Episode 158: Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy (Part Two)

0:00 Seth: Okay. Coming out of the first two books, where philosophy's point is to disabuse Boethius of the idea that his happiness can be found in external things, he's left in kind of a negative position. It's her task in book three to point out first that happiness is actually achievable and then where you would go looking for it. So that's the overall purpose of book three.

0:24 Mark: Yeah. And I describe this as teleological because it's not merely a matter of, you know, figuring out what God's will is. And that's what we should. That. That's what the perfect. It's not. It doesn't go that way. It actually starts, you know, on a very Aristotelian, slash Platonic way of defining good as that which people pursue. And then, of course, you have to deal with the problem like, well, a lot of people pursue a lot of stupid stuff.

0:49 Wes: So what is that?

0:50 Mark: How do we find the actual good from the apparent good?

0:53 Seth: One of the initial starting points. I don't know if it's the translation that makes the language seem very modern, but just to read the first part of prose two, this is page 43. Philosophy looked away for a moment, as though withdrawn into the sacred chamber of her mind. Then she began to speak. Mortal men laboriously pursue many different interests along many different paths, but all strive to reach the same goal of happiness. Now, the good is defined as that which, once it is attained, relieves man of all further desires.

1:26 Mark: So it's a big orgasm. That's what that is, right?

1:29 Seth: Yes, exactly. This is the supreme good and contains within itself all lesser goods. The Boethian take on Stoicism, this idea that fortune is fickle and that you can't put your faith into things which you can't control. Things that are ultimately changeable in this translation. I don't know if it's in the original Latin, but there's a lot of discussion about anxiety and desires not being fulfilled, which I assume in some ways is triggering some of the reference to some of the more psychoanalytic things that, that Wes has mentioned. But this idea that happiness is the cessation of all further desires strikes me as odd.

And not just odd in a pre medieval post Stoicist kind of way, but just the idea that suffering is to be found in desire and that happiness is the cessation of suffering, which is what I have more recently been taught as kind of the lesson that you get from Westernized Buddhism. Anyway, I don't know if that's the tone of the original text, but that was one of the themes that I found interesting in here.

2:37 Mark: It almost seems like this is not necessarily describing a phenomenology of, hey, haven't you experienced the supreme good? Well, ask the sages. The sages have experienced that. It's the one that relieves man of further desires. Logically, it's this move that's made throughout here, as whenever you have a comparison, whenever you have a value judgment, you must somehow be referring implicitly to the infinite.

3:01 Wes: By contrast, you're establishing a limiting case. And when he talks about happiness here, he's talking about. He uses the phrase perfect happiness is the one in which all goods are possessed. Obviously it's not something that anyone but the sage would experience, and no one is the sage. The idea is to establish a limiting case to say what happiness is, or perfect happiness and the possession of all goods and the cessation of all desires, which is again, not something that could actually happen to us.

3:31 Mark: And it's just defined as a definition. Right. It's not reflect on the perfect good as you've experienced it. Isn't that when you don't have further. No, it's the limiting case is the definition. We're sketching out the essence.

3:42 Wes: Yeah, I mean, in the Nicomachean ethics, I think. Isn't that the very first sentence? Basically, the good is sort of definitionally set up as that towards which all things tend or which all desires are directed. Something like that, yes.

3:59 Dylan: So when I read this, I was thinking about. Because there's other parts of it that had that kind of existential feel. And here it seemed that there was no question of lacking. So you attain the good and you're relieved of all your desires, rather than it being that sort of constant state. Now maybe it's because it's a limiting case, then it's a way of framing that constant state of desiring. That's what the good is, the thing that we're inclined towards. And so in some ways it becomes a definition of desire.

4:32 Wes: So this is book one, the first sentence of the Nicomachean ethics. Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action pursued, is thought to aim at some good. And for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. The way he's talking there implies the desires, the subjective desires involved in those activities as well.

4:52 Mark: And Boethius puts it that way a lot of times in here as well. But just that this particular formulation that Seth was commenting on as sounding Buddhist, like it does seem like it at least should be in subjunctive mode, the good is defined as that which, if it were obtained, would relieve man of all further desires. Like, not a statement of fact in the way that's right here.

5:13 Wes: In each and every case of what we aim at, we could just leave each separate good as its own thing and not try and sum them up under one category. It seems like a kind of abstraction. So I like ice cream and I like horseback riding. Why do I need to call those both good things? Those are just the things that I aim at in those two particular domains, whatever those domains are. And yet somehow we want to think, even though those are radically different domains and radically different kinds of pleasures and so on and so forth, we want to say that the very act of aiming at something that there's enough in common at any aiming to talk in terms of some commonality to what the end is. And that's why we want to talk about the good as opposed to just particular cases.

5:59 Mark: Yeah, and it's not even. You could say the unifying thing is that we all aim at what we think is good or what will fulfill a particular activity. You know that what's common is an internal structure. You know, that it is aimed at a good. But no, he does want to say it's actually the objects that we aim at somehow have to be unified. There might be some things that are, you know, purely illusions. Like that is you're aiming to kill your neighbor, but really the only reason you're doing that is because you think that that's a means to an end. And the end that you're shooting at, you know, which is your neighbor's been being very loud and you want.

You want it to be quiet. And so the silence, something about your environment like, well, that's the good that you're shooting at. And, well, why do you want the silence? Because you want happiness. So it's ultimately that we're all shooting for happiness, whatever the particular means.

6:53 Wes: Right.

6:53 Seth: In the logic of this, the shooting for happiness, we're all shooting for happiness is we're all shooting for the satisfaction of our desire.

7:00 Mark: I'm shooting my neighbor for happiness. That's I.

7:04 Dylan: Shooting my veins for happiness.

7:06 Seth: Shooting up for happiness.

7:07 Dylan: Yes. Well, toward the end of prose two, this is just underlined. All this shows clearly that all men seek happiness for whatever anyone desires beyond all else, he regards as the highest good. And since we have defined the highest good as happiness, everyone thinks that the conditions which he wants more than anything else must constitute happiness.

7:30 Mark: You know, it's interesting with these. So he has this whole section on riches you might think are great, but they don't really give you happiness and fame. And so he starts by just dismissing them all, that these are false goals, you need to get at the true happiness. But then he ends up sort of Hegelian like, well, actually there's something true, there is something awesome about fame. It's just that if you were legitimately virtuous, then you would deserve fame. And so what you really want is not the fame you want to deserve fame. And so this state of virtue is really what happiness is about. And virtue somehow ends up being a synthesis of the non illusory parts of all these other things. You would deserve riches and you would deserve fame and you would be worthy of power and this kind of stuff.

8:20 Dylan: Yeah. So in prose nine, towards the end on page 159, he says, unless I'm mistaken, true and perfect happiness is that which makes a man self sufficient, powerful, worthy of reverence and renown, and joyful.

8:34 Mark: Yeah. So it's not even, you might think pleasure, sexual pleasure or something is worth shooting for. Well, no such pleasures harm the people who enjoy them is one of the things he says. And certainly they're temporary. So we've seen in the earlier section that those can't be part of. But being joyful, that's kind of the good part of that. That's what you wanted out of sexual pleasure or something is joy.

8:59 Dylan: Well, and he ties it deeply with self sufficiency.

9:02 Wes: Exactly right.

9:03 Dylan: In this section, you know, that which is self sufficiency, which can do everything by its own power, which is honored and famous. Is not this also most pleasant and joyful? This whole section turns on showing that all the things that he undermined earlier, honor and power and riches, if attained in the context of self sufficiency, it means that you're going to be in a position of lacking nothing. And the lacking nothing means that you have achieved all the good. And therefore you will be in this sort of as good as possible place

9:40 Wes: a lot of different philosophers or psychoanalysis here. I think the question is when we have a certain attachment to something like fame or to pleasure or any of the other things, we have a fantasy of something that it can do for us, that it can't really do for us. And that fantasy has something to do with this talk of self sufficiency and integrity. So for Lacan, it would mean we get seduced by pleasure not just because it's pleasurable, it's because it signifies something much more. It signifies. It's a fantasy of the completeness of the subject.

Right. Getting rid of that lack that Simone de Beauvoir talks about. It's a fantasy that we can be complete and that we can do it through any one or number of these activities. When that completeness actually can't come from the outside on the Stoic version, it has to come from the inside out and it has to come by way of virtue. So for the Stoics, at least, if you. In the limiting case of the sage, there is this possibility of completeness. Again, it's not the objet petit a out there. It has to come from the inside.

10:52 Mark: So it's not sexual gratification that's the problem. It's sexual gratification with a partner that's not self sufficient that's the problem.

11:00 Wes: It's the signal, you know, it's what these things signify over and above their.

11:05 Dylan: Boethius, the master of masturbation lady philosophy

11:09 Mark: is visiting him in his cell.

11:10 Dylan: All right, I'm sorry, Wes, I did not mean to undermine you. Actually making a point.

11:15 Mark: There was no follow up on that joke.

11:19 Wes: No, I'm just repeating myself. So that's the part I find interesting in Stoicism. It's less interesting if you just say, oh, people are deceived because they think pleasure and all these external things are the good, when really it's something else. But what's interesting psychologically is why people make that mistake. It's because they can easily create the fantasy. They're mirrors in a way. You know, the Lacanian mirror. They are mirrors which give us pictures when we look at ourselves through them. They give us a false picture of integrity or wholeness. That is subjects that we can't have that we have to abandon. Although again, the stoicism kind of diverges there. That's the interesting part to me.

12:02 Mark: Well, but Seth, tell more about your interpretation there, which was that all these things are done to achieve cessation of desire.

12:10 Seth: The Buddhist take, he says it fairly explicitly. I thought Dylan kind of Already reiterated, he says this is page 57. So just right before that, would you say that one who lacks nothing stands in need of power? Of course not. You're quite right. For whoever is deficient in any way needs outside help. So sufficiency and power have one in the same nature. That seems to be true. Would you say a thing that is perfectly self sufficient and completely powerful should be scorned? Or is on the contrary worthy of honor? Undoubtedly is most worthy. So we may add reverence to sufficiency and power and conclude that all three are really one.

That is true. And so on and so forth. It's that if you are happy, then you're self sufficient, which means you're lacking for nothing. So you essentially have all the power that you need. You don't need to go looking for power or looking for honor looking for these things because you're self sufficient. If you are unhappy, you are lacking in something and you go to seek to fill that lack with something like power, honor, money, pleasure. And the logic seems fairly straightforward in the sense that it's couched in the language of desire and anxiety.

That's why I'm reading it the way that I am.

13:25 Dylan: Yeah, it makes the end result, I guess we were talking about it being the sage, seem very Buddhist as well. Right? In the sense of being unaffected.

13:36 Seth: Yeah, I would say this too. The universe of discourse here is very circumscribed. So it's the same examples over and over again that are clearly coming from Boethius own experience. But it's wealth, honor, power, fame which gets mentioned and then kind of dropped here and there. Pleasure, family, friendship, beauty and health. These are all relating to the individual. And there's no talk of justice in here or no sense of having some kind of accountability for other people. So there are some very tight boundaries drawn around this that ultimately are challenging for me. But I think the internal logic of it makes sense.

14:20 Mark: A really weird step, the end of that quote you read. That's the top of page 59, that true and perfect happiness is that which makes a man self sufficient, powerful, worthy of reverence, renown and joyful. And to show what that I've understood you. I acknowledge that whatever can truly provide any one of these must be true and perfect happiness, since all are one and the same. So that's a weird, weird leap of logic there. I mean, you can say that, well, fame is not really going to be enough because if you don't have money or power, then fame is overrated.

Ask anybody that was signed to a major label on MTV a lot you need more than that. So you need these other things too, for your happiness to be complete. But to say that having them all together would be better on the previous page, philosophy says even if you had all those separately, that still kind of wouldn't do it, because they're all temporary things. They somehow must relate to something higher and beyond. But in relating something higher and beyond, to say they are really all one in the same, this sounds like he's just anticipating the theological point that he's going to go on to make, which is just that God is simple.

And so if you're going to ascribe any properties to him at all, they have to be his essence. It's not just that God can know about justice, and so there's a relationship between God and justice or something like that. No, if God is just, it's because God is justice. And if we're going to ultimately say in the next step of the argument that happiness and virtue are God somehow, then we have to say that somehow all these different virtues, all these different elements of what people shoot for, they boil down to one and the same thing. And I don't know if I can make a lot of sense of that.

It ultimately seems to be like, well, they all participate in the form of the good or something. Just like he says, we all become gods in a sense, by being godlike, by being.

16:22 Dylan: If you're going to be generous here, you have to put aside this kind of infinite divide by zero kind of argument, because that's exactly what it is. Mark, you thought it was ultimately gesturing towards the theological argument of unity. And in the end, unity is going to trump everything because, you know, infinity trumps everything. It's the same kind of thing. So I think you have to at least not quite take that step and recognize that they're all together, all as one, all these five different things. And taking the step to say they're all the same thing requires you to make a oneness is infinity kind of claim.

17:09 Seth: Yeah.

17:10 Dylan: And you don't have to do that to get the point. You don't have to go all that way.

17:15 Mark: Well, it seems Wes interpretation of they are all one in the same because it's the same underlying psychological motivation. Whether you put it in Wes's way that we are looking for wholeness or the Buddhist way, which might amount to the same thing, is we're looking to not be lacking something, then in that sense, psychologically, they are all one and the same thing. But that's much Less informative. That's just like saying, well, they're all things at which we aim. So in that sense.

17:43 Dylan: Oh, I thought you were going to say something different.

17:45 Mark: That's not a very robust sense.

17:46 Wes: They're all trying to fulfill a certain function, right, which for him will be performed by virtue or God. And that's the function of, again, completeness, self, perfection. That's the sense in which they end up being the same. Human depravity is broken into fragments. That which is by nature one and simple. I mean, each one of the fragments. I don't know how to explain it, but.

18:12 Dylan: Well, is it that they're the same in kind, in a sort of way? That's what I thought you were going to say, Mark. And I thought that's the kind of thing that you were pointing to, Wes, is that it's not that they're the same and that you have these five things that are all now one big unity. Each of them is indistinguishable because they are all really one thing. It's that they are all of the same kind. And so there's a kind of speciation going on. So if I think of it psychologically, they have the same kind of psychological burden that you can make the same kinds of mistakes in each one of them. And then self sufficiency is performing a role for all of them that saves you.

18:55 Wes: The problem with all these things is not just some assertion. Well, this is vicious per se. He has to get us out of the realm of the incomplete and the temporary. Because the highest good can't just be something that's subject to fickle fortune. We could lose it. We'd be worried about losing. And that doesn't work. And then each one, he tries to show can't perform this completion function by itself because you would need one of the other ones to prop it up. But the thought experiment here is, well, what if you could have all of those together and no danger of ever losing them? Well, in some sense that would really do the trick. I think he thinks that once you've reached that point, what you're really talking about is sort of a something that epiphenomenal or something like that supervenes on virtue or supervenes on one's relationship to God or something like that. I'm not sure.

19:48 Mark: I mean, I would like to take it metaphysically seriously without bringing God into it, because he doesn't bring in God. Yet here in the quote that you were reading, Wes, top of page 58, human depravity has broken into fragments that which is by nature 1. And simple men try to grasp part of a thing which has no parts, and so get neither the part which does not exist nor the whole which they do not seek. So you might think that something like human well being, the telos, is saying something. Is the telos, is that referring to the directionality or is it referring to the object of the directionality? In other words, what you're shooting for, the telos is the goal. Right. It's not just the fact that we are goal oriented, therefore we have a telos.

20:31 Wes: Yeah, the telos is the end.

20:32 Mark: The goal, the telos is the end. Okay, so you might say that the telos is ultimately, so it's happiness, but to say that somehow it has no parts, because the way you just described it, Wes, like, well, if we really could have fame and money and all these things and have them eternally, well, that sounds like you're describing something that has parts. Like it's fame and money and glory and whatever, and eternity is maybe an extra part or a part of each of those things. But he wants to say, no, no, metaphysically, it's a single thing. The telos.

21:09 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it's a little unclear because he goes 58 at the end of that paragraph. So honors, fame and pleasure can be shown to be equally defective, for each is connected with the others, and whoever seeks one without the others cannot even get. Get even the one he wants. And then Boethius asks what happens when someone tries to get them all at the same time? He indeed reaches for the height of happiness, but can he find it in these things which, as I have shown, cannot deliver what they promise? Of course not. I said that's a very unclear move there, because the next logical step in the argument is to figure out what the consequence of having them all together, just at least hypothetically, is.

21:50 Mark: Yeah, and then it does seem like it's not actually fame that you're shooting for, it's being worthy of fame. Like fame by itself, even as a part of things is incoherent because he says no matter how famous you are, you're not famous in the next town over, there's somewhere where you're not famous. There's a century from now, nobody's going to remember you. So your fame is always going to have limits and it's not going to provide what it says it is. So it's not just that you can't have fame without money because you need the money to throw the galas to keep Your fame or something like that, it's that fame is somehow internally incoherent.

22:24 Wes: Yeah. If we could possess those properties in heaven, then maybe we could possess them in the right way or something. I don't know. But to possess them on earth is always to possess them in this incomplete way.

22:35 Dylan: What he's leaving the door open for is not just the fact that we are potentially going to attain those things, but there's also the door open for how you have corruption, how you have vice, how you have the soul descending into wrongness and going against nature. I mean, in the next couple sections is the notion that nature is aligned with the good. When we are behaving badly or unhappily, that is because we are acting in some way contrary to nature and we are being corrupted in one way or another. To me, there was sort of complicated but unsatisfying sort of combination of where is it that that corruption happens?

Is that corruption part of our willfulness, or is that corruption inherently part of us as human beings, in that we are partly divine, but partly not? And our distinction from the purely natural world as rational animals that seem to be sort of all in the mix there, but part of what's at stake is how we have failure to attain happiness, failure to be good.

23:45 Mark: Yeah. It's interesting that we don't see, you know, we see very much the Aristotelian principle that everybody. Or Platonic principle, that everybody pursues what they take to be good, as opposed to the Augustinian. No, no. Some people, like, positively will sin. Like there's none of that in here in that sense. Maybe that's another sense in which this is pagan rather than Christian.

24:09 Dylan: Neoplatonist.

24:11 Mark: Sure. So what else do we want to say about the teleology here? We've talked a lot about the infinity trumping everything, so that the way that turns up in here is right. We're shooting for a perfect good. I hesitate to bring up Stoicism again, but is that like, Wes, in the stuff that you were reading, you were saying that some of this stuff that looks Christian is actually right there in some of Epictetus other work. Is this talking about the perfect good as opposed to the things that we should shun? Is that also just straight up Stoic language?

24:41 Wes: The idea of the perfect good is just that fame is a good and wealth is a good, and all those things are goods in a sense. So I think this goes back to any sort of virtue ethics. The perfect good just has to be activity in accordance with virtues. The perfection part is Just the complete part. So you're looking for the good in the absolute sense, and you don't. Imperfect goods can be anything you like, anything you desire. But for the thing that is actually going to be a sort of guarantor of happiness, you need the perfect good, which is virtue and God and all that. The imperfection of the other ones is just there. They don't provide secure happiness. They can't perform that function, that ultimately function to perfection.

25:24 Dylan: He does seem to align nature itself with that Perfection in Prose 10, in the middle of the first paragraph. Now, no one can deny that something exists which is a kind of fountain of all goodness. For everything which is found to be imperfect shows its imperfection by the lack of some perfection. Therefore, God must exist. It follows that if something is found to be imperfect in its kind, there must necessarily be something of that same kind which is perfect. For without a standard of perfection, we cannot judge anything to be imperfect. Nature did not have its origins in the defective and incomplete, but in the integral and absolute.

It fell from such beginnings to its present meanness and weakness. Okay, so I think I might have answered my own question. Is that in this respect, nature, born of divine origins, was originally perfect and complete, but has fallen. And here he seems to be saying that nature itself has fallen.

26:23 Wes: If you go on to the next paragraph, there is a certain imperfect happiness in transitory goods. Now he wants to be able to say that there is this perfect and enduring happiness in the same way that nature's imperfections are relative to something perfect.

26:37 Mark: Just to apologize for my uncharitable reading of his Stoicism, it's not that I can't take joy in my family. It's just I have to admit that that joy is kind of imperfect. It's fraught with worry as well. It's not the perfect happiness. Doesn't mean you should shun it.

26:55 Wes: Right.

26:55 Mark: Unless you are just a perfectionist, nothing less than perfect will do. Perhaps you can be perfect in virtue, but then also partake some of these imperfections. I'm not sure about that.

27:08 Seth: There is an important move in this prose ten section that you mentioned. So you have the Cartesian imperfect implies perfect, and it's followed by the causal chain, the Aristotelian first cause, which is the whatever is caused is less perfect than the thing that causes it. Until you get back to. And you get to God equaling happiness.

27:29 Dylan: Yep.

27:30 Seth: But this is where he says something that changes just slightly. You become happy by acquiring happiness. It's still this mechanism of ownership. So in other words, Happiness is not an activity or a disposition. It's acquiring, it's becoming self sufficient. But that self sufficient is. It's an acquisition of a thing. It's acquiring self sufficiency. Acquiring happiness is how you become happy. And this is where Mark, he makes the move and says, and since God is happiness because he's the only self sufficient thing, insofar as you become happy by becoming self sufficient yourself, you acquire God. In short, you become a God.

28:16 Dylan: This is towards the bottom of page 63, right? He says, from this conclusion, then I will give you a kind of corollary. Just as the Geometricians infer from their demonstrated propositions things which they call deductions. Since men become happy by acquiring happiness, since happiness is divinity itself, it follows that men become happy by acquiring divinity. For as men become just by acquiring integrity and wise by acquiring wisdom, so they must in a similar way become gods by acquiring divinity. Thus everyone who is happy is a God. And although it is true that God is one by nature, still there are many gods by participation.

29:02 Mark: There may be many gods by participation.

29:05 Dylan: Okay, there may be many gods by participation.

29:08 Mark: I'm not sure if that matters. I don't understand that. I mean, I've never understood participation. So that's not. It seems a lot of hand waving.

29:18 Dylan: Guilt by association. Mark, you don't understand guilt by association.

29:21 Mark: That geometric talk is what makes me feel like it's not only admissible for us to point out logical fallacies, but we really owe it to anybody in the audience who would think that this is a good argument, that this whole section to just point out the stuff that just doesn't work. This stuff on page 62 was kind of the thing that I most objected to in the entire book. You mentioned this perfect causing the perfect and all this stuff, but really it's the. It's ultimately equating God and happiness. So he's really equivocating two senses of good. So one is he's talking about origins, right?

If there's good in an effect, there must be more good in the cause. And so the ultimate cause, God is the ultimate good. And then on the other hand, he's talking about aims. We all aim at the good, and we aim at the perfect good over the less perfect goods. Like when we see the difference, we might really want money and fame, but when we see how vain those are, when we become wise, then no, we want the perfect good. So it must be one and the same thing. God who is the cause of everything, and God who we aim at ultimately we're not just aiming at happiness.

We've shown here that happiness is God. Again, because God can't just be happy in terms of having the property of happiness. God does not have properties. He is in essence, any properties that he may have. Which makes it very confusing to talk about God, but, you know, welcome to Christian theology. That's just. That goes with the territory.

31:02 Wes: Well, he's trying to. I mean, the structure of the proof is here's why God is the perfect good, and we all aim at the perfect good. Therefore, we all aim at God at being Gods. I mean, ultimately, yes, it's about being divine, acquiring divinity. Yes. So the overall structure, I don't think that's. Is that false? Is that illogical? I mean, it's. Yes. I don't. The internal parts of it, I don't buy. But if you were to accept that, hey, look, causality shows us that God is the perfect good because all the other goods have to come from Him. And then you accept that, yes, we all aim at the perfect good and therefore we all aim at God. I think that's sound.

31:45 Mark: I still feel like there's two uses of good. One where you're talking about. It's really about greatness.

31:50 Wes: Oh, I see what you're saying in

31:51 Mark: terms of, of the amount of power. That's what the cosmological bit is really talking about, is that there must be at least as much power and force and awesomeness in the effect as there was in the cause. Right. Things only go downhill in the terms of causation. Energy dissipates out from the original cause. And so talking about God is the greatest in that sense does not sound like exactly the same thing as well, what is the ultimate good that we all aim at? Well, it must be the most perfect good. You see the difference between those two?

32:23 Wes: Yes, I'm trying to see where in the argument it's that each of the

32:27 Mark: premises uses the word good. But because good, because of the context in which it was derived, actually means slightly different things, then it does not follow that we all aim at God. We all do aim at happiness. Happiness is the ultimate good. And if I buy this stupid cosmological argument, then God is the cause of everything. It does not follow that we all aim at God. In fact, maybe we are ignorant. Okay, so he's right. He has to rely on some Platonism of the truth is something that we all are not ignorant of. We need to just remember it. It's something that we subconsciously know.

So that when we are aiming at Happiness, whether or not we think of it as God, that is in fact what we are aiming at. And we'll kind of figure that out if we pay attention to lady philosophy. Whereas I feel like you could have a bunch of nice atheists who all aim at ultimate happiness and you accept that there is a perfect happiness. Maybe you could accept all that and still not think that it's God.

33:26 Wes: Yeah, I mean, the overall structure of the argument is sound. It's just the part you're rejecting is this move from. Really, you're. You're rejecting the premise that God can't be the ruler of all things without being the perfect good, that those two things are not actually related.

33:44 Mark: Yeah, that's definitely part of it. If you say just because God is the ruler of all things, he must be more powerful than anything else. But can't there be a bastard God that's a ruler of all things? A God that is completely doesn't care about our notions of good and evil because he's beyond all that. Why would he have any relationship to the kind of thing that we aim at? Well, it's because you're taking this as a package deal, that God is a God that loves us and created us as something that aims at him. And so we.

34:17 Wes: Part of the idea is that he's the unmoved mover and that the way he rules things is by having everyone aim at him as the good. So that's part of it.

34:25 Mark: And then there's some nice poetry about that. God throws us all out.

34:29 Wes: Yeah. So it's actually. It's a complicated argument with roots in Aristotle, so there's more texture to it. But yes, it's not something we would accept really, in the end.

34:41 Mark: And that's the sense in which I felt like this text is a popularization in a way that if you did read Aristotle, would be much, much more painful to read about the same subject in, but at least it would be ultimately much more meaty and interesting. Whereas I just feel like the way that is spelled out in this supposedly foolproof geometric way such that he answers lady philosophy. It could not be doubted what you have just said like that. No, that as stated, it does not work very well at all. But let's find good parts.

35:17 Wes: I don't want to. Is there anything else in Rain on your parade? You guys should feel free to do as much of that as you want.

35:23 Mark: We're in the home stretch here.

35:26 Dylan: Why don't we move on to four and five? I mean, in four, he begins this question of trying to address the question of evil in the world. And one thing I liked about four and five is in the previous three books, I kind of felt like, you know how when you read Plato and you're listening, you're reading Socrates and you have the interlocutors and you feel like something, like the other interlocutors are just chumps in some way. I mean, what are they there for? They're saying, yes, Socrates, no, Socrates, of course Socrates. You don't always feel like they're alive.

There are times when you do, but sometimes you feel like they're not as alive as they could be. And I often felt that way through the first three where maybe he was just getting a lot of consolation or whatever, but it was sort of lady philosophy just sort of telling him like it is. But in books four and five, Boethius asks some tough questions about the existence of evil and gives a fairly long section in book five about how can free will and determinism be compatible at all? And why doesn't it in the end lead you to doubt the existence of God altogether?

And there I felt like, regardless of the reply, I felt like there was some more animation to Boethius character in response.

36:50 Mark: Wasn't there a line somewhere in there where lady philosophy says, like, well, okay, I mean, that's a little beside the point about. Of consoling you, but yeah, all right, we can go there, whatever. It gets a little caught up in these technical questions. So it's not. Yes, the problem of evil is a central part to the consolation that's brought up in book one and is only really here in book four. But I think when it gets on to book five and this, like, determinism versus freedom, that's where it's getting a little more academic. Yeah, no, I agree that Boethius is getting carried away with how cool philosophy is and not just getting over his situation.

37:30 Seth: Yeah, well, he's healthier, he's taken the medicine, he's feeling better. So philosophy's monologues need to get longer. One of the things that I thought was interesting about the early part of the argument in book four. Look, the good are always powerful, the evil are always weak. And I'm going to show you why that's the case, that virtue is rewarded and vice is punished, is that there's a very, I would say, evolved distinction between having the will to do something and having the power to do it. And it immediately made me think of the episode we did with Eva where in the course of talking about Augustine, that She essentially said that he invented the idea of will.

And this is such a short, in the grand scheme of things, such a short time after Augustine. I wanted to know if anybody had noticed that and if they. If anybody was more aware of what sort of influence Augustine might have had on him. Because he very clearly talks about will and power, that you must want and then have the means to achieve something. And this is all in the context of saying where evil people and good people both want happiness, they want the good, but evil people continually fail to achieve it. Which goes to point out that they don't have.

It's not in their means. They don't have the power, they're powerless. But good people are good by virtue of achieving good, which means they want to be good and they have the means to do it. And then that's essentially the causal loop turns back around, shows that they are powerful. Anyway, it just seemed like a very mature delineation between will and power and a very clear break from the Platonic and Aristotelian, or at least the Platonic notion that knowledge of the good would be sufficient. You know, this idea that if you know what's good, you do it.

And that he makes the point repeatedly that, you know, evil people are in error, but not in error in the sense of they're aiming at the wrong object.

39:30 Mark: Well, is it that knowledge is power? So an evil person is aiming at fame. And according to Aristotle's law, whatever you want to call it, that's what somebody wrote in my margin, that it's everybody aims at what they think is good, that that's Aristotle's law. I don't know if that's accurate. And so Boethius agrees with that, that that person thinks that fame is the good, but they're just wrong. And in their being wrong, in their lacking the correct knowledge of what is actually good, that's where they're weak.

40:00 Wes: Well, his argument here is actually that they are aiming at the good. And their failure to be able to get that is what makes them impotent, that they're wrong about what is good. When they aim at fame, they're still aiming at a good, or is it

40:15 Mark: a means end thing? So they're aiming at fame because they think it will bring them happiness.

40:19 Seth: Yes, that's the way. Well, he says it, I think both ways, but that's the way I read it.

40:24 Wes: So they want happiness just like everyone else. They're confused about what will lead to it and they're impotent to get it. You know, when it Comes to getting

40:31 Mark: it and is there room here? Is there any evidence here that he read the akrasia part?

40:37 Wes: Yeah, he mentions the intemperate because those

40:40 Mark: guys are clearly weak. Like their evil is not a lack of knowledge. Like that works for that.

40:46 Wes: Yeah. At some point he talks about some types of people and one of them is intemperate.

40:52 Seth: Yeah.

40:52 Mark: And he really builds on. Once a bad idea creeps into this, he really runs with it. So that page 79 pretty much. If you don't pursue your teleology, right, if you don't pursue correctly happiness through virtue, then you cease to be human. You cease to be right. Being a person is a matter of doing what persons do. And what defines a person in its essence is to pursue happiness, to pursue virtue, so that if you don't do that, you cease to have being at all. In the pure and simple sense of the term. Are. We cannot say that they are just like a cadaver is not a man.

41:36 Dylan: Is not performing the actions of a man.

41:38 Mark: Right. We could say a cadaver is a dead man.

41:41 Seth: Yeah.

41:41 Mark: Yep.

41:42 Seth: It's a beast.

41:43 Mark: Right. The unvirtuous do not even exist in an absolute sense. Quotes. They don't have the existence proper to their nature. They. Yeah, like you said, Seth, there he goes through the different animals that they're acting like instead.

41:56 Seth: I actually kind of like that part. Do you have it at hand? I want to read page 83. Because he says you don't exist because you're not adhering to your nature as you know, a rational being that seeks the good and that you're no better than a beast. Because would we say, for example, that beasts know the good but don't have the means to achieve it. And he says, you will say that the man who is driven by avarice to seize what belongs to others is like a wolf. The restless, angry man who spends his life in quarrels you will compare to a dog. The treacherous conspirator who steals by fraud may be likened to a fox.

The man who is ruled by intemperate anger is thought to have the soul of a lion. The fearful and timid man who trembles without reason is like a deer. The lazy, stupid fellow is like an ass. The volatile, inconstant man who continually changes directions is like a bird. The man who has sunk in foul lust is trapped in the pleasures of a filthy sow. In this way, anyone who abandons virtue ceases to be a man, since he cannot share in the divine nature and instead becomes a beast, which I think is probably not fair to those animals.

43:00 Mark: Well, yeah, and each of those animals has its own teleology and is perfect in itself. It's just that when you act like them, that's bad.

43:07 Seth: Well, when my dog starts talking to me about desiring fame so that he can get happy, I have to smack him. What are you talking about?

43:15 Wes: So yeah, this is straight out of Aristotle, right? So being virtuous, it's an energeia, being at work, being yourself. And in human beings it happens to be fulfilling this rational nature. So it's about actualization when you say. It's a very dramatic way to put it to say that they don't exist. But the idea is that they aren't fully actualized. Let's say they aren't. They've strayed very far from being what they are.

43:43 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, early on, page 80, he says where he begins to make the point that things that aren't acting according to their nature don't exist. He says, for just as you may call a cadaver a dead man, but you cannot call it simply a man. So I would concede that vicious men are evil, but I cannot say in an absolute sense that they exist. For a thing is which maintains its place in nature and acts in accord with its nature. Whenever it fails to do this loses the existence which is proper to its nature. But you may argue that evil men are capable of action. I will not deny it. But such capability is the product of weakness, not of strength. So it is a kind of weird move which I'm not sure that's. I see why there's something sort of born out of Aristotle in it. But it seems to go a step too far in denying the existence in things that don't act according to its nature.

44:46 Mark: Isn't this just Augustinian? So page 72, the end of book three, he has this whole argument, I think that's straight from Augustine, that evil is nothing. Right. We say God can do everything. Right. You've agreed to that already. You've agreed God is the over all powerful font of everything. But yet God cannot do evil, since he can do all things. Evil just can't be a thing at all. And so I think this is what Wes was describing as a dramatic way of saying that an unvirtuous person does not exist. That's actually supposed to be follow from this general, that evil cannot exist. There is no evil in nature. So we're going to have to be committed in book four and book five to explain why apparent evil actually is not evil.

45:33 Wes: Yeah, but he's putting that together with the Aristotelian notion. So the eye, for instance, when it's taken out of the body and it's not functioning as an eye, is an eye and name only. It's that sort of idea. And really it's that there are gradations of actuality, let's say, if you don't want to say being. But the more something is functioning as what it is, the more it is what it is. And so, yes, I see it as a dramatic way to say they don't exist, but I think Aristotle would say they're failing to function as what they are. And so they. In some sense, yes, they have less being, they have less energeia, they have less actuality is really the way it's often translated.

46:13 Dylan: Yeah, and it's that flip that seems to be a mistake. Right. So that saying that it isn't fully actualized, what that means is that it really isn't. And it's the same kind of, you know, in not being perfect, then it no longer is anything.

46:30 Wes: Well, he says in an absolute sense. I mean, obviously he knows they exist in some sense.

46:36 Mark: Yes, but I want there to be a Bertrand Russell who was a Christian, who gives a reinterpretation of all statements about evil in terms of quantifiers that then shows that you don't actually need evil in your ontology. There is some such a thing for all such things. If they are. I can't do it. I can't be that Russell right now.

46:58 Wes: Reduction by way of definite description is that the.

47:01 Mark: Exactly. But he can't do that. It's too far back in history.

47:05 Wes: Evil just means there exists an X such that X is. X is what? X is not X. I don't know.

47:15 Mark: X is not good.

47:16 Seth: Yeah, you guys don't want me to open up my notebook of all the formalizations I did of Boethius proofs. Oh God, you don't want to see my symbolic logic. My pages and pages.

47:26 Wes: You should put it on. Put it on the blog.

47:31 Mark: Then it would be actual. I believe that they don't exist and that they are evil. So doing evil can't be something. A power that people desire, because happiness contains all the objects of desire. Unified. There you go. So then we get. We're finally back to the part that was supposed to provide. Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, really they don't, because the aim of an action is its own reward. All things that aim at happiness, which is virtue. We've already shown that absolute Good is the common human prize. This is always achieved by good men, but not by anyone who lacks virtue.

So there you go. And likewise, wickedness is the punishment of the wicked. Being infected by vice is itself a huge evil. So it doesn't matter if you look like you're succeeding and even goes even so far that if you are being bad and you are punished, that's actually good. Right? Being punished is a corrective of your evil. So if you actually get away with the evil and are never punished, then that's the worst thing, because not only are you have an evil desire, but you're able to put it into effect. And so that's really evil. It's really just terrible to become president and get through eight years even though you're evil and never get indicted for anything.

It'd be much better to have some goodness, some good punishment mixed in.

48:57 Seth: Yeah, this. I mean, this is where there are some really interesting stuff in the last book or two, but this is definitely where I see Dylan's ire getting up. And I agree this is prose 6. What appears unjust is towards the good. And talks about providence versus fate. Providence is in the divine mind and fate is what you see acting out in time. This is going to come up later, this distinction. Nothing is done for the sake of evil. It's all done in error. And by the way, are you such a good judge that you could tell how do you know that a person is good or evil, or that you don't have the perspective that God has?

But then there's on page 94, this is where I felt like this is like one of those stretch defenses that you get. God in his wise dispensation, spares the man whom adversity might ruin, so that he may not suffer, who cannot stand suffering. And there's this whole paragraph where it's like, well, if you're Paris Hilton and you suffer a cold and that's the worst thing that happens to you, you know, that's because you couldn't stand it. You just don't have the constitution. God only visits suffering that people can bear only enough. And I hear this.

That's something you hear a lot, like in the popular vernacular, right? This idea that God doesn't give you anything that you can't handle and that it's a sort of a test of your resolve and your ability is something that persists to this day. And that I guess comes from some form, some piece of Christianity. But it certainly doesn't come out of this philosophical tradition. This is the piece that this is the one that hurts me the most.

50:40 Dylan: Did you read the end of that paragraph on the top of page 95?

50:44 Seth: Go ahead.

50:45 Dylan: Some have earned worldly fame at the price of glorious death. Others, by not breaking under torture, have proved to the world that virtue cannot be conquered by evil. No one can doubt that such trials are good and just and beneficial to those who suffer them.

50:59 Mark: Yeah, well, look on the bright side of your torture. You showed them.

51:04 Seth: You can't doubt it, Mark.

51:07 Mark: I can't.

51:08 Seth: It's right there in writing.

51:10 Mark: It seems like I'm doubting it. But that would be evil. And evil doesn't exist, so I can't.

51:15 Wes: Well, evil exists. It's just, I mean, yeah, evil doesn't exist on his scheme.

51:20 Mark: It has no essence. It is merely a lack, it's merely stunted.

51:25 Wes: Like if you take seriously virtue ethics and you say happiness is virtue and the only thing that's really good and bad is being virtuous or not being virtuous and all those externalities aren't really relevant, if you go that far, the stoic route, you know, then it leads to a lot of these conclusions like, and this is sort of the sort of thing Plato said as well, right? That if you are vicious or unjust, then you're unhappy. For me, I sort of agnostic on this issue. Like are really like wicked people, is it possible for them to be happy? And then I guess really that question comes down to the more basic question is do we really want to define happiness in this way?

Do we just reject the idea that it's virtue or do we say, well actually happiness to a large extent is wealth and power and pleasure and all these things. And I say this seriously like I am agnostic, you know, I think if you do take the virtue ethics picture seriously though, there's a lot to be said for the argument that viciousness is its own punishment and virtue its own reward? Something like that.

52:30 Dylan: I think that part of what happens in this is that while I can buy that the vicious person is unhappy, it's not the same thing as saying that the person who is undergoing the worst sort of misfortune is actually the most happy by definition. This idea that turning the screws makes you more virtuous or only focuses your virtue, it seems to have this fallacy of taking the opposite side of the coin. That while it may be true that the vicious person is unhappy, yeah, I

53:05 Wes: think it's pretty clear that suffering doesn't necessarily make people more virtuous. Let's just take that Kind of idea.

53:11 Seth: It's a horrible idea.

53:12 Wes: On the other hand, you might advance another more textured argument to the effect that even though there's not in general more suffering doesn't lead to more virtue, you're able to attain higher levels of virtue by virtue of suffering. In other words, if I have never suffered, then there's a lot of virtue skills that I simply don't have the opportunity to exercise.

53:34 Mark: It makes you more interesting. If you've suffered, you're just a deeper person. That's Nietzsche.

53:40 Wes: I mean, it's not that. It's just that suffering is an opportunity for you to use that virtue muscle.

53:46 Dylan: There's certainly an extent to which adversity builds character. It's absolutely true. Just like any kind of training.

53:52 Seth: Right.

53:52 Dylan: You don't get stronger in the physical way unless you are competing against some kind of resistance.

53:58 Wes: Exactly.

53:58 Dylan: And it's true, by analogy, for things like virtues and the character of your soul, the extension to simple suffering as being the generator of virtue is just not true. It may be true that virtue grows in a cauldron that has some adversity to it because of the ability to exercise it. But just like having a building dropped on you does not make you stronger, but just crushes your body and destroys you, mere suffering is not going to, in its extreme, is not going to improve your soul. And that's the problem with the argument, is that when it's not textured like that. So you can read it as saying, yes, there's a certain amount of adversity that builds your character. But the part that I find myself reacting to is the explicit invocation of the more extreme forms of it, which involve a kind of, I will purge you.

55:03 Wes: I don't take it as seriously. So when she's talking about providence as a personification, she gives trouble to some whom too much luxury might spoil. Yes, that's bogus on the face of it, that kind of providence at work, and it doesn't even fit well with the rest of the philosophical picture, but it just doesn't bother me that much. And the grain of truth, there again is the training metaphor that Dylan, that you used.

55:28 Dylan: So the reason why that it bothers me is that even though I recognize the grain of truth, there is the fact that that logic has been explicitly used as a political and institutional weapon against people.

55:44 Wes: Say more about that.

55:45 Dylan: Just the inquisition by itself, purification by pain, the idea that thousands of women who are accused of being, and men too, of being witches who the very way in which they're going to show that they're not witches is by managing to not drown and that we're going to bring out the good in your soul by invoking suffering on you so that you can be saved by God. That whole rationale for things like the Inquisition that destroyed tens of thousands of people in lives and was the rationale behind all kinds of horrible things, and that's just an extreme of it. That's what gets me going about the explicit political implications that come out of it that aren't a fantasy, that really were used and really were part of what was going on.

56:37 Mark: Can I just come at this from the other direction, which is, Wes, you had raised Lacan earlier, and I was thinking of Rorty's characterization of Lacan in the book that we just read about it, which is that desire is insatiable. That desire is in some way internally incoherent. It always wants something that cannot actually happen. So that was kind of my Lacanian moment in reading just about this whole. What we desire is the perfect happiness, and that somehow this is achievable through Stoic means, through virtue, something like that. That actually, no, that's not the way desire works.

That you would have to extinguish desire altogether a la the Buddhist or the unsympathetic Stoic, which is. This is something that Boethius specifically argues against. He says, wow. The Epicureans thought that the only reason the Stoics were wrong is because they didn't sort of recognize this positive perfection that you could actually attain. I guess that's the chink in this for me. I think I agree that that's not the way desire or happiness actually works.

57:42 Wes: So I think the way desire works is that I agree with Nietzsche, it's not just pleasure that we want. There's always this other thing, which for Nietzsche is powerful. But you could call it this sense of integrity or this ultimate completeness as a person which takes you out of any sort of insecurity or danger. But power is the right word, and it's the right word for Lacan as well. Right. The whole mirror stage idea is that you're really just an assemblage of parts and you fantasize a unity which isn't there. And for Lacan, you do that by looking in the mirror and seeing this bodily unity and attributing to yourself a psychical unity that isn't really there based upon that.

But then in our relationship to things, the sort of mirror thing we are using them, you could think about Hegelian recognition here. As well. Our relationship to objects in the world isn't simply this one way. I desire something and that's it. It's also the relationship of identification is very important. The sense in which it confers on me some sort of power of recognition by being a signifier of what others would give me in terms of recognition. So all of this comes back to this Aristotelian idea of actualization. It's about the surplus layer of desire that we can't actually fulfill is this actualizing thing.

I want pleasure, but I also want something over and above that. I want that actualization. And actualization doesn't come from power and fame and wealth and all that it comes from. For Lacan, it doesn't come at all. Or as an existentialist, you just have to abandon that. Or at Lacanian, you have to abandon that project. For an Aristotelian or a Stoic, you go all in and you say, no, it's possible, even though you might say, oh well, only the sage has it. So in a sense you really are saying it's impossible in the complete sense. But you paint this picture where it is possible to be completely happy by being completely virtuous.

So that's the interesting linkage between these points of view.

59:43 Mark: Or maybe the compromise position would be to say it is possible to attain this. But that's not because you are adhering to a pre established providence, right? That Boethius explicitly says it's these false views of the self, that that's a matter of forgetting the self, that fundamentally the true self is a unity, it is happiness, fulfillment. So it's something that we should even remember from before our birthday. And achieving the self would then be recovering that well. So get rid of that silly picture of predestination and think that there really is a self that is achievable, but it would be a positive creation. It would not be a recollection or adhering to the preordained divine plan.

1:00:28 Wes: Yeah. So for Nietzsche, right? It could be being what you are, you know, it could be something specifically tailored to your character instead of trying to fulfill all the Aristotelian virtues, you know, the virtues are person specific and they depend on how you've been constituted really as a person previously.

1:00:46 Mark: So we did not talk about book five and I will happily refer folks to the History Philosophy without any gaps podcast episode 119 where they talk about Boethius solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge. I know, that's the most famous part of the book. I Just could not care less about it. At least not today.

1:01:04 Wes: I agree.

1:01:05 Seth: Oh, man. All right.

1:01:08 Mark: Did you have a comment on it, Seth, before we wrap up, did you want to sum it up or at least make some commentary?

1:01:15 Seth: Well, he has to reconcile God's foreknowledge and the fact that there's no change because God determines the world absolutely with free will for human beings, and he has a way of doing that. If they do it in the history of philosophy without any gaps podcast, then I'd say go ahead and listen to it, but I thought it was fun to read. It was interesting. Anyway.

1:01:36 Mark: How do we reconcile God's foreskin with the practice of circumcision?

1:01:41 Dylan: I kept that in my brain.

1:01:44 Wes: That occurred to me as well.

1:01:45 Dylan: I just didn't let it escape.

1:01:51 Mark: Great minds think alike, but speak differently.

1:01:57 Seth: You just erred. You errored Mark in your way of understanding how to be good, whereas Wes and Dylan and I, we actually had the power to make sure that our will was executed, which was. We kept our mouth shut on the foreskin pun.

1:02:12 Mark: You were strong. Yes, I am pretty tired, so. Yeah. Thanks, guys. This was pretty fun. And it'll be even more fun next time talking about Confucius. And nowhere will we say Confucius. Say nowhere. Nowhere in that whole episode will that. That's the first thing somebody said when I announced the topic in a Facebook post is how we should make the most of that. We should really display our.

1:02:41 Seth: Where does that even come from?

1:02:42 Mark: Awful Western? What, Charlie Chan, Some crap like that. Some 19.

1:02:48 Seth: Some Bugs Bunny cartoon or something like that.

1:02:51 Wes: Wasn't it some commercial or something?

1:02:55 Mark: Confucius. Look it up for next time. So that is the only context we'll discuss that in next time. Is the origin of that meme nice? Yes. We're reading the Analects, the whole thing in Chinese. The Chinese characters are in the book that we are reading. Are we reading the Chinese characters? Well, our eye will glance over them as it moves quickly to the English. Maybe the 15th time that you see this character for Tien Heaven, then you will recognize that I learned at least two characters. Not that I could actually write them down, but I can recognize them in context when they're right next to the sounded out version.

All right, thank you everybody, for your support, for your love. Please check out our Facebook group. Please check out the blog partiallyexaminedlife.com please check out our Twitter feed. Tell us whether you agree with these things. If you disagree, tell us what's on your mind. Tell us your secret desires and we'll see if they match up to True Happiness. Our closing song will be Carrie Akre's Last the Evening from the 2007 album of that name. Carrie was a major figure in the 90s Seattle grunge scene with her band Hammerbox and then. Goodness.

I picked this because it seemed the kind of thing that Boethius might have been singing it to himself or the Muses singing to him through himself before Lady Philosophy shows up. Anyway, I hope you will go to nakedlyexaminedmusic.com and listen to my interview with Carrie from nakedly examined music, episode 17. All right, good night everybody.

1:04:29 Seth: Good night.

1:04:29 Dylan: Good night.

1:04:30 Wes: Good night.

1:04:56 Unknown speaker: Empty faces I've seen them all in these certain places and from the corner I want them all as they dance and move But I won't last thee here alone Cause my heart is telling me it's time to come home so many nights I I have been here singing my song through tears and laughter for a while it was really good but that time has passed and I've understood that I won't last Leave me here alone Cuz my heart one is telling me it's time to come home so baby freak out come on reach on out someone save my soul Cuz if I stay here too much longer Going to drown nobody will know so baby reach out Going freak on out someone save myself Cuz if I stay here too much longer I'm going to drown and nobody will know.

For all the love I meant to save it went wasted upon a sadden game and trembling now upon my knees I pray inside Someone will see that I won't let lasting here alone Cuz my heart is telling me it's time to come home so let it break out come on reach on out Someone save my soul here too much longer I'm going to drown in the battle now yeah baby freak out going reach on out if someone sa my soul Cuz I'm staying here too much longer I want to drown and my body want to hell Baby freak out no someone save myself Cause I stay in here if I stay in here I'm gonna drown in the body.