Ep. 255: Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 255 is something like, how does a philosopher wage war? And we read the Art of War, attributed to sun tzu in the 5th or 6th century BCE for more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is. This is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin. And my strategic disposition is favorable.

0:32 Seth: This is Seth Paskin making sure that my men have no choice but to fight in Austin, Texas.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan preparing for the best of all possible wars in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:43 Seth: Nice.

0:43 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, defined by wisdom, reliability, humanness, courage, and strictness.

0:49 Brian: In Midland, Michigan, this is Brian Wilson, looking forward to rhetorical thrusts and parries in Dallas, Texas.

0:57 Mark: Welcome, Brian.

0:58 Seth: Hi, Brian.

0:59 Brian: Hey, guys.

1:00 Mark: Folks will know Brian from the Combat and Classics podcast at least. You better if you've been at partiallyexaminedlife.com ever and looked at the network podcasts and you had done something with this before, right? Brian, can you get us started here and maybe say, actually say something about what Combat and Classics is and then talk about Sun Tzu?

1:19 Brian: Combat and Classics was spurred on by me being in the Marine Corps for a long time and then going to St. John's College in Annapolis and then going, what next? So I thought about setting up something like some online seminars, maybe a podcast exploring classical literature for veterans. Really just cashing in on that classical literature for veterans podcast. Boom. You know, the late aughts, untapped market. Yeah, I mean, Joe, I was supposed to be on Joe Rogan tonight. He's been blowing up my phone. But I was like, joe, you know, when you hit the big time, maybe we'll talk. But, you know, still just counting my Casper money from the veteran classical literature tie in.

2:00 Mark: But there's not actually that many military texts in particular that you cover, right? You cover the regular classics.

2:05 Brian: I feel like we've done way more Moliere than we have, like, any type of military classical text. So we've actually never done Sun Tzu because it's something that most of our listeners are probably pretty familiar with that were in the military, have at least heard of it and probably read it. The other crew is always like, you know, let's do something military. And I'm like, let's do the Poetry of Yeats. We haven't done this one, but I'm really glad you guys had me on to do it, because this book is really the cornerstone of Marine Corps Doctrine.

This is all of what's called MCDP1 war fighting, which is our primary core doctrine publication. It's just like copy pastes from Sun Tzu and then change it a little bit so the professor doesn't catch you copying stuff and plagiarizing. But rereading this definitely tickles that maneuver warfare. Fancy that. I spent about 13 years nurturing in the Marine Corps, so I'm looking forward to chatting with you guys about it.

2:59 Mark: Had any of the rest of you read this before?

3:02 Dylan: No, I read it a lot, like in college.

3:05 Mark: What's your take, Dylan, particularly in rereading it?

3:07 Dylan: It's an interesting combination. I'd forgotten how much of it is very practical because the book is referred to analogically or whatever warfare is. Any kind of conflict or any kind of. Like the paper that you pointed us to where he's making the analogy of debate and warfare. Or you see this book referred to in marketing techs and stuff like that. You forget how much it is about waging war and fighting. It's very, very practical in this respect. For me, the thing that stood out on reading it was there's the tactical stuff and assessing the environment and things like that.

But how much of it is really focused on the disposition that the troops have to have with respect to the commander and the way in which the commander is responsible for getting all of the troops to operate as one. And that theme goes through the whole thing. It's the first way, in fact, and that was remarkable about it. And the fundamental tactic is the one that in some ways it must be the most important thing and maybe for a whole bunch of reasons, it's the one that you have the least practical stuff in on how to make them one in there.

4:19 Wes: I have a one sentence summary for this. It's not the size of the ship, it's the motion of the ocean. So again and again you see the theme of the this book is that it's not the size of the army necessarily or the amount of force that you can bring to bear, but other considerations, including especially the types of morale and considerations that Dylan mentioned, or the psychology of getting troops to obey you. But also we'll see this in the first chapter. It has a lot to do with communication and interpretation. So how do you interpret communication?

The intentions of the enemy and their mental and emotional states as well as their material states, so their location or the amount of power that they have, their capabilities and then how do you communicate your own? In a way, of course that's going to end up being deceptive. So that's my initial impression of this, and I found this much more interesting and exciting than I thought I would.

5:20 Mark: What you think, Seth the book is

5:22 Seth: about intelligence and deception, planning and the ability to understand and map out action and reaction before it happens in order to secure the outcome that you're desiring. And it's fascinating in that respect. I too am one of those people. It's like I've predominantly heard this in the context of like business strategy or marketing or something like that. In reading it, I could, I could certainly provide that analysis of the stratagems of people I have worked for and may perhaps be working for right now and applying it as a rubric. But more importantly, it seems as much a work of psychology as it does anything else. How to interact, if you think about it, how to achieve the goals you want and stay focused on the outcomes that you want to achieve as opposed to the path to get there. It was interesting and very readable, which is pleasant, at least in this translation.

6:18 Wes: Yeah, the who Moved My Cheese? Chapter was amazing. But really actually I just want to say as a quick aside immediately made me want to write a self help book where I just convert each of these chapters into something that's do it

6:31 Seth: because there's an insatiable appetite for self help books that say the same thing over and over and over.

6:37 Mark: So the translation we read was by Michael Nylan and I believe it's from 2020, right?

6:42 Dylan: I think so, yeah.

6:43 Mark: It's a Norton edition. Keeps talking in there about how a annotated edition is going to be coming out.

6:48 Wes: Well, there's going to be a Norton Critical edition that's coming out. So if you've ever used those for any other yeah, they're really good and bring in lots of background material.

6:56 Mark: Apparently since 1972 the preferred way of anglicizing these names like Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu and Sun Tzu is with a zi, Laozi and Zhuangzi. That's probably too hard for us. So even in this version they call the book Sun Tzu because that's what people know it as in the West. But then in the actual text they'll refer to him as Tsun Tzi. So I guess the free one that you'd find online is probably from like 1910 is a much older I was listening to a fellow from Hong Kong read the Librivox version. He pronounced it Sun Tzu, which I don't think I can say 50 times fast during this conversation.

So give us a break. Let me just put that out there. But yeah, it's from. They're not exactly sure. He's kind of like Homer. It might be one person, it might be several people. It's attributed to this particular guy, Sun Wu. So Sun Tzu is Tsu's master. So it's Master sun, but the guy's name was actually Sun Wu. And he might have collected them or it might be things by his students or, you know, it's really unclear. And I guess the oldest version is actually from like the 2nd or 3rd century BC.

8:05 Wes: I think the first textual version is around 221 BC. And that's a compilation from an oral tradition probably that goes back hundreds of years before that. And then I think that early text is not exactly what we see here. Things got amended and changed. And I think what we have here, I think it's around 200 AD that we get the text that we're reading.

8:25 Mark: That was my understanding. The guy himself is supposedly a contemporary of Confucius. So Lao Tzu, Daoism is slightly before both of those folks. And so I had found this secondary source just to give us something. Sun Tzi and the Art of War the Rhetoric of Parsimony by Stephen C. Combs. One of its points was to relate this to Aristotle's rhetoric. But the other one that I found more interesting was just to see this. How is the Sun Tzu a Taoist text? And if it's a Taoist text, then it's kind of like Marcus Aurelius is to Stoicism, Epictetus, the old time Stoics.

Don't get too attached, don't get too excited about anything. It's not a philosophy of action. Whereas by the time you get to Marcus Aurelius, it's like, no, you can be the most active person in the world and still have this philosophy. So that's kind of how I was reading Sun Tzu here, is that obviously you're going to war. You would think the Taoist approach to war is don't do it. Stay away from positions of leadership, stay away from that kind of responsibility, achieve enlightenment on your own. But, well, if you're going to be out there, is there a way, given that Daoism had sort of percolated through the whole culture, is there a way that you can bend like the reed, that you can do all this very active stuff but still be seen as not striving while you're doing so well?

9:38 Brian: You guys did Aristotle's rhetoric Fairly recently. And I was wondering, and with that in mind, those two episodes you guys did on the rhetoric, did the Combs article make sense to you guys in terms of the Sun Tzu approach to rhetoric vis a vis, like the Aristotle, Aristotelian idea?

9:52 Dylan: It made sort of sense. I found myself objecting a little bit to sort of his broad characterizations.

9:59 Wes: Yeah, me too.

10:00 Dylan: Of Greek and Chinese, because I found it sort of so broad brushed. I didn't believe his characterizations of Chinese stuff because I knew a lot more about the Greek stuff, and I didn't believe that. But the part that reminded me a lot about the rhetoric reminded me how tactical the rhetoric is, especially with the enthymemes and stuff. And we only really touched on that in terms of stratagems for persuading. And maybe we didn't take it as seriously as maybe it was intended at the time. We could do a whole thing. I mean, it'd be a little bit like reading this book and really taking it very seriously.

Well, how do I process taking my knowledge about the land and deploying my knowledge about a defile versus a meadow versus I have a river that I'm running my enemy into, really processing and bringing on board all of those tactics and how you go through the decision process for them? That's the way I think you would end up taking the rhetoric really seriously about trying to deploy the techniques explicitly to be more persuasive.

11:03 Wes: I think you can see broadly because the force and persuasion are analogous in a certain way. And the Greeks thought this as well. Sorts of things that will apply to persuasion will apply to the use of force. So if you take ethos, which has something to do right, with the credibility of the speaker, that shows itself here, as in the credibility of leader, the authority of a leader, the ability to get to people to do things and be authoritative and enthymemes. The logos side of things, I think, corresponds to calculating and deliberating. And then the pathos side, I think, corresponds to reading people's intentions and emotional states and using deception to appeal to them. Right. As he'll say at one point, appealing to their avidity and manipulating their emotions so that they end up doing things that are dumb.

11:55 Mark: There is a literal part of Combs, which is that there's a rhetoric involved. So in chapter three, Sun Tzu says, best is to subdue the enemy's troops without ever engaging them on the battlefield. So much of this is not even about, like, you're already in a battle. What do you do? Like, no, it's about planning. Planning Planning and looking for your opportunity to achieve your goals. So the best thing would be to do nothing. You know, don't move forward an inch unless you see the conditions as optimal that you really. It takes so much effort. He lists all these costs to raise one of these giant armies and then to do anything with them. You're just constantly wearing them down. Like, if you want to send them anywhere, they're going to get separated, they're going to need food, you're going to have to set up supply lines.

12:43 Wes: They affect the whole economy.

12:45 Mark: If you're traveling with your army through, you know, you're trying to use your enemy's grain as much as possible, so you're not having to use supply lines. But then you're causing inflation in the area where you are, and you're demoralizing everybody there, like, so just much better not to fight.

13:00 Brian: I'm really glad you guys asked me on here because it was a fascinating kind of journey to read through this, because this was basically my introduction to philosophy. I was doing this stuff before I went to St. John's I just didn't really know it was philosophy. But there's literally a religious sect in the. Like, this is supposed to be doctrine for the entire Marine Corps, but then there's a religious sect kind of in the Marine Corps called the Rabid Maneuverists, of which I was, you know, a proselytizer and rabbi of some sort and would make the joke in the Marine Corps, we say, you know, there's a hard way and easy way in the Marine Corps way.

And my go to joke was, there's a hard way, an easy way, a Marine Corps way, and then an even easier way that I'm going to find because I'm incredibly lazy. And, oh, by the way, this is like in our doctrine, this is what we're supposed to do, is find the absolute easiest way to do it. And I think what you're talking about, Mark, is making sure nobody wants to fight you is the way to successfully wage war is to be so good at it that nobody would ever want to go toe to toe with you because they know they're going to lose because you have this ability to flow like water, to be nowhere and everywhere, to be able to use overwhelming force whenever you want to so nobody would decide to fight.

14:04 Wes: Some of this is political, right? So in that chapter three, he'll talk about undermining alliances and anticipating strategies. So in other parts of the book, we get the ways you're going to project your capabilities and deceive them into thinking certain things. I think the politics part of it is if we're to make sense of this idea of avoiding engagement, other than looking really strong, you have to think about the political wheeling and dealing that you could use to keep out of conflict.

14:31 Dylan: A big part of that politics, it's clear, is the politics between the commander and the ruler. A big theme in it is that the commander has to make sure that everyone obeys his commands, including the ruler. And that there's this interesting implicit disconnect between the people who are in charge of the process of running the war and the people who are the stakeholders of the state. And even that stuff like the politics are at issue. They have to be conscious of it, but they're not exactly the ones. It wasn't clear to me, except for the fact that the commander has to make sure that he doesn't pay attention to his rulers, how much they were involved with it. They knew that, yes, it's going to affect the economy and stuff like that, but there are different animals in this respect.

15:22 Wes: This is mentioned a few times, but my one sentence summary of that chapter is obey contingencies, not people. And that means you don't obey the ruler if you're the general or the commander and they want you to do something stupid. But you're also not just kowtowing to your subordinates. You want to win their respect, but you also want discipline. And the thing that completely determines your behavior are contingencies, including what terrain do you find yourself in and any other sort of relevant circumstance that has to be the thing that determines your behavior. Not general principles, not orders from on high, not the need to satisfy people on low, but just what's required by the circumstances.

16:03 Dylan: In a funny way, it's principled unprincipledness. You are going along and you can't run your answer through a meat grinder, and you can't be idealistic and principled in that way about how you're going to go about winning. You have to recognize you're always subject to contingencies just the way west said, and you have to be constantly processing them. The book itself is sort of testament to a way to talk about processing them and then also categorizing them. That's where the tactics of the different kinds of terrain, the different ways of using fire, for instance, that you have to have available to deploy.

16:40 Brian: I'm glad you brought up chapter 10, because by chapter 10, it kind of hit me how aphoristic the book is, and especially chapter 10. Chapter 10 is really just a series of aphorisms. And almost every single one of those I was just translating into Marine Corps speak. I made a note to myself, it's like, why is he teaching this in aphorisms if this is a serious study at the general officer level of warfare, why are we dealing with aphorisms? And then I got to chapter 10, which is straight up aphorisms, and pretty much translated every single one to a Marine Corps aphorism and went, oh, because we're just as dumb when we're in the fight as people in 5th century China.

And we're tired and we're hungry and we're thirsty and we just want to sleep and we want to what we call go internal instead of keep external, our focus. And it's these aphorisms that kind of become the touch point of all of your decisions. And so you get into 10 and every single thing in there is basically the mantras that we would say to ourselves in the Marine Corps. Right. And something you were just talking about in terms of planning, Wes, is the plan only survives first enemy contact. And so we have this idea of what we want to accomplish and how we want to accomplish it.

But with what you were talking about, Dylan, about the planned disobedience is it's not just between like the general and the ruler, it's at every single level. And in Marine Corps land, it's part of the doctrine where it's like, hey, I'm going to give you a mission and I'm going to give you an end state. Here's what I want you to do, but here's what I want you to accomplish. First off, we separate those two things. That's kind of wild, right? It's not just what you want to do, it's task and then intent, what I'm going to try to get you to accomplish.

And then you can chuck that task anytime you feel like it. Because the plan only survives first enemy contact. So if you satisfy the intent, even if you did something completely different than what your boss told you to do, whether you're a 19 year old lance corporal or a 50 year old general, notionally it should be like, hey, great job. And I think that that is one of the kind of key things when he's talking about parsimony, is be economical and how important speed is, right? When speed is of the essence, which he hits on a couple times and makes it very clear like it's the most important thing, you don't have time to call the boss and be like, hey, I know you told me to do this, but things have changed, so I kind of want to do this.

Is that okay? You don't have the time for that. So you have to immediately react to the circumstance. And then we get into. I don't know if you guys have ever read much. John Boyd, who was an Air Force colonel, kind of revolutionary dude, but he wrote about this thing that he invented called the OODA loop, which is observe, orient, decide and act. And he was a dog fight guy. So he basically made the hypothesis that whoever observes, orients, decides and acts fastest in a dogfight wins. Because if you're turning and burning, the person that can turn and burn fast, the person that can gain the initiative, and the person that is then causing the enemy to react to you is going to win.

And so there's a lot of that stuff that's implicit here. I think that's why Sun Tzu's kind of lasted so long.

19:24 Wes: We didn't mention the title of this chapter, which is not in and of itself very exciting. It's called Configurations of the Land. And there's a lot about that terrain and land in this book. And you see the title of this chapter and you think, oh, my God, it's another one of these. There's open, hanging, split, all these different descriptions of get out of the swamp quickly types of land. And you're like, oh, God. But then you get into it and you're like, well, now all of a sudden he's talking about insubordination and how that's the commander's fault.

And the failure to enforce regulations and deliver clear instructions is the commander's fault. And then you goes back to the configuration of the land, the type of land creates the conditions for victory. And then goes back to this idea, which he's mentioned before, that you don't obey the directions of the ruler. This is not about the desire for fame. It's not about glory. The sole criteria is to protect your men and advance your ruler's interests. And to do that, you obey the land, essentially, which is another alternative title I had for this.

So you obey the land, not certain psychological states, not the ruler, again, not the troops. And then I think that translates more broadly into this idea of obeying contingencies rather than people. I bring that up again just because it's interesting the way this book, it might start in these nitty gritty details. Then all of a sudden you're getting to these, Brian, as you pointed out, these aphorisms and these very broad ideas which find so much applicability, whether to warfare or to anything else you want to think about.

20:52 Seth: It's an extended argument against dogmatism in some respect. So, Wes, what you say, obeying the land is really obeying contingencies. So it's the idea that the good commander is the one who understands the contingencies that are in play in the particular circumstance and is able to adapt strategies and tactics to align to the contingencies in order to achieve the desired outcome. And so what he's essentially saying is, don't do what you're told to do. Do what achieves the goal that you're told to achieve. So when he says, you know, the excellent commander does not obey the ruler.

So the ruler says, go wage war on these people or go conquer this town or whatever, the good commander understands what the objective is. And if that commander can accomplish that objective without having to engage in the tactics that they're directed at by the ruler, then that's what makes them excellent. And what it means is that the good commander can't be tied to a specific set of directives or strategy. It has to be very aware of the physical terrain, the status of the men, and more importantly, the status of the enemy. And we haven't talked about deception, but at least with respect to intelligence, he's saying you have to know yourself, but you have to know the enemy as well.

You have to know the land, right? The heavens, the land, yourself, the enemy. You have to know all of these things. The more intelligence you gather, the more you know, the more you can determine the outcome that you're seeking to achieve. But it's knowledge of the particulars, not knowing how to execute a maneuver or stand on a principle. It's about understanding all of the contingencies of the situation in order to position yourself best to succeed.

22:44 Wes: Do we want to talk about chapter one in light of that? Because that's.

22:47 Seth: Do we want to talk about the text? Yeah, that'd probably be a good idea.

22:50 Wes: You're talking now about this evaluation of the status or the state of your own state and then the state of the enemy. And I think that pretty much is what chapter one is doing.

23:00 Mark: I guess the way that I was reading chapter one, it's like there's a double meaning, that it sounds like a daoist text a little bit. The five considerations that must always be kept before you when gauging the strength of the two sides and investigating the true conditions so as to arrive at a good grasp of the situation. Number one, the way, in other words, the dao, two, the heavens, three, the earth for the field commander, and five, the regulations. So this sounds like you have to be with the way and you have to know the heavens and the earth, but it actually, as it clarifies, it's actually very specific and literal.

23:33 Wes: It's the weather.

23:35 Mark: Yes. The heavens is like knowing the weather. The earth is knowing the terrain like we've been talking about. The way is a little weirder. The way, by definition refers to whatever allows the people and their superior to be of one will and therefore willing to live or die with him undeterred by danger. This is what Dylan was saying at the beginning is like, this is the first big point. And he doesn't say a lot more about this. And this reminded me of some of the more virtue ethics kinds of things that we describe this as a manual. In other words, it sounds like it should be deontological.

Here's some advice. Here are things you should do. Some of the language in here, like, this is. No, a great general is this kind of person. Like, that's the way, from what I remember of Confucianism and Taoism, that a lot of the descriptions of the sage is just like, the sage is awesome. The sage is someone who can easily pluck victory from the jaws of defeat. That kind of stuff like, well, that's not helpful. How does. How does that tell me what to do? Oh, so here it's whatever it is that allows people and their superior to be of one will and therefore willing to live or die with him undeterred by danger.

24:38 Brian: I can get how just reading this, like, it wouldn't be clear as to what that means, but when I read it, it was not to say obvious because it sounds really pretentious, but kind of obvious because the way and kind of what he's describing or how I'm interpreting what he's describing is just military units working together. That's where that just grows organically out of. And you can point to the same thing if you've never been in the military. Just being on a sports ball team where it's like, if you just practice and practice and practice, you're going to have, number one, implicit communication.

You're going to know exactly what somebody else on your team is going to do before they do it. And then their piece of that is good leadership is just recognizing the people that are good and rewarding them and recognize people that suck and firing them. And if you can just create that simple dynamic within a unit, like that way what he's talking about with the way it just happens. And I think that's true of most human interaction. If you have somebody that sucks. Right now we have five people on the podcast. One of them, I'm pointing at me right now is not as good as everybody else.

So the leader of the podcast is like, let's not invite that Brian guy back. Everybody else is like, good call, boss. And then you create that cohesion, right? So that way is kind of what he's talking about. And what's missing from that is just a discussion of what we do in the military, which is we have an aphorism for this, because we have an aphorism for everything is rehearsals, where you make your money. And so it's about getting out in the field and doing what you're trained to do and just doing it again and again and again and again. Because you see who can handle stress, who can't handle stress.

And if your commander is rewarding people that can and getting rid of the people that can't, you're going to produce that implicit communication you're going to produce that way among the troops.

26:15 Wes: So the closest he gets to, I think, to explicitly telling us how you unify the will of all these people, aside from paying attention to morale and various ways of being Authoritative, in chapter 11, he tells you how to use the terrain to induce that, which is to say, he'll tell us, for instance, the cohesion increases as you penetrate farther into enemy territory. People, once they get cut off or once they're put in desperate situations, that cohesion dramatically increases. So that's part of what you do as a commander. You put troops in situations that demand their complete cooperation as a matter of survival. Obviously, it's not just that, and that sounds rather cynical, but that's a good example. It's a practical and telling example of how you induce people to kind of unify their will with other people.

27:11 Seth: This is a point where I think, bringing in the secondary literature a little bit, I feel like talking about this concept of harmony and way. It sounds to me like you're giving a much more practical reading of way than we got in the secondary literature, which was much more, you know, it's. The water flows naturally to. To downhill and avoids that. You know, the way is being in harmony with nature and bending and not breaking. What you're saying is basically something a little more directed, I would say, as opposed to, like, it's not just simply fluid and flowing in conformity with the circumstances, but implying a system of judgment and habit, something that's a little bit different than what we were getting from the.

27:54 Wes: But you are making people feel like they're part of a larger whole. Right. So that's critical because the larger whole,

28:00 Seth: is that your intent or is that the outcome?

28:03 Wes: You want them to be undeterred by danger. You want people to be courageous. I think that's really the big thing here. That's what he explicitly says the way involves and to do that you unify everyone into one will. So they're no longer simply worrying about themselves as individuals, but they are completely immersed in the whole and the status and well being of the whole. They function to serve that.

28:23 Dylan: I think you're exactly right, Wes. When Seth brought up the secondary literature, one thing I thought that that Combs article failed to really connect was the notion of habit and how habit directly in Aristotle works like this. That is, you do something over and over and over and over again until you don't even think about doing it anymore. It's just the way it works. And to me it parallels what's being talked about here explicitly. You have to work at doing it and there's actions you do. Maybe I'm answering my own question at the beginning about that. There's so little talking about how to go about accomplishing the way is because all of the tactics end up by implementing them. You get some big chunk of that out of it.

29:08 Brian: There's not a big difference. If we look at chapter one, he says the seven ways to gauge the two sides and investigate the true conditions. That's not just true of warfare, that's true of training too. If you're doing some field exercises and you want to find out who's your best guy, which ruler has the way as in which one is doing exactly what you're doing as the head boss, who's doing exactly the same thing. So that means you're on the same page. Which commander is the abler, who's executing it? And I love number three, which is whose side earth and heaven favor.

That basically means luck. Who's the luckiest one, Right. How great is it that this classical Chinese writer on strategy is going, yeah, luck, who's lucky? And how important is that? You know, like. And this is where we get some a little bit divergence. Because reading the combs and having spent a lot of time with this kind of thing and spent a lot of times with kind of Greek philosophy, I don't see a lot of daylight actually between kind of a Socratic approach and this. I think Combs is trying to tease it out a little bit more than maybe exists.

But, you know, I don't know how much Socrates talked about, like, it's better to be lucky than good. But Sun Tzu's right here on item number three, where you're going, who's the luckiest?

30:18 Mark: That's one of the things. But so much of this planning, where does he talk about, if you're 5 to 1, then you should attack. If you're 10 to 1, then you should surround. There's like different troop amounts that basically you want to be so overpowering again. You want to wait to make your move until there is a minimum of luck involved. Yes, there's always going to be. The weather could change, but a lot of things are foreseeable. In the chapter on fire, make sure you're not downwind with the fire you set, right? Pay attention to the weather and plan your pyromania, your pyrotechnics around whatever the weather happens to be.

30:55 Dylan: Luck favors the prepared.

30:56 Mark: Exactly.

30:57 Wes: Yeah.

30:57 Brian: And a lot of this stuff is intuitive, but I feel like codifying it is a great exercise. And then reading that codification is great exercise. Like guarantee I could take any one of you guys out in the field. And if you've never shot a rifle, if you've never been on patrol, if you've never done a raid, I could put you in a couple circumstances and you would go, this is bad. This is not where we should. Like, we're surrounded by hills and it's dark. This is probably not good for us, Right? So a lot of this stuff is intuitive and so like the fire, don't be downwind, and that kind of stuff.

But we see this in philosophy more generally, and we see this in this, which is like, hit on the fundamentals, because war is so unpredictable. Because conflict is so unpredictable, we want to really reinforce the basic fundamentals because everything is going to be chaotic and it's going to change. So just try to remember these core

31:42 Wes: principles also that you can rest. You know, as we'll say in this chapter, you can actually wrest advantages from the conditions that seem to disfavor you. So if you're paying attention to the contingencies, bad weather, for instance, that may be an opportunity to saddle the enemy with something.

31:58 Seth: I'd like to just pick up on something you just said, Brian. It's conflict. Like, if we start framing this in terms of conflict as opposed to war, the broader application, and you can think about any kind of conflict, whether it's interpersonal or political or what have you That I like that term for helping me understand how to reframe this as a stoic equivalent as opposed to a military manual.

32:23 Brian: Well, and it's very practical when you think about it in terms of conflict. Right. And especially, like for me, I live in entrepreneur land. I do a lot of, like, starting up businesses and I do a lot of consulting type stuff. And I use this kind of approach all the time. And what I'm fighting is mostly bureaucratic inertia. The touchpoint story that I always come back to is because I worked in human intelligence and part of the KGB's case officer training was basically them giving the brief and saying, listen, hey, we're part of a communist state and we're part of a giant bureaucracy.

And all of that is basically designed to keep you from doing what you need to get done. And so you basically have to figure out how to hack this system to get what you want, when you want it to get done, what you need to get done. And so I approach that in business all the time. And I just go, okay, this is what you're telling me you guys do or how you do it, but this is what you want to accomplish. And so sometimes I'll tell my client, hey, I'm going to change this, and other times I don't, and I just do it and then fix everything. And then they're like, wait, what did you do?

And I'm like, I just ignored these 17 protocols that you said I was supposed to do because they're all stupid and I just got it done. And they're like, well, how'd you do it? And I'm like, two steps. And they're just blown away by this because it's bureaucratic inertia and it's people not willing to get into a conflict because the incentive is I want to keep my job, whereas for me, I just don't care that much. And so you can use this in your approach to life and going, there's a hard way, there's an easy way, and then there's an even easier way that you can find to get it done.

If you recognize that the conflict is just bureaucratic inertia or stasis or the way that we do things.

33:57 Seth: I have to say for the listeners, we're doing the we have video on, and I can't read what's behind Brian, but he has a giant whiteboard of very neatly lettered columns and rows that he's clearly tracking something of great importance.

34:14 Brian: It's just my score on solitaire, like that's all my terms.

34:17 Mark: Your fantasy football.

34:20 Brian: Again, this was so refreshing to me and also eye opening because I kind of realized, especially reading the combs. So thank you for sending me that mark that this is my philosophical baseline. This is where I went to school for my initial philosophy training was like Sun Tzu and maneuver warfare. And then I went to St. John's and got introduced to the Greeks and all that stuff. And for me they fit really nicely. But I just want to. And I know we're trying to go chapter by chapter and I keep hacking that because it's totally fine again, I just do what I want. I flow like water. But I'm just wondering, as you guys read this and you spent so much time with Greek philosophy, what are the things that you think are similar and what are the things that you think are like vastly different? If we took this as like an approach to rhetoric or philosophy, I was

35:01 Mark: trying to look at this as a form of virtue ethics. You can kind of match it up against what Aristotle says. And so for instance in chapter 11 we were talking about chapter 10 about ground. Well, chapter 11 is called nine kinds of ground. But in the middle of this it describes sort of what the ruler is like. And I thought this matched up well with this talking about the way at the beginning in performing his duties, the field commander remains calm but unfathomable, disciplined and self governed. He puts blinders on his officers and men so they never know what he's thinking.

Be a man of mystery. Like it seems a very lonely, unsociable kind of life. That you're so practically oriented here that you're not doing what Aristotle thinks is the best, which is to have these friendships where you do philosophy together. This is the Taoist virtue of silence. That you don't use rhetoric to try to convince people of things you don't very much against the spirit of Socrates that you sort of say as little as possible partly because you don't want to reveal your hand, you don't want to reveal anything that would be a weakness, but also just as a matter of efficiency that to again don't make any move unless you're sure this is going to be the most effective possible move.

Like Stoicism and some of these other forms, Epicureanism. It does seem like a lot of self hacking would be involved to make yourself into this kind of entirely practically oriented person.

36:24 Seth: Isn't there an assumption of a certain kind of framework here that isn't there in Aristotle? Does Aristotle have any text where he talks about leadership in combat or war. I mean, that's not what Aristotle was talking about.

36:36 Mark: The virtue of courage and stuff. Yeah.

36:38 Wes: This is a forced comparison, I think, isn't it?

36:41 Seth: I don't think judging the commander as represented in this text against Aristotelian virtues is going to yield us much. I think Wes is right. It's a forced comparison, but only because you have to assume the frame of this hierarchy and this set of responsibilities that aren't there for Aristotle.

37:02 Wes: I think you can do something if you read the troops and the commander, for instance, as different components of the psyche. If these sorts of relationships become parts of the psyche, then you can understand how do you motivate yourself? How do you have the right kind of authority over yourself? And I think think some of that does actually make sense as a virtue ethics.

37:21 Mark: I am like the sudden striker snake. And if you tickle my right arm, I'll whap you with my left arm. And if you tickle my left arm, I'll whap you with my right arm.

37:28 Brian: I hope somebody gets that reference.

37:30 Seth: I'm going to poke you in the middle, mark.

37:32 Mark: Then I'll whap you with both arms. That's just one of the analogies he gives.

37:36 Brian: Combs was talking about how this would be contra the forms that Taoist philosophy would not have any forms because everything is relative to everything else. That was somewhat intriguing to me to meditate on because, I mean, I run this thing for St. John's called the Plato Project. And we just literally went seminar the Complete Works of Plato. So I spent two and a half years leading seminars on that. And I don't think the forms are as big a deal as most people make them into. Like, they don't get a ton of screen time. They're just kind of in the background occasionally, like supporting actor types. But what Combs proffers is that this is kind of the anti forms, this Taoist philosophy, which was interesting to me.

38:14 Mark: We're actually going to do Lao Tzu in one of the next dozen episodes coming up here somewhere. So we'll get back to this. But the word dao just means the way in terms of like the path. I mean, it could be the practice. So calling daoism, like the people that follow practices like that's the most generic possible. But Confucianism also talks about the dao. All these different competing forms with daoism talk about the dao, just they mean something else by it. And I'm not totally clear whether Combs is correct in saying that what the dao means here, which, you know, you interpreted Brian pretty specifically as getting along with the other people in the chain of command in your unit.

If that actually connects in the way that Combs says it does, as the Taoist thinks of it, which quoting here, the way refers to the ultimate state of being, where the ongoing process of change is completed in the unification of all things. The realm of non absoluteness and absoluteness, where being and no being merge, where yin and yang are one. The total spontaneity of things like that's pretty confusing. Well, we don't want to spend too much time on that in this context. But the thing that surprised me in interpreting Sun Tzu as a Taoist is I normally think of the dao sort of like I think is implied by the quote I just read as something that glosses over all changes.

It's like the one of Parmenides. Whereas the way Combs sketches out it. No, it's actually more like the Heraclitean one that everything has changed. And to understand, right. When we had Eva Brann on here about Heraclitus, she actually interpreted Heraclitus not as a mystic, but as like the father of analytic geometry, the ratio, the logos. Reason means ratio. And so what we're actually understanding, as somebody following Sun Tzu, understanding the dao is understanding the actual connections between all things. That means you don't just wash over everything and it's like this inchoate mist.

No, it's actually seeing the relationships between this and this and this and this. It's that analytical brain that you have to bring to mind. It's a left brain, not a right brain thing. In order to understand the field of battle and how all the different elements hook together.

40:20 Dylan: I think, Mark, that last bit that you're saying about how Sun Tzu is talking about the way as being all about contingencies and knowing the particulars. That sounds exactly right to me. I feel completely unprepared to talk about, make a comparative philosophical discussion about the way in Lao Tzu and the way in Buddhism and the way in and all these other things. I do think what you said about how he means it is the way

40:45 Wes: he means it in the first chapter, as we've said. Dylan, the thing that you pointed out is this whole what he explicitly says that it has something to do with the unification of the will of the superior and the subordinates. And then we get these various other contingencies which we're going to find out that those things have to be obeyed. And then he tells us that winning and losing is entirely predictable, that you can calculate that beforehand. Analytical. Yeah, which is amazing. But it's not like playing risk. It's not like you're going to say, oh, I have the bigger army, or those sorts of considerations.

It gets much more subtle. So he'll tell us it has something to do with the ability of the commander, the strategic and tactical ability. This is my high level summary. And then the capacity of the commander to induce obedience, to be an authority figure. Troop strength and training are part of this. And then terrain and weather are part of this as well. But it is about character ultimately. And it's also about the ability to, you know, as I said in the beginning before, to interpret and to communicate. So the final section we get here in chapter one is about the idea of war as the art of deception.

And you have to be able to understand your own state, your own capacities as an army, your own level of power, where you stand, location wise and in every other way. Then you have to be able to feign something different to the enemy and the same thing with your intentions. You have to be able to intend one, one thing, but communicate to the enemy something else. The same thing for the enemy state. You want to be able to accurately evaluate their power, their location, their intentions, and also their mental and emotional states. So are they angry?

Are they prideful? How do you feed their pride? How do you get them to do something just because. That they should know better not to do just because you can piss them off. So I think that type of stuff, I think has to be connected somehow to the way. I don't think we can make any more explicit connection except to say that you're in tune to some of these factors that you might normally not have thought important. So who goes into battle? Yeah, I'm going to do a lot of calculation. I know I can win, but I'm going to know that based on the psychological evaluation as opposed to troop level evaluation.

43:00 Brian: I thought it was interesting that right in chapter two, we're finally getting back to the chapter by chapter thing after my 20 side notes. But right in chapter two, the first thing he talks about in initiating battle is talking about how many guys he needs, how much stuff he needs and how much money he needs. Which I think to a lot of readers that might seem a little bit weird when we're talking about a mindset in chapter one, we're talking about this way stuff. We're talking about the earth and the heavens and all this stuff. And then he's like the main Rules for deploying troops require 1,000 four horse light chariots, 1,000 leather clad carts, 10,000 armored soldiers, enough provisions for 1,000 leagues as a rule, attend to.

And then he's got all this other stuff, right? And that comes back to another very common aphorism, which is amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics. And so I think that this is where you get into that ability to predict. And also it's the ability to once you see the enemy, right. Once you see the enemy, and to a trained eye, as soon as you see him, you know exactly what state they're in. Anytime you talks about this in later chapters, like are they waving their banners rapidly? Are they making a big harangue? A professional, when they see stuff like that is instantly going to give away exactly what their status is.

And so these kind of things that he's talking about in here make a ton of sense. Even if they don't make sense to a general readership. It makes a ton of sense from a professional readership. We got to talk about logistics and we got to talk about intelligence. And if we have logistics down and we have good intelligence, I can absolutely predict who's going to win this.

44:24 Dylan: The logistics runs throughout the whole book, not just here, but over and over and over again. There's got to be some aphorism about armies move on their bellies or something like that.

44:33 Brian: Yeah, that was Napoleon. Armies march on their bellies.

44:36 Dylan: Yeah. And right after what you just read is transforming that into an attention to morale. So all those logistics were basically what you need for 100,000 troops. Now once you've done that, you have to know that's going to take a long time to win. Both your soldiers and their weapons are going to lose their edge. Once you have all that stuff, it's all going to start depleting every single thing, which is the next piece of logistics.

45:02 Seth: Mo money, mo problems.

45:03 Mark: You got to strike fast before everybody gets tired and wants to go home.

45:06 Wes: And you're going to be dependent on where you are. Right. You're going to have to depend on the enemy's provisions and grain.

45:12 Seth: And I mean, I tie this back into the comments he makes about the relationship between the commander and the ruler, which is is it's easy enough to say like let's build an army and go smite them. And the wise commander in this case, what he's saying is, should point out that, okay, here's what it's going to cost. And that cost is not a one time cost. Here's what it's going to cost to do that. And here's the continual upkeep that's just as long as the army is within our borders and as soon as they go across lines. When he talks about the supply chain and living off the enemy's supplies, you know, it's like one wagon of grain is worth 20 wagons of grain from home.

Again, it comes back to, this is a contingency. You have to understand this. The cost of doing this is X. And if you can't afford to do it and yet you pursue that, then you're not being wise, you're not following the way, you're not doing what you should be doing, which is if you can't afford to fight the war, if you can't maintain the supply chain, if you can't get an army from A to B just because you can't supply them, then to make that your strategy is foolish, you're going to lose.

46:17 Mark: Sieges are for suckers, right?

46:19 Wes: So that's one of the things. Don't do lengthy engagements, don't do sieges, don't do long transport lines. This is where he also, he talks about the inflation, the economic effects of doing this.

46:31 Seth: Everywhere the army goes, prices go up.

46:34 Wes: Yeah. So it's a logistical problem, it becomes an economic problem, it becomes a resource management problem. And elsewhere we'll see in here, some of this is about managing the level of effort you put in, the level of energy. And we're going to find out that. And this applies to warfare as in life. I have this amount of power and I'm just going to come at things with overwhelming force and that's going to win the day. You got to be able to manage the energy, you got to be able to hold onto it and your resources, not use them until there's an opportunity where you know they're going to be effective so you don't waste them. So I think that's the really interesting part of this. It's not just about the expenditure of energy and the expenditure of force, but it's how you manage those things and preserve them and so on.

47:21 Mark: I think that sounds like a good place to wrap up part one. Why don't you just go click over to part two? It's the next thing, it'll be already released. It's right there in your feed. Thanks for supporting the partially examined life. See ya.