https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=QmccFcq6WRQ
when people are shaming you and they don’t care about your intentions and they’re not offering rational justification for their claims that’s a purity code and it can dress itself up as being in service of the most noble but it’s a purity code. It’s a form of bullshit. It’s making salient and catchy certain appearances that actually do not track reality and try to dissuade us from questioning or reflecting or seeking if this particular rule is grounded in reality. That’s a purity code. Welcome back to After Socrates. This is episode 9. We continued last time our long journey through the reverse engineering and we looked at inner dialogos, the demonian of Socrates and the dialogical self. For those of you who are interested in exploring the topic of the self more, I point you towards the series I did with Greg Enriquez and Christopher Master Pietro on my YouTube channel called The Illusive Eye. There we using the collective intelligence of distributed cognition within an integration of argumentation and dialogos, trying to exemplify something and experiment with something. We made a collective argument for the self as a dynamical, dialogical self but nevertheless real. So for those of you who want to really go even more deeply into that topic, that resource is available for you. We learned also how to add on an extra dimension of wisdom cultivation by extending the vertical dimension of dialectic. We’ll of course keep that in mind. Now we are passing temporally, not temporarily, we’re passing temporally beyond Socrates. We’re now looking at the people that came after Socrates’ death and of course one of the primary people is Plato but as I said from the very beginning I wasn’t going to try and separate Socrates and Plato very much. I just want to make a couple points, two final points about Plato before we move on to the other great disciple of Socrates. So a couple things about Plato and for those of you who watched episodes four and five of Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, this will be familiar, but Plato had a dialogical model of the self. I alluded to that a couple times when we were talking about the dialogical self. Famously he has a tripartite model of the psyche where there are different centers. Now he represents them as sort of semi-autonomous beings, I think thinking of them more as eye positions, very much like from the head, the heart and the horror and he talks about achieving an inner justice, learning, having them dialogue with each other so they are properly proportioned, ratio, so that we are properly religio to the world and when we get that proper proportioning we mitigate and ameliorate the way in which our salience landscaping, to use my language, gets distorted and when that drops we see more deeply into reality and of course that affords us to internalize what reality is more like so we can conform more to reality in our inner justice and then the whole thing spirals in a vicious, not a vicious, in a virtuous cycle anagogy, the ascent out of the cave and the point about that of course is that that anagogy process which is the core I would propose of Platonic spirituality is something that satisfies two of our core meta desires. A meta desire is something we want anything that satisfies our desire to possess, any of our specific desires to possess. One of our meta desires is we want inner peace. We don’t want to satisfy our desires in a way that is causing internal conflict, anxiety, etc. We also don’t want to have our desires satisfied by what is not real and the anagogy process not only leads to this opening up of the world and the opening up ourselves and the coordinating of ourselves with and conforming to reality. It mutually satisfies in an accelerating manner those two profound meta drives and this is why I can make a strong case for bringing about a life of meaning and happiness. Now one thing that comes up in the scholarship around dialectic is Plato has especially in some of the dialogues like the Sophist and the Statesman he seems to point to a specific practice. Again it’s not clear if this is to be equated with dialectic. I agree with many of the scholars that it’s not but it seems to be a component and again it’s not he doesn’t give clear instructions on how to do it so it fits into the broader argument but it seems to involve what he calls practices of collecting and dividing as we try to determine what things are. What naturally comes to mind to us is the formation of a taxonomy. You know we have dogs and then we have cats and then we have dogs and cats are both mammals and mammals are living things they’re animal not plants and it doesn’t look like that’s what Plato was primarily on about although Aristotle to some degree seems to take that up and of course let’s be grateful that Aristotle did that because that helps drive the project of scientific taxonomy which is a very important project. I’ve made use of it repeatedly Aristotle’s ideas about how you construct a scientific taxonomy went into for example the four kinds of knowing. So we’ll see later that Plotinus an important follower of Plato and considered the founder of Neoplatonism rejects that sort of taxonomic understanding of the process of collection and division. So it’s clear at least Plotinus argues so and I agree with him that what Plato is talking about is taking place at a more primordial level it’s taking place as Plotinus will argue at the level of the forms it’s therefore I think much more plausibly associated with what’s going on when we’re doing this kind of relevance realization where we’re trying to make a profound sense and articulate meaning and what you can see actually going on there are these processes of differentiation and integration so let me give you a visual phenomenological analogy. One of the things I’m trying to do is integrate various aspects of my environment and so they form a coherent whole, a gestalt but I don’t want a good stult like for an I take off my glasses and with everything is blurred together what I want to do is I want to keep things differentiated with enough acuity that I can distinguish and so what this is is we’re toggling between when seeing things as belonging together and in that sense the same is more relevant to us and where differentiating between things becomes more relevant to us. Another way people talk about this is we’re moving between trying to generalize and use broader categories and discriminate and use narrower categories and what you should probably note first of all realize is that that of course is again this evolutionary process of recursive relevance realization it has to go towards this optimal gripping and getting our meta optimal grip and our meta orientation and what it’s doing is trying to always get that balance between the trade-off of when do I need to distinguish between things and when can I group them together into a gestalt and of course there is no answer to that it depends on the problem the task at hand the situation. Now one of the things we can note is when that systems are like a cognitive system is simultaneously integrating and differentiating and you can look at the work of Kelso and others about this multi-stability in the brain when you’re getting that constant when you’re getting a system that’s simultaneously doing that think about when you’re reading a word you’re distinguishing the letters but you’re grouping them into the word and we’ve talked about how it’s simultaneously bottom-up and top-down so when you’re doing that that simultaneity of integration and differentiation a system is becoming more complex it is complexifying now the thing about complexification is it produces emergence and this is an important property that’s different from what we get in sort of a taxonomic understanding so biological example you start out as a zygote your cells start to differentiate into different kinds of cells but they also start to organize literally self organize into lungs and hearts lungs and a heart and brain so the system is simultaneously differentiating and integrating so that you develop a body that has emergent properties they can do things as I go can’t do and of course there’s a deep connection therefore between that notion of collection and division as the driving of the complexification of our relevance realization so that we are properly ratio religio to the complexity of the world so that we continually are generating emergent abilities to deal with deeper realities that of course lines up with that discussion of anagogy that we previously had so we need to think about that I think rather than sort of the temptation to drop into an Aristotelian or scientific taxonomy is what we should be doing we need to think more about that process of driving the complexification of our cognition so that it couples appropriately tracks well the complexity of the world okay so Socrates has two great disciples one you know of as we’ve talked about him throughout and we were just talking about him and that’s Plato but he has another great one that you don’t hear about very much and that’s partially that’s because we don’t have as much from him we have mostly fragments but he was known as Antisthenes and if you want more on Antisthenes and the cynics and the Stoics which I’m going to be talking about please see episode 14 of awakening from the meaning crisis so Antisthenes is actually alive at the time of Socrates in fact he’s older than Plato and he seems to be personally closer to Socrates than Plato was and when he was asked what he learned from Socrates he didn’t do what Plato did he said I learned from Socrates how to converse with myself and it’s like wow I talked to myself all day long well we’ve done enough about inner speech and inner dialectic into dialogos to treat what he says with more respect and reflection he’s not talking about our everyday ruminative inner speech that often drives and is driven by anxiety or distraction or self-deception he’s talking about integrating Socrates into our inner speech so that we get an inner dialectic into dialogos that is oriented towards the cultivation of wisdom so he’s very much in line with what we were talking about in episode 9 now Antisthenes was actually quite critical of Plato and this is good for us because now we have opponent processing between Plato and Antisthenes that we can use to triangulate backwards and get a deeper understanding of Socrates at least that’s what I’m proposing to you now the fact that he was older and personally closer to Socrates means we can’t dismiss him now we can’t dismiss Plato and just give priority to Antisthenes because well just to put it in a sentence Plato is bloody brilliant and so we can’t just dismiss him we have to hold these two together in opponent processing and triangulate backwards to see more deeply into Socrates now especially the Socrates that is a forerunner of our attempts to develop a practice of So I’m making a lot of use here of a book by Susan Prince well an article by Susan Prince called Socrates, Antisthenes and the Cynics and the Blackwell Companion that I used previously and it’s right here if you remember we’ve already made use of this book I strongly recommend that article by Susan Prince it’s brilliant it’s brilliant so what is Antisthenes critical about Socrates well there’s a few things but I want to zero in on those that are relevant to our project here he was critical of Plato’s use of propositional argumentation which is really really interesting because we have all of the scholarship saying that you know Plato was trying to use propositional argumentation to ultimately get people to see beyond the propositional but Antisthenes was even more if I can put it this way extreme about that now that doesn’t mean that he was just sort of like some sort of you know you know early Christian monk that just took a vow of silence for 30 years or thought language was evil his relationship and his attitudes towards language are very complex and much more critical than Plato is Plato is critical of language he’s especially critical of writing but he seems not to have quite the stance towards it that Antisthenes does now we have two of his fragments from Antisthenes and they’re both famous and but they’re famous and precisely for how challenging they are so the first one is it is impossible to contradict which is what I can do it I can do it right now right a perfectly square circle that’s a contradiction what does he possibly mean by that like so the point is these these hit us almost like paradoxes they seem false on appearance but we have enough respect for this person that we think something else is going on so there’s an element also of irony here very different from Socratic irony in some ways but in another sense very similar to it here’s the other quote it is impossible to define the essence which is like that’s him making really clear that the project of trying to come up with definitions and that thinking that we can come up with final definitions of the essence the form what’s crucial what matters the most he’s challenging all of that idea now Susan Prince argues and I won’t recapitulate all the scholastic exegetical argument but she basically says the weight of evidence suggests these were not so much statements he didn’t just sort of state them and as things you should consider true or false they were much more koan like you know what a koan is we talked about this from the Buddhist tradition koan like provocations designed to command attention and then redirect it towards something what is it he’s redirecting it towards well Prince argues and this is a direct quote the futility of logical discourse so Antisthenes is much more like clearly anti-definition anti logical discourse than Plato which is really interesting really interesting but yet he’s not opposed to dialectic into dialogos because what did he primarily learn from Socrates how to do that with himself how to be Socrates to himself even more so so we’ve got this rejector of logical discourse and of logical definition already in tension with the fact that what he most learned from Socrates was inner dialectic but now I’ll add even more attention to it he was the first person apparently in the philosophical tradition to actually offer and of course the more irony here a definition of logos you don’t get it Heraclitus talks about the logos all over the place and of course Socrates and Plato are invoking it constantly as we’ve seen but Antisthenes the person who’s opposed to definition and propositional logical argumentation offers a definition but as you’ll see the definition is designed like a koan like a parable to take us in and then explode us out so here’s the definition and we’re gonna play with it which I expect or I suspect was exactly what Antisthenes wanted us to do with it he’s trying to provoke us it’s like a Zen master coming up to you and saying something deeply provocative so here it is logos is the enunciation revealing that what is or was just like okay so initial reactions in some sense this is a response to Socrates always asking what is it these these quintessential you know Socratic questions well what is courage well what is friendship what is wisdom so the logos is whatever answers that but notice this is such a weird way of putting it first of all the enunciation it’s like why not just say the statement right it’s this it’s this much more evocative term so an enunciation is a pronouncement and it’s a sort of a clear pronouncement so when we’re enunciating we are pronouncing in both senses the word notice how we’re we’re playing I’m playing with this but we need to right like I’m pronouncing my words but I also pronounce you man and wife right pronouncement does that and notice that one is the second one is a revealing or disclosing or a making and the first is an articulation a clarification and it’s somehow this pronouncement in doubles in the double senses discloses right it reveals and the word here is very slippery like the like you know revelation especially when we use it when we have sort of mystical and and religious connotations reveals discloses what is but also or or or not and or was like so need you start thinking about this it starts to explode in your mind now pronouncement is to make something out make it noticeable and we can even use pronounced right as an adjective for something physical like you know that cliff is very pronounced it sticks out a lot right so what we’re talking about is a clear sizing up noticing I point you to Mateson’s book from 1976 that’s shown up in some of my other talks this notion of sizing up right what we’re doing is we’re making something we’re making a distinction between background and foreground we’ve talked about this with salience landscaping we’re taking the things that are foregrounding and we’re configuring them together so the background and the foreground and then the foregrounded stuff gets configured together and then what’s configured is framed in terms of what aspects are relevant to our problems our goals our situation and and and this is a way in which we are noticing what things are how they pronounce themselves to us so another way of taking his part of the statement is a clear sizing up noticing that makes intelligible what something is or was so the logos makes one notice clearly the revelation the appearing the pronouncement of what is or was now why does he put on that extra disjunction it’s not an and it’s or so we’re where it’s not and we’re not adding the two we’re shifting attention between is and was it’s an aspect shift he’s putting a special emphasis on change or flow and the flow or change between different aspects in time so he’s probably and we know he’s probably influenced by cradle lists and cradle this was a disciple of Heraclitus Heraclitus is going to become very important for the stoics probably for the cynics because the cynics are the progenitors of the stoics and Antisthenes is considered the founder of both lines so Heraclitus was this idea that everything is in flow in flux but not randomly there is a logos running through the flux very much the idea of the through line and it is born out of a tension of opposites like we have been talking about here and it’s not in words Heraclitus don’t listen to my words but listen to the logos within them or beyond them all things are one that’s Heraclitus that’s also being now brought into this and so the logos is therefore not a definition that’s why he creates something that looks like a definition but explodes out of any definitional framework we have to really appreciate how the profound respect that Antisthenes garnered he isn’t saying he’s he’s notice what he’s doing which is he’s doing he’s like sort of Plato is like sort of unfolding things like this and think about how this goes with the collection and division by the way and Antisthenes is how can I bring everything in to this so that it will convey so much so provocatively and redirect your attention and reorient you I want to redirect your attention and reorient you so you can track the logos as it unfolds in things so I’m proposing to you that in his mind logos is closer I’m not claiming it’s identical I don’t have the evidence to do that but logos is closer to the flow of eidetic induction that we’ve already talked about than it is to what we normally call a definition we know and this is corroborating evidence that he explicitly rejected Plato’s theory of the forms he seems to have rejected sort of more I guess Aristotelian interpretation or a logical interpretation which as I’ve argued with a host of other authors that’s probably not the fairest reading of Plato what he seems to have rejected in the theory of the forms is precisely that it was presented as a theory which of course it wasn’t but he didn’t like the idea of the timeless abstract logical entities that many people took the forms to be so whether or not that was Plato’s theory and I’ve argued again by the help of many other people that that’s probably not what’s going on in Plato it’s certainly something that was being used as an interpretive framework and Antisthenes seems to be responding to those aspects that take it away from this notion of logos that is very central to him now what about this other one it’s impossible to contradict but of course we contradict each other all the time so that one I have to tell you if if I hadn’t have had the help from Susan Prince I wouldn’t I don’t know what like I had a sense of that I have a sense of his flair for paradox and you know the Zen like sort of provocation I get that but what like no what’s more specifically is going on here but right so first of all let’s take it that this is all also meant to read it redirect attention and reorient us in some way well what is it redirecting our how is it redirecting our attention so Prince argues to the conception of the propositional subject itself so instead of the proposition Antisthenes is trying to get us back and look at the process that produces the proposition especially the subject of the proposition so again how did how did we size something up so that it came to be something that could be a subject of a proposition so he’s trying to get us to realize the problem when people are disagreeing is not when they’re disagreeing importantly not trivially like is there milk in the fridge no I don’t mean but when they’re disagreeing philosophically and in some ways this reminds me of the latter Wittgenstein but I’ll have to put that aside the problem was not at the level of the propositions but the orientation think of all the work we’ve done on orientation even the meta-orientation the fundamental framing the meta-orientation the meta-optimal grip sizing up the orientation from which people were speaking the orientation and the process flowing from it that sizing up and disclosing the propositional subject so what he seems to be arguing is that most philosophical argument if people actually had the same orientation and sizing up they would realize the same things as relevant they would draw similar and close in proximity implications so they wouldn’t actually contradict each other so think about this is actually a brilliant proposal that we get right we get locked into the propositions and the propositions are opposite to each other and what we’re trying to do is manipulate the propositions and he’s saying that’s only symptomatic of the fact that we are disoriented from each other and that’s the fundamental difference and insofar as we are disoriented from each other we are not contradicting each other we are talking at cross purposes now I’m not sure that that’s always the case I’m a scientist and I think there’s times when we actually argue about specific hypotheses and propositions but I think he’s certainly saying something we need to pay attention to when we are reflecting on when we’re reflecting on the results of dialectic into dialogos and properties of how it’s practiced for our reverse engineering project and so what did he do well we have enough of his writings and he wrote so he’s not against like writing when he criticizes Plato so we have enough of his writings to see the strategy he adopted and I want to read a quote to you from Prince’s article because I want to show you that what she’s what she’s saying lines up with so much of what we were doing we’ve been doing already okay when live conversation between differently minded people think of that let’s see how that goes with what we’ve already been talking about fails as it apparently always does at least according to him the root of progress is education or improvement of the individual minds okay that’s of course very Socratic and this takes place oblique we obliquely you have to you have to use language and you have to get at the orientation the non propositional obliquely and experientially has to be right in the perspectival in the participatory not through exchange of literal propositions or analysis of their logic so what’s the contrast is what she says but through an expansive engagement in the conceptual fields and verbal fictions of others examining each name and considering its various meanings seeing the worlds of others and considering how one might change or extend one’s own field and ultimately achieving a higher standard of discourse rather rather in accuracy or in range sounds a lot like I dedicated action and all of the dimensions we’ve been drawing out of dialectic into dia logos so we can pick up on one important aspect of that well one important aspect is like I say is how it’s convergent with I dedicated action the phenomenological exploration right all of the stuff we’ve been saying about dialectic into dia logos but another aspect that we can now give more specific emphasis is this attitude towards language of trying to get language to show rather than tell it’s a way of drawing everything together so the low low go a that’s plural of logos all these instances of engaging in logos and dia logos we’re not arguments Prince makes is really clear they are a skeezes this is the word we get aesthetic from but as Pierre Ado made very clear the original meaning is in any kind of self-legal ation the original meaning is experience practice the Eric’s thesis involving ponus which means toil or labor so what we’re doing is we’re actually engaging in practices that involve significant effort and transformation labor on our part that’s a very different attitude than towards making arguments but using language to do important work important training spiritual exercise again very much like what we see when people using things like the Zen Cohen or Jesus of Nazareth offering a parable etc think about all the great parable makers Jesus of Nazareth said Artigatama as we’ll see later Kierkegaard it’s a different way of using language the Sufis have a whole tradition of stories that are parables that do that kind of laborious work and our spiritual practice with language getting language to show us something that it can’t tell us and see how that lines up with so much of what Socrates doing and Tisthenes is on to something about Socrates just as much as Plato was now what’s interesting is does that mean that Antisthenes would just sort of come up to people and offers in Cohen’s no like his writings he had a different reputation apparently he would engage in and this is an ancient quote harmonious conversations he was doing that oblique exploratory inducing drawing people out trying to play with language show it so it shows rather than tells and we know that what Socrates thought of that because in the symposium he says he praises Antisthenes as a matchmaker matchmaker like he’s getting he’s arranging marriages no no no and Tisthenes knows how to bring people together or bring himself together with another person so they start to fit each other draw each other out are in harmony now what’s interesting is these logos logoi training practices exercises were thought to be part of three types of training that were all interlocking and mutually supporting this strengthens the case by the way of how we’re supposed to think about how language in service of the logos was being used by Antisthenes so there’s the logoi training but there’s also gymnasia which is like in the gymnasium wrestling right and and you know this is a point that my good friend Rafe Kelly makes you know that you know Socrates was a soldier and Plato is actually his nickname it means broad shoulder because he’s a wrestler and the gymnasium and the academy are right beside each other and they’re interwoven and this is also the case for Antisthenes so he said he sees the thing you’re doing with our bodies to train them like when you’re when you’re when you’re learning when you’re doing that training in the gymnasium in one sense you’re not doing anything you’re not doing anything so in one sense you’re losing language you’re not doing anything you’re not making an argument you’re not making a case but in another sense you’re doing something really important you’re training yourself to develop sets of skills and virtues and ways of getting an optimal grip and orienting and getting a metal optimal grip in a meta orientation remember the stance from fighting and sparring and then there was a third kind of training we have less about it but it’s very we have some clarity about what kind of training it was it involved a training with your self-image your self-reference your self-relevance and it was designed to make you resistant to shame sort of the opposite of what we’re doing in our culture in our culture we’re trying to change people’s behavior so that we do not offend or hurt he was doing a practice so that people could not be shamed by anything that was said about oneself so learning to have this resilient relationship to oneself image and there was practices around that all three practices emphasize and Prince makes this clear from Nyssa so the Greeks have two words for wisdom Sophia and from Nyssa Sophia is very much what a lot what Plato is doing giving us this comprehensive understanding of sort of the fundamental structures of intelligibility for Nyssa is how you fit your cognition to a situation so it fits it well so it’s it’s so Sophia is much more about finding thing principles that are context invariant from Nyssa is about being contextually sensitive and fitting yourself to the situation it’s really close I would argue to what we’ve talked about as that online relevance realization that’s happening in our consciousness and our fluid cognition as we’re solving our problems that’s why people call it translated as practical wisdom as opposed to theoretical wisdom remembering that theory actually comes from theory which means to see deeply into things and practical doesn’t mean what it’s come to mean for us which is pragmatically getting to the bottom line in late stage capitalism so that we don’t disrupt the flow of money to the wealthy what it means is no no it means and Aristotle gets this really well when he says it’s about knowing it’s not about being angry or not being angry it’s knowing when to be angry at the right time for the right reason to the right degree that’s from Nyssa’s and you just see it’s about meta-optimal gripping and you know evolving your cognitive fittedness so Antisthenes is doing all these trainings to really shape that capacity to enhance your recursive relevance realization I would add one thing this is not something he said I would recommend especially what we see his followers the cynics taking up and we can sort of read that back into a third kind of training I would add training in improv I brought a couple books to suggest that to you all right obviously though the books are only to get you started and I don’t do this but I have done participant observation of people doing it there’s a video about with two other people who are going through sort of improv movement and dialogue it’s really really really cool and I’ve had several students who’ve done when who’ve written papers with me trying to make a case for the role of improv in the in the cultivation of wisdom the two books are truth in comedy the manual of improvisation by Charna Helper and Del Close and Kim Howard Johnson and then another one is the improv handbook the ultimate Wow I guess it’s sacred the ultimate guide to improv improv improvising in comedy theater and beyond Tom Solinsky and Deborah Francis White I want to talk about a specific instance of this and why it’s relevant so you all know what role-playing is Dungeons and Dragons etc and then there’s what’s called live action role-playing LARPing in which you dress up and move around in physical space and you actually interact and then there’s a move beyond that which is called Jeep form it’s become very prevalent in Scandinavian countries what happens in Jeep form is that you go into a situation and the dungeon master isn’t spinning a fantastic world the dungeon that he’s at he or she is actually a director and let’s see if she’ll say to you okay you’re gonna take the role and she’ll give you a specific role and then she’ll speak to the other people you’re taking this role and you’re taking this role and this is a situation you’re in and she’ll pick up objects this is a gun this is a trophy etc and go so you’re doing all this aspect shifting you’re taking on identities you’re assigning identities and then you’re doing an improv with it and the director will interrupt cutscenes it’s so much like what’s happening here is they’re filming this cutscenes get you to switch roles get you to jump to another scene because the director is trying to get things to flow the improv to flow to bring about a phenomenon called bleed what’s bleed bleed is when the distinction between what’s happening in the game and what’s happening in your life breaks down so that you’re actually not just playing a game you’re doing a serious play in both senses of the word that actually is supposed to transfer to your life and bring that capacity for improv into your real-life situation the reason I say this is because we see the later cynics like Diogenes doing right this provocation that’s often involves a kind of improv performative art so before we pass to a discussion of the cynics I want to note how much Antisynes is emphasizing the horizontal axis of dialectic but how he is enriching it and making it much more embodied and improvisational and creative and bringing in a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about and really trying to emphasize it and preserve it from being ignored or crushed by propositional logic and argumentation he’s also making important there’s an important point about co-orientation that part of what we need to do is harmonious conversation that first of all make sure people are co-oriented before they start any exploration or reflection on a topic on a virtue that’s really important we don’t get that in Plato’s dialogues very much if at all so as I said the cynics and this is literally the book to read on the cynics if you’re interested in it so the cynics the cynic movement in antiquity and its legacy edited by our Brock Brahman and Marie orderly Gullig Kazee so first of all especially this is a something that you might have heard of you’ve already watched awakening from the meeting crisis don’t bring the modern meaning of cynic the modern meaning of cynic is somebody who suspects there are always a secret agenda a hidden motive an ulterior goal they’re really beset by their hermeneutics of suspicion appearances are always deceiving and misleading and there’s always something nefarious going on behind and whenever things anything looks good it’s ultimately not good that’s not the ancient meaning of cynicism it’s so telling that that’s what the word cynical has come to mean for us because that’s what not what the cynics are on on a that’s not what they’re about at all that’s not what they’re on about at all the cynics are not in the hermeneutics of suspicion they think we need to distinguish between appearances that mislead us and the appearances that take us into reality and they’re trying to reorient us the hermeneutics of beauty into being able to track the appearances that disclose reality and those those appearances have to be more real when look whenever I say something’s an illusion that’s unreal that’s dependent on me saying comparing it to something that I take to be real there’s a point made by Marlo Ponti and by Plato and DC Schindler in his commentary on Plato the hermeneutics of suspicion is actually dependent parasitic on the hermeneutics of beauty if it was always the case that appearances distracted us and misled us we could never know that the very act of taking up the cynic attitude in the modern sense undermines its general claim it’s a performative contradiction now performative contradictions if you remember are contradictions not between propositions but between what you’re saying and your perspectival participatory state and so the kind of contradictions that the cynics were interested in were not propositional ones but getting people to notice these performative contradictions and what they would do is they would do provocative often improvised performative art some of its famous so the most famous disciple of Antisthenes is Diogenes and he goes into the marketplace in Athens and he’s carrying a lantern around and this has become a prototype for us it’s on it’s in the on the Tarot it’s in a Led Zeppelin album cover etc. eventually people get like what are you what are you looking for in the marketplace you must be looking for something that’s hidden and then Diogenes says I’m looking for one honest man all right now notice just think about how that’s an attempt to startle you and reorient you you’re in the marketplace and you’re looking for all these things and remember Socrates walked into the marketplace and said look at all the things I don’t need right and you’re looking and you’re looking and you’re looking but what should you really be looking for and what do you what are you actually relying on even though you haven’t looked for honest people but are they honest in the marketplace and if they’re not then what are you doing there now I’m not making a crypto marxist point here I’m trying to get you to see how it how he works there’s another story Alexander the Great heard about Diogenes Diogenes lived outside of Athens in a barrel we’ll see why in a minute he lived like a dog that’s the original meaning probably of the cynic it means dog philosopher Alexander came out here’s Alexander the Great and Alexander was a master of his own mythology cutting the Gordian knot and riding the particular horse and doing that and he was always cutting through and showing how he was more than a mortal man he was a demi-god and and he was just he like he was a master of this and luckily he was able to back it up but by by being a military genius etc so here he comes up to Diogenes he comes up to Diogenes and says I can offer you half of the world what do you want what do you want and think about looking for the honest man Diogenes looks up to him and says could you move a little to the left you’re blocking my sunlight this is one of the few times where Alexander is kind of stumped what’s he doing what’s he doing with these and there’s so many of them and some of them we would regard as sort of yucky so I’m going to say one and I did it in awakening from the meaning crisis and it’s and it’s a very interesting story because it’s a very interesting story because it’s a very interesting story so I’m going to say one and I did it in awakening from the meaning crisis and it’s and you’ll first and think about it and hold on to it he goes in there’s two versions of it he goes into the marketplace and has sex in front of everybody with his partner his wife or he comes into the marketplace and he masturbates in front of everybody and everybody is horrified they’re horrified why would he do something like that and now you’re probably like yeah I don’t like this guy think about it what’s he doing what she’s saying well what I did didn’t harm anybody gave two or one person some pleasure didn’t didn’t alter your lives at all and yet you’re really focused on that and you don’t care about all the immorality all the stealing and lying and bullshitting and misdirecting and exploitation that’s going on in the marketplace right now to redirect attention and reorient us now there’s one especially important reorientation and it’s actually captured in all of those stories but especially in the last one the cynics reject convention conventionality and they reject the shaming honoring practices around it so what it is that they don’t like about conventions or the conventional they regard them as man-made human-made artificial not long-standing subject to corruption and decay and you shouldn’t set your heart and identity on them because they are unstable things that will ultimately disappoint you and frustrate you because they are unstable things that will ultimately disappoint you and frustrate you so shame is used in order to pretend we are shamed or honored that’s used in order to pretend that these conventional codes are actually somehow truly real or the way things really are but of course they can’t be the way things really are and so this is a kind of fundamental bullshit it’s making something salient in a way that doesn’t allow us to question or not question whether or not it tracks reality so we have to make a distinction here between a purity code and a moral code so a purity code is when we have conventions and they are violated because those conventions help us sort of stabilize social identities so rational justification is not needed because intentions don’t matter intentions do not matter so while I’m standing here something happens and my pants drop and I’m suddenly here in my underwear right I’m ashamed I’m embarrassed because the conventions by which my status is preserved have been violated and therefore I feel small in your eyes but I didn’t intend to do that in fact I didn’t do anything at all it merely happened to me and there’s actually no justification there’s no rational justification why is seeing his underwear like like where’s the moral harm or the cognitive deficit there isn’t one now compare that to a moral code intention does matter that’s why we make a huge deal about it in the law did you intend to cause that person to die yes you’re guilty of murder if you did you not pay attention the way you should have yes you’re guilty of negligence manslaughter if both of those aren’t the case are you guilty of anything no no matter what but there’s a dead person yes but there was no intent there was no negligence rational justification is needed whenever we try to propose a moral or a legislative law this is why we’re doing it this is the argument for it the cynics are trying to get us to wake up to this different situation the cynics are trying to get us to wake up to this difference one of the things they’re trying to provoke in us pay very careful attention when people are shaming you and they don’t care about your intentions and they’re not offering rational justification for their actions and they’re not offering rational justification for their claims that’s a purity code and it can dress itself up as being in service of the most noble ends but it’s a purity code it’s a form of bullshit it’s making salient and catchy certain appearances that actually do not track reality and try to dissuade us from questioning or reflecting or seeking if this particular rule is grounded in reality that’s a purity code and we know that purity codes when we look at other people’s purity codes we can say how ridiculous but we of course are blind to how our own purity codes can overtake us moral codes are conducive to the cultivation of wisdom and they were bound up in the cynic mind with moral codes and causal laws those were the things that the cynics said they followed the moral law and the natural law and they they for us they sound like they’re opposite but for the cynics they go together because the point of the moral law was always to be responsive to the causal order of reality so what we learn from the cynics is the importance of non-propositional redirection and reorientation metanoia that changing of how we notice things of how we’re oriented and that metanoia is directed to what really matters for nises what really matters in this situation waking people up from their performative contradictions waking them up to the difference between purity codes and moral codes and that only moral codes are conducive to cultivating wisdom and responsive to reality and that’s the point of the moral law and the moral law and responsive to reality logos is much more an exercise in transfer transformative labor co-trained with the other training of fronis’s the co-orientation with others that antistinies taught that co-orientation antistinies is about right the member of the harmonious conversations it’s about ratio religio with other people and that is more important than argument or agreement in between argument and agreement is this other thing the ratio ratio religio of co-orientation so that we can train together in becoming more socratic more virtuous and remember this all circles around back to being able to internalize this into your inner speech internalize socrates so here are some points to ponder how can we bring these enhancements of the horizontal dimension into our practice of the logos of dialectic into the logos how can we bring that in so that is going to be part of what we’re going to do what we need in our practice how does all of what we’ve been talking about with antistinies and diogenes translate into internal dialectic into the logos dialectic into the logos well you see how it matches better with a lot of the stuff we were talking about when we talked about the internal dimension the of socrates’s dialectic into the logos but now the opponent processing how can we integrate the platonic socrates and the cynic socrates back together how can we stereoscopically look through these opponent processing and see more deeply the socratic figure that we are trying to internalize in order to practice following the logos so i’m not going to offer a specific practice i’m going to offer specific practices after we talk about the group of people that followed from directly from the cynics the stoics however i want to point to you a couple of books again that i recommend you consider in order to bring help bring this dimension in so verbal judo the gentle art of persuasion verbal akito the art of directing verbal attacks to a balanced outcome the martial arts here we got all right we’ve got judo which is more external art and akita which is an internal art and they of course fall under and should be put in the context of the work done by rosenberg important work on non-violent communication a language of life empathy collaboration authenticity and freedom the third edition these are all things that will help you in a real world context to get into the harmonious kind of conversations in which you could start to apply the virtues that you are cultivating in your specific practices that lead to dialectic into dialogs thank you very much for your time attention and commitment this is a very special episode in which i’m going to fulfill my promise to take you through the whole ecology of practices that we’ve been preparing for and the lectures have been pointing towards you