https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rpndwf45nao
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Last time we finished our look at the Axio Revolution in India. We took a look at what was going on in the Buddha’s state of enlightenment. We took a look at some of the cognitive science in such awakening experiences. And then we moved to interpret, following the sage advice of the bachelor, some of the Buddha’s pronouncements, trying to get beyond interpreting his pronouncements as propositions to be believed and instead understand them as provocations so that we may enact enlightenment. And that means enacting the threat that we are facing and then enacting the psychotechnologies that can respond to it. We took a look at this in terms of ideas of parasitic processing, reciprocal narrowing, addiction, the opposite of anagogic acceleration as opposed to reciprocal narrowing and creating a counteractive dynamical system, the counteractive system of the eightfold path for successfully dealing with parasitic processing. So we saw that these higher states of consciousness, these awakening experiences can bring about transformations that alleviate modal confusion, parasitic processing, reciprocal narrowing, many of the ways in which we fundamentally lose our agency in the world in a self-deceptive and self-destructive manner. I’d now like to return back to what’s happening after the axial revolution in the West. So Socrates was fortunate. He had a great disciple in Plato. Plato was fortunate in that he had a great disciple in Aristotle. Aristotle had a great disciple, but he was not so fortunate. Aristotle’s great disciple is not himself a great philosopher. He is another kind of great. He is Alexander the Great. And Alexander the Great is an example of the kind of thing that predates the axial revolution, the world conqueror. Alexander creates an empire and takes the Greek way of thinking throughout most of the known world in a way that reestablishes in perhaps a dangerous manner the pre-axial world. Alexander is so glorious that the line between being a human being and being a god is blurred. He creates a personal mythology in which he is a god man, very much like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, which might perhaps explain why Alexander was so readily welcomed into the courts of Egypt. Either way, what happens is a twisting of the world because not only does Alexander represent a return to a pre-axial way of being, he also represents a fundamental disruption to the world in which people had found themselves. Let’s compare the world of Aristotle to the world of Alexander. Now in order to do that, we have to understand that Alexander himself does not live very long. He dies in Babylon, that most ancient of cities. It’s not clear what he dies of. As a young age of 33, he has a child, but the child of course is too young and is therefore quickly killed. His major generals fight amongst themselves and they carve his empire up into four smaller empires that are perpetually at war with each other for about 300 years. This period is known as the Hellenistic era. If you’re alive at the time of Aristotle, chances are you live, if you’re Greek, part of the Greek culture, you live in Apollos. This is where we get cosmopolitan from. It doesn’t mean city, it means a city state. Like for example, Athens and its surrounding agricultural supporting environment, or Sparta. You know many of the other citizens. You know them face to face. We mentioned the idea that Athens is developing democracy. Remember when we discussed the sophists, at least for the adult males. That’s a significant defect in this society, but I’ve already gone into that. You’re participating in your government in a direct manner. You live close to, it’s accessible to you, the seat of that government. You often know personally people involved in the government, sometimes even the leaders themselves. Everybody around you speaks your language. Everybody around you has ancestors like you yourself do stretching back beyond memory who have lived in this place. Everybody around you has the same religion as you. Everybody has basically the same allegiances to this place. Your polis isn’t just where you lived. Your polis is such a tight relationship between agent and arena that one of the greatest punishments you could suffer in this world, the world of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle is to be ostracized. Which is just, you’re not killed, you’re not imprisoned, you’re not punished in any way. You’re just told to leave the polis. And for many people they would rather die or face imprisonment than be ostracized because the polis was such an embedded existence for them. Their identity was so enmeshed in it. So see, look how deeply connected you are to yourself, to your environment, to the people around you, to your government, to your culture, to your history. Alexander comes and smashes all of that. Greek culture is now distributed into Africa, the Levant, into Asia, Asia Minor, Asia Proper, right down to the borders of India. You have Greek kingdoms, Bactria, that are integrating Greek culture with Buddhist philosophy and religion in what is modern day Afghanistan. Now what does this mean? Well this means in the Hellenistic era people are being moved around and shuffled around and they belong to far-flung empires. You are now probably thousands of miles away from the seat of government. You do not participate in that government, nor do you know personally most of the people or any of the people in it. The people around you might not have lived where you’re living very long. You might not be living where you’ve been living very long. Your ancestors might have been from Athens and here you are dwelling in Asia Minor. The people around you speak different languages, worship different gods. Notice how all the connections are being lost. You don’t have a connection to a polis, you don’t have a connection to a shared linguistic great extent, shared history, shared ancestry, shared religion. You’re experiencing what Porteous and Smith and Brian Walsh call domicide. We’ll come back to this later when we talk about the meaning crisis today. Domicide is the destruction of home. Now there’s two ways in which domicide can occur. One of course is physical destruction of your house and that’s important. But there’s also cultural domicide in which you have a house, you have a dwelling, but it is not very much your home. Now we’ll come back to this being unhomed again when we talk about our current situation. But notice how often we will use the language of loss of home to describe our current situation. We often talk about how we now feel unhomed in the cosmos. So people are experiencing this radical sense of domicide. They don’t have deep connections to themselves, to each other, to their environment, to their history, to their cultural surroundings. They have very little political participation. They feel insignificant. You can go to sleep and you’re part of the Ptolemaic Empire and you wake up and you’re part of the Seleuciate Empire. So this is known as an age of anxiety, the Hellenistic period. The art changes. It becomes much more frenetic, it becomes much more realistic, it becomes much more organized around sort of extremes and tragedy. The confidence that we saw in the earlier periods, the period of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle is gone. Greece itself has suffered a titanic civil war, the Peloponnesian War. Sparta defeats Athens, the home of Socrates and Plato, one of the places where Aristotle did most of his work. Sokola is very quickly itself defeated by Thebes. Thebes very quickly loses its hegemony. So the Greek world loses and loses until, of course, it’s overwhelmed by Macedonia and Alexander. So whereas the Greek culture is spread throughout the world, it’s also thinned. It loses its depth. So there’s a change that starts to happen. You can see, as I said, in the art, the expression of this, you can see it in what starts to happen in religions. There’s a lot of syncretism. People are trying to create religions that integrate different cultural deities together. A Greek deity, for example, and an Egyptian deity are integrated together, perhaps into Serapis or something like that. You also see the elevation of mother goddesses to pan-cultural importance, like the mother goddess Isis, because, of course, when you feel domicide, when you feel a loss of home, there is nothing that means home more to you than mother. And if you don’t have that with your physical mother, what you want is some divine mother that can make you feel at home no matter where you are in this fractured, domicide-laden world. But philosophy also responds. The Axial Age has left a powerful legacy with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and that project has not come to an end. But it does undergo transformation in the face of the Hellenistic meaning crisis. Up until now, the main thing that wisdom was trying to deal with was foolishness. And that’s not abandoned, but that’s now seen as insufficient. So one of the great philosophers of the Hellenistic period is Epicurus. And Epicurus famously said, call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others. So there’s now a therapeutic aspect to wisdom. Wisdom is now importantly about dealing with the anxiety and suffering that people are experiencing in the Hellenistic era. So a new model is created. So we’ve seen the idea, right, of the sage as somebody like Socrates who provokes the Axial Revolution, leads you out of the cave, all of these wonderful and powerful images and figures. But a new metaphor emerges. The philosopher is the physician of the soul. A philosopher is somebody who can cure you of existential suffering. This becomes crucial. Now many of these new philosophical schools, the Epicureans for example, and the Stoics, take it upon themselves to try to exemplify Socrates. The Epicureans do this in a very unique way. They do this, a useful way of analyzing their position is to take them up on their own metaphor. What is their diagnosis of the disease that is afflicting people and what is their prognosis for the cure? Now the Epicureans are very relevant to us because they in some ways represent a very secular alternative in the midst of what was still a very religious world. And that is pertinent to us. So the Epicureans diagnose that our main problem is the problem of the soul. Diagnose that our main problem is fear. Now that’s interesting and there’s something right about that, but we have to slow down first. And here’s, in order to get closer about how we should try and appropriate what they’re saying, the work of Paul Tillich here is especially useful, especially the work he does in his masterpiece, The Courage to Be. Although he does not talk about the Epicureans very much, he concentrates on the Stoics, as we will as well, he nevertheless brings up important distinctions. This is the distinction between fear and a word you heard me use more often, which is anxiety. Now these terms are often used interchangeably and we often, and we also mix up the word anxiety with eagerness. We’ll say, I’m so anxious to see you tonight. That’s horrible. You shouldn’t be anxious to see somebody. That means you’re distressed, right, and you’re suffering a loss of agency and you have a nebulous sense of threat. That person’s terrifying. What you mean is you’re eager to see them. So first of all, give up that meaning of anxious. Secondly, we use these terms interchangeably. And, you know, in everyday discourse, that’s probably all right because they do overlap in some ways, but they’re important. It’s important to at least talk about the polar differences between them. Fear is when you have an observable direct threat. The tiger comes into this room, I experience fear because I have an observable threat. In a very important sense, I know what to do. I may fail in doing it, but I know what to do. Okay? Anxiety is different. Anxiety is when the threat is nebulous. You’re not quite sure what the threat is, and you’re not sure what to do. You don’t know what to do. So very often when you’re suffering existential issues, you experience anxiety. This is why this is the preferred term used by Kierkegaard or Heidegger, although Kierkegaard does use fear in one of his books. But that has to do with fear. So the Epicureans are often translated, I think correctly, I’m not making a scholastic point, as talking about how we are suffering because we can’t manage fear. I think a better way of understanding it, given this distinction, and fear is when you have an observable direct threat, you’re not quite sure what to do. You’re not quite sure what to do. You’re not quite sure what to do. I think a better way of understanding it, given this distinction, and following on Tillich, is we suffer because we can’t manage our anxiety. Because the fears they talk about are not really things that are a clear threat where we clearly know what to do. Okay. So, according to the Epicureans, basically we don’t control our imagination and our thinking, and so we suffer from anxieties that cripple our ability to get a grip on the world. So, let me give you one. Many people are anxious about death. In fact, sort of prototypically, people will often say, well, they’ll often use the existence of death as a way of talking about how their life is ultimately meaningless. I’m going to die anyways. What does it matter? I’m going to die. And it’s terrifying. It’s going to, I’m just afraid of death. We know that if you expose people to triggers about their own mortality, they become cognitively rigid, they go into something very much like this parasitic processing, they get locked down, right? Now there’s a couple things you can do. You can pursue immortality. And of course, the religions of the ancient world and some versions of the modern world offer this. I have very little to say for this other than as a cognitive scientist, I think that is an utterly doomed strategy. The evidence that your mind and your consciousness are completely dependent and emergent from your brain is overwhelming. And one thing is indisputable, your brain dies. And when your brain dies, your consciousness, your character, yourself die with it. I know that’s even, I suppose, antithetical to what many Buddhists believe, but that’s irrelevant. So I think the strategy of pursuing immortality is not going to work. It makes a fundamental confusion. It confuses somebody, something that’s phenomenologically, like, mysterious to you with making a conclusion. Look, I can’t experience my own death. I can’t imagine it. Because whenever I’m trying to imagine being dead, I’m still consciously aware. And so death is like, oh, and therefore I conclude, well, there must be something about me that’s immortal because it’s inconceivable that I can’t be at some level. But of course, that’s false. And that points to what the Epicureans talk about. They talk about there’s another strategy. Instead of trying to achieve immortality, can you radically accept your mortality? Because it’s indisputable that you’re going to die. Now, how do you do that? Well, first of all, realize that you can’t possibly be anxious about your death. And you say, yes, I am. OK, well, give the Epicureans a chance. First of all, if what you mean by this, your non-existence, and you say, ah, I just, I can’t conceive of my non-existence. Well, OK, this is a standard move by Epicurus. Well, what about all of the world before you were born? Do you have trouble conceiving of that? No. Does it terrify you that you didn’t exist then? No. So your non-existence isn’t itself terrifying. And you say, ah, but it’s the loss. Well, the problem with that, the Epicureans would say, is that’s equivocal. Do you mean reduction or do you mean the absence? And you mean, well, death is total loss. And then they say to you, ah, but you can’t ever experience total loss. They famously said the following, where I am, death is not. Where death is, I am not. What that means is, if I’m aware that I’m losing, I’m still alive. And if I’ve lost everything, I’ve lost awareness. And I can’t be aware that I’ve lost anything. So that can’t be what it means. OK, so it means partial loss. Ah, so what you’re actually afraid of is losing some of your agency. You’re afraid of some of the reduction in your capacities as you’re dying. But of course, you’re doing that all the time. So what is it you’re actually afraid of? Well, the Epicureans say, you’re afraid of losing what’s good. OK, well, what does that mean? Here’s where the Epicureans, they are sort of very, very modern. They say, well, good is ultimately something like pleasure. And they got associated with hedonism, and that’s not quite right. But they don’t mean pleasure in terms of bodily sensation. They mean pay attention to those things that actually give you the most meaning. Oh, OK. Now, what is it that really gives you meaning? Now, the things that we are most liable to lose as we age or as we’re sick, we’re liable to lose our fame, we’re liable to lose our fortune, right? We’re liable to lose our wealth. That’s scary. But then they say, quite rightly, But those aren’t the things that give you the most meaning in life. What is it that gives you the most meaning in life? And here’s where the Epicureans have a beautiful answer, and they pick it up from Socrates. The thing that gives you meaning is friendship, and they mean that very broadly. So they were unique in their community. They included women in their community, not primarily for sexual relations, but they considered that the ability to obtain meaningful relationships was crucial. And with those, and OK, meaningful relationships, not just the relationships, but being able to exercise philosophia, the pursuit of wisdom and self-transcendence. And the point is that as long as you are, that is always available to you. And that any of the pain you’re suffering from the loss of any of these things is ultimately manageable by you. You can learn to manage it. Now whether or not you ultimately agree with the Epicureans, right? Do you see what they’re doing here? They’re refusing to accept, I’m afraid of death! They’re saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, are you? Do you really want immortality? What you’re actually afraid of is losing your agency, which you’ve identified with these things, but that’s not actually where your ultimate happiness lies. That as long as you have cognitive agency, you can cultivate philosophical friendships. And Epicurus did this right to his very last moment, even though suffering from some horrible stomach illness. So he exemplified what he was talking about, such that when you die, it doesn’t matter to you. So his disciples, and Epicurus had other ways, he tried to get us to not be anxious about the gods, famously crafting some of the first arguments that are used by modern-day atheists against being concerned about the gods. I wouldn’t say Epicurus was an atheist. He’s a non-theist. He basically argues that the gods are irrelevant. And therefore, paying attention to them or being overly concerned with them, being anxious about them and their nebulous threat, is not something you should rationally do. So Epicurus’ disciples would practice internalizing Epicurus. They would write his sentences on their household walls, on their household utensils. They would practice. They would form communities together where they would reinforce all of these practices, where you constantly train in being able to accept your mortality. Now, I think this is valuable to us. And I think one of the things that any wisdom tradition should do is give us a way of responding to our mortality. I would recommend that that project hasn’t stopped. I recommend Tillich’s book, The Courage to Be, as a discussion about that from a more modern context. And as I said to you, we are not caught by the usual framing. Either you believe in an afterlife or your life, your current life is meaningless. Instead, the Epicureans say there’s an alternative strategy, there’s an alternative therapy for dealing with the anxiety. And that is by learning how, not just learning beliefs, but learning how to live in the acceptance of your mortality. Now, while I think this is relevant, I don’t think that their diagnosis is sufficient. I do not think that the meaning crisis of the Hellenistic period was driven primarily or solely by a fear of mortality. Why? Because mortality has always been with us and always will be with us. I think they’re right that periods of chaos and domicide exacerbate. We know this from mortality salience research, right? Things that are making us feel more vulnerable tend to make our mortality and our terror around it more salient to us. But I think there’s another school that gets a better understanding of what was going on in the Hellenistic period and gives a more comprehensive answer. And this is the Stoic school. Now, Stoicism is very relevant because Stoicism is a direct and explicit ancestor to some of our current forms of psychotherapy. The current forms of psychotherapy that are the most evidence-based for being effective, the cognitive therapies, like cognitive therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, rational emotive therapy, etc., directly come out of Stoicism. You read Aaron Beck’s book, for example, on cognitive therapy. He repeatedly states this and cites Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and others. So the way we are trying to deal with issues of anxiety, and if you probably noticed, we have an anxiety depression crisis in our culture, is we are very much putting into practice things that originated with the Stoics. Not as much from the Epicureans. So that means the Stoics have a different diagnosis of the problem and a different prognosis for the answer. So what’s their issue? They also believe we are suffering from a kind of anxiety, a kind of suffering of a loss of agency and the distress around that, because that’s, of course, what’s shared by all of these schools confronting the Hellenistic crisis, meaning crisis, the crisis of domicide. But they have a different interpretation of it. Now, we have to do a bit of history. There’s quite a bit more history that comes out of, directly out of Socrates and flows into Stoicism. I want to go over this a little bit carefully with you. So we have Socrates, and we know one of his greatest disciples is Plato, but he has another one, Antisthenes. Plato wrote dialogues because he was trying to get us to emulate and eventually internalize Socratic and Lencus, that question and answer process that Socrates made famous. When Antisthenes was asked what he had learned from Socrates, he argued, he didn’t argue, he just simply stated, he didn’t make an argument, he just simply stated that he learned how to converse with himself. Now, that sounds like, well, I talk to myself all day long. So that’s exactly the thing. This doesn’t mean your internal just talking to yourself, it doesn’t, and the problem with that is that talking to yourself is often what goes seriously awry in anxiety and depression. This is what psychologists and psychotherapists mean by rumination, when that talking to yourself gets caught up in those parasitic processing spirals, and it just spins out of control. Antisthenes means something else. He means he learned to do with himself what Socrates was able to do with him. He really learned how to internalize Socrates. So although the Epicureans pattern themselves on Socrates, they come out of Socrates, the Stoicism is really something close to being a religion that’s trying to internalize Socrates. So that Socrates is basically, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully because the Stoics certainly wouldn’t, Socrates is turned into a systematic set of psychotechnologies that you internalize into your metacognition. So what became crucial for Plato, as we saw, was argumentation. But for Antisthenes, the actual confrontation with Socrates was more important. Both Plato and Antisthenes, the two of them, are very similar. Both Plato and Antisthenes are interested in the transformation that Socrates is affording. Plato sees this happening through argumentation. Antisthenes sees it as happening through confrontation. And you can see how they’re both right, because in Socratic and Lankus, Socrates comes up and he argues with you, but of course he’s also confronting you. We talked about how he’s sort of slamming the actual revolution into your face. So Antisthenes has a follower, Diogenes, and Diogenes epitomizes this. This confrontation. And by looking at the kinds of confrontation, we can start to see what the followers of Antisthenes are doing. So Diogenes basically does something analogous to provocative performance art. He gets in your face in a way that tries to provoke you to realizations, those kinds of insights that will challenge you. He tries to basically create a poria in you, that shock experience that you had when confronting Socrates that challenges you to radically transform your life. But instead of using argumentation and discussion, as Socrates did and Plato picked up on, they were really trying to hone in on how to try to be as provocative as possible. So famously you know about one of these. It became a card in the Tarot and it became an album cover for Led Zeppelin. You have the man with the lamp walking, wandering about, the hermit with the lamp. Well this is Diogenes. He walked into the marketplace carrying around a lamp and looking and looking and looking and looking. And everybody said, well what are you looking for? And then he just kept looking and looking. What are you looking for? What is it? What is it? And then he said, I’m looking for one honest man. And then everybody got pissed off at him because they are so intrigued by all this looking and questing. And then when it comes to something that, right, and they’re pissed off because they know he’s right because they’re in the marketplace. And everybody’s lying and cheating and stealing, right? But they don’t want to know that. They don’t want to pay attention to that. Now that sounds sort of, yeah that’s kind of cool and courageous. Yeah, but Diogenes does other things that you might not find so cool or courageous. Well they’re courageous at least, but you don’t find them cool. Diogenes also famously came into the center of the marketplace and masturbated in public. And most, we’re all going like ew, ew, right? How are these two things possibly related? Well, here’s how they’re related, right? The group of people that start to take shape in this tradition are called the cynics. It’s not our modern meaning of the word, so I’m going to use a capital C. Because this just means, you know, being suspicious that everybody has an ulterior motive or a secret agenda. That’s not what is meant here. This means actually living like a dog because Diogenes also famously lived outside of Athens in a barrel. So let me tell you one more story and then we’ll try to connect all of them. So Alexander, the future emperor of the world on his ascendance into godhood comes to visit Diogenes. So you can imagine here’s the whole, like all of this entourage and here comes Alexander to visit Diogenes. And he comes up to Diogenes and he says, I can give you like half the world. What do you want? And all Diogenes says is, could you move a little to the left? You’re blocking my sunlight. So why is he living in a barrel? Why is that his answer to Alexander? Why does he look for one honest man? Why does he masturbate? Like what is going on? Well, the cynics had a particular understanding of the Hellenistic domicile. They had the idea that what causes us to suffer isn’t what we set our heart on. It’s not just a particular that we set our heart on our life and we’re afraid of losing it in death. We can set our heart on all kinds of things that ultimately will cause us to suffer. Why? Well, their idea is when we set our hearts on the wrong things, those things will fail us and that’s how we suffer. You can see some similarities to some aspects of Buddhism and to some of the asceticism that the Buddha first practiced himself. So the cynics came to the conclusion that what the Hellenistic period was showing is that many of the things that we take for granted, and think about what that word means, we take them as being part of the structure of reality, are actually not fundamentally real. They don’t have staying power. They’re not permanent. They’re actually man-made. They are historically, culturally dependent and they are temporary. And when we set ourselves on these things, the current of events can easily and readily wash them away and then we are left bereft. Our hearts are torn from us and that is how we experience domicile. Okay, so what should we do then? Well, you should learn not just acquire a set of beliefs. Dogenes isn’t just believing things. He’s living in a certain place in a certain way. You should learn how to set your heart on the kinds of things that are not man-made, are not contingent, that will not be swept away by events. What are those kinds of things? Well, one are the laws of the natural world. So this is why Dogenes lives in a barrel. He wants to live as much as he can like an animal in one sense. In another sense, he doesn’t want to live like an animal at all. But he wants to live as much by natural law as opposed to man-made law. He doesn’t want to be invested in man-made cultural institutions or practices, cultural political value systems, because those will end. And then if we have set our heart upon them, our hearts will be broken. So you want to as much as you can live according to the patterns of nature, because those are not man-made and those will not disappear with the change in history or culture. Now, if it was just that, then of course, Dogenes would just live like an animal. But the cynics also said in addition to natural law, there are moral laws. There are moral laws as to what is a proper way to be a good human being. Now, you may say, but isn’t that all culturally relative? And of course, that’s a big dispute. But one of the things that the cynics did was to try and make a distinction between moral principles that are culturally based, sorry, moral principles that are not culturally based and purity codes that are culturally historically based. And they are similar to each other in ways such that we can often confuse them together. So a good way of understanding this is in terms of more modern language of guilt versus shame. Now, again, we use these terms interchangeably and we shouldn’t because having a distinction between them is useful. Guilt is your distress at having realized you’ve broken a moral principle. Shame is your distress at having violated a purity code. Let me give you an example. As I was delivering this video, there was some sort of malfunction in my clothing and my clothing suddenly fell down. I would be deeply embarrassed. I would experience shame. Why? Because I violated a code, a cultural code, which is I’m supposed to be fully clothed in a public discourse. I said, I am. But if that happened, have I done anything immoral? Obviously, you would say, no, you didn’t do anything immoral. You didn’t do anything wrong. So I don’t feel guilt. I feel shame. Sometimes they can be against each other. Right. You may be made to feel ashamed even though you’re doing something that you believe, let’s say, in a justified way is morally right. Many people who supported blacks during the civil rights movement were subjected to terrific amounts of shaming, even though they didn’t experience any guilt in what they were doing. See, purity codes are designed to keep the categorical boundaries that make a culture in a particular historical period run the way it’s running. They are highly tied up with the invested power structures who are usually highly invested in keeping things running the way they’re running. So we have lots of important boundaries that are protected by purity codes. So for example, just to give you one more example, just to make it clear, none of you, I hope, would be distressed by me doing the following. Here’s some water. Is that OK? Imagine if I do the following. I collect lots of saliva in my mouth. Lots of it, just tons and tons of saliva. And then I spit it into the glass. Until there’s gobs and gobs of saliva in my glass. And now I swirl it around. Just imagine it. Come on. And then I drink it. And now you’re going, ew! Now notice, if I mix the water inside my mouth and swallow, you’re fine with that. But if the saliva comes outside of my mouth into the glass, you find it repellent. That’s because there’s an important purity code here. The purity code is, this is the boundary of John, and things inside this are John, and pieces of John should not come out into the world. John should not spit. John should not fart. John should not burp. John should not cut his fingernails off and leave them in front of you. John should even not leave his bed unmade because he’s leaving his impression behind. And that’s yucky. Okay, that’s a purity code. Now very often we confuse purity codes with moral codes. We confuse purity codes because we confuse our disgust reaction that’s often purity code based with a moral judgment that should be based on reasoning and evidence. Please listen to me very carefully with what I want to say. First of all, I’ll give you something non-controversial. Both of my parents are dead, but suppose they were alive. I don’t want to see them having sex. I don’t. I would go, ew! Ah! Is that a moral argument? Of course not. There’s nothing immoral with them having sex. That’s why I’m here. In a similar way, and please hear what I’m saying, I might not want to see two men having sex. That doesn’t mean that that is anyway a moral judgment on my part. A lot of the ways we have persecuted gay people is because we have confused a purity code disgust reaction with a legitimate moral argument. The people who started the process and were still pulling them apart today, right now, right here, right now, were the cynics. What Diogenes was trying to do was get you to pull apart the moral code from the purity code. He did nothing immoral by masturbating in public. But although lots of people were doing stuff that was culturally acceptable in the marketplace, most of it was immoral. Do you see? Alexander comes to him and offers him power and fame, but those are all the things the Stoics say are no good. Sorry, the cynics say are no good because if you set your hearts on them, those are man-made, human-defined, and therefore your heart will eventually be broken. Set your heart on what won’t get broken. So the cynics developed this very powerful, provocative way of enacting Socrates and trying to get us, the cynics are trying to get us to realize what we’re setting our heart on and to pull apart our automatic disgust reactions from moral reflection on what we’re doing. Now Diogenes has a disciple, Crades, and then Crades has a disciple, Zeno. This is not the Zeno of Zeno’s paradoxes, this is a different Zeno. Now, whereas the cynics tended to be sort of hostile to Plato because of his emphasis on argumentation, Zeno was deeply influenced by the cynics, but he also really liked Plato. He saw that there was value in the argumentation and he realized that there’s deep connections between your ability to rationally reflect and your ability to use your reason. So what he wanted to do was integrate the rational argumentation and reasoning of Plato with the provocative aspects of the cynics. So he crafted a way of life that put the two together and then he would walk up and down a stoa, this is a covered colonnade in Athens, teaching this new integration. That’s where we get the name stoic from. Stoic doesn’t mean being stiff upper lip and tolerating the decline of the British Empire or stuff like that, it means something much more sophisticated. So Zeno’s insight was there’s something deeply right about the cynics, but they’re getting something wrong. They’re concentrating too much on the product and not enough on the process. They’re concentrating too much on what we’re attaching our heart to rather than the very process of attachment itself. Because the stoic said, yes, particular cultures in history are variable, but being social isn’t. Human beings are inherently social. Yes, particular political, cultural and historical institutions and traditions are variable, but it is part of our humanity to be social. We shouldn’t be leaving the polis because notice that Diogenes and Socrates have to actually enter the polis to practice their philosophy. So Zeno said, it’s not what you set your heart on, it’s how you set your heart. And this is always a hallmark of rationality. One of the crucial, and this is even recent work on rationality, Kiestanovich, the hallmark of rationality is learning not to focus just on the products of your cognition, but find valuable and pay attention to the processes. What process? What is this process of setting your heart on? Well, it’s something we’ve already talked about. It’s this process of co-identification. It’s the process by which the agent arena relationship is set up. It’s the process by which you’re simultaneously assuming an identity and assigning an identity. And you’re doing that all the time, unconsciously. Now, the stoics say, ah, that process of co-identification is where your identity is being formed. That’s where your agency is taking shape. But if you mindlessly co-identify, if you do it automatically and reactively, you will, if you’ll allow me the acronym, you’ll mar that whole process. It’ll be open to all kinds of distortion, self-deception, self-destruction. You can see here again the axial age ideas. So, what do we need to do? Well, we need to pay attention to this process. We need to pay attention to how we’re assuming and assigning identities. We need to do it in such a way that we can strengthen our agency in the face of the threat of domicide. So, what I want to explore with you next time is what did the stoics actually advocate as practices and how are these currently being taken up in our own psychotherapeutic endeavors to deal with our own version of domicide and the meaning crisis. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you.