Ep. 342: Zhuangzi on Knowledge and Virtue (Part Two)

0:09 Mark Linsenmayer: Exam in Life Episode 342 Part 2 Finishing up our treatment of the Zhuangzi We've been contemplating this. It's not metaphysical monism, because he's not saying all is literally one. No, there are different things, it's just that the difference between them don't really matter. The interpenetration of opposites. Everything implies everything else. Nothing can really be considered in isolation because it has a sort of a penumbra. Just to define it, you're defining it in terms of its contrast with all the other stuff. And so even a horse carries around non horseness with it. Theo, you wanted to take this a little further.

0:46 Theo: Well, I think this paragraph will either maybe help, maybe hinder. We'll see. This is on page 17. For courses have never had any sealed boundaries between them, and words have never had any constant range. It is by establishing definitions of what is this, what is right, that boundaries are made. Let me explain what I mean by boundaries. There are right and left, then there are roles and duties, then there are divisions and disputes, then there are competitions and struggles. And this is the kind of thing they call the eight Virtues, said sarcastically.

As for the sage, he may admit that something exists beyond the six limits of the known world, but he does not make any further assessments about it. As for what is within the world, he may assess it, but will not express his own opinion. As for historical events, he will give an opinion but not debate it. I don't know what that's about. For whenever a division is made, something is left undivided. Whenever debate shows one of two alternatives to be right, something remains undistinguished and unshown. What is it? The sage hides it in his embrace while the masses of people debate it, trying to demonstrate it to one another.

Thus I say that demonstration by debate always leaves something unshown.

2:07 Mark Linsenmayer: Who's the mathematician that we studied with the incompleteness Gödel? Is this a Gödel statement?

2:13 Theo: It was, I think, slightly a Heideggerian about revealing and unrevealing. I'm just wondering if this makes clearer or is skirting around this, that horseness, non-horseness that we were debating.

2:27 Mark Linsenmayer: I mean, I'm reading the beginning just as another Cratylist sort of statements, right? Words have never had any constant range because their reference are not well defined enough metaphysically for words to have constant range. The world changes too much. Courses have never had any sealed boundaries between them. So you can walk in a zigzag course. What counts is Confucianism. What counts is there are lots of different Confucians. So there's not one Confucian course even, you know, there's just different individual choices that people make and we sort of lump them together in scholarly traditions, right? So it's traditions that makes these divisions between things.

3:05 Seth: If you go further in the text, when the guidance of a course becomes explicit, when it becomes clearly and manifestly a course, it ceases to be the course. And in the text only the last course is both capitalized and tagged with a definite article. So this puts me in the mind of Confucian ritual. Once it becomes reified, once it's a thing, a this that has instructions and a process and whatever, it's no longer a way. Instead it's an artifact somehow. It's a human artifact. And the way is the way of heaven, right? Ways are ways of heaven. Language is human, politics are human, houses are human, artifacts are human.

So there's something to saying like, yes, you can debate a thing and you can argue and say, but that's not the path to the way. You're not going to get there through argumentation or demonstration or anything like that, because it's essentially uncodifiable. I don't want to say ephemeral because that suggests transcendent and airy and so forth. But to go back to your Lacanian name drop mark, you remember how it's the underneath, it's almost like human experience, language, all of this stuff is almost at a symptom. It's the consequence of heaven moving.

The wind's blowing the 10,000 things. We are the product, the earth. And human experience is the product of these moving things. But we look at the output and we think it is the Creator. We look at the chair and we Think that's the chair maker, right? And he's trying to say no. Anything that you can grasp and experience as part of human experience in that way is not the generating force, it's what has been generated. And we keep trying to grasp the generating force and we succeed. The whole notion of what becomes explicit is you can think of as the artifact or as a created thing.

Becoming the is, not becoming is. And so anything we can talk about, anything we talk about our language and our human experience in the world, once we can put our hands around it and describe it and talk about it, then it's not the creative force, it's not the way, it's not what's becoming, it's what is. We are constantly bringing into being. Things are constantly being brought into being from nothingness, so to speak. So becoming is constantly happening. There's constant transformation. But don't mistake what is that you can see, feel, taste, touch, write about, talk about, speak about, whatever.

For the power of becoming. And the power of becoming is what underwrites the way. If you want to tap into the right way, you want to be in harmony with the power of becoming, not simply be in harmony with what is. You're not harmonizing with the world of things. You're harmonizing with a generative force.

6:10 Theo: I would say that you don't need to get rid of all words for that because obviously we're reading a really long text here. So I think like Zhuangzi has the idea that words can also. They could be a way of words, but it has to be generative words. It has to be words that constantly push the reader or the writer onwards and don't try to codify or cut off possibilities. That's why he's trying all these different styles. Unless someone disagrees that this, that ultimately, if we get the way, do we throw this book away? Do we throw the letter away? Once you've got onto the roof, Ultimately

6:44 Mark Linsenmayer: the end of the rambling, the wandering chapter was about again mentioned. Fish, page 224. A fish trap is there for the fish. When you get the fish, you forget the trap. A snare is there for the rabbits. When you get the rabbit, you forget the snare. Words are there for the intent. When you get the intent, you forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?

7:04 Theo: Yeah, it's a great passage and also like contradictory. He still wants a word with someone. Or is that just like the Lao Tzu sage, I would say, eventually ends up in quietism. I'm not quite sure if that's the case for Zhuangzi, but he approaches words in the correct manner as something that's good for the momentary flowing of life, but doesn't attach too much importance to them.

7:29 Mark Linsenmayer: When you say words are like the piping of baby birds, you don't just mean that they're meaningless. The piping of baby birds has a purpose, like give me the worm, mom or whatever. They just don't have any meaning. You wouldn't write them down. The sacred words of the bird, Peep, peep, peep. That's not. That would be elevating them beyond their, as you say, their immediate purpose.

7:49 Theo: I mean, Confucius is often in here, as we've talked about before. And I think if Zhuangzi reads Confucius, and I think he thinks that Confucius can be read in a way that eliminates a certain way, you shouldn't take him seriously at all. Taking text seriously is the mistake.

8:04 Dylan: Well, too seriously. Right. I take it that's a little bit about where this joke with having a word with you that we referred to earlier is sort of comes in line to me. I thought Seth's pointing out that all this discussion of this and not this is honing in on maintaining a orientation to where the source of all being is, even in the midst of interacting with and identifying beings and entities. So there's this kind of tension that you're having to maintain all the time. And that's one of the challenging things to me about texts like this, and maybe that's one of the reasons why they're written as dialogues or narratives or parables, is if you just analyze them and try to pin down everything, you're at some level missing the point that the parable is trying to present to you, because you have to keep things that are effectively opposites or contradictory together at the same time, because it's in that interaction and that friction that you are getting towards something closer to the truth of what the parable is talking about or what the story is talking about.

And I thought Seth did a pretty good job of formulating that. One of the conclusions of that is in the. In the way the dao as being a source, as an axis, even in having a kind of fundamental, I want to say, multiplicity. But multiplicity is implying a quantification of all of the different being in there. And that's not really what's going on, because it's more like the sourceness of not this. That's Going on. And so it's undifferentiated source that in becoming, you know, when you pull out of this, out of it, you still don't lose that undifferentiatedness of the not this, which remains a source for all of those activities.

10:09 Mark Linsenmayer: Should we talk more about the source? Since that is like a main technical term in here, just like the great Source as teacher return to the source, he says again and again and again, Dylan, were you using that sense of source in the this and not this or.

10:26 Dylan: I think so, but it's an unfortunate coincidence, but I think that it ends up aligning with course. Where course is the word being used for? The way is the word for dao, right?

10:38 Mark Linsenmayer: In the Daodejing it was like everything comes from the dao. First there's the dao, then there's heaven and earth, then there's. Which we contemplated as a cosmological thing. I don't feel like we get that kind of cosmology in this text, at least in the parts that we read. This time it's more, you know, saying what I'm doing comes from the source. Sounds more like it is a psychological. You know, it is authentically coming out of my action as an emanation of nature or something like that, as opposed to something externally put on me from some definitely phenomenological.

11:12 Theo: If it's not me, it's something in experience. The source is imminent somehow. I don't really know a great way of talking about it, though. I think Zhuangzi would agree that it's not something you can talk about very

11:24 Mark Linsenmayer: easily in that chapter, Chapter six, the Great Source as teacher, he just talks about genuine humans. What is genuine humanness? Well, just because the term Ren. The Confucian's claim, right? That is what being humane is. So Chuang Tzu, the Taoists want to say that to be truly, genuinely human is to be inhuman is to have your actions come from the source, not from human culture or something like that. So being a humanist, you might think like what a great literature. And. But this is sort of a Rousseau, the noble savage, having your actions come out of your nature and hence from nature itself. That is what genuine humanness is. We want to accord with the ways of heaven, but we can't really know the ways of heaven. But the best we could do is. Is how does heaven appear in us, giving us desires in a telos or whatever.

12:15 Theo: Also in kind of turning oneself towards the human and defining the human. And this was brought up, I think, with Karen, you start to say what is Inhuman, in a sense, you start to cut off the freaks or those that you don't consider human. So the human way creates boundaries and that's what becomes inhuman about the human way. So we might think of this as what is a horse problem, but what is a human.

12:40 Mark Linsenmayer: Do we want to talk about intrinsic virtuosity? Seems like we were getting into that quite a bit last time.

12:45 Dylan: We should talk about this. Right. Because what I find myself challenged by here is whether I'm missing on the one hand, because of this sort of tension that's in the text, the using of parables. We've been going back and forth trying to analyze what's going on with the talk of this and not this is whether or not I'm missing something really important about the lack of conclusion going on. Then we get to talk about virtuosity, which is, as far as I can tell, a way of being virtuous in the sense made me feel very much like the way in which you would use it in the Nicomachean ethics of being excellent in some way.

Putting aside not a discussion of specific excellences that goes on in Aristotle, but the notion of doing something really well. And that's what virtuosity is. So now you're getting into a discussion about living well in a very broad sense. And it aligns with the ways in which things. There's some kind of alignment with the way. Even if there is something like multiplicity there. We raise all the questions that we've been talking about before, that is in the text is if something has an identity that is a virtuous action activity, is that not the way in which everything should be.

You know, we should all be trying to apply that. There's this notion, this tension of virtuous acting that is all individual. So it's multiplicity of identities, kinds of things. The reason to talk about virtuosity is it is pointing to picking out things, being better than other things.

14:27 Theo: It's nurturing life. Nurturing life, that's still a vague term.

14:32 Dylan: It's dancing around. If you're talking about nurturing something, you're talking about making something what it is, pulling out more of you just call nurturing life feeding its lifing. You are at least displaying that you know something about the lifing of that thing. If you are nurturing it, and if you talk about what you're doing with it or interacting with it is not nurturing it, then you are also making a distinction that reveals something about what it is.

14:58 Theo: I think that that's correct. But also, I think there's a real tension here in the sense that we want to give like an Aristotelian, like we are something like a seed that can be cultivated, or we might say Mencian, you know, that there is something that we cultivate in ourselves to become. But in the same sense we have an idea of like we are hollow instruments that was brought up before, you know, that there's a certain we're not determined in the same way. In the Zhuangzi text. He's kind of, I think, pulling in two directions here, that we seem to have some things that mean cultivating life. But he doesn't want to, like, he wants to give the most minimal explanation on that.

15:35 Mark Linsenmayer: I'm not sure even good. Cultivating life. Right. If you say that I'm going to expand my sense of self to encompass everything so I no longer care if I as an individual live or die, then like. Well, what makes me cultivate life is

15:48 Dylan: that in the text, that notion mark of cultivating your attitude where you don't care whether you live or die.

15:55 Mark Linsenmayer: I saw this many times.

15:57 Seth: I have it notated as 94, but I think that's the PDF. Life and death are fated and that they come with the regularity of day and night is of heaven that which humans can do nothing about simply the way things are now. Some people look at heaven as a father and therefore love it. But why not love even more that which towers beyond it? Sorry, I don't need to read the rest of that. But there are multiple occasions where there was one that says you can't accelerate birth or slow down death. Something like that. There's no deliberate activity that can impact birth or death. And anything that you cannot impact through deliberate activity you shouldn't care about.

16:35 Mark Linsenmayer: For example, one of you said something about identifying yourself not as what you are now, but as the becoming. So, you know, we go through a state of transformation from birth toward death. So why should I identify any less with like the dead end that, you know, gets reused in the environment or something, you know, the dead body that

16:55 Theo: is, if we keep it to just experience, then, you know, we take the Wittgensteinian point that death is something that happens in life and therefore it's another transformation that one should embrace. And this happens a lot in the funeral. There's a lot of funerals in the text and people thinking about death and yeah, I think it's often portrayed as embracing the transformation that is just whether it's final or not. That's Also part of the skepticism, part of the therapy of self, maybe skepticism to help to kind of go, well, we don't know that death is death. All we know is transformation. That's what we're always presented with. And therefore we should approach death with the same joy that we would. We would approach any transformation.

17:40 Seth: At the very least, you shouldn't abhor death. Yeah, that's somewhere around the same place as, well, don't delight in life or abhor death.

17:48 Mark Linsenmayer: So there has to be some way of understanding that he's talking about the

17:51 Seth: genuine humans of old.

17:53 Mark Linsenmayer: Yes, but I think Dylan's general point, though, about we're having trouble maybe because it's inarticulable, saying what the goal actually is. If it's not specifically like pro life in the sense of this particular part of the transformational cycle, the life part. It's not that because that would be a static thing, whereas normally we think of. No, it's the anti lifers. Right. If you're Nietzsche, you're saying the people that want to say that there's a static world, those are the anti lifers. I'm a pro lifer because I'm into the change and the flux, but Nietzsche's still emphasizing health and the part of the change in the flux where you're actually vibrant. Not the entire thing.

18:36 Theo: Definitely entire thing. In Zhuangzi, like in a sense to embrace sickness, if that's what you have.

18:43 Mark Linsenmayer: Like Nietzsche, you don't despise the despisers of life enough that you should be so pro life that you're pro not just the struggle, but like the actual death that is part of life.

18:55 Theo: Did we get to the telos problem?

18:57 Mark Linsenmayer: Every virtuosity is pure potential.

18:59 Theo: Yeah. Like, what are we nurturing? Because it's a real tension between we being undeterminate free beings and like completely determined. Like, I'm not quite sure of the relationship between freedom. Like, is it stoicism that often kind of comes up here or.

19:17 Mark Linsenmayer: So there's a big amor fati embrace. Death is part of life. Anything that happens to you, if you lose a foot, whatever, just embrace all that. It was all sort of faded. That's what fate is. Enjoy whatever position you happen to be in. But then there is that feeling of Dylan. You'd use the word intentional before, and I sort of wasn't sure if intentional meant planned, but I think maybe it doesn't mean planned, but it's. You can be not planned, but yet still be intentional. Right. When you leave the door and you're open to the world before you. And you're responding to the. That doesn't mean you're just whimsically sort of letting yourself be swept along like you're doing something intentional, yet not planned.

19:57 Dylan: Yes, I agree. And also, you know, thinking about, you know, your characterization of embracing your fate. Right. That doesn't mean that. Let's just take the case of, you know, you lose a foot saying that you've lost a foot. So you might as well just embrace the fact that you've lost your foot. That's different than saying I have the intention of, of choosing to lose my foot. And so the embracing of one's fate seems much more like a psychological disposition of being where you're at, embracing where you're at that gets wound up in the way. To be where you are in your existence and be thriving as much as possible is to not be ground down by lamenting what you had before you could have had or you lost or any, any of that stuff. Because that regret, for instance, or desiring to be something you are not is in no way going to lead you to thriving in the state you're in.

20:59 Mark Linsenmayer: I did notice this time. I did not notice this when we talked with Karen. There's a footnote that says the reason there are all these one footed people is, is because that was a common punishment. You commit a crime, they chop your foot off. So it's not just like this just happened to me. I was born a hunchback. The way that she was talking about being disabled, it's like I don't see anywhere here addressing like should I feel guilty, presumably? No, you should never feel guilty about anything. But I'm not sure why and why that wouldn't make you a psychopath. If you just like, I murdered somebody and they cut my foot off. Oh well, I embraced what fate has, you know, you can't regret. Maybe I shouldn't have done that.

21:36 Seth: That would be very out of balance, Mark.

21:39 Mark Linsenmayer: Right. If you're not have in tranquility even

21:41 Seth: for a moment, you would be out of balance as a murderer. And having your foot cut off for murder is a very unbalanced punishment for the weight of the crime.

21:51 Theo: I will say wouldn't have been as bad as murder. They'd kill you for murder.

21:55 Mark Linsenmayer: Yeah, okay, all right, so what I said something bad about the king they shot. They cut my foot, I slacked off on guard duty.

22:01 Theo: I mean, there is no condemnation. That's a very good point. That's a Confucian problem almost.

22:07 Seth: It's not simply a confucian thing. Theo, in 15 years of doing this podcast, we run across this all the time. The being okay with the is, a sense of resignation or acceptance of the is, implies a certain lack of a moral stance, right? So anytime we have a wisdom tradition of any sort whose prescription for a good life involves letting things go, letting things be, like not reacting to whatever, there tends to be a normative component. Says like, well, you know, if you just accept the world the way it is, how are you ever going to change it, right?

And how can you be an activist? How can you. And there's always that tension. It's not strictly. It's not just here and it's not just in Confucianism, it seems to be, how do you reconcile ultimately the is ought distinction? How can I be in the world accepting that things are the way they are and moderate my response to it so that I'm not constantly being off balance and all that stuff, but still maintain an ethical stance with respect to it? Because passing judgment ultimately involves emotions and energy and concepts of justice and things like that that are going to put you off balance.

It's the same thing where we talk about this in the context of these Eastern wisdom traditions as being guidebooks for rulers. They're trying to order the ruler's soul. They're trying to give the rulers advice that will make them more balanced under the assumption that a balanced person will act justly and so forth. And, you know, it's not a Kantian or deontological style.

23:55 Mark Linsenmayer: A couple of these things made me think of this on page 38. Just talking about one of the people that Zhuangzi through Confucius is admiring. And there's a comment like, if you fail to find stillness even for a moment, you are, quote, galloping around even while sitting. So you have to be in balance and chill all the time. So, yes, you wouldn't be going out and murdering people. That would definitely not be Wu Wei. But if you did find yourself in a situation where you have been punished or whatever, or you do something terrible to somebody, do not sweat it. Definitely don't sweat it.

24:28 Theo: If you ever get onto Zen, one of the big followers of Zen was the samurai class in Japan, and they found themselves in a position where they hacked people to bits like their job was murder. So there is a way to kind of connect this philosophy with many, many forms of life, which is its strength, but also like its ethical weakness. We might say that it is right to point out that Confucianism closes one off from ethical possibilities in one Sense, but also to follow the way, whatever that is, is to kind of take the way of least resistance. Like, you're not grinding up, you're not pushing, you're finding a way to react organically to naturally.

But you know, least resistance, you're not changing things dramatically, I suppose, like you're making great pieces of art, or you're being really skillful in cutting oxen apart. But like, beyond that, is there something ethically vibrant about Daoism or is it just like a critique of the limits of other ethical systems?

25:28 Mark Linsenmayer: Yeah, it seems like it may be just incon along with existentialism. So, you know, we did our no country for Old Men episode where we have this horrible hitman who is existentially authentic and seems to be fulfilling all the things that an existentialist heroes would do. And so we were asking, is it essential, as certainly Levinas and even Sartre would say, that like, yes, to acknowledge my own freedom, I have to acknowledge the freedom of others. So likewise here, like to express your own telos or something, do you have to acknowledge and play nice with the telos of others?

It seems from what we read here, you don't. You're like the fish that pass each other and you just don't get in each other's way. And that's how the fish are happy. But there is also this sense of part of adapting to other people and having real relationships, you know, is a true openness to the other in the way that Buber or Levinas or something would definitely approve of. Not that they present themselves as an irreducibly Other that has to be respected in the abstract, but that shows up as something that you can then adapt to. This is sort of getting to the flexibility.

Maybe as a final point here to end where Karen eventually led us, which is this view of the sage as being like the uncarved block or whatever means that you can go in a variety of situations, encounter different types of people, and you can react in a very authentic way to them and not just whiz past them like one fish whizzing past another, but like actually look into their eyes and not just be there waiting to judge them with your preconceived standard, but like have a real openness to what the other person has to say. Not that they're going to then dominate you, you know, with their teachings or something, but you can at least have an openness that you wouldn't have otherwise that because you are this uncarved.

I have in my notes here, virtuosity is a potential. It's actually limited by taking a definite shape, because the number of items that harmonize with any definite entity are always finite. But if you don't have a shape, you can harmonize with everything. So the sage is empty of fixed forms, like still water, and so gives life affirms the existence of each thing. That is the sense in which I think, Dylan, you are absolutely right that like he's pro life in this very immediate sense.

27:45 Theo: I will say you didn't get to the butterfly dream, which you perhaps should is the most famous element. But maybe you did that before. Most probably.

27:53 Mark Linsenmayer: I guess we talked about that in episode 12. Probably, yeah. Thanks again for joining us, Theo.

28:00 Dylan: Thanks, Theo.

28:01 Theo: Thank you.

28:01 Mark Linsenmayer: Next time we're talking about Plotinus, the first and foremost of the Neoplatonists. His writings were collected in a book called the Enneads. We are reading selections from that presented in the Essential Plotinus, Reading four essays, Beauty, the Intelligence, the Ideas, and Being, the Descent of the Soul and the Good, or the One. Let us know what you would like us to cover by emailing us at pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com or by making a comment on the blog at partiallyexaminedlight.com or you could reach out through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook I am bursting in right before this episode is going to be posted.

I see that this part two came out pretty short, and I will blame the network problems that Seth was having that caused us to keep having to stop and wait for him to try to fix it, and then eventually he just couldn't participate. His lag was too terrible. But the upside is that I have a few minutes to say a few things to you right now. The first is to remind you again about the book called the partially examined 15 years with your favorite philosophy Podcasters. This book actually features Theo on the abridged transcript of our Tao Te Ching episode.

And normally I don't like that term, abridgment. I don't want to hear an audiobook that is abridged. I want to hear the whole thing. But in the case of transforming many years of podcasting into a written form the way that our editor Chris did, these abridgments is pure genius. And everybody that has gotten hold of the book has told me that it is so readable and definitely a different thing from having listened to the podcast. So even if you've listened to all those episodes, this is still a great thing to add to your life. And if you haven't, or maybe you want to introduce one of your friends to the partial exam in life, maybe even a friend that is not a podcast listener per se.

These presentations of the episode material are just spot on. They've got the profound points, the funniest bits. So again, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com book second, we've also just promoted the fact that the PEL spinoff podcast Close Reads Philosophy with Mark and Wes is now fully public in that there is a public feed through the Evergreen Podcast Network. You can find their page@close readsphilosophy.com or search close Reads Philosophy with Mark and Wes on Apple Podcasts or wherever else. Also, I want to remind you of the existence of the rest of our network podcasts.

Wes is still recording Subtext. His episodes are Posted@subtext podcast.com I am still doing pretty much pop Nakedly examined music and philosophy versus Improv and I keep the current episodes of those up to date@PartiallyExaminedLife.com Though each of course has its own feed and its own Patreon page. You will get a weekly email announcing all the releases of the various things if you put your address in the subscribe to Email Updates widget@PartiallyExineLife.com every month or so. I also sum up the various things I'm working on@marklintemeyer.substack.com I have now finished teaching my second semester of my Core Philosophical Texts online course.

I'm currently designing a course for the fall. It's going to be a different course. I will be updating partialexaminedlife.com class this week with my current deliberations so you can provide any feedback you'd like as I'm designing this and determining exactly what dates to administer it on. Finally, of course with all our old episodes, I would put one of my songs at the end of the episode and I've long since stopped doing that because I'd mostly run out of songs that I wanted to highlight. I actually thought with juggling this many podcasts that I had retired from performing music, but since last August I've had a new band practicing.

We finally in March recorded a demo which now we finally have album art for and it is up@marklint.bandcamp.com it is a four song EP recorded live with an eight piece band. It's actually three of my original songs that have been previously recorded. Maybe they will be old favorites to you, plus a beloved cover from our live set. I actually have enough new original songs for a whole new album, but we want to do this as sort of a warm up and in fact keep these songs off of the new album since these are just our new interpretations of older material that I wanted to highlight especially.

I'm very excited about it. I hope you'll give it a few minutes. Again, that's marklint.bandcamp.com and I'm going to play you right now track two from that a new version of the song I Insist, which in a very different interpretation was the opening track from the songs from the Partially Examined Life album released way back in 2015. So I hope you like it. Thanks so much for listening to Partially Examined Life. Thanks for your nice ratings and reviews of our various podcasts. You might want to leave one of those if you haven't. Thanks for any support you might have given to any of the projects that we are involved in for your attention.

Your love your hate listening. I don't know what your exact relation to this property is, but I'm happy to have you around. Good night everybody. All right, I am bursting in right before this episode is going to be posted. I see that this part two came out pretty short, and I will blame the network problems that Seth was having that caused us to keep having to stop and wait for him to try to fix it, and then eventually he just couldn't participate. His lag was too terrible. But the upside is that I have a few minutes to say a few things to you right now.

The first is to remind you again about the book called the partially examined life 15 years with your favorite philosophy podcasters. This book actually features Theo on the abridged transcript of our Dao Te Ching episode. And normally I don't like that term, abridgment. I don't want to hear an audiobook that is abridged. I want to hear the whole thing. But in the case of transforming many years of podcasting into a written form the way that our editor Chris did, these abridgments is pure genius. And everybody that has gotten hold of the book has told me that it is so readable and definitely a different thing from having listened to the podcast.

So even if you've listened to all those episodes, this is still a great thing to add to your life. And if you haven't, or maybe you want to introduce one of your friends to the partial exam in life, maybe even a friend that is not a podcast listener per se. These presentations of the episode material are just spot on. They've got the profound points, the funniest bits. So again, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com book. Second, we've also just promoted the fact that the PEL spinoff podcast Close Reads Philosophy with Mark and Wes is now fully public in that there is a public feed through the Evergreen Podcast Network.

You can find their page@close readsphilosophy.com or search close Reads Philosophy with Mark and Wes on Apple Podcasts or wherever else. Also, I want to remind you of the existence of the rest of our network podcasts. Wes is still recording Subtext. His episodes are posted@subtext podcast.com I am still doing pretty much pop nakedly examined music and philosophy versus Improv and I keep the current episodes of those up to date@PartiallyExaminedLife.com Though each of course has its own feed and its own Patreon page. You will get a weekly email announcing all the releases of the various things if you put your address in the subscribe to Email Updates widget@PartiallyExaminedLife.com every month or so.

I also sum up the various things I'm working on@marklinmeyer.substack.com I have now finished teaching my second semester of my Core Philosophical Texts online course. I'm currently designing a course for the fall. It's going to be a different course. I will be updating partiallyexaminedlife.com class this week with my current deliberations so you can provide any feedback you'd like as I'm designing this and determining exactly what dates to administer it on. Finally, of course, with all our old episodes, I would put one of my songs at the end of the episode and I've long since stopped doing that because I'd mostly run out of songs that I wanted to highlight.

I actually thought with juggling this many podcasts that I had retired from performing music, but since last August I've had a new band practicing. We finally in March recorded a demo which now we finally have album art for and it is up@marklint.bandcamp.com it is a four song EP recorded live with an eight piece band. It's actually three of my original songs that have been previously recorded. Maybe they will be old favorites to you, plus a beloved cover from our live set. I actually have enough new original songs for a whole new album, but we want to do this as sort of a warm up and in fact keep these songs off of the new album since these are just our new interpretations of older material that I wanted to highlight especially.

I'm very excited about it. I hope you'll give it a few minutes again that's marklint.bandcamp.com and I'm going to play you right now track two from that a new version of the song I Insist, which in a very different interpretation was the opening track from the songs from the Partially Examined Life album released way back in 2015. So I hope you like it. Thanks so much for listening to the Partially Examined Life. Thanks for your nice ratings and reviews of our various podcasts. You might want to leave one of those if you haven't. Thanks for any support you might have given to any of the projects that we are involved in for your attention, your love, your hate listening.

I don't know what your exact relation to this property is, but I'm happy to have you around. Good night, everybody.

37:43 Theo: Good night.

37:44 Mark Making Music: Good night. In place of a soul I got tendency, got a meaning I got energy well I push it along into a tumbling world on my own of my own wealth I don't know what I'm driving I am pressing the keys I am losing what's left of my periphery I am forward especially I am motion and force and something too fast to see and my eyes focus upon to a point and regret and I will pierce every dawn of the bells to react and I will overcome all the crap that I drag I am not asking the world I am not asking the world I demand it, I insist if I must give a reason well consider this fish I demand it I require in the stake while I make in all love I inspire fire it breaks of a soul I got irony in the space of a conscience A rock in this piece of my belief is a 15 ton truck if I hold out my hand you will shiver your sh I am driving I am pressing it down if I fly at this speed I will be sleeping around I am forward, I am on the way I'm a mistake of the view the future will all be someday and my eyes focus out to a point and refract and I will pierce every dawn of the fail to react and I will overcome all the crap that I drag I am not asking the world I am not asking the world I demand it, I insist if I must give a reason I'll consider this myst I command this I require you must think what I make and all the love I inspire don't be put out yourself and true I'm a person, a person another force of nature Come be one of those guys who puts me in his mouth I am rolling dawn I won't save you won't save you.

Sam. I demand it I assist. If I must give a reason why. Consider this test. I demand it. I require. You mistake what I make and all the love I inspire. My eyes focus out to a point and refract and retract and blow.