version? Is that what you're thinking of now, or.

31:35 Eva: Well, I'm thinking of the notion of a will, the will to power, particularly in Nietzsche's case, as being the fundamental cosmic force. The problem seems to me that one should say such a thing to begin with, that once you've said it, the problem of dealing with it follows seems to me a derivative problem. But first, why conceive of it that way? In other words, what are the responsibilities of a philosopher who brings such notions into the world? And it seems to me that he can't protect himself by saying that he's writing for some and not for others. Once you publish a book, anybody can read it. So he really captivated much of Europe with his books. So there has to be some responsibility for the consequences. Does that seem wrong?

32:27 Wes: Yeah, I think we disagree about whether there were actual consequences.

32:31 Mark: But okay, let's talk about that dastardly Augustine. That guy.

32:37 Eva: Back to Augustine.

32:38 Mark: Yeah, it's his fault.

32:41 Dylan: So I wanted to quote the first part of your discussion of Augustine. So you talk about three different books

32:48 Eva: on Augustine, and the Confessions is really the most.

32:52 Dylan: At the end of the discussion of the first one, which was the free choice and.

32:57 Eva: Free Choice, Yeah.

32:58 Dylan: At the end of that section you say, so concludes the founding charter of the West's will, a distinct power given by God to thinking creatures, so that there may be freedom in his law ruled creation. Thus it is a power for receiving and obeying commands. Hence it has an explicitly defining propensity for disobedience. Because the exercise of free choice requires the ever ready capacity to reject a command. When sound, the will cleaves to the unchangeable eternal common law. That rationality informs God's creation, but in defection it is perverse, turned wrongly inward as self will, self subjected to private law, a deprived privative privacy expressed as the law of lust, of libido and cupidity, excitation and possession, which by its very turning inward becomes enslaved to external things.

The ultimate expression of this lust is dominion for its own sake, pride and self deification being grounded in unintelligible nothingness. And then you go on to characterize confessions as Augustine, speaking of the will that is embodied in a human being as a source of suffering. This seems to be decisive, like here, will is novel.

34:12 Eva: I've never wished anything like this before in anything I've read in antiquity. And the novelty is, first of all, introducing what he himself calls a faculty, a power, namely power to be perverse. Why is it primarily a power to be perverse? Because if it weren't that, it wouldn't be free.

34:34 Dylan: Okay, so I want to get right back to that. But what is the difference with, say, the earlier Greeks, Socrates and Aristotle, is that the will is not a faculty. The activity of the soul is just that. It's an activity. And what you would call will is not a separate power or soul.

34:56 Eva: If I may just agree with that in this way. Both Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics also have schemata tables of the soul which tell you what the faculties of the soul are. And none of them is there anything that has the name will or has the characteristics of will. That's what you just outside.

35:16 Dylan: But I guess I was also looking to think of when you say that Augustine invents will in the West. It is the notion of doing bad things.

35:27 Eva: It's the notion of the ability to resist good.

35:31 Dylan: To resist good.

35:33 Eva: The good being God and subsidiary goods being beings of creation, and the ability to say no to the commands of God and to resist the beings that are good in the world. That's the primary new characteristic that is embodied in this new notion which he calls will, voluntas.

35:58 Dylan: When you talk about Confessions, you bring up the famous scene of the pears.

36:03 Eva: That's an example.

36:04 Dylan: Yeah. Since we haven't read Augustine yet, for PEL, maybe you could recount that section.

36:11 Eva: He and a bunch of boys, I think they were 14 young adolescents, went into somebody else's garden that had a pear tree that had very nasty, bitter, unpleasant fruit, and they collected sacks of them. The point was, at least for Augustine, I don't know, the other boys gave it another thought. It was a lark. But for Augustine, it means that he engaged in evildoing for the sake of transgression. He didn't want the fruits of this evildoing. He didn't do what he did in order to get something he wanted. He did it in order to be bad.

36:49 Dylan: You quote him as saying, I loved my own fault.

36:52 Eva: And this is what sinfulness is.

36:54 Dylan: Not doing wrong, but loving it in that way. It's the birth of the will. Because this is the most clear sign of. Of willfulness is doing something sinful for its own sake.

37:06 Mark: So how does this not just follow from the denial of the Socratic view that everybody tends toward the good, that it seems even some of the People that Socrates was arguing against in his dialogues. If you just deny that everybody is oriented toward the good, in fact, I could just recognize the good, but yet choose the opposite.

37:25 Wes: Wait, it's not that everyone is oriented towards the good, it's they're oriented towards what they believe to be good, which is often wrong.

37:31 Mark: Yes, I will accept the correction, but. So you don't think any of the people that Socrates is arguing against actually would deny that?

37:39 Eva: Would deny what?

37:41 Mark: Would deny everybody pursues what they perceive to be good because it seems that's all you need to get the will as you're describing it here. And it seems that's a very controversial point within Socrates that he has to spend a lot of work to argue for. And so it would be surprising if the entirety of antiquity somehow was represented by that view, that then Augustine was the first to state the contrary.

38:01 Eva: I think first of all that what you say is right, that the notion that good is what people want, just as happiness, is the position of good and therefore what people want. That. That is the view both of Socrates, of Plato and of Aristotle, and of all the other ancient philosophers that I've read about. Now, human beings probably would differ on this, but in the dialogues at least, people don't disagree with that. They agree that they want something good. And that attitude that is so familiar to us, of wanting to not only sadism, but of masochism, of enjoying being bad, of enjoying sin. As I say, I imagine that many people were that way, but it's not an officially recognized category. And that seems to be interesting.

38:55 Mark: And we certainly wouldn't see it among the ancient tragedian heroes or anything like that, or the villains in their pieces a little bit.

39:02 Eva: In Euripides you begin to get the notion of doing things to hurt yourself. But certainly in Aeschylus and Sophocles, that's not a thought that anyone officially thinks. I'm not arguing that there weren't people who were sinful in the Christian sense of the word, but rather that it's not a category that the people who write recognize. And that's of course all we can go by, what there is in the literature. And that seems to me remarkable. It would be interesting. I'd like to sort of challenge the world to produce a line from a Greek author of the 5th or 4th or 3rd or 2nd century before the Common era.

39:45 Mark: Well, I was more thinking in the Bible.

39:47 Eva: Oh, yeah, that's the other tradition, the other tradition they know all about. After all, the Old Testament stands behind the discovery of sin. In Christianity. I absolutely agree.

40:01 Mark: Okay, so you're actually teaching us another thing about tracing a genealogy. You're not saying Augustine was the first one in history to invent it, but you're saying within this Western philosophical tradition, Augustine is where this notion actually gets sketched out.

40:13 Eva: Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. And in bringing in the Old Testament and when you think of the Old Testament, something becomes explicit about that, that you really that notion of sinfulness, that is to say of perversion, of the will, of a desire to do bad for the sense of doing evil. In order for that to come about, you need the notion of a God who made you of a creator God whom to rebel against. And the Greeks don't have that. The gods didn't make them the gods. They have a much more relaxed attitude toward their gods.

40:47 Mark: It may be new that Augustine is reflecting on himself and his own, you know, in this anecdote that you related his own desire to do evil, where I think it's all too common to say people in the in group, they want the good and everybody else are just loathsome creatures by nature. And it's actually a cultural accomplishment to say, oh, they too want the good, they just don't understand what the good is. That it may be a fundamental thing to cast them as demonic.

41:14 Eva: The other that works perfectly with the notion I'm trying to formulate because they want the good, it's a different good, but the public mode of speaking about it is still that of goodness. The matter at issue here is that sin evil becomes desirable. In other words, the new will. Augustine's new will is a will that makes sinfulness desirable as being self assertion against the Creator. It's a form of rebellion.

41:44 Wes: Yeah. So this isn't just wanting something pleasurable, even though we know it's ultimately bad for us.

41:50 Eva: Yeah, but no, it doesn't even have to be pleasurable. It could be nasty.

41:53 Wes: Right. This is wanting something bad because of

41:56 Eva: the just wanting to be bad. Look, I'll tell you why I believe that every Greek mother knew about sinfulness, even if it was not a public category. Because I can't imagine that Greek babies didn't have infants, didn't have the terrible twos. The terrible twos are the incarnation of sinfulness, that is to say of willful rebellion, which isn't about getting something, but it's just about being rebellious. Can I tell a short anecdote of sinfulness?

42:27 Wes: It's about getting independence though, right?

42:29 Eva: Yeah, but independence, right. I was babysitting a kid and I was eating a bologna sandwich. He'd had his lunch and I said, do you want some of my bologna sandwich? He said, nah. And before long he wrested it from my fingers and was eating it. That was sheer willfulness. So I do believe that there's always been willfulness. What I'm simply arguing is that it didn't have a formulation and Augustine is the formulator of this new notion.

43:00 Dylan: But it sounds to me that to the extent that you're wanting to undo some of that formulation, there's something distinctly problematic about the formulation. It leads to consequences. That's undesirable because in what you just said about Greek mothers and the presence of this kind of willfulness that is wanting to do bad, you're not denying that that exists as a category, but that there's something about Augustine's formulation and what it leads to that you want to undo.

43:30 Eva: And so the reason it's a serious matter with two year olds, terrible two, they get over it one day, everything, sweetness and light for a while until adolescence, one comes right back. But the reason that this is serious because it's so closely connected to the notion of freedom and independence. And it raises the question whether freedom and human independence aren't in some way allied to perversity. I don't think so, especially in freedom of choice. Augustine actually thinks that.

44:05 Dylan: So that in Augustine you have. The clearest manifestation of our freedom of choice is actually in doing perverse things.

44:15 Unknown speaker: Perverse is defined by the Creator God and the ethos.

44:20 Eva: I think the notion of a God who made us is essential to the discovery of this category, but it's not essential to holding onto it.

44:30 Wes: Yeah, perverse. Just the word, I think is getting at the turning against. So the turning against God aspect of this, the defiant, not perverse in some other sense.

44:39 Unknown speaker: There's a nice quote, Eva, in your book where you say sin is the first parent of will. In a certain sense I see you as allied with Nietzsche to some extent, but this also came up recently. I was in a debate about free will, like a public debate. And there's a naturalist movement, you know, it's particularly championed by scientists, but they draw a strong parallel. They make a point of saying that the notion of free will or choice is very closely aligned with the notion of sin and that you can't unwind that idea of freedom of choice from a notion of having some kind of moral responsibility in the eyes of that creator God.

And I'm very sympathetic to what I see. I see you as wanting to point towards something that sets us free from this notion of sin, which has the attendant thing such as guilt. And try to, by reaching back to Socrates, but also pointing forward to something else, highlight the fact that as long as we're sort of tied to this notion of will, we are going to get caught up in these discussions which are inevitably going to bring in that. I'll call it ideology, that monotheistic creator God ideology.

46:00 Eva: Yeah, that sounds right to me, if that's an interpretation of what I meant.

46:05 Unknown speaker: Yeah, it's an interpretation, yes.

46:10 Mark: I'm glad you brought up the anecdote about the children because, you know, it seems strange to say Augustine invented this when surely we see it all around us. But just to give a sort of simplified example, because it's hard to get our hands on what will is the notion that everybody acts selfishly. So another way to interpret the little children's action is that they're being selfish. And we can acknowledge that people act that way. And then we could talk to them, as Socrates does, and try to bring them to accord, to say, oh, really, what you're trying to do is go towards some good, but then actually the good is shared among us.

You know, everybody's still sort of reasonable, potentially admitting that people take actions that like little kids, actions appear as selfish. If you promote everybody acts selfishly all the time to be a philosophical principle, then what are the behavioral outcomes of having that be a thing in the popular culture? Well, people could either embrace it, greed is good, and have a horrible society in that way, or the people that reject that, then engage on this sort of altruism, the kind that Nietzsche doesn't like, that he thinks is sort of ignoring human nature.

Try to remake yourself in a way that completely ignores what you're about. And so either of those options, as opposed as they might appear, are reactions to admitting this one point of philosophy, admitting it as a psychological fact. So that there's a big difference between observing, going back to your example that little kids have wills, or that people act willfully in many circumstances to seeing as a fundamental phenomenological fact that we are driven by the will.

47:50 Eva: It seems to me that egotism is the most innocent of notions compared to willfulness. Egotism is just wanting things and not caring how you get them if necessary. Kids are terribly selfish in that way. You know, I worked in a kindergarten for a while. Kids take things away from each other if they want them. Sinfulness is more complex and I think more wicked. Selfishness isn't nice, but sinfulness is perverse. And the reason is that in the one case, it's a kind of innocent desire to acquire things, to have them, but in the other case, it's a desire to dominate, to impose yourself, to command, to deny obedience where obedience is really required. So it seems to me that sin is not the same as selfishness. That selfishness is relatively innocent isn't.

48:57 Dylan: Part of the problem with Augustine's view is even though it's rooted in this notion of sinfulness, it ends up being its own solution. From Augustine's point of view, that is, while the epitome of willfulness is being sinful, the cure for that is the clenched fist notion of the will. You are going to harden your will against itself and you're going to will against your own will.

49:26 Eva: You will to will.

49:27 Dylan: You will to will.

49:29 Wes: Yes.

49:29 Eva: And that, of course, is the complexity. Some authors think that, for instance, Hobbes thinks that's a terrible way to. It doesn't make sense. So that seems right to me that to will to will is both the sin and the solution to the sin. And that's the problem for Augustine.

49:53 Mark: Yeah, it seems very different to say that Augustine has discovered that sin is an ontological option for us. We can either go with God's commands or we can turn away from God's commands. That seems much less problematic than to say people are fundamentally driven by sin, that we are fundamentally sinful, which is also a thing that Augustine thinks. And that makes him very much in a line, if you think that Nietzsche's view is people are fundamentally driven by a will to power, to say people are fundamentally driven by sin, that leads to exactly the kind of, well, either I embrace that or I with a clenched fist try to fight against that and end up kind of a weird, pathetic excuse for a human being, you know, at least according to Nietzsche's analysis.

50:36 Eva: So one might conclude from that, and I think that is my conclusion, that the clenched fist or willing to will resolution to willfulness is just another way of getting entangled in the same way. And that some way has to be found out, which is more a relaxation than a further ratcheting up of willfulness. And that's what I tried to delineate in the conclusion, that reflection thinking, well,

51:10 Dylan: what's the problem with the clenched fist? Just to be the devil's advocate a little bit.

51:16 Wes: Are you being willful now, Dylan?

51:18 Dylan: I'm being willful, yes.

51:20 Unknown speaker: I can't wait till Dylan turns three.

51:27 Mark: Three score.

51:30 Eva: Yes. Okay. You know, devil's advocate is very precise here because the devil is the Incarnation of willfulness and pride.

51:41 Dylan: So when we say clenched fist, I think that the image of the will, it does sound like something turned inward on itself and maybe harmful to itself. And so as an image that gets across your distaste for it and your point about it, if I could go

51:59 Eva: on with exactly that it's harmful to yourself, both because it's a kind of self you're eating at yourself and because it's going to be harmful in what you actually do now, but go on.

52:14 Dylan: That the clenching, the notion of a will that is fully activated and a grip, doesn't necessarily have the same negative notion. It's less receptive. It's less a notion of will as kind of relaxed, active receptivity. It is more of a proactive, energized, grabbing the bull by the horns kind of will. And that's different than. It's different than the clenched fist upon itself. But it's not the open hand.

52:48 Eva: No, it's not relaxation either. It's what I call the mainline argument, namely the rational desire.

52:57 Dylan: So now we're into Aquinas.

52:59 Eva: It starts with Aristotle. It's his term, actually, rational desire, but it's developed by Thomas. That's the other tradition.

53:07 Dylan: Okay, so, okay.

53:09 Mark: Are you saying that these figures appropriate the. I think what Dylan was getting toward arguing for was I was talking to him beforehand about social justice, that if you think that there are serious problems in the world and a relaxed receptivity is not going to solve those problems. So I need to get a hold of myself and grab the bull by the horn, whatever analogy you want to use. But certainly it's not going to be just paying attention to my body. And when I get tired, you know, I need to get the job done, which is much greater than any person can actually accomplish. I need to be tireless, and that's what gives my life meaning. So are you arguing against that form of existentialism?

53:48 Eva: Yes, certainly against tirelessness. I don't want people making decisions when they haven't had enough sleep. But I mean, it's partly funny, but it's also serious. It seems to me that the kind of relaxation that Heidegger speaks about in his late writings, letting go, letting be, which he describes as a kind of waiting for the epiphany of a new coming that doesn't do us any good. I absolutely agree. You have to do things, but the question is in what frame of mind and with what temperamental that ground you do them, whether you do them in a commanding mode, in a hasty way.

And We've got to be acting right now way or whether you think it out, you know what you're doing, you use your judgment. And above all, you're in a mode. What I think of as the best mode to be in is of interest. Interest not in the sense of having an interest in something which has to do with acquisition, but being interested in the world around you. Interest literally means to be among. Being among other human beings. Reflecting, thinking it out, going slow, saying no to a lot of things that. That seem unnecessary, participating in what you want to participate in, forgetting about endless options, making a few choices with slowing down, making good judgments.

And that seems to me to be a way of being in the world that has set the will aside in favor of thoughtfulness. And that's really the principal argument.

55:51 Mark: What you just described seems quite different from the Heraclitean view that you seem to be very much at home with. Of fundamentally there being conflict in the world. And we're part of that conflict. And that's sort of part what holds the world together and is not so bad.

56:05 Eva: Yeah. You know, that might be true. That my newfound hero Heraclitus is a little bit at odds with my newfound conviction that the will ought to be undone.

56:17 Dylan: Well, it seems to me a perfectly natural question to ask. Especially since the last time you were on, we were talking about Heraclitus, is what Mark just said. That notion of an active world in tension with itself and one's own activity in it. Speaking about will and willfulness would seem to be very at home in that. And where exactly it falls.

56:39 Eva: I hadn't really thought about it before, but it now appears to me that if the world itself is fundamentally a world of mutual contradictions, of things being held together by their tension, so to speak, then maybe it makes sense that one shouldn't add to that tension by being oneself intense in a crab.

57:07 Dylan: A crab claw.

57:09 Eva: Yeah. In other words, there's a whole slew of human ambition. Driveness. Hurry. If the world really is fundamentally in tension with itself, maybe we should be counterweights in some way. I mean, I've never thought of bringing the two together. It's true that somehow they ought to be brought together.

57:33 Dylan: Well, maybe we should go back to the mainliners who you say essentially get discarded. You link them up with Aristotle and then sort of supremely articulated by Thomas.

57:46 Eva: Yeah. What I find so remarkable about Thomas is that he's precise. And in being precise, instead of reducing the will to the moment of decision making, which is what happens when this tradition gets discarded that the will is thought of as making choices, decisions in the moment. And the laboratory experiments about the will are all about small decisions of that sort. So that the neuroscience of the will is all about last minute choices, small decisions. He thinks of the will or of the actor's willingness extended in a sequence of phases which he names.

It begins with the general disposition of the will toward the good, and it ends with the execution of the will. And in between there are phases that have to do with thinking it out, that have to do with. With agreeing with yourself to act, that have to do with the final decision, to make a final choice about means, and then to do it so that the will is not a single act, but it's a way of going about living.

59:19 Dylan: Well, in that way it sounds just like Aristotle in the sense that it's a habit, a way of being. A way of being.

59:26 Eva: It's a way of being, but it's not a habit, because in a habit you're acting without rethinking it every time. Right. And this is a mode of reflecting on what you're doing in various stages.

59:40 Dylan: So a mode of being as opposed to a habit, a mode of being as opposed to. In that way, it's active.

59:46 Eva: Right. And one important thing about this way of looking at the will is then the question of free will, which agitates everybody. Everybody wants to know, is the will free or not? And those laboratory experiments that are so fascinating to me, they have to do with showing that the brain acts nanoseconds before the decision is made. There are many things to complain about in that, but the main complaint is that that's not the will. That's a tiny part of the will. The way that Thomas thinks of it. The reason that the will is not free for Thomas is that overall, in the beginning, at the end, it is bound to its rational desire for what is good.

The very thing some people object to. But that's the claim. So that it isn't free in the sense of being able to choose whatever it wants. It's already bound to the love of God or for some overarching good. Then the question of free will is only a question of choice among means. And for him, that's the freedom of the will that you can choose means. So among other things, that solves the question of the freedom of the will. There isn't any. And that seems right to me.

1:01:21 Dylan: There's no response to the fact that Eva just said there's no such thing as free will.

1:01:26 Eva: Well, yeah, right.

1:01:29 Unknown speaker: I'm in complete Agreement.

1:01:31 Eva: You're in agreement.

1:01:32 Wes: I'm not in agreement.

1:01:33 Eva: But, you know, that can mean two very different things.

1:01:36 Wes: I see Aquinas as being compatible with a certain kind of compatibilism.

1:01:40 Eva: Yeah, right, yeah.

1:01:41 Wes: So reason, responsiveness. And it's not only Aquinas. I mean, I think Leibniz is on the same track. But the freedom we have is not to do with being godlike creatures ourselves who sort of can stand outside of our circumstances or even our psychological motivations or any of the other determining features in the world. It's that even the apparatus of determinism, the brain, for instance, is underwriting. So, for instance, if we are engaging in real thoughtfulness and real inquiry, and if we reason something through and make a discovery, it's not the case that the legitimacy of that train of reasoning simply evaporates because.

And we say, oh, it was really just brain operations. Well, it was both brain operations and it was those thought processes. And similarly, you could say with any choice, the decision making process, there's a freedom to it to the extent that it's reason responsive as opposed to simply responsive to our immediate inclinations, that I see as a certain kind of compatibilism. And it's certainly not. Yes, there's no freedom of the will. If we take free will to be sort of a naive folk version of free will in which we. So, for instance, contemporaries like Sam Harris sort of adhere to where we must stand outside of any sort of causal chain.

Rather, the freedom comes in the fact that whatever the causal chain in the case of brain states, it underwrites a subjective decision making process which is legitimately responsive not just to inclinations, but to reasons.

1:03:12 Unknown speaker: I would ask the question of why does anybody even feel the need to try to come up with compatibilism? And what I mean by that is compatibilism. If we were undertaking some kind of a historical or scientific inquiry, we would never come to this position. It's one of those weird back me into a corner untenable type things that somebody comes up with when they're desperately trying to protect something.

1:03:35 Eva: Yeah, exactly.

1:03:36 Wes: No, I don't agree at all. I think we're trying to reconcile a certain subjective intuition of having a certain kind of freedom with determinism, especially modern, scientific.

1:03:50 Mark: Is that kind of freedom actually free will, though? I thought one of the points here in Eva's book was to decouple the notion of freedom from the notion of will and say there can be very concrete and important ways we can talk about freedom, and that should not be looked at as choice, as the moment of choice.

1:04:05 Wes: I am actually am talking about free will right now. Yes. There are, of course, other types of freedom, and I think the idea Eva outlines, it's compatible with ideas concerning becoming freer psychologically, for instance, freer from compulsions or freer from the willfulness and the busyness with which we might lead our lives. But I'm actually talking here about free will, and I don't think compatibilism is bogus. I don't think it's a way to save the appearances. It actually is trying to preserve a very, very important intuition, and not simply a delusion, but an intuition about the way the world would be much different, for instance, if we weren't actually subjectively responsive to reasons.

So if there's no such thing as free will, then there's no such thing as inquiry either, because you could simply say that's reducible to brain states. When I do a mathematical calculation, am I governed by arithmetic laws or am I governed by brain states? Well, actually, both are true. But what the freedom aspect of it is the fact that I'm also governed by the responsiveness to mathematical truth. It's that responsiveness to truth which we ultimately must preserve. We cannot do away with that no matter how much we talk about brain states.

1:05:12 Eva: But.

1:05:12 Dylan: But this all turns on what we mean by the free part of free will, Right? So you've characterized the naive folk version you attributed to Sam Harris as a free will that is utterly untied or unconstrained to anything, and dismiss that as hopelessly naive.

1:05:35 Wes: And in fact, it's not even coherent, it's not even consistent with itself.

1:05:40 Mark: Just to clarify, you're not attributing that to Sam Harris, you're saying that's Sam Harris straw man.

1:05:44 Wes: Yes, exactly.

1:05:45 Mark: That he's arguing against.

1:05:46 Unknown speaker: Right. Okay.

1:05:47 Dylan: Yes.

1:05:47 Eva: A will that is unconstrained, perfectly free, absolutely contingent. In other words, it's perfectly useless.

1:05:56 Wes: Right?

1:05:56 Eva: Yes.

1:05:57 Dylan: Yes. When you have a headline that says scientists show that there's no such thing as free will, it's that notion of free will that's always at issue. And it's a strawman that ends up falling because it's not really even a very coherent question.

1:06:14 Wes: Right. You don't need science to disprove it. That's what's so annoying about you don't need to do any science because it's not coherent. It's not a position you can consistently hold. If you simply analyze it conceptually, it falls apart even as a notion of the will.

1:06:26 Dylan: But isn't that notion have a kind of deep root in the stuff that we've been talking about already? 1. One is in contradistinction to determinism, that if you're going to revise that naive notion of free will, you're going to have to also revise what you mean by being deterministic. And the other is the notion of willfulness as being the kind of sinfulness that we're talking about in Augustine seems to me to be directly related to this. That notion of utterly untethered willfulness.

1:06:53 Eva: Well, it's not utterly untethered because it's directed to rebellion in Augustine's case in Augustine. But it seems to me the place where you find compatibilism rife is the philosophers who've been captivated by the neuroscientists. Neuroscientists are determinists one at all. I've not read any who aren't, that is, they either think that natural conditions determine everything in a deterministic way or in a probabilistic way. It doesn't matter one way or the other, but that the determining conditions of the will are totally naturalistic. These philosophers can't imagine a world without something like free will.

So they invent the notion of a compatibility between determinism and freedom. And they mean different things by it, but in the primary way that I know about, it's really a kind of sophism. If you do something willingly, that is, you're willing to do it. It doesn't matter whether you were determined to do it by your natural or psychological natural history. It's free because you willed it, you were willing to do it. That's one kind of compatibilism. If I agree to my servitude, am I free? Doesn't make sense to me.

1:08:16 Wes: Well, Leibniz is onto the same sort of thing, right? We've already agreed that there's no such thing as a. A freedom of will that's completely unconstrained and the freedom comes in being constrained to the truth. So that's where it's actually quite compatible with Thomas Aquinas. Reason, responsiveness. So for instance, when I do an arithmetic calculation and someone tells me, oh, you didn't just do math, it's just your brain states work in a certain way. You tell them, no, that's silly, those two things are compatible. I can actually do math and be subjectively constrained by my responsiveness towards arithmetical truth.

And I can also be deterministically constra by brain states by the way the brain states follow each other. And it's precisely the same thing with freedom of the will. The idea is that I don't escape servitude or being bound by something, but what I am bound to is much bigger than mere the contingencies of my inclination. I am bound to truth in some way. So when I'm able to reason about something and make a decision about that thing, yes, there are brain states that deterministically underwrite the activity of reasoning. But that doesn't mean that the subjective truth of my reasoned responsiveness, of my saying, okay, yeah, I'm not going to go out today because as simple as because it's raining or something like that, that that's simply wiped away, I do have that reasoned responsiveness and that is actually not something trivial.

And so I don't think it's right that compatibilists, again are just unwilling to give up freedom. I think it's a widely held philosophical position. In fact, it's by far the most popular position among philosophers. Not because they're simply stubbornly attached to the idea of freedom, but because they can't get around. I think they're trying to acknowledge this fact that subjectivity and reason responsiveness is something quite different than mere determinism. And because I think again, the ultimate implication of this, if there is no such thing as a certain kind of freedom, compatibilistic freedom in decision making, then there is also no such thing as inquiry.

There is also no such thing as thoughtfulness.

1:10:11 Eva: That's the argument, but that's the argument for why there has to be compatibilism. But is that an explanation of how they can be. I agree that it's got to be compatible, but does it?

1:10:24 Wes: You'd have to solve the mind body problem to give the explanation.

1:10:28 Eva: Yeah, exactly. That's in the end what it comes to. One would have to show that in fact thought can emerge from matter or from force and matter. But in the meantime, compatibilism is more a statement of what has to be rather than an explanation of how it can come about. Would you agree to that?

1:10:49 Wes: Yeah, absolutely.

1:10:51 Eva: So it's a problem rather than an answer.

1:10:53 Mark: So this book is supposed to give us a way to not be forced into that, but to have a different conceptual view of the will, which somehow lets us off the hook from being forced into this position. So tell us more about how that. Because, yeah, I really do want to hook up your thesis here to the debates that we had in our separate episode on free will, for instance, and I didn't. Your chapter on compatibilism, which I was able to scan a little bit.

1:11:15 Eva: They're different, compatible.

1:11:16 Mark: It still was a little unclear to me. I felt like it would be very unsatisfying to folks that are deeply into that debate, as Wes has exemplified here.

1:11:25 Eva: So what are you asking me to do?

1:11:28 Mark: Sum up a little bit more of why you think compatibilism has conceptual problems at its root, that we are not forced to a compatibilist position because we are not forced to this do or die question of there must be free will, because if there wasn't, then there would be no moral responsibility. Yet there is determinism. What, in those steps, where has something gone wrong?

1:11:48 Eva: Nothing's gone wrong in those steps. But I regard those as statements of problems, not as answers. And compatibilism is presented as an answer to me, it seems the way to put it is the two must be compatible or else all sorts of undesirable consequences would follow. But that doesn't seem to me to be a theory.

1:12:10 Wes: Yeah, I absolutely agree that. Yeah, to the extent that it's presented as a solution and then we wash our hands of the problem. Yeah, that's what I mean.

1:12:18 Mark: So there is nothing in this book that will let us dissolve the problem before it arises in the first place. That is how I was reading it.

1:12:24 Eva: Well, yes, if one can decouple the question of freedom from willing to begin with.

1:12:30 Unknown speaker: There you go.

1:12:31 Eva: But no, the ultimate question is absolutely nowhere have I found the slightest approach to an answer to the question how nature and thought are related. Well, that just seems to me the ultimate mystery. Nature and thought, nature and spirit.

1:12:51 Mark: So one of the figures that you bring up in here is Sartre.

1:12:54 Unknown speaker: And I was.

1:12:54 Mark: Since we've had a couple episodes on here, I was able to look at that chapter that gives you an example. Like when we brought up Sartre, we saw him. Oh, he's a compatibilist, just like all these other views. He says, at the phenomenal level, of course, we perceive ourselves as free or something. But then that's completely compatible with a scientific determinism, even materialism. And what always seems implausible about Sartre, the way we've considered him, is that he says everything we are, we are ultimately responsible for. And that sounds to us like I must have made a choice at some point.

So I made a choice to become this kind of person. And you can sort of see an Aristotelian familial resemblance in that. That. Well, it might not be my choice. Right. Now, whether I resist the donut or not, but I made a choice somewhere back in time to become the kind of slob that can no longer resist a donut right now. So, Sartre, you know, you could read a similar thing into that that I've. From my very conception, I've made these choices, and I've built myself up over time. And so now, as a result of my freedom of choice, now I, you know, and I can stop on a.

None of my choices in my facticity, and none of these habits that I've set up in the past really prevent me from just turning around and making a completely contrary decision and moving my life in a different direction. And that seems always implausible to me because it seems like, come on, I didn't choose the difficult circumstances I'm in now. I chose some things about myself, but most of these things sort of came upon me before I was even. They snuck up on me. They came at me when I was young. They can't, you know. So I wouldn't call that a choice.

However, your analysis of Sartre is that that right, the moment of choice is not where freedom comes in. That freedom is in our overall life orientation. And it is something that evolves over time. So you could say people are free, but that's decoupled from saying we always have choices. The choice becomes, in fact, for Sartre, on your analysis, an illusion. It becomes, you know, because when I bring up rational reasons, you know, so in this particular circumstances, should I do this or that, should I join the army or should I stay home and take care of my mother, that the things that I bring up as rational reasons are themselves chosen, are themselves the product of my previous disposition.

What I would consider to be a legitimate reason always comes from some deeper part of myself. So if there is a freedom in this free choice, it's because I already made these choices or had this freedom long ago in building myself. That moment of deliberation is not the characteristic moment of freedom for Sartre.

1:15:17 Eva: Yeah, that seems to me exactly right. Here's a way I put it to myself. It's the same thing, really. Insofar as we are determined. It's because psychology is natural science. That is to say, we are psychologically natural, and therefore it's a deterministic. The world of the spirit and of thought is naturalistic. I think that Sartre is saying we don't have a psychology. We don't have, as he would put it, an essence. We exist, we are, and we are undetermined because we haven't got a nature. And our freedom consists of making the choices which build up exactly as you described it into further choices. But the aboriginal choice was already made. And he says that the notion that we have rational wills is an illusion. That's just a latter day appearance. Which is essentially what you were saying.

1:16:18 Mark: We should all use the word aboriginal more often in the way that you were just using it there. I love that. Do we want to take this back to Thomas Aquinas or did we already say enough about how his picture the Sartre is really a variation off of the Thomas Aquinas version, where Thomas Aquinas likewise does not say the moment of freedom is this one last part where we choose this over this, that. For him, it's that he gives a very rich phenomenology of decision making and

1:16:46 Eva: that the will is not essentially choice, but is a much more extended psychological event than choice alone. Which makes it possible to say that we have choice but not free will. And the choice really only has to do with means. He's very clear about it. He called it electio election. And it has to do with choosing between various equally good means and occasionally between more or less indifferent ends. So he solves the free will question in that way. The most dramatically abrogated one, I call it will to be found is in Hobbes, who simply says that will is the last impulse, the final impulse, before I do or don't do something. That's what's called the will, has nothing to do with choice. It's totally driven from behind. And that really is the version of will that is accepted in most contemporary treatments of the will.

1:17:53 Mark: It seems that the arbitrariness with which one could assign the word will to just this last stage, or to the whole thing, or to something completely, or to what Sartre assigns it to, seems to point for you to something that's wrong with the concept. Like a concept that's that fungible is not a real concept in the first place.

1:18:12 Eva: Yeah, not so much wrong. But it makes it an invented, rather than, I want to say, a natural notion. If you look, for instance, I was at one point very interested in the imagination. Well, there are many, many different theories about how the imagination comes about and what it does. But there's general agreement about what it is, what it means to have an imagination. Chiefly it means having mental images and knowing how to speak about them that's so different about the will. There's nothing about it which anybody agrees about, except, I mean, there's schools, but there are so Many schools, and even they differ within themselves. Even compatibilism has a number of versions to it. So yes, the fact that it's so unsettled tells me that there is something about it which is an artifact.

1:19:09 Dylan: Yeah. Can you think of anything else in human inquiry that is much about an artifact than about something that's like a natural phenomenon?

1:19:21 Eva: There are many concepts which seem to me artificial, but none of them have to do with. With such fundamental phenomena. So no, I can't. And that's partly what drove this book.

1:19:33 Mark: So if the concept of will is so changeable over time, I guess I'm a little confused why. The biggest objection that we've had so far to why it's bad for will to be such a prominent concept in our culture is the notion of sin that went with it at its inception, at its birth, from Augustine. But clearly a lot of these, since the term will has then been so strong, stretched to denominate so many different things. So for instance, with Nietzsche, it is explicitly has nothing to do with sin. It is antithetical to the notion of sin. It's a way of overcoming the notion of sin. So why be so down on will on the grounds of its association with sin, when I'm not even totally clear that that's still its dominant?

1:20:14 Wes: But isn't there still a broader association between the will and what it means to live a good life? And I thought Eva was trying to decouple that at the end.

1:20:23 Eva: Yeah, the association of will with sin has lost some of its force in recent times. So that was not the chief objection. It seems to me the two notions of the will that are really not good to live with is first of all that of a suprahuman or subhuman will that drives things and we have to give into it. For instance, the notion that there is a future which we have to recognize and then accommodate ourselves to it. This is what's going to happen. You better give in to it. That's a notion of a will, that is of a coming being that is going to impose itself on us. It seems to me to be simply bad. There isn't any future.

1:21:15 Mark: Is that a live view that you've seen in more recent philosophers? It seems like kind of a relic of the 19th century of manifest Destiny and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer everywhere.

1:21:25 Eva: When we make decisions at the college here, we're often told, well, this is what's coming. You better be proactive. In other words, we're told that there is an inevitable future and then it needs Our help. I've never understood that. If it's so inevitable, why do I have to help it? That's a universal mode of speaking. Such and such is going to happen. There's no resisting it. So go with it. Well, doesn't make sense to me. If it's so irresistible, why do I have to go with it? So that dehumanized willing, that willing of a kind of ghost or spirit that wills a future or wills a condition that seems to me very dangerous. The other kind of willing is the one that has to do with being continually in a.

1:22:21 Wes: The executor of one's future.

1:22:23 Eva: Yes, exactly. Thank you.

1:22:26 Wes: Go ahead, just do it. Being driven, it sounds like you mean. Yeah, being.

1:22:32 Eva: Yeah, being driven and not having time, not having the sense that one can be. That one can act in the world. That seems to me a very common notion nowadays. And that's part of what I mean by unwilling.

1:22:49 Mark: So I've been trying to accommodate this ideal that you set out, which again, sounds very much like the advocacy of the philosophical life, and slow down and be curious and think about things and don't let anybody push you around. But don't feel like you have to use your will to remake yourself either. So that's one of the ideals that I have for myself. But then another one that is a nagging thing.

1:23:11 Wes: What if we're too busy for that? Sorry.

1:23:15 Mark: Yes. Well, it's feeling like you should be a social activist, that there are clear problems with the world. Now, of course, if you just say, I know what I need to do to fix the world and just I will exert my will, and then you're blind to contingencies and how you should change your strategy. And you're not even listening to the people that you're trying to help. Of course there are so many problems that being too willful would then bring about. But is it at all incompatible with a steady, and really, for the most part, not all that overly reflective, certainly not scholarly approach to doing good in the world?

That I'm going to listen to people, I'm going to be open, you know, I'm going to be intelligent, I'm going to. To pursue the best strategies that actually seem to fit with the ongoing picture of the world that I can, you know, the best that I can come up with. But I'm going to fundamentally be oriented toward the future and toward fixing the obvious things that are wrong. No more thought is needed to determine that there's suffering in the world that needs addressing.

1:24:15 Dylan: Isn't Martin Luther King really willful and also.

1:24:18 Wes: Yeah, and this is a larger question of are you advocating a life of the mind? And is that really for everyone, this contemplative life, as opposed to the life of action or the political life?

1:24:28 Eva: Let me put it cautiously. A little less activity would probably do us a lot of good. A little less growth would do us just in the magnitude of things. Probably do us a little bit of slowing down would probably do us good. Look, our students, when asked what it is they want to do in the world, they generally want to change it. Well, it would be nice to know whether for the better or for the worse. That's the kind of thing. I mean, that's the simple practical application. Slow down, do a little less, think a little more, choose your causes.

1:25:16 Dylan: Let's say you do that. Let's say you, on reflection, you decide that something needs to be changed for the better.

1:25:23 Eva: Yes.

1:25:24 Dylan: And I think that part of the question that we're wandering around right now is not the notion of willfulness, that is, for the sake of itself, of just change, for the sake of change. But once you have, on reflection, decided that some great change ought to be made, we could come up with a long list.

1:25:45 Eva: I'm not for great changes, but that has something to do, of course, as always, with my personal background in life. But I am for doing little things right here now, things that I think I can retract if it's not the right thing that will do, add a little bit. I mean, we're now in the political

1:26:09 Dylan: realm, so there's something about that makes sense. And on the one hand, you have, in the political realm, advocates of great change that as a result of that, it leads to a kind of disaster. And then you have advocates of great change that, on reflection, seems to have been the least you could have done, and it comes too late. So, like, you think of something like ending slavery or changes in the social status of. Of blacks in America or the caste system in India, I mean, there's all kinds of social changes that were monumental, after which there's, in some respects, no going back from. And that advocacy didn't come from incremental notions necessarily. Now, maybe there would be an argument that there were people saying, well, we should do this slowly and walk our way slowly over the cliff.

1:27:02 Wes: The broader question here is the tension between what it means to get an education and whether that's simply a preparation for the life of politics, the life of action. I wish students would be more egotistical at that point in their lives. It should be about expanding themselves, expanding their spirits, let's say. Maybe that sounds a little Nietzsche.

1:27:22 Mark: Expanding their will.

1:27:24 Wes: Or maybe it's just about building the kind of character that will help them lead a good life. Although I'm a little more pessimistic as I've gotten older about the role of liberal arts education in doing that. But it's, you know, that's why I'm highly sympathetic to Eva's position here. I don't know, Eva, if that actually fits with what you're saying.

1:27:43 Eva: That describes my position very well. There's a kind of principle of action which I find obnoxious. It's a way of saying unless we do X, we can't do Y, where Y is some reasonable good result and X is the whole system. So unless we change the whole school system, we can't teach some children to read. That seems to me to be so stymying. In other words, that largeness has to be a part of. Of one's action, that small actions aren't what really count, and there's a lot of willfulness in such notions. Does that make sense? It makes sense, yeah.

1:28:31 Mark: No, I think that's tied to a lack of political efficacy in our culture that we feel like there's nothing that I can do individually. In fact, there's no point in my giving to charity or any of that because my job is just to do my damn job and pursue my own interests. And if anything's actually going to get done, it's only through my vibe. And we know how little that counts. But it's these big forces that should be at work that aren't at work. And that's what's so frustrating to me,

1:28:56 Eva: the notion that in order to do the small next thing, such as teaching someone to deal with a book, for example, that in order to do that, you've got to change huge quantities of things, which is a way of not getting anything done.

1:29:17 Wes: Yep.

1:29:18 Eva: It is a direct consequence of what I'm trying to say, though.

1:29:21 Mark: I heard a dissenting grunt from Seth.

1:29:23 Eva: Seth, what's.

1:29:24 Mark: Seth, tell us your view.

1:29:27 Unknown speaker: Well, I'm.

1:29:28 Eva: Sir.

1:29:28 Unknown speaker: Yeah. So much of this is over determined for me because I think I might have a unique position in the sense that I have one foot in this world of the intellectual, you know, the world of the mind. And I have one foot in the world of all these motives that you describe about speed and business and entrepreneurship and change and technology and all that. And so I'm very sympathetic to Eva's argument. And I think as an Explication of the history of the notion and how it's evolved. This is kind of unparalleled. I don't know of anything else where this much work has gone in into the idea of the will.

It's fantastic. But I still want to hold on to my criticism that will is somehow inextricably tied up with guilt and power and sin. In the sense that if you listen to the language of entrepreneurs and all these self help organizations, right, there's always some kind of language around having to take action, to be decisive. And to do that you have to overcome yourself, right? In order to overcome your poverty, you have to overcome yourself. And that means overcoming your fear of success or your fear of this or holding on to these emotional attachments.

The narrative of the appetitive and the rational exists and is alive today in the world of people who are trying to convince you to act. Just earlier today I heard this phrase. Successful people make decisions quickly and change their minds slowly. And unsuccessful people make decisions slowly and change their mind quickly. That is a diagnosis of the age if I've ever heard one. And so I have to be honest, I was not able to digest the full complexity of Eva's solution. But I think there's some kind of middle ground between saying there's a pastoral reflective life and there's a life of action.

And these two things are somehow opposed to each other. I agree that we could use to slow down and we could use to think about things a bit more. But I don't think we can undo the will that's out there with that as a strategy. We're not going to win by advocating that. I'm in agreement and it's appealing to me, but I don't think we can countermand the will that exists in society by taking that action.

1:32:04 Mark: We have to change the whole system before we do that.

1:32:08 Eva: Right?

1:32:11 Unknown speaker: Yes. Maybe that's it.

1:32:12 Eva: That's a good final word.

1:32:17 Mark: Thank you so much for doing this, Eva. I also really, I'll admit that I got more into the book as I went on. I had a really hard time getting back to that moment of having the patience section by section that you do with these figures and the position that you are arguing for that we've been talking about. This relaxed openness is the position to be patient enough to read the book.

1:32:37 Eva: That's how I felt.

1:32:39 Mark: It's certain kinds of scholarship, but I did appreciate it and was by the end now I'm like, oh, I wish I'd read those four other sections.

1:32:46 Eva: I want to Say something about that. Unlike authors of great books, I am perfectly happy for people to. To pick around in the book and read the things that interest them. So don't exert too much patience.

1:33:04 Mark: I will read all the notes in order, 100 pages of notes.

1:33:09 Unknown speaker: And we will certainly encourage our listeners to pick up a copy.

1:33:12 Wes: Yeah, I will. At the risk of sounding like I'm just trying to flatter you, Eva, it is a wonderfully written book.

1:33:18 Eva: Don't hold it.

1:33:20 Wes: It's not the kind of writing that you're going to often see in these types of books. Usually.

1:33:24 Eva: Oh, do you mean that in a good sense?

1:33:27 Wes: Yes.

1:33:29 Unknown speaker: It's engaging that you hide the footnotes

1:33:31 Mark: in the endnotes, that it's not constantly interrupting with the scholarly. Even though it's a deeply scholarly work, it doesn't read in a painful way like that.

1:33:42 Eva: I'm glowing here.

1:33:43 Wes: So we encourage listeners to pick this up.

1:33:46 Dylan: I would also say that while you can definitely read it straight through Eva's point about being able to pick through it, it also works very well that way that you could, from the index, pick the person that you were most interested in reading about and get a deeper summary of it and pick or brown through it. It would work very well that way.

1:34:05 Mark: And you've also steeled me for our next episode, which we're going to be talking about Augustine's Confessions.

1:34:10 Eva: Oh, really?

1:34:11 Dylan: Yes.

1:34:12 Eva: Well, you'll see again exactly what I mean then.

1:34:16 Mark: Well, so I had already previewed it. I in fact, got through the whole thing as an audiobook and found it really quite painful and hard to get to the good nuggets within all this. Oh, God, glory is God. Glory, glory, glory. God, God, God, Glory, glory. So the fact that you characterized him as, you know, if you read his perceptive account of memory, you will know that like anybody who has read any of him, they want to know him better. You have some kind of glowing recommendation of Augustine's style in there. So I'm going to take that as a challenge to myself to enjoy that book.

1:34:53 Dylan: Relax your will, Mark.

1:34:54 Wes: Yeah. And not just try to boil it down to its chalky philosophical residuum, I

1:35:00 Eva: should say, you know, just to complicate everything. It's complicated. The. A very difficult and big book called on the Trinity. Augustine's book has a totally different presentation of the will. So we can. You can begin at another end and you get something very different.

1:35:19 Mark: Yes, I was grateful in your chapter on Augustine, you know, that you were pulling from all these different sources that I'm never going to read all those. Although it was nice to see that you even in talking about the book the City of God, you said, which I have not read in full. When does a scholar admit to that in the middle of a work There might be something else in there, I don't know. And I know you didn't just search on the keyword will in the electronic.

1:35:45 Unknown speaker: I know that you didn't do that. Yes, thanks Eva.

1:35:52 Wes: Thank you very much.

1:35:53 Eva: Thanks Eva for Thank you. It's been a pleasure being together with you all again.

1:35:58 Unknown speaker: Citizens, we are going to give away copies of Eva's book to a few of you lucky folks. The drawing is August 3rd and you don't have to do anything to be eligible. If you love Eva as much as us, you can also get 30% off of your order of one of her many books@pauldrybooks.com by entering PEL at checkout. The discount may not be reflected in the total, but will be applied before processing by the good folks at Paul Dry Book Books. Take a look at the blog for more details.

Hey folks, we're supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. Big donors since last time have included John Glaser, David Voyeur, Charles Wright, Paul Keogh, Jack Sheppard, Koh Liang Xiao, Robert Tabb, Tracy Crook, Amog Sahu, Timothy Sullivan, Melissa Cole, Sung Yong, ok, Kyle Trotter, Heather Brook, Harold Johnson, Julian Taylor, Jeffrey Rabar, Stephen Claussen, Matt Hargis, Patricia Lipscomb, Scott Khoury, Jordan Taylor, Saqib Nizami, David Kraftsoe, Diane Beaudet, Michael Gomez, Patricia Broccolina, David Michaels, Thomas Kaiser, Frederick Kisha, Grant Edwards, Lucinda Walker, Jacob Baird, Todd Costa, Kristen Ray Larson, Donald Parker, Gustav Toner, Cynthia Pereira, Lira, Robert Mahoney, Molly Blades, William Park, Keith Schaefer, Mark Navalis, Joshua Stein, Matthew Churchill, Corey Astel, and Timothy Flavin.

Thanks also to the smaller donors, including those who are newly or on a continued basis signed up for our $5 a month citizen site. If you go to partialexaminedlife.com you can participate in discussions there.

1:37:25 Mark: Read supplementary material.

1:37:27 Unknown speaker: There'll be links to our Facebook group, our Twitter account, our YouTube channel. If you use the itunes store and you get a moment, please go there. Leave us a nice review. Another way to support us is through our Amazon banner. If you click the Amazon ad on the right side of our homepage, do all your shopping as you would normally do. It'll kick a little money back to us. If you bookmark that and do that often. That's a great way to. To show your ongoing support. Oh, and the song you're about to hear, I insist. Brand new recording, very spiffy. Thanks to Jeff Esty, Ken Keighley, Steve Patrinko and Daniel Gustafsson for helping me by playing on it.

Good night.

1:38:02 Mark: Good night, everybody.

1:38:03 Eva: Bye.

1:38:05 Unknown speaker: In place of a soul I've got tendency gotta lean in, I've got energy well I push into a tumbling world of my own, of my own. Oh well, I don't know what I am driving, I am pressing the keys, I am losing what's left of my periphery. I am forward essentially I am motion and force and something too fast to see. My eyes focus out to a point and reflect and I will pierce every door knob fails to react and and I will overcome all the crap that I drag. I am not asking the world, I am not asking the world, I demand it, I insist. If I must give a reason, well consider this fist I demand it, I require.

You must take what I make and all the love I inspire. In place of a soul I've got irony in the space of a conscience. In this piece my belief is a 15 ton truck. If I hold out my hand you will shiver. We all she ever. I am driving, I am pressing it down. If I fly at this speed I will be sleeping around. I am forward, I am all the way. I'm a mistake of the future will all be someday. And my eyes focus out to a point and refract. And I will pierce every door. Nothing fails to react and I will overcome all the crap that I drag. I am not asking the world, I am not asking the world, I demand it, I insist.

If I must give a reason. Well consider this fist, I demand it, I require you mistake what I make and all the love I aspire. Don't be put on the fire fool to cover yourself and drew. I'm a person, a person, not a force of nature. You'll be one of those guys who puts feet in his mouth. I am lonely and done. I won't save you, won't save you. I demand it, I insist. If I must give a reason, well consider this fist, I demand it. I require mistake what I make and all the love I inspire in my eyes focus out to a point and refract and retract and turn black and go back and attack and re lat and distract and react and react and react and.