Ep. 284: Mark Twain’s Philosophy of Human Nature (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 284 is what is human nature? And we read an essay by Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, called what is man? Published posthumously in 1905. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, a speaking trumpet in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in all caps in Austin, Texas.

0:37 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, the result of the law of construction in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:44 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey satisfying an assassin's conscience in one way, a philanthropist's conscience in another way, a miser's in another, and a burglar's in still another way in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:56 Seth: All right.

0:57 Mark: This was a request from a listener who did not respond when I asked him if we could read his name on the air. So I'm not going to read his name on the air, but if you give enough money, then we'll consider it. Maybe ask us before actually making the donation if we want to read the thing. So you don't just get disappointed. But, yeah, this was something we were not aware of. At least I wasn't anybody. Is anybody aware of this?

1:19 Wes: Nope.

1:19 Seth: Nope.

1:20 Mark: That an author renowned for his keen analysis of human nature through his fiction actually wrote an essay saying what his conception of human nature is, which I kind of assume is always going to be a disappointment compared to what actually shows up in the fiction. Because in the fiction it's like, wow, what realism of how that person reacted to that thing. What a complex characterization. Whereas this is a brute force exercise, this very simplistic reduction of the human being to a determined machine. Opening thoughts.

1:54 Dylan: It is a dialogue, so it's perfunctorily not an essay. I guess I only knew of Mark Twain from having read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and knowing of him as an icon. But I'd never read anything else of his and never much of a sense of his role as a cultural icon of sorts. But reading a little bit more about him, it made it clear that he was working through writing lots of different essays of commentary about human nature. Effectively. This, I thought, was pretty straightforward. I found the whole all caps thing a bit. It was an affectation, which I don't think necessarily worked for me.

2:33 Mark: He just didn't have italics on his typewriter. I think that's all. A good editor should have fixed that.

2:38 Dylan: Yeah. I suppose the generous interpretation is it's a way of presenting inflection of some sort into the conversation. But the affected inflection is of a grumpy old man, a cane yelling at you. There's some things to sort of talk through about it, but it's very straightforward.

2:56 Mark: So I guess it was not printed until after his death. He died in 1910, but its copyright dates from 1905, when he was still actually alive. Whatever reason he did not want this published, whether it's because he actually thought it was too bleak, as the paper suggests, maybe, or. Or it's just that wasn't his style, it's unclear.

3:17 Wes: Well, I think he published plenty of bleak and pessimistic things. So even like for instance, the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which is very funny but in some ways seems very despairing about human nature and maybe one might even call it cynical. And then there's the. What is it? The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and other sorts of stories. There's always this sort of combat in him between the darker pessimistic side and then this more humane and charitable side, or the side of him that almost has a kind of affection for humanity.

So I think he's not a misanthropist and he's not a philanthropist either. It's a love hate relationship with human beings. So this essay, it wasn't surprising to me to read, given what I read of Twain and know of Twain. And it's interesting in that it takes some of his preoccupations. So for instance, Twain was really into the technology of his times and he was an inventor, I think he invented some early version of the typewriter, in fact, and he lost a lot of money trying to be an inventor. But in this essay he's interested in machines and he's interested in the ways in which, you know, we might think of human beings as machines.

And that's a big theme here. And of course this isn't something original. What he's doing is he's tying together many of the different trends and thinking that have developed over the previous few hundred years. But of course, sort of come to a culmination right with Darwinism and the developments in modern science towards the end of the 19th century. So what he does is he gives his kind of common sense humorist spin on that sort of thinking. The reduction of human beings to machines, the idea that we don't have free will, the reduction of motivation to a kind of psychological egoism, all that sort of stuff fits in with certain secular trends and thinking.

But Twain gives it a I guess accessible humorists take on all that stuff.

5:25 Seth: So I guess first thing is the structure of the text is a dialogue between an old man and a young man. And anytime I see a dialogue, of course, I don't think of Hume, but I do think of Plato. So, you know, immediately I was wondering if there was some Socratic element in here. But upon reflection, it has some structures that are similar because the young man is very much just a foil in a lot of respects for the old man to get his point across. The old man is more assertive and dogmatic, I would say. But, you know, the implication here is that the characters embody the theory that's being expressed in the sense that the thesis is that human nature is something that's molded over time with innumerable outside impressions and outside experiences and influences.

The old man is the truth seeker, is the character who's had more experience, and he's basically acting as the outside force on the young man and this whole thing. So there's an interesting rhetorical device that plays into the theory that's being expressed as well. I will say that it wasn't super fun. Reading Twain can be very fun to read. Twain can also be very challenging to read. I'd be curious. I know he wrote it towards the end of his life, but I'd like to understand a little bit more about what motivated him to produce this particular text in this particular form that he did, if such thing is possible.

6:51 Wes: It's not a work of pronounced literary quality. Right. Or anything like that. So it really is an essay, and it's a very simply written essay. I mean, the element of dialogue, I don't think it does a lot. There are views in here which were still scandalous to people, to a lot of people. So it gives him some cover to attribute these views to different characters.

7:13 Seth: Is that not to interject, but you think that's the rhetorical devices to the dialogue so you can assert it without taking responsibility for it?

7:21 Wes: I think probably in part. I don't know, but I think probably in part. I know that from the little I've read. I know that that could be a consideration. But the other part of this, it does tell you a little bit about the psychology of these different types of views. So it is true, for instance, that as we get older, we do get more cynical about human nature.

7:45 Seth: Are you saying we get wiser as we get older with.

7:47 Wes: Yes, yes, exactly. It's one variation on what it means to be wise. And certainly this seemed to be what happened to Twain and Twain is someone who also experienced a lot of tragedy in his life and on some accounts even became quite bitter about it. But he here, the old man, right, is Twain. Or he's expressing the views that we know to be twins. I don't think there's any doubt about it. And the young man is not much better than a Socratic interlocutor. It's not like he's making the strongest sorts of arguments. It is true that in a way, the theories that he espouses, you know, so for the idea that we have free will and a kind of naive sense of free will.

Right. Not the philosophical sense, but the naive, everyday colloquial sense of free will, which certainly is incoherent, that idea that we have, that in a way, it's culturally and philosophically young. Right. It's the way people tend to think early on, civilizationally, I think. And then it. With more reflection, it's subject to skepticism. But I also think when we're younger, we're prone to that point of view. We have all these aspirations. I think we're more prone to thinking of ourselves as in control of our fates and our futures. And, of course, life teaches us, we learn the hard way, that that is not the case.

So the old man knows something about determinism because he's lived it.

9:06 Mark: There's another essay in this collection, what Is man in Other Essays Called the Turning Point of My Life, that applies the same vocabulary about being manipulated by outside forces. Exactly. To his own biography. So that just said to me that, yes, the old man represents his views. He's consistent about it, at least at that time. If these were written near each other,

9:28 Dylan: I mean, I guess we'll get into this a little bit more. But there's a kind of extremity, and it felt to me like a certain kind of progressive inconsistency in the way he applies these different categories. For example, the contention of the old man that all influences are from outside and there's no source from the inside.

9:51 Wes: Except for temperament.

9:52 Dylan: Except for temperament, which I guess gets to the. What kind of contradiction that is. Especially since temperament is trainable.

9:59 Wes: Yeah, it seems trainable early on. And then towards the end of the essay, it seems like it's not trainable, like you can't do much about it. There is that, you know.

10:08 Mark: Right. It does sound like sometimes that he's putting forth the blank slate, the tabula rasa view. But then in other places. No, there's. There's huge amounts. You know, there's limits for how well, training can change you. It's not all training. Right. It's definitely like training plus temperament or heredity, whatever the makeup of the machine. And he's. I think, probably rightly, we don't know a lot about exactly how that works. We know he thinks we can say with surety that some people are just simply worse machines than others. And we can look at Shakespeare and say, man, that was a good machine.

Well, we can't say. I was reading this some of the time is like, he's denying genius. He's certainly not denying a certain cult of genius, but he's not denying that like, wow, Shakespeare had a great machine. It's just that since nobody created themselves, nobody is responsible for their own, either initial talents or their own developments, since, as you said, it all comes from outside. You know, some people have temperaments that are going to be more acceptable of training, are going to be able to excel more. It's all something that is, in a sense, predetermined or at least laid out by the circumstances of the whole causal net of the universe.

So the sort of praise that we might have for. Maybe it's just the tone of. You know, I think he thinks that moral philosophy has just been stated in a misleading way in the past. It's not that he's giving us a new moral theory. He's not saying morality is impossible because of this or we shouldn't praise people or something, but having a better understanding of what we are will give us a better perspective in how to talk about these things.

11:46 Wes: Reading this essay, I thought, well, a lot of this is just. I don't think any of these points of view are all that foreign to people or at least to.

11:55 Dylan: It's not scandalous. It's not going to be exactly scandalous.

11:58 Wes: It's not scandalous. And I think many of. For many of us, it's just. Yeah, okay, yeah, that's. That makes sense. And it's certainly ascended. There are views that are ascended among intellectuals, right. Human beings as largely as the products of culture and socialization and biology, some mix of nature and nurture. But just thinking about what Mark just said, a lot of it is, I think if you prod people, you will find out that a lot of this stuff still is scandalous. Like the question of personal merit. Right. Or the question of dessert. You know, I always want to make the argument to people that no one actually deserves anything.

The worst criminal doesn't deserve to suffer for their crimes. And the best people in the world, the people with the best characters don't deserve to suffer less because of that or enjoy life more because of that. And that's sort of, you know, in this, early on, in this essay, in this talk of personal merit, we are constructed the way we are, and that's not our fault. We don't get praise for that. If by temperament and genetics and training, education, we become a great this or that, a genius or whatever, we can't really take credit for that. And likewise, if we become a criminal, it's true we may have a bad character.

And it's true, it may make sense to scorn people like that in the sense of pointing out that, yeah, that person has really bad character, but the idea that they deserve suffering because of it or deserve to be rewarded for it, I think that's spot on. But I think many people would resist. Maybe you guys are going to resist that idea, but many people would resist that idea.

13:30 Dylan: He doesn't engage in the flip side of that. He's very interested throughout the essay of pointing out that we can't take credit for the good things that we have, that we don't deserve accolades for the virtuous things that we do. We can't take credit for our good behavior. But he doesn't engage on the notion that we also shouldn't be found culpable for our bad behavior. That just basically gets dodged, I mean, ignored. Which is the obvious flip side of it. Right? The obvious flip side of there being zero credit or responsibility earned is the flip side of it.

There's also zero responsibility garnered if it's actually zero. And I found it interesting that he didn't engage that part of it at all. He was more interested in sort of pointing out those foils knocking people down a notch for thinking too much of themselves. A kind of anti authoritarian, anti moralist kind of reaction against Victorianism. It's kind of how I interpreted it.

14:34 Mark: Well, we definitely have to get rid of this distinction that you might have between manipulating people and talking to them man to man. You know, like people, because we're machines, we can only be manipulated. It's just that one of the ways that we are manipulated is through our reason is through. Just like if I'm trying to talk to you honestly, that is imparting an idea to you, whether I intend to change you or not. I guess maybe that's what it comes down to. So it's not like if somebody has done something wrong, you want to just say, oh, we don't need to punish anybody because it's not really their fault, because you want that deterrent effect, that you don't care in some ways, and you want that reformatory effect.

He does suggest one thing about association, that to put a criminal in association with a lot of other criminals is like the worst thing you could do. Right. That is going to make them more corrupt. It's not going to reform them, you know, so as a practical matter, how to actually reform them? We should change and should not let some sentiments about they only deserve to be with their own kind or something like that to make us continue irrational policies.

15:38 Seth: It certainly generates external influence when you incarcerate the person. And in so doing, you put them in circumstances that are going to mold and shape their character, as you say, not more than likely, not in the direction of reformation. And you also, by punishing, create external influence on everybody else in one way, shape or form. By the way, side note, I think deterrence has been proven to be predominantly a myth as far as punishment is

16:09 Wes: concerned, for the death penalty. Yeah, I don't think it's been proven to be a myth, really. If we stop putting people in prison at all, we're going to have no crime in terms of just placing this

16:20 Mark: in a historical context. So I just looked up, while we're talking here, Laplace's demon in 1814. So that's the idea that there's complete causal determinism. And, you know, the demon would know this causal net if he just knew all the initial facts. He would know all the things that happened in the future. So this whole idea of complete determinism, including us, that we are cogs in the machine, too. We are not unique, special souls with our own swerve or something that are outside of that. This had been in the culture at least this long. At least 85 years here or 80 years here.

16:53 Wes: Yeah. So if I just to restate that, if I know every fact that there is to know about every subatomic particle in the universe and every other relevant physical description that I can give, and then I know the laws of nature. Once I know that, I know everything about the future. Right. If I'm a determinist. So if 5 billion years ago I have all that data, then I know there will be a mark. I know everything that mark will do. I know that long before he exists, that sort of thoroughgoing determinism about human behavior.

17:24 Mark: The other historical connection, apparently he was interested in pragmatism. Right. So this is around the same time that James, you know, after Peirce had published his pragmatism. And there's a Few things in here that at least called that to mind. One of the most interesting things at the end, I think, Seth, you referred to the old man as the truth seeker and. Well, yes, he was a truth seeker. He clarifies toward the end of this essay he does not continue to be a truth seeker because nobody continues to be a truth seeker. And if you remember the Charles Sanders Peirce essay, the Fixation of Belief, that was how that worked, that it's not like Descartes thought, that we could just doubt everything and investigate till we find something.

It is more like the Lakatos, the more recent philosophy of science stuff where no, no, we have beliefs and something comes along such that maybe we're seeking or facing some counter evidence or something, so maybe there's a little churn, but then we just fix on another belief, you know, sort of move as little as possible, then we're done being truth seekers. So according to this, the old man, you know, Twain himself was a truth seeker, was interested in philosophy and now then he figured it out and yeah, so he's done asking questions. He merely is passing on the wisdom at this point.

18:38 Dylan: And part of that is directly in line with the psychology of the view, which is that we're all always behaving to our own gratification of our own self esteem, that we want to think highly of ourselves. And so the longer you go along in life, the more you're going to have a history that you want to say, I'm a good person, I did the right thing, and it's going to be harder and harder for you to change course and maintain that point of view.

19:08 Mark: Yeah, that's probably the most important, certainly most harped upon thesis in the whole thing is that that is the, our conscience is fine with us calling it that our master, that is the thing that we will inevitably seek to serve, is feeling good about ourselves. And even things that appear to be selfless actions, we only do them because they make us get off somehow to

19:31 Wes: secure our own approval.

19:33 Dylan: Yeah, which is different than getting off, honestly.

19:35 Wes: So yeah, that's what I was going to say. It's interesting that this isn't simply framed in terms of a pleasure principle, right. Where we say, you know, there are similar dynamics at work. Right. The question is why do people do things that are unpleasurable or engage in self sacrifice? And one can always say, well, there's a calculation about, you know, I'm working out according to the pleasure principle, doing some calculus of maximal gratification so that even if it hurts now, it'll lead to more pleasure in the long run. So if we're thinking in terms of the Platonic division of the soul, that sort of account puts the emphasis on the erotic, on Eros.

And Twain's account puts emphasis on the thumotic, on Thomas spiritedness, on the approval of others, on one self approval as a product of the identification with others, which is another way of talking about conscience. And that lines up, of course, with other accounts of other philosophers like Hegel, right, the emphasis on recognition. Or with Nietzsche, who has his own, who also rejects a simple pleasure principle account of things and wants to talk about will to power, which I think is intimately related to the thematic and this desire for recognition.

But yeah, that's the one thing that actually did really surprise me about this essay is the emphasis on conscience as being the master as opposed to mere pleasure.

21:01 Seth: Did you feel that there was any wavering on that point? At times it seems that what you're trying to do is satisfy your conscience, but you're satisfying it because of the feeling you get. I had a hard time decoupling it the way you just described Wes. If it's clear here for you guys, that's fine, we can drop it. But I just felt like it's a little gray there.

21:22 Mark: I think you're right that it is stated in a way such that it is not falsifiable. I think we can make this whole reading a test case. I think I brought up in a nightcap, like, well, okay, fine, falsifiability is separating science from non science, according to Popper. But don't we also use it in everyday context or in philosophical context to say, yeah, there's something seriously wrong, since, you know, we don't really take Marxism as a science or even alleged science at this point anyway. But it still seems like it's a pretty bad for Marxism that it made so many historical predictions that didn't come true.

Can we criticize views about human nature like this one on similar grounds that it sounds like sometimes like you're saying, Seth, that you know, we actually feel some pleasure, you know, and that would be like what Wes described, something like the pleasure principle. And that would be a falsifiable claim. Because you could see, I mean, maybe a falsifiable claim at least, I'm not sure. You know, there might be methodological issues in figuring out whether someone actually felt pleasure or not, especially if the pleasure could be unconscious. But here, clearly he's admitting unconscious impulses in such a way that he's just Arguing that even if you would not accept the explanation yourself, that you're only doing it for your own approval.

That's why you're doing it.

22:32 Wes: This is actually a complicated issue. So Mark, you bring up the philosophy of science aspect of this and the question of falsifiability. I think that when we do psychology and philosophical, moral psychology and philosophy, psychology in general, we're in a domain where we're not dealing with things that are falsifiable. So I think we're stuck in that sense. But the point that Seth was bringing up, I think is important because the question is whether conscience is reducible to the pleasure principle. And one could ask the same thing of Nietzsche.

Well, isn't your will to power just reducible? He's very critical of English empiricism and English pleasure principalists. And one can always ask, don't we seek power because it's pleasurable or for the sake of future pleasure? One can always ask that question. And Twain speaks in ways that make it sound like, well, it would be very distressing to not have one's own self approval, right? You know, if I don't help the old woman, you know, I walk home in the cold because I want to give my 25 cents that I was going to use for cab or whatever to the beggar.

And what am I balancing? I'm balancing the torture that my conscience would do to me if I didn't give that 25 cents away against the physical discomfort of walking home. And so one could always think about this in a way that seems to reduce it to pleasure versus displeasure. And I think this is the most complicated question at work in a text like this, or for an advocate of psychological egoism, because it's trivial just to say, well, we do everything according to what we prefer, right? Of course, if I do something, it's not that I ever do anything that I don't prefer.

I might prefer unpleasurable things because I think they're right, for instance, but that doesn't mean I don't prefer them. But then the question is what psychological states go into preference, right? Is it always reducible to pleasure? Or is there something in us? Are we induced to act in ways that actually have nothing to do with pleasure? And that's entirely possible, right? In the same way that there are lots of things that go on with us biologically going in our bodies, we don't need pleasure to motivate them to happen. There might be innumerable sorts of psychological states that correspond to motivated behavior in human beings.

It's unclear if pleasure captures all of that or if everything is reducible to pleasure and pain. So, right. Maybe death drive is one irreducible component. Maybe power is one irreducible component. Those are the complicated questions underlying all this, I think.

25:11 Dylan: I think that one of the things that happens, typically is putting all of those things that you're pointing to, I think, rightly, Wes, as making it complicated, as if they're all on a scale of pleasure, that they're all measurable by pleasure. And that's in the end, the rub is that is there one axis by which to understand all motivations, or are there multiple axes that are distinguishable from one another, even if in articulable ways such that you would not say, as you said, like, that Will is necessarily a axis of pleasure, properly speaking.

25:49 Mark: And I'm not sure if he can explicitly allow in his theory unconscious pleasures, but certainly the unconscious plays a huge role in his picture of this determined machine. That it's not just that, wow, you know, you think that we're having a conversation and you're reasoning things out, but really it's your mechanism that's making the decisions for you. Like, that's true. He does say that. But he also, further than that, say that it feels like we are determined that he gives his young man, you know, some challenges. Like, I want you to just tell yourself that first thing tomorrow morning, you're going to think of some particular idea.

Think of it right now and say, this is what I'm going to. And you'll just find that your mechanism, your mind is not under your control. It will just zip away. And this is how it works. And most of the mental work that goes into calculating things, reasoning things out, is just the machine that is our brain churning away, whether our conscious mind is aware of it or participating it in it or willing it or not. So given that, there seems like a lot of room for us to be wrong about our motives, this whole thing again reminded me of Nietzsche and other folks that we've read.

26:53 Seth: I think that point brings me back to my question. Is the only marker we have of whether we're satisfying our conscience is how we feel our emotional state. If we do something, do we feel good? Do we feel bad about it? Do we feel guilty? Are we conflicted? Just like Mark was talking about? We don't necessarily have direct access to what will satisfy our conscience. The only marker we have is as we aspire or desire to do something, how do we feel about it? What thoughts do we entertain? Are we guilt Ridden. Does it make us feel good? Does it make us feel bad? So to a certain extent, what I felt like he was saying was we ultimately desire to satisfy ourselves. He starts off right, there's no such thing as a selfless act. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is make ourselves feel good or satisfy some desire of ours. And what I'm wondering is the mechanism for how we determine what that is.

27:51 Wes: So I think he talks about the mechanism a bit, right? Which is that it starts out, we want approval from other people. So the way conscience develops, this is very much in line with Freud and other accounts. But we basically identify with other people and their values. As children, we want approval from parents, and later on in life, we want approval from our peers. So we act in such a way as to get that approval. That approval is important to us. It's pleasurable. And eventually it becomes an internal relationship. Right? I internalize that other recognizer, that other consciousness.

And I feel pain when I do, for instance, what I think of as the wrong thing. Regardless of whether anyone is around to see it or whether there's any danger of anyone finding out about it. My conscience will just torture me anyway. So I can fully internalize all of this stuff as conscience or as bad conscience.

28:47 Dylan: And this is the avenue by which training works in his picture is cultivating by external forces the kinds of things you regard yourself highly for. And so it's hard not to say. It's also Aristotelian in this respect, right. That gathering the right habits together so that you will have high regard for yourself in the right way, that amounts to sort of training your conscience.

29:17 Seth: Yeah.

29:17 Wes: You want to change your habits and your behaviors. Hang out with a different crowd. That's one important thing, right? This is true. I have willpower. I'm going to force myself to do this. Probably most of us find out that doesn't work. It's really, how am I going to Jerry rig my environment to manipulate myself into doing more of the thing that I think I should be doing and less the thing I should not be doing? So I think this is another old man moment. Like the part of what it means to be wiser and older is to figure out that trick. We change our methods of motivating ourselves from focusing more on the will to focusing more on external circumstance. And carrots sticks that we build into the things around us.

30:06 Mark: Seth, I think you said something about that the only way we know when we've satisfied our consciences is how we feel about it. And the young man toward the End of The essay, page 68 or so gives a potential counter example that there's a servant, an old forgetful servant who is ticking him off and he's decided, you know, that he will not get mad at the servant, but then he just flies into a rage. So this is sort of the weakness of the will problem, like you've determined it is good for me to not get angry, but then you get angry anyway. And as in our weakness of the will discussion with Aristotle, it's not that this was a violation, it's not that your machine wanted to not get mad and you got mad anyway, or your self approval involved not getting mad, but then you got mad anyway.

It's that the self approval is so fickle it has whims. And so there was an immediate pleasure in getting mad that was satisfied there, but then immediately the other pleasure, the other whim from your master jumped in and was disapproving of the first thing.

31:10 Seth: No, that raises an interesting point, Mark, that if it's possible to act in such a way that's counter to the satisfaction of your conscience, and you can only recognize that in retrospect, right, with reflection and memory, then it kind of puts the kibosh on the whole man as machine thing, doesn't it? A little bit. Because the implication there is you have inputs and outputs and there's a single threaded processing that you wouldn't be able to react in a way contrary to the satisfaction of your desires if you were a machine.

31:46 Wes: Ultimately, he wants to write to talk here about the conflict between temperament and conscience. So this is a case where if we want to do pleasure principle calculations, those calculations break down or they lead to counterintuitive results. Because the pain that he's going to experience, the sense of humiliation or having done something wrong from berating his servant, will be greater than the satisfaction of going off on her. So why would anyone do that? Right. Don't you do the calculation? You see, one thing is going to be more pleasurable.

Hey. Then you do the thing that's going to be more pleasurable. So this example complicates things in a few ways. It reminds me of Locke a little bit, right? Because the future is kind of fuzzy to us. So when we do these calculations, we can't really make a good assessment or we can't be fully impacted by our sense of how the future is going to be. So we may know abstractly we're going to feel more pain, but in the moment, the thing that really arrests our attention is the pleasure of, say, in this case, discharge of telling off the servant. And the way Twain cashes this out is in terms of his hot temper, his temperament.

And the way I would reformulate this is just in terms of the conflict between the instinctual, which is not a word I'm going to use because Twain uses it in a very specific way in this essay. But it's between our impulses, our basic impulses, like, for instance, to act, to do something angry, and our conscience, which is still something very motivated and depending on sentiment and feeling, but can come into conflict with impulses that have more immediate sway over us, let's say, whatever the pleasure principle, calculations will get taken over by these impulses.

33:45 Mark: Are there any other distinct pieces of philosophy that we want to overview? And before we end part one here, animal intelligence versus human intelligence.

33:54 Dylan: Yes, that's a good one to bring up.

33:56 Mark: He discounts the role of language as being such a determiner, you know, that it's just, yeah, we have a more complicated machine, but it's not fundamentally any better. And he seems to have a very high opinion of the intelligence of ants, for instance, to react flexibly to novel problem situations.

34:16 Wes: He says that animals, right, can think and they can communicate. This reminded me of a. I forget what episode it was, but I had said something. Seth and I were having a conversation about whether birds know things, right, because of their instinctual behavior regarding nest building. And I said something like, you know, I think birds do have knowledge. And someone put in a. I put an up, an excerpt from that, and someone cantankerously said something about, well, that's not knowledge. That's, you know, knowledge is true opinion plus justification.

So the traditional philosophical version of what it means to know. And of course it misses the point because that's the question, right? To what extent is knowledge actually procedural? To what extent is it actually know how? And with Wittgenstein, for instance, right, we begin to think of language more as a kind of. If we think of meaning as use, we can see the way in which knowledge might involve more know how than we thought and not just know that. So that it may seem absurd to say, well, ants know things and they build cities and they can reason, they can do this and that.

I think most of us would want to look at that behavior and say, they're not conscious of what they're doing. They don't have language, they can't know things. But I think Twain has a point, which is that when we see animals do things that look as if they involve reasoning, and he gives Lots of good examples. There's no reason to not treat that as an instance of reasoning. Whatever other psychological observations we want to make about the degree to which it was conscious or this or that. I think undeniably, for instance, animals can make inferences, let's say, and act on those inferences.

Like the horse that goes and knocks out the pin so that he can open the door to get the corn.

36:12 Mark: Did you detect any hint of behaviorism in here? Usually that is an immediate thing that causes us to dismiss the thinker and say who this person is. Certainly removing that distinction, saying it's really not important that human beings seem to have more self reflection as they act than animals do. Because really we don't have anywhere near the self reflection that we think we do. Self reflection that we have has no ultimate causal import. It's at best a determined cog in the determined machine. Whether some of it shows up as data that we can access or not is almost. I'm not sure if it's beside the point, but it at least does not make us the special creatures that a Cartesian dualist would think that we are. But I'm not sure if that sort of reduction is enough to say that he's behaviorist or anything like that.

37:06 Wes: I don't think so because I think the behaviorist rejects the necessity of referring to internal subjective states when we talk about and explaining behavior. And I don't think Twain goes that far. He wants to talk a lot about these internal subjective states, but is still

37:25 Mark: using the Jamesian categorization an expression of the tough minded mentality as opposed to the tender minded mentality. I don't know if you remember that from James's pragmatism, but it started that whole book by talking about the empiricists that they want to make themselves so tough minded. And Twain, like you can handle the truth. I'm going to tell you the truth, but maybe I won't publish it. He thinks himself very tough minded that he's willing to face what we at least before doing his philosophy would have thought of as awful facts about ourselves.

37:55 Dylan: He certainly glories in a kind of truth telling aspect of his old man telling it like it is revealing the secrets to. Or maybe that's the secrets, but a kind of typical old Manish corrective to the youngsters about how the world really works.

38:14 Mark: Did anyone else have throughout this process and throughout this discussion the Neil Young song Old man going through the old

38:21 Wes: man look at my life I'm a lot like you were not once Even though, like, that's one of the few songs I really know how to play on guitar, but.

38:30 Seth: Oh, that's interesting.

38:32 Wes: Yeah.

38:33 Seth: No, but now I won't cease to think about it for the rest of the evening, I'm sure.

38:37 Mark: Thank you. I wanted to make sure I got that in the public part of this so I can ruin some people's evening as they contemplate this. Well, let's wrap up part one. This is going to be a shorter episode overall because it was a simple reading and that's fine, that's wonderful. We'll get into a lot of more direct quotes and I'm sure have some spin off discussions in part two. If you are a supporter, you can hear that as the next thing in your feed. If you support us specifically by paying Apple, you're not going to see that until next week.