Ep. 247: Aristotle on Rhetoric and Emotions (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: Can we just sum up again, the main tools by which he analyzes reasoning here? So syllogisms are what he's concerned with throughout his logical works. Right? These logical forms, all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. We're saying an enthymeme is a particular kind within that. And then we're also talking about inductions, which seem like a different kind of reason reasoning altogether.

0:26 Wes: Well, an enthymeme is a syllogism in which one of the premises have been left out. But this other stuff is talking about how premises are formed essentially from signs, from examples. And a lot of it just refers to basic causal reasoning, observation about the world and the assumption that some things

0:43 Dylan: are causally related, it's all in the realm of likelihoods, right? So ways in which you talk about things likely being the case, and that's part of what makes it persuasive. This is one of the things that's most interesting about the whole discussion is it's very plainly about the way in which we look at the world and find ourselves convinced by things even in our own thinking. I mean, even though this is focused on the way in which our speech is persuasive to one another, and very explicitly is about law, courts and talking to one another and stuff like that, it clearly has just direct relationship to the way in which we go about even convincing ourselves speaking to ourselves about the world.

1:22 Mark: So do we have a quote for what we want to say and remainder about syllogisms somewhere to start in the book?

1:28 Wes: You know, I think the main point, just to sum up, is that enthymemes are not just leaving out premises as we've given numerous examples of, but they are arguing often from likelihoods by way of signs or examples rather than necessary inferences. So that the kind of conclusions we're ending up with are really conclusions about what's more likely than not, not about what's demonstrably true. And this is the kind of reasoning which is going to be common in public discourse, right? Because we are talking about human concerns and about what's ethical and about what's just. And a lot of that is not going to be clearly demonstrable in the way that, say, you know, the Pythagorean theorem is demonstrable. It just doesn't allow for the same level of precision and certainty.

2:16 Mark: I also found it interesting, the end of chapter 21, where he's talking about the types of maxims. In other words, do you have to give the whole enthymeme or not that something could not just even have one premise left out, you know, assumed, but could have all of them left out? You know, that if you build in. I think this is what we're looking at in some of the examples before, where you, you know, if you phrase something where you say laziness or so you know, if you use a pejorative term, then you're kind of building in another assumption that the thing you're describing is bad and that.

So you could even do that. He says the four types of maxims where the addendum is already known and not needed. In other words, the reason or lacking because it's self evident as soon as it's stated or you have the reason and you state it fully, or you have it somehow incorporated into the maxim itself that it really becomes an art in how concise you can make this. And he says you could even make it kind of a riddle if you think everybody's going to get it right.

3:12 Wes: If you're.

3:13 Mark: If you're relying enough on old chestnuts that like, oh, okay, I see where they're going with that. I don't need you to spell out any of the reasons. I will see this as an argument in itself. I feel like people use that. Somebody used that recently, the. Was it a Winston Churchill quote, that if you're not liberal when you're young, you have no heart, but if you're not conservative when you're old, you have no brain. And just putting that out like that was an argument, whereas there's so much left out of that. Yeah, but I hadn't thought that you could unpack that and say, that's an enthymeme.

3:44 Wes: So the idea is, you know, some of the premises are just one is observational. People who are older tend to be more conservative. And you might think people are older, tend to be wiser, therefore, to be, you know, stuff like that.

3:55 Mark: But I'm used to seeing things like that is like, that's not an argument, but it is an argument. It's just a very compact, sloppy argument. You know, an argument that relies on the audience sharing certain common assumptions. So that's not going to be convincing to anybody who's a liberal.

4:10 Wes: And often we can see the grain of truth in it. It's just that things are more complicated than that.

4:16 Dylan: You just have to understand that an argument isn't necessarily something that is locked down. Right. It is an argument. It's just you have the question of whether it's how persuasive and how clear and how underpinned that argument is.

4:29 Wes: I mean, do we want to cover anything in chapter 24 about fallacious enthymemes? And because he does go into that. Right. The way in which they can be deceptive and wrong.

4:40 Mark: Oh, I said 18 through 22 in my intro, and that's what I studied. So if you want to say. If you want to say 24, I'm fine, but I don't remember it.

4:49 Wes: So, for instance, some of them are just arguments by analogy, and a lot of them are really funny. One of the examples is part whole inferences. So everyone knows the meaning of any given word because we know what all the letters are. So you reach this fallacious conclusion that people necessarily know what words mean just because they know what the component letters are in every case. So it's a false inference. But you can see how those sorts of parts. Whole inferences, that one's kind of absurd, but how that would and does happen in everyday sorts of reasoning. So he gives lots of different examples like that. And again, public discourse is rife with this type of stuff, especially Twitter. So lots of pitfalls to this type of reasoning.

5:34 Mark: So should we move to emotions or is there anything else people want to pull out? The whole reason I wanted to read this book is because in the Martha Nussbaum Therapy of Desire book that we're reading to accompany our Epicurus episode, there's a chapter on this. And I was very curious when I actually looked back a little at that chapter that she wrote. It kind of makes the same points about emotions that we already made in our interview with her. In our. Pretty much every time we've dealt with emotions, we've made it clear that emotions are not just irrational feelings.

It's like nausea, like they. No, they're judgments. I'm mad at you because I have a perceived slight or something like that. So we've talked about it with Spinoza and with. With Sartre, with several other thinkers that I think they all probably are. This Aristotle text is where this all stems from. It's so funny that it goes all the way back here, but yet it's still something that is, I don't think the dominant. Like it needs to be argued against today that people think like, oh, you know, there's the rational, logical side and then there's the emotional side.

And those are so different that. No, no, emotions involve judgments. They are to that extent species of rationality. But once you get past that insight, there's a lot of detail here, and I don't know that a lot of it stuck with me or that I found it very insightful.

6:49 Wes: You know, I guess if we're starting book two, chapter one, we should just say that some of this is just very practical, right? It's about if you're trying to persuade an audience, you have to know something about the emotions, he says, because you have to be able to think about what sorts of emotional responses they're going to have to your speech, because that's going to have an effect on their judgments. It's not just the reasons, but what happens to them emotionally is going to affect their judgment and then the other part of it. So the enthymeme is the logos part of it.

And this emotion stuff is the pathos part of it. And then there's the ethos, which is the sort of person that the speaker appears to be, which is not to say what sort of external reputation they have or anything like that. That's not what's taken into account here, but just the sort of level of credibility. And, you know, I think he breaks this down into three things at some point, one of them being goodwill, judgment, virtue and goodwill. Judgment, virtue and goodwill. So when these things are conveyed, and again, it's not by something external, but by the speech itself, then it also makes what you're saying more persuasive.

So he reviews that in chapter one, and then in chapter two, he says, we need to know something about the emotions. So he jumps into an analysis of anger, which is something we discussed at length with Martha Nussbaum, who disagrees with his definition, by the way. I happen to think he's right. But this idea that anger is a response to being slighted or belittled. She didn't think the slighting was actually necessary, but I think Aristotle is actually right about this.

8:23 Mark: Should we just read the quote here? Chapter two. This is on page 190 of the Sachs. Let anger be understood as a desire already. That's interesting. Accompanied by pain for revenge, for a perceived belittling of oneself or anything of one's own when that belittling is not appropriate. There you go. Is it a desire for the pain to go away?

8:45 Wes: It's the desire for the pleasure of revenge.

8:48 Mark: Right. Whereas she says hate is not accompanied by pain. Later.

8:54 Seth: That's a fun little section.

8:55 Mark: But anger is accompanied by pain, but yet it has a pleasure of anticipated revenge.

9:01 Wes: Right.

9:02 Dylan: And anger is possible to cure because it's not associated with evil. Whereas hatred is impossible to cure, essentially because it's associated with evil.

9:12 Wes: So he gets into the three forms of belittling. I think this is the fundamental insight that's so important politically and ethically because a lot of violence and conflict stems from the ways in which. From people's feelings of humiliation and.

9:27 Dylan: Well, their anger is a result of that.

9:30 Wes: Yeah. And their desire for revenge and then their enactment of that vengeance. So, for instance, it's a very good predictor of. You know, I taken classes on the sociology of murder, and second degree murder often follows a humiliating instance, something that might seem extremely trivial. So I think that gets most at his idea of insolence. That's one of his three forms of belittling. Contempt, spitefulness, at insolence, where insolence involves doing something that's Essentially right. Am I right about that? Saying things that bring shame to the person who suffers them.

10:03 Mark: It is a very status oriented set of definitions here.

10:07 Wes: Exactly.

10:08 Mark: Which you're interpreting as how psychologically insightful that is. Whereas I feel like he lived in a society with slaves and with very clear status distinctions that maybe we don't have. And so maybe that's why this did not seem. Though I take your point.

10:25 Wes: Well, I think, you know, and as yet you've accused me of having this as an obsession and you're. I guess that's fair. But it's because of thinking about the role of status and narcissism and what psychologists would call this narcissistic injury. Think back to Hegel master slave dynamics and the role of recognition and status there. To our Fukuyama episode, to our Dr. Drew episode on Fonagy. The importance of mirroring the importance of status in psychological constitution. Status in Orwell, where it's supposed to be really a fundamental feature of nationalism and it's intimately related to will to power. Will to power and status are inextricably related. So yes, as a psychological principle, it seems to have a lot of explanatory power to me.

11:11 Mark: Sure. I'm just trying to think of how literally to take status here. That when you're talking about status in a psychological sense, it seems like a fairly flexible thing. You know, someone is better or worse than me, as opposed to a caste system.

11:23 Dylan: It's not that strict.

11:24 Mark: You don't think in Aristotle it's that strict?

11:27 Dylan: It's not that strict at all.

11:29 Wes: Well, think of the examples he gives. Right. So, Mark, I guess what you're getting is people believe they deserve to be shown great respect by those who are inferior to them in family and power and virtue and generally in any attribute in which they themselves have any great superiority. So I think this, you know, obviously it goes for hard and fast distinctions of class and status. All this hierarchical status stuff suffuses social relations as far as I'm concerned. Whether it's a boss employee relation in the office or more subtle class relations that we don't like to acknowledge in the United States. Also just assumptions about, you know, I'm better than you at something.

12:07 Dylan: He gives himself some more prosaic or, you know, less hierarchical examples. At the bottom of 192 and top of 193, he says people are angry when their feelings are hurt. Anyone feeling pain desires, something. So if anyone deals any sort of blow to his getting it, immediately, say to his drinking, if he is thirsty. And similarly, even if he does not, if he appears to do that same thing, or if anyone acts in opposition to him or does not act in support of him or bothers him in any way, when he is in this condition, he's angry with them all. That's why people who are sick, poor, in love, in thirst, and in general in the grip of unfulfilled desire are prone to anger and easily aroused, especially against those who belittle their present distress.

A sick person, for example, at those who belittle his illness, A needy person, at those who belittle his poverty, someone in a war at those who belittle the war, A lover at those who belittle love. And similarly with the rest. For each person has the way paved for his own anger by the passion that is already present. That's pretty broad.

13:08 Wes: One of the examples I'm thinking about with second degree murder, that always stuck with me, is a case in which a guy and his friend were hanging out one weekend and the guy took a french fry off his plate without asking and he shot him. The analysis of this turned out to have something to do with. And it turns out most murders happen on the weekend because people are really stressed out by the status and hierarchical implications of work. Right. It's not just the actual labor of the job, which is problematic, but power relations that go on and humiliating things that happen and then they expect to be free of that on the weekend.

This is the theory. So the idea is that that expectation makes people more sensitive to these slights and insults and they're more likely to fly off the handle. So it's not the french fry that the guy was angry about. Exactly. It's not, okay, I have one less french fry. And that enrages me, you know, I really need that french fry. It's a status injury thing where someone. And he felt belittled by that. He felt like he was not being given the proper respect and he was primed to explode after various other humiliations and that was the last straw, so to speak.

14:19 Mark: Well, that seems a good explanation of domestic violence as well. That like the sensible businessman who keeps himself proper all day long and then gets home and expects things to be free of that dynamic and is not gonna take any guff and is gonna fly off the handle.

14:36 Wes: Yeah, Wants to be respected, wants to be treated as a superior because they've been an inferior most of the day.

14:44 Mark: So if someone is poor and you mock them in their poverty, that that's going to make them especially angry, like maybe that just seems a foreign thing

14:52 Dylan: to mock somebody for being poor.

14:54 Seth: It's certainly not foreign to him to mock somebody.

14:57 Wes: Instead of thinking about poverty, think about your personal shortcomings. And if someone really knows how to. If you've been in a fight with someone, they really know how to hurt your feelings. They really know how to get at something. One of your personal flaws, I think that's the insight it's inevitably going to be enraging, especially the things that you

15:14 Dylan: feel most insecure about.

15:16 Wes: Yeah, he even says that.

15:17 Dylan: Right.

15:18 Wes: So if someone calls you dumb, oh, you're an idiot and you're relatively self confident about your intelligence, it's unlikely to be a status injury.

15:26 Seth: It also depends whether the belittling is done publicly or has with it the ramifications of having other people. In other words, you can be embarrassed and you can be shamed. To be embarrassed in front of people is significantly worse than just having somebody one on one point out your foibles and kind of needle you. You can. That can get under your skin. But it's very different when it's done publicly.

15:51 Dylan: It just ups the temperature.

15:52 Seth: Right? Big time.

15:53 Wes: I don't know, Mark, are you still skeptical about this or are you?

15:55 Mark: I would have to re. Listen to our discussion with Nussbaum to see whether I think this is nice. Necessary for anger. I think that from what I recall, her point was this is an understandable way that people could get angry. But is this what just anger is as a definition of anger, or is this a definition of some Greek word that doesn't quite match anger and maybe has the status injury part built into it? I'm not really sure.

16:19 Wes: I think the word here is actually Thomas.

16:22 Mark: Yes. Okay, well, that sounds like from our discussions about thumos in the past, that has the status injury part built into it.

16:28 Wes: It's actually the modern Greek where I found this out because I recently hired someone from Greece for a job and I got into, of course I got into the, oh, hey, I've studied some ancient Greek. And then we were comparing words and she's like, oh, there's some similarities. And since anger is the first word of the Iliad, I'm like, so what's the word for anger? And is it menin? And no, it's thumos. Or it sounded something like thumos, which she said, if I were to try

16:54 Dylan: to think about other things that I think are anger, that don't seem necessarily to be belitting, those are ones that I'd want to try to Maybe explain to see if this was not quite right. So if I think about the one that leaps to mind are cases where I get angry, but there doesn't seem to be a person involved. The best it could be is that it's belittling by analogy. Like I get so angry I want to throw my computer through the window.

17:18 Mark: Just frustration. Yeah. Far more often I get actually angry that way than at a person.

17:24 Wes: But the question is whether frustration is reducible to status injury, which I happen to think that it is. It's like when Xerxes has the sea whipped because he can't cross it.

17:36 Dylan: I tend to agree with you on that. That what I'm feeling is I'm feeling mocked by my computer.

17:41 Wes: Exactly.

17:42 Dylan: And that is what, Even though I'm anthropomorphizing it. Yeah, that's exactly the kind of riled up that I get.

17:49 Mark: Or getting angry at God.

17:50 Seth: The example, Dylan, that you put me in mind of was yesterday. I had just put sky down to bed and I was out on the porch with Shannon and we were talking to some friends and the dog started barking and I just immediately went blood red with rage about the dogs potentially waking up Sky. Because the worst don't wake the baby. That's the worst thing. I think I might have called my dog a fucking asshole.

18:18 Wes: Yes.

18:19 Seth: No, I, I, I frequently say I'm going to murder you to my do. But let me get back to the text for a second, if I could. Mark, maybe we can. We don't want to get hung up on whether this is a definition of anger. I think we've treated that in another but page 192 in the Sachs. It's 1 1379A. So it's already clear from these things what the condition is of the people who themselves are angry, as well as who it is they are angry at and for what reasons. For they themselves are angry when their feelings are hurt. Anyone feeling pain desires something.

So if anyone deals any sort of blow to his getting it immediately, say to his drinking, if he is thirsty, or if anyone acts in opposition to him or does not act in support of him or bothers him in any other way, when he is in this condition, he is angry with them. All this is what people who are sick, poor in love and thirst and in general in the grip of unfulfilled desire are prone to anger and easily aroused, especially against those who belittle their present distress. So it's maybe not just the belittlement, but it's the opposition or the Obstruction of the satisfaction of desire that causes anger.

Which explains Dylan's example. Right. So if the computer didn't freeze or printed properly or whatever it is, that's frustrating that Dylan wants to. His desire is unsatisfied, and the computer is an obstruction to that. It's not mocking him, although that's the way he characterizes it after the fact, or maybe even in the moment. But the reality is it's an obstruction to his desire.

19:54 Wes: These are the big questions, whether. And I have this argument with a psychoanalyst all the time who thinks that, yeah, frustration is enough for anger.

20:03 Mark: Right.

20:03 Wes: And you even see it in babies, right, where they seem to be enraged when they're frustrated and crying. And we wouldn't think of them developmentally as being at the level where they could feel slighted. So that's one counterexample. And I think the one that Nussbaum is thinking about is injustice, the anger you would feel at seeing injustices done. And so the question is whether those could be fit into Aristotle's paradigm of belittlement or status injury, or however you want to put it. And I think that's actually a very complicated question, but I'm inclined to sympathize

20:36 Mark: with Aristotle, Seth's example about getting mad at the dogs. I think it's clear that you're not actually mad at the dogs, that you're, by analogy, extending it to the dogs. You're mad at the situation you're frustrating, but you're smart enough to realize that you're not actually going to kick the dog because of this, even though the dog is the thing that's causing the frustration, and the dog is something that will respond in the way a human will to anger. So, like, it would make complete sense to actually be mad at the dogs and for frustration to be something derived from that.

But I'm positing that maybe more often than not, with this idea of obstacles, that maybe the frustration is the central thing and that we apply it outwards sort of as an afterthought. I'm also thinking, like, athletic competitions. I'm so frustrated. I'm on my basketball team, and they're just providing a really solid defense, and we just can't get through. And I'm so angry about it. And so. But am I really angry at them? Like, that's what they're there to do. That's what, you know, they're actually showing me respect by competing against me. If they were just like, ugh, I don't even have to try.

I'M going to just show off. Like that's what would really piss me off at them for disrespecting me. But to be just angry at them because they're playing too well, what you

21:50 Wes: can say rationally about this is different than what you actually feel. And of course, if you watch people play basketball or if you've ever played it and gotten angry while you're playing it, there's plenty of opportunity to feel disrespected. Just because you can always interpret resistance as a form of. And frustration as forms of disrespect, even if they aren't.

22:12 Mark: But you don't think that's fundamentally different than when they're merely being good and you're frustrated by that and so you're angry at them or they're actively mocking you and trash talking you and riling you up in a very direct way.

22:23 Wes: Just being good can seem like a form of mockery. It's not rational. But yeah, what you can say to yourself rationally about these things is much different than just how it feels when Xerxes whips the sea. It's not just a crazy person. It's someone who's acting on a fundamental psychological dynamic that's there, even though we're not as likely to act on it.

22:42 Dylan: This is where it goes down. Your will to power, Right. It's not just thwarting your desires, thwarting your will to power.

22:48 Wes: Right, exactly.

22:50 Dylan: And that is what is making you angry. And that's why it's also interesting to align it with Thumos. Your Thumos is being thwarted.

22:58 Wes: Yeah, that's a good way to think about this. Is it, you know, if we thought about the tripartite model of the soul, is it Eros? Is this fundamentally about Eros or is it fundamentally about thumos?

23:07 Dylan: And I guess part of that when you we say, well, are you really being belittled? Well, I think it's probably the case that what comes along with that is that you not being on top, not being the most powerful one, which is what's going on when you're losing and you think that you ought to be winning. And that rational part where of understanding, well, this is the competition between and may the better competitor win kind of thing, that's an attitude of sophisticated sportsmanship you have to cultivate and it's a good thing to cultivate it.

23:40 Seth: But now we're circling back to where Mark didn't earlier buy into the notion of status and honor and all this. And it seems like we're circling back to that, where it's like, well, I have some belief about the type of status I should be accorded, the type of honors or recognition or whatever or rights that I have to express myself in the world, and that I believe that I have a certain set of projects that I should be able to accomplish. And when those are frustrated, it feels like we're just coming back to validate the earlier Aristotelian stuff about status in society that we were questioning or that Mark was questioning.

24:16 Dylan: At least I think you're right, Seth. I think both Wes and I are relatively aligned, that we think that it's a pretty accurate interpretation of anger that Aristotle presents. And we've sort of been going through. It comes down to whether or not these other examples that seem to be associated with anger really fall into this question of sort of status and will to power or not.

24:40 Wes: We should talk about the practical implications of this right, which amounts to like a one line throwaway at the end of the chapter two. It's like, yeah, you should think about what's going to make people prone to anger so that you can present your opponents as guilty of those things which cause people to get angry and as being the sort of people they get angry at. So this becomes a manipulative rhetorical tool.

25:02 Dylan: Why do we need to understand emotions? It's exactly that. It's anger and other emotions. You need to understand your audience and how your audience reacts to things so that you can know how to use that in order to persuade them of things.

25:17 Wes: And I think what Nussbaum was getting at is anger can be at injustice. And I would try to reduce this to status stuff, but she doesn't think that's the case. And the idea is that we shouldn't therapeutically just work on ridding ourselves of anger because it's appropriate to be angry at injustice. And then if you think about the rhetorical application here, one might say, yeah, it's perfectly okay to whip up people into outrage if the object of that outrage is injustice, because that outrage is motivating and it will lead to reforms that will help solve the problems of injustice. That's a really difficult and important ethical question when it comes to rhetoric and public discourse.

26:01 Dylan: The reverse is true as well, is that displays of anger can be formulated as a persuasive way to show that one is a victim of injustice. This is the way in which. What was the latest Supreme Court justice hearing with Kavanaugh. Yeah, Kavanaugh, right. So he used this technique of displaying very, very vocally how angry he was as a way to emphasize the character of injustice that he felt he was being subjected to. And in fact, he was encouraged to do so explicitly. Show them that you're angry is a way to be persuasive about the fact that he was a victim of injustice.

26:49 Mark: Which is different than what Aristotle's talking about because he's talking about manipulating the audience, not necessarily showing that you, the speaker, are enraged. I don't think Aristotle says that anywhere. You might want to act enraged to get them enraged or to demonstrate, you know. But it certainly fits in with the. The model here.

27:07 Dylan: This is a pretty logical conclusion that you're speaking to your audience and to be more persuasive about the fact that you have been subject to injustice.

27:15 Mark: I'm trying to think about how this works with regard to the notion of privilege, that I think people use this thumatic attack to say, if you have privilege, then you have a certain expectation. You're easy to anger because you have such high expectations. Whereas if you are used to being beaten down all the time, then you're just like, I'm just gonna roll with it. I'm just gonna. You know, this is what I expect. Isn't it horrible that some people have such high expectations because they've been so coddled? On the other hand, if you think, like about Nietzsche, talking about sort of who the privilege would be, the strong, these are the ones who would slough off, would find it.

And I think Aristotle says something to this. If somebody is so far beneath you, criticizing you, then you might just. Their opinions doesn't even matter. They're so worthless that I can show contempt for them. So, like, that's what privilege is. Privilege is. Is not that you'll be so ready to anger because you're expecting so much, but that you will just be able to blow things off because you are elevated above it.

28:13 Wes: This is the interesting thing, because being defeated and overpowered can be a belittling thing. Nietzsche famously talks about the pathos of distance and how political superiority already always resolves itself into psychological superiority. That's a maxim that I've repeated many times on the show. But the extent that people who have power think of themselves as morally superior in some sense, but then on some primitive level, contests of any sort, they're like trials by. What are they called? Ordeal. Right. Contests can be significations of one's worth.

So if you are in that position of power and you are defeated by someone you think is an inferior, then that can be a humiliating experience that leads to anger. It can be a signifier. It can be evidence, let's say that your sense of moral superiority or your sense of essential superiority was not all it was cracked up to be. So there's this interesting dynamic that goes on between worldly power and moral superiority. These two things are, I think, taken again, at an irrational psychological level to be related to each other. And this is one of the engines, I think, of political conflict.

29:36 Mark: We might want to just mention again this distinction between anger and hate. Anger is again, something that supposedly can be expiated, that it is hostility for a perceived slight. But then if you see something that the person who made you angry either apologizes or suffers some terrible thing himself, you know, worse than what you would have inflicted on them, then you're not angry anymore, according to this. But I think a lot of maybe what we would interpret as anger, you know, anger against people on the other side of the political spectrum or something like that may actually be hatred.

That nothing is going to make you feel better about it. Like if they're cast low, you're going to ha, ha, ha, you're gonna revel in that, and you're still gonna hate them. Maybe it's that in that case you have anger and hatred. Says the former, the angry person wants the person he's angry at to suffer in return, while the latter, the hater, wants the person he hates not to exist.

30:28 Wes: Where are you reading page 200?

30:30 Mark: Right at the end of chapter four.

30:32 Seth: Yeah, it's very interesting. He says also that there's no pain. Anger has pain because anger has desire. It's almost. Hatred is desireless. It's just pure. And that's why it can't be expiated, because you can't satisfy that desire, or you can't persuade them that the desire can't be fulfilled or shouldn't be fulfilled. And you also can't satisfy it.

30:51 Wes: Interesting.

30:52 Dylan: Anger comes from things done against oneself. But hostility arises even without anything directed at oneself. For when we take the notion that someone is a certain kind of person, we hate them. And anger is always directed at particular people, such as Callias or Socrates. But hatred also applies to classes of people. For everyone hates a thief or an informer, and anger is curable by time. While hatred is incurable. The former is a desire for pain, the latter for evil. For someone who is angry wants to see the other person suffer. But in the other case, that makes no difference. And while all painful things are observable, the greatest evils are the least observable, namely injustice. And bad judgment.

31:33 Mark: So misos is the Greek word for hate here I'm trying to determine if there's also some difference. Like, I see clearly a difference between thumos and anger, the way we use it. But I don't know enough about misos to say whether that actually is what we would say hate is.

31:51 Seth: Well, in the context of this discussion, what all you need to know is that whatever that word translates to, you're not going to persuade those people of anything. People who hate. The class of people who hate, don't

32:04 Wes: hate on the people who hate.

32:06 Mark: Angry at the people that hate. I don't hate them.

32:09 Seth: Well, you know, it's funny, I often say that. Like people say, are you. My wife says, are you angry? She's very tuned in. And I'm, you know, I'm very stoic. Are you angry? And I'll say, no, I'm frustrated. So maybe we can say to people, don't hate, don't hate, be angry.

32:25 Wes: It's a more mature state, I think,

32:27 Dylan: because it made me think of Socrates and why sometimes you. Often you read a Platonic dialogue and you find yourself enraged at Socrates at the end of chapter two. This also bears on this question of what the scope of anger is and whether it includes justice or feelings of justice or injustice. For Aristotle, he says people still get more angry at those who belittle them if they do so in the presence of five sorts of people. People they feel rivalry with, people they admire, people with whom they want to be admired, and either people around whom they feel shame, or any of those who feel shame around them.

They also get angry at those who belittle people of a sort that it would be shameful for them not to defend, such as parents, children, wives, and those they rule. Also those who do not give them the gratitude they deserve, since the belittling goes beyond what is seemly. Also at those who are ironic about things they take seriously, since irony is something that shows contempt. Also those that who do favors for other people if they do not do favors for them, since this too shows contempt and not considering one worthy of the things everyone is worthy of.

Forgetfulness, even of names, for example, is also something that produces anger despite being about something so slight, since forgetfulness too seems to be a sign of belittling, because forgetfulness comes from carelessness, and carelessness is a sort of belittling.

33:49 Seth: So basically everybody's walking around waiting to get triggered.

33:52 Dylan: This paragraph alone, to me makes it clear that why people would be angry about injustice and that for Aristotle, at Least that it's all part of one thing.

34:04 Mark: I guess maybe this is what strikes me as not quite apt about the sort of status language that I don't entirely disagree with Wes about, but that I feel the need to show some token resistance to is because I feel like when you put it purely in psychological terms, then ethics becomes something psychological. In other words, Aristotle is saying here that we don't like people that we think do bad things. Like, you know, that's part of what's built in. People that we are friends with are people that we think have virtue, people that we hate, people that we are angry at are people that are associated with something that we perceive as wrong.

And if you merely put it in terms of what we perceive as wrong, what we perceive as right, that's a very purely psychological way of putting it. I think Aristotle is committed to again, that idea that everybody naturally turns toward the good and so there really is something objective and primary about the ethical and that the status stuff is to some extent a secondary, you know, is an offshoot, is a psychological manifestation of our relationship to that objective, you know, value.

35:15 Wes: I see these things as in fundamental conflict. And again, I think of Orwell where he thinks of nationalism in the broad sense, conflation of the good and status. And I think this is the fundamental political problem is that we have trouble telling when it is we're interested in status entry and when it is we're interested in well being. So we will typically say that we're interested in the well being of a group when what we are doing is we're identifying with a group and we're feeling status injury on behalf of that group. And those two things are actually very hard to disentangle.

And part of the difficulty in disentangling them is, as we saw in our Baldwin and White Privilege episodes, status is a legitimate ethical concern, right? So to be disrespected, systematically disrespected culturally by a society is actually a legitimate factor in one's well being. So this makes it extremely complicated. But I will say that often political conflict is amplified to a really irrational degree by this sense of self righteousness that involves the conflation I described. People are actually acting on their will to power under the guise.

So this is actually a Nietzschean critique too, fundamentally as well, but acting on will to power under the guise of supposed ethical concerns. And then sometimes it's both, they just get mixed up.

36:44 Mark: So you're accusing Aristotle of being naive in this way?

36:48 Wes: Well, you'd have to reread the past. I don't know if I'm accusing him of that or not. I have to think about that.

36:55 Mark: But it would make sense. Like the kind of thing that Nietzsche would criticize Aristotle about is just by basically being too objectivizing about the ethical and thinking that it is really something that we are all attracted toward, that there really is a shining light of the sort built into our nature. Not quite of the sort that Plato described coming from this otherworldly perfect land of forms, coming from God, but that there is something even in our biology that I guess as I'm talking myself out of this, as I articulate as is the norm, it seems both Aristotle and Nietzsche have to think that accepting the instincts that Nietzsche is actually pushing toward is basically his equivalent of what the good is.

The good is objective for Aristotle because it is built into human teleology. And well, how is human teleology manifest? To us it is through instinct. So I completely contradict myself.

37:47 Wes: I'm reminded of Twilight of the Idols. Doesn't he say something like instinct is happiness on one of his rants against asceticism?

37:55 Mark: But anyway, yes, but clearly instincts can pull us in multiple ways, whereas teleology, according to Aristotle, there is a singular good. That was the difference between them as virtue ethicists.

38:06 Wes: Yeah, I think we've highlighted and shown how important this is to a lot of the other philosophy we've studied. The intricacies of status concerns versus ethical concerns versus the instinctual and desire.

38:19 Dylan: And why you would claim to be a psychologist if you were a philosopher.

38:23 Mark: Did we read chapter six on shame? Was that part of the.

38:27 Wes: It wasn't.

38:28 Mark: I'm just reading it now. What sorts of things make people feel ashamed or shameless and in whose presence and what their condition is will be clear from the following. Let shame be understood as a certain pain or agitation over bad deeds, present, past or future, that appear to bring one into disrepute. And let shamelessness be a certain belittling and indifferent attitude towards these same things. So I think the ambiguity is in there as well. It's pain or agitation over bad deeds. In other words, sort of objectively bad. But qualify that appear to bring one into disrepute. In other words, according bad. According to your society. He just doesn't have a strong distinction between these.

39:06 Wes: It sounds more like what we would call guilt or conscience.

39:10 Mark: All these that result from vice are of this sort, such as throwing down one's shield and running away, but comes from cowardice or embezzling money. You know, it's the standard list of. Here are all the things that are bad. That's what made this whole text so infuriating to me. Just to. It's like so many of the ones like the bacon that we read recently, that part of it reads like a technical manual. So, like, the key is to understanding what this is a manual of. And then you can kind of skim over some of the details. But you have to understand, like, what virtues are all these details supposedly plowing into. But when he's just like, let's list all the things that people could be accused of. Let's list all the things that are bad. Let's list all the things that might make you mad.

39:51 Seth: Like, it's not the catalog of ships. That's not his intent when he does that, is to say, like, it's because, you know, he's trying to say, like, okay, look, there's so many different ways that you can experience this or respond to this or do this. And then he typically is going to give you strategies for how to approach them and how to. How to address them. So cut him a little bit of slack. I mean, he's dead, so he doesn't give a shit.

40:16 Wes: But leave Aristotle alone.

40:21 Mark: We gotta start some Aristotle. Memes. Not enthymemes. Just memes.

40:29 Wes: Well, actually, I found something that. I found a video that drew some. Even though they weren't confused, they didn't think that meme and enthymeme were etymologically related, but they made the case that memes are actually a subclass of enthymeme based on shared cultural assumptions. So very interesting.

40:46 Seth: I thought it was funny. Like, when you do philosophy, there's always the ancient Greek terms that get translated and the ones that don't. Right. And that it's a strategic move by the translator to say, like, well, I can't quite capture all the nuance of X, Y, and Z, so I'm just gonna leave this as eudoxis or whatever the. And I noticed that, like, enthymeme is one of those that they just don't even bother. It's like we got no analog to it. I can't compare to it. And it was a little off putting in the beginning because I was like, what in the. It's not even a fun word to read.

It's like kind of a weird. It's got a weird taste in your mouth, and it's kind of long. And it just. Enthymeme or enthyme. You know, And I just thought how strange it took me a while to get my mind wrapped around the concept of it. And then once I did, it was fine. It's become kind of part of the vocabulary. But it's funny that that's the case, that there's literally not even a word that's even relatively close, like anger or hatred or idea or that somebody felt comfortable using in translation. Both of the translations use enthymeme.

41:51 Dylan: Yeah.

41:52 Wes: And it seems like it's going to be something completely boring and technical until you start thinking about what it means to leave out some background assumptions and how common it is in everyday discourse and what the implications of that are, which is in itself really fascinating. Any more wrap ups?

42:17 Seth: So there's a couple key things I pulled out of this. One is that Aristotle's painting a picture where speech acts and the act of publicly speaking involves an audience. And that you have to acknowledge that in a way that's much more sophisticated, I think, than what we get in Plato. And it's also that he's describing the enthymemic. How's that? Enthymemic speech as an invitation to your audience to basically paint the picture in themselves. So the most persuasive speakers are not the ones who give the best argument or who paint the clearest picture of the facts of the case.

They're the ones that do the best job at tuning into how the audience is going to react and set the stage for the audience to fulfill the argument that they're giving themselves. So in other words, it's getting people to get to where you want them to be, but doing it on their own. And I know that that's a theme that comes across in some platonic dialogues about education, you know, like Meno and whatever, where you're. You're trying to educate people, but you need them to. Learning is about them coming to figure it out themselves. But I think Aristotle, in a really nuanced and impressive way in the rhetoric, it's describing a situation and an action and a relationship, a human relationship.

That to me was really compelling and from the perspective of somebody who does marketing and who's actually working on three marketing initiatives right now about how we can bring our strategic message to our existing customer base and tie it into what we have now and our future vision and all this kind of stuff. I was very much appreciative of some of the insights that I gleaned from reading this.

43:59 Mark: Excellent. I was happy to do this as I didn't expect this to be a kind of soft introduction to his logic, but it is. So I Feel like I'm much more prepared now to do the prior analytics or posterior analytics or whichever one of the logical works we end up doing. And I guess I will. I want to throw it out to the audience whether you feel like, God damn it, enough with the Aristotle already. Enough with the ancient Greeks. Because to me, this has been a slow walk up to doing Aristotle's metaphysics. And so until we do his metaphysics, which is, you know, a long book, it could be a multi episode thing in itself and something on his logic.

We're not done with Aristotle. I don't know if I can put this away for another year, even though I sort of hate the experience of reading Aristotle, but I really like the experience of being done reading Aristotle and having an understanding of generally what he's talking about, because so many other people were influenced by this. And this is just making me want to chase, you know, other things in rhetoric that we've done. All these people reacting to him. So this is such a necessary step there. If it's eating your vegetables, they're damn good vegetables.

45:08 Seth: Is that when we'll know when it's time to shut the book on Pel. It's like when we finally do metaphysics, Aristotle's metaphysics. It's like, all right, drop the mic, we're done.

45:18 Mark: No, that means we will actually be. We'll have the groundwork to have another five years of episodes on metaphysics when we get to the metaphysics, as opposed to picking at little bits of metaphysics now and again every couple years. It's not been something we've done systematically.

45:35 Seth: I hope you guys have a great time with that.

45:39 Dylan: It's an interesting book. Mark, you just called Aristotle the broccoli a philosophy.

45:44 Wes: Yes. Which is a rhetorical.

45:45 Seth: Yeah, well, wait, that's just one sentence. So let's put this together. Aristotle is the broccoli of philosophy. Now we need one other sentence to make it an enthymeme, don't we? That's just a declaration.

45:57 Mark: I feel like it's maybe the one

45:59 Seth: that's built in because broccoli is good for you and rinses out your colon.

46:04 Dylan: People generally hate eating it, even though they shouldn't.

46:06 Wes: You dislike eating your vegetables, but you feel good afterwards. And then this is an argument.

46:11 Seth: Yeah. The thing is, with cruciferous vegetables, you don't feel good after eating them.

46:15 Wes: It's a use of analogy as a premise. And which vegetables?

46:19 Seth: Cruciferous broccoli, cauliflower.

46:21 Wes: You actually don't feel good after eating them. I wouldn't know.

46:24 Seth: So they're very fibrous.

46:28 Wes: Ah. Okay.

46:29 Mark: Unless they're soggy and dry. I don't know. I've had too many good tastings.

46:32 Seth: Aristotle is like the broccoli philosophy because broccoli blows your colon out.

46:38 Dylan: No, you just have to. You just have to roast them with some olive oil and salt and pepper and it goes down great.

46:43 Mark: Yeah, I guess that's what Sachs is doing.

46:47 Seth: Sachs roasted Aristotle with olive oil and garlic bulbs.

46:51 Mark: Next time, we're doing some readings on policing and racism and phenomenology, including chapter one of Alex Vitale's the End of Policing, Alia Al Saji's A Phenomenology of Hesitation Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing, a little bit of Maurice Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, and some of Linda Martin Alcoff's Visible Identities, Race, Gender, and Self. Our ending song Here is a Reason with the Beast by Shriekback. I talked to Barry Andrews, the writer of the song on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 107. You can, of course, get that@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com thanks, everybody. We'd love to hear what you think of this. You can email us@pel partialexaminedlife.com make a comment on the blog post corresponding to this episode or on Facebook on Twitter. Thanks. Good night, everybody.

47:38 Seth: Thank you.

47:39 Wes: Good night.

47:39 Dylan: Good night.

47:39 Seth: Good night.

47:54 Mark: Don't want to do this but he gets you there?

47:57 Seth: Got a reason with the beast? He makes a rat's nest from your pretty hair? Go to reason with nest? Try to deny him but he stands his ground?

48:10 Wes: He's a pitbull that you can't impound?

48:13 Mark: Comes the monster in his season and he won't calm down?

48:16 Wes: You got to be

48:20 Seth: with the beast?

48:36 Mark: He makes you listen to your shriveled mind? God reason with beast?

48:42 Seth: His reasons floor is often hard to find?

48:45 Wes: God bless him the beast?

48:49 Mark: The agapath wreath around his brow?

48:52 Seth: His yellow teeth gnaw into all your vows?

48:55 Dylan: He rips the buttons from your clean white blouse?

48:58 Mark: Just have to reason with beast?

49:17 Wes: Sam.