https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=V6wnjpvyo0w
Welcome everyone to a special episode of Voices with Verbeke. I’m here with Jack Viznak. He’s also known as Lantern Jack. I’ve had a discussion with him on his podcast channel which I’ll allow him to introduce in a sec and we’re going to, first of all, I want to introduce a lot of you too, Jack. He’s doing work that is I think very convergent with the work I’m doing in a lot of important ways and we’re also going to talk about a book he’s written, I think a truly wonderful book on stoicism that I think is very pertinent and relevant to the meeting crisis. So welcome, Jack. Thank you, John. It’s an honor to be here. Should I say a little bit about my background? Yeah, please. Yeah, introduce yourself. Who you are, what you do, and how you became interested in my work and etc. Yeah, so I’m Jack Viznak aka Lantern Jack and I have, I studied ancient Greek philosophy in graduate school focusing on the stoics in particular and their notion of moral duty and since the second half of grad school I’ve been podcasting on my show called Ancient Greece Declassified about all things ancient Greek and Mediterranean, so Romans, Egyptians, Persians, trying to understand that amazing first millennium BC and all the incredible technological, cultural, political advances that happened during that time and try to understand why those things happened in the time and bring that knowledge to a popular audience, which is often excluded from the latest advances in those fields because the latest research is usually published only within academic journals, etc. And during my many philosophical investigations into the legacies of those ancient thought systems, I came across your series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and there I found a way of investigating these trends that I wish I had encountered earlier in my formal schooling, which is to see them not just as not just to analyze the arguments themselves as the philosophers do, not just to look at the particular social circumstances behind Aristotle or, you know, the stoics, but to see it in within the context of the evolution of human thought and how thought systems evolved and how what were the major problems that thinkers are trying to overcome and how did that lead to new thought systems and how did those, you know, how are those synthesized with advances in the sciences, etc. and spiritual movements? So that was a very refreshing and enlightening thing to find. And when I found that I had you on my show, we talked about Platonism and the cave, Plato’s cave and its legacy. So I’m and then you graciously agreed to read my book. So I’m honored that you’ve done so and I’m honored to be here to talk to you about it. Well, thank you. Thank you, Jack. Yeah. Well, so the book is The Invention of Duty Stoicism as Deontology. And as I’ve often noted, many of the world really wonderful books are thin books and notice that this is it says a lot and brevity and clarity without without any dumbing down. I’m finding the book both that the material and the manner in which it is written is exemplary. So I’m strongly recommending it for people who are interested in a stoic way of life and not just as an intellectual interest. They’re interested in stoicism as Hado would say as a philosophy, as a way of life and also for people who are interested in deeper notions of the cultivation of wisdom and responding to the meaning crisis. And so that’s what I want to talk to you about, Jack. So first, why don’t you lay out there’s a there’s like a couple of key moves in the book. One is the argument about, you know, about this notion, the central notion I’ll let you talk about. It’s often a translated as appropriateness or well fitted. And you argue for a duty interpretation instead. And I want to that’s one I’ll sort of challenge you on, but in a dialogical manner, then you make a very good case for understanding the stoic framework. And of course, there’s some you do some work around the notion of formulae. But I’ll let you talk about that if it comes up. But that this is not this is not a rule based way of life. And that stoicism shouldn’t be understood as rule based. And then you do something that I think is very exemplary and is part of this current attempt to revivify stoicism with a way of life, which you try to say, how can we put this into practice for the non stages with a practical method? It’s not quite a method, but a practical, a practical form of deliberation such that we can actually enact this framework. And so those are the if you want to talk about anything other than that, that’s fine, but those are the three points I really want to zero in on because those are the ones that really grabbed me when I was reading this book. Great. So the first point, which is often people outside of the field of philosophy find this very surprising is that scholars of philosophy claim that the notion of moral duty is a modern notion that it’s at least in the West. Before Emanuel Kant, the German philosopher of the Enlightenment, there was no notion of moral duty. There was, there were notions of duty, like military duty, religious duty, civic duty, duty to your family. But the idea of a purely moral duty where there’s no external authority that’s obligating you to do something. It’s just something that you arrive at and you realize on your own. And then you have to do it. And so the third point is that the consensus view in the scholarship is that that’s a modern innovation led in particular by Emanuel Kant and is missing from the ancient discussions. And in my book, I argue that actually the Stoics pioneered a notion of moral duty and an entire ethical system built around it. And then the third point is the method of deliberation. So our sources, our surviving sources on Stoicism are very limited. Stoicism is a school that has like 700 years of history, and we only have texts from the final two and a half centuries or so, and we don’t have any complete texts from the first three centuries of Stoicism. And that would be presumably where the founders of the school were working out all the nuts and bolts of how to define the notion of duty, which they called kathakon in Greek and afikion in Latin, and how to find your kathakon or afikion. The first source we get is basically Cicero, the complete source, and he and the other famous Stoics that we know today, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, they are writing to audiences that already know these terms. They already know how earlier Stoics would have defined these terms. They already know what they would have said about it. So they don’t go through the trouble to explain the definitions. That’s why we have to, that’s why there’s debate about it. That’s why I claim it’s a different meaning than other people, because you have to use the available texts and context to infer the meanings. And anyway, in my book, I try to do a kind of reconstruction of what the method of deliberation the Stoics offered was based on the later sources and then the few surviving fragments we have from the earlier sources. Yeah, it’s a reconstruction. There’s a little bit of reverse engineering going on too, where you’re sort of trying to figure out how does this sort of, how would this hang together coherently and make sense as a system? Well, so let’s zero in on the first one. I, with you, I reject the claim that Kant invented moral duty. And so I guess what I want to get at is, and again, I think you present the literature correctly as believing that or representing that, that’s sort of the mainstream view. And then they have this opposite way of translating the Greek term as like appropriateness, doing the appropriate action or doing something that’s well fitted. And there are problematic aspects about interpreting that just as appropriateness. You also do note, because you’re a good scholar, that there are problematic aspects about interpreting it as duty. The fact that plants can have this and small children can have this is problematic, at least for most people’s conception of what duty means, which is a reflective sense of obligation. And it seems that that’s not something that plants or animals or very small children have. So, first of all, am I getting that correct? That that’s sort of the, there’s, like I said, you’re right that many of the ways in which at least the standard interpretation of appropriateness is something that’s at the preferential level. Like you could do this or not do this, right? Whereas you want to bring in, there’s a stronger sense of obligation in what the stoics are saying. And that’s what undermines the mainstream interpretation. But you do acknowledge that there’s the difficulties around the plants and animals and the small. That’s why it’s sometimes also translated as proper functioning or well-fittedness, things like that. Is that, am I getting it correct? No, yes, absolutely. So the stoics come along after Plato and Aristotle produced these huge volumes of work and they introduce a new term in ethics, catechon, which the Romans then translate as offician. And so one question is, why did the stoics take this obscure word that’s only used like a handful of times before them in the surviving literature and make that their main ethical term? And we can get to that in a bit, but then the other question is then what does it actually mean? And again, you have to, you have to infer from a small number of pre stoic occurrences of the term that we have and then from the stoic usage and that word, it probably can mean appropriate in some contexts. And it’s similar etymologically to other words like prosaicon that mean appropriate. And so for, for probably from the late 1800s until today, scholars have thought that it always means the appropriate. And so when the stoics say that, you know, the sage or the moral person will do their catechon or officium, it’s just saying they’re going to do what’s appropriate, that there’s no claim about strong obligation. Right. And so in my book, which it was an outgrowth from my PhD thesis, where I spent probably many, many months just looking at all the occurrences of this word, I came to believe that it almost always has a notion of very strong obligation. And so I guess one key disagreement is the degree of obligation. You know, so the standard view is that it’s just, there’s some obligation, but it’s really just the feeling of appropriateness. And I’m saying, no, the word carries with it that it is so that the term I suggest is prescribed that there is an order, a providential order of nature. The stoic God is you might say nature or the God or the stoic version of Zeus is this artisanal fire that permeates the entirety of nature. And this, this God’s rationality guides everything in nature. It’s kind of like Spinoza’s view of nature. And so every plant, animal and human has a prescribed activity. Now, when you say prescribed activity, you, I think, get over the problem with plants and animals having Cathayquinda, because we would not want to say that plants have duties or animals have duties, doesn’t make sense in English, but if you think of it as prescribed activities, then it, it’s not such a big obstacle. And, and the key thing is that for the stoics human, although humans have prescribed activities, just like plants and animals, the way that we do those and figure out what they are that we should do involves reason and involves choice, which are completely different than from how plants and animals like the stoics believe that plants and animals just automatically impulsively, they’re kind of programmed algorithmically to just do what providential nature has prescribed to them. Whereas for humans, we are given a piece of Zeus’s mind. We’re given our own center of rationality, our own command center, if you will. And so we have to do a bit of work to to figure out what is prescribed for us. And that’s our duty. But once we figure it out, we have to do it. OK, well, there’s two things that come out first. I want to come back to the notion of have. It sounds like we’re venturing into Frankfurt’s notion of voluntary necessities. And I want to explore that with you. But then the first thing I want to get clarity about is you made a distinction, as you do in the book, between this and a sense of religious obligation or command by a deity. But when you explain it there, it sounds like that’s what it is. It sounds like what’s ultimately happening is there’s a deity commanding. And we admit that the commands. But if you’ll forgive me, I could hear a Christian saying, but the commands given by God are rational in our best interests. And so we are obligated to to to to serve them. Or we we will. The nature of the obligation is we will lose our humanity. We will lose our chance at the best possible life or something like that. And so how is this different than a religious command? That’s an excellent question. And I actually think it kind of is a religious command. OK. So I think that. You know, the this notion of a moral, a purely moral duty divorced from any political, religious or otherwise external source of of obligation is kind of like the holy grail of a certain kind of ethics. And I’m not sure it’s ever been. I’m not sure that any philosopher has ever succeeded in doing it without religion. So I think Kant, although he is heralded as the originator of the notion of a kind of purely rational moral duty, I think Kant requires a rational God, a rational benevolent God as well. And I think the stoics require a rational benevolent God. So I’m not actually convinced that it is possible to create a notion of purely moral duty without God. So I’ll just say that. No, no, that’s well, first of all, before we talk about the merits of that proposition on its own, I think that’s an important thing to say, because I was going to say that seems to me to be a fundamental difference from what you’re writing in the book and at least the standard presentation of Kant. I mean, the standard presentation. And of course, I agree. It’s problematic. You know, it’s a fundamental difference from what you’re writing in the book. And I think that’s the most important thing to say. I agree. It’s problematic. You know, is that Kant is the meta value, the meta good of the Enlightenment is autonomy, right? Political autonomy and moral autonomy and aesthetic autonomy. And, you know, Habermas, we get the separation of these autonomous realms of normativity that are completely autonomous, the ethical and the aesthetic and the epistemological, et cetera. And yet I saw Kant as trying to offer a completely autonomous notion of duty, that it was something that was completely generated from within the rationality of the individual. And I didn’t see that in the Stoics. Now, one more bend in this. Oh, OK, go ahead, Jack. Yeah. So I just want to just add a quick point to this. So I think so Kant wrote a book, I think it was eight or nine years after the groundwork where he laid out his first theory of duty, and it was called religion within the bare bounds of reason. Yes. Yes. And it has in part of it is an essay called like on the radical evil in human nature, which was published as an independent essay before that. And there he seems to be drawing it, pulling in this kind of Augustinian notion of radical evil. Yes. And Goethe famously reacted, had a quip about this. He said, oh, after working so hard to free his mind from prejudice, Kant tarnished his philosopher’s robe with the stain of radical evil to make the Christians kiss it. And so I think what sets Kant and the Stoics apart from more directly religious duty is that they try to do, they try to infer the nature of the divine purely rationally. So they, they say, OK, let’s forget about any holy text. Let’s forget about any claim of revelation. Let’s forget about any prophet. Let’s forget about any traditions. And let’s think purely rationally what seems to be guiding the universe, because they both think that there is something guiding the universe. And then they infer that there must be this rational, benevolent deity. OK. Right. And so it’s a very, very kind of minimalistic conception of God. There’s no lore. There’s no mythology. There’s no personified descriptions. But again, I feel like they both in there, if you think of the Kantian and the Stoic systems as these Jenga towers, if you remove the God piece, I think it would all crumble. But again, that’s, that’s controversial. Well, no, but I agree with you. I think it’s right. So then, well, I want to put that you also talk because you bring this up also. There is a bit of mythos. I get there’s no revealed or sacred texts, but there is there is the brotherhood of all humanity and and somehow humanity forms like the word that’s often used is one body. Like there’s this, you know, there’s this superorganism that’s not God, but is an important, right? I don’t know. An important mediator between God and individual human beings. And that seems to also be playing an important role so that very like in your book, I see that often it’s the sense of participation in that superorganism that often generates the sense of obligation. Is that is that a fair thing to say? I think so. I think so. So if you know, I’m not I’m not an expert on Kant, but I think that the scholars who do know much better than me. Agree that the argument, so Kant wants to move, he wants to establish this idea that all of humanity is like the stoics, basically one cooperative body and that we should use, we should never use humanity as an end, sorry, as a means, but as an end as well. Right. And I think scholars tend to agree that if you look at Kant’s very complex argument, he’s trying to move from humans all being rational to this point that we are all in it together and we should not use each other as means. OK. And and I think now in Kant’s argument for that, it’s like this huge web that it’s hard to untangle and scholars disputed in the stoics. It’s a very, very clear string of propositions. And you find this in Marcus Aurelius, but I think this must go back to the earliest stoic. He says, if the thinking element or faculty is common to all humans, then we are all endowed with reason. And if we’re all endowed with reason, then we’re all endowed with internal commands about what to do and what not to do. And if we’re all endowed with these logical commands, we are all subject to the same law. And if we’re all subject to the same law, we’re all part, we’re all citizens of the same community. And if we’re all citizens of the same community, then the universe is our polis. And that’s the kind of, I think, stripped down argument that the stoics offer. And I think it’s very similar to what Kant does. But Kant says, you know, more dense than I’m qualified to analyze. Yeah. And I think when Dining is right in his book on the philosophical history of Europe, Kant tries to do it in terms of something like a notion of social contract. Whereas I get it, the stoics are actually invoking a sense of identity. I’m reminded of that passage in the book where you’re talking about, you know, the foot isn’t a foot if it’s no longer, you know, part of the body. And it has to understand itself as a foot in order to properly. And so it will step in the mud. It will get itself dirty. Right. Because as a foot, it wants to as a as a as a living thing, it wants to stay clean. But as a foot, it will do that because that’s how the whole body will be served. I take it. That’s a different notion. There’s this fundamental sense of like, well, I wouldn’t want to even invoke some of my terms. Like there’s this participatory knowing there’s this deep belonging being a part of that gives that sense of obligation. No, absolutely. And so, you know, the stoics would say that the wise man. In a shipwreck is not going to scream in his final moments of agony. He’s just going to kind of accept. Yeah, OK, I’m going to die. And it’s because he realizes that he is kind of just as a foot is part of a bigger hole, your whole body and and and the foot has to go in the mud for the sake of the body to do what it needs to do. An individual human is part of a larger hole, which is humanity. And it often happens that one or a few or even thousands of humans for the stoics have to be killed or suffer terrible fates for the sake of humanity as a whole. It’s not OK. It’s kind of a grim meaning. But I think I think this actually brings out an interesting contrast with Kant, because Kant thinks that actions that are really done from duty and not just in conformity with duty, which he thinks a lot of things can be done in conformity with duty. Yes, but it’s not really from duty. Like if you’re really doing action from duty, it means that that action that there’s no other incentives helping you to that action is just in fact, either there are no other incentives co-leading you to the action or all other incentives are actually hindering you. But you know that you have to. It’s very German, if you will, like conception of duty. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say it’s pietistic, too. It comes from the whole piety movement. Yeah. Go ahead. And so he thinks that, you know, he says in the famous pan-famous passage, I’m willing to out of a love of humanity, says Kant, I’m willing to concede that perhaps most of our actions are done in conformity with duty, but not from duty, because if you look at all those actions that are in conformity with duty, you always find the kind of egoistic self and you only see the true nature of dutiful action when you see people doing things that go against their own interests. And the Stoics reject that they think that. One of the key, yes, corollaries of the thing of the of the notion that we’re a part of the whole body is that the interest of the individual is exactly the same as the interest of the whole. There’s no difference. So when so when the Stoic sage dies for the sake of his community, he’s happy. He’s not he doesn’t think he’s he’s sacrificing himself for the community. He thinks that he is doing the happiest thing he could possibly be doing. And that’s for me where I find the sense of duty doesn’t feel right as a term. That’s where I wanted to push back on you because because that pietistic notion in Kant, which is like, you know, in the groundwork, he talks about the pure will, right, being the only good thing, the good will. Right. And it’s this it’s this pure act of will that you’re not if you do it because you love the person. That’s not duty. If you do it because you love the good, that’s not duty. Right. It’s this it’s this. And that doesn’t seem to be like what we’re talking about here now. The Stoics seem to be talking about this. Well, it sounds more like love. It sounds more like the sense of participation and a love of humanity that is interwoven with the love of oneself. The way you’re talking about that seems to be at work here. Yeah, well, I’ll grant I’ll grant you that it’s not the same as the Stoic duty is not the same as modern duty. Right. But I’m what I’m saying is that it can be recognized within the realm of variance of the concept that we call duty. And so Kant, the thing is that Kant just thinks that the Stoics are basically lying. So when the Stoics claim both the Stoics and the Epicureans, interestingly, claimed that the Epicureans did not believe that God has any role in morality. There might be gods, but they don’t care about us. So they’re basically effectively atheists, although they are also perhaps agnostics. But both the Epicureans and the Stoics claim that the wise person will be happy even in the Bull of Phalaris, which was a famous torture mechanism. Yes, yes. You’re burned alive. Right. So so you put in this in this bronze bull and then you’re roasted and then you start screaming. And then there are these musical instruments, wind instruments in the mouth of the bull that turn your screams of agony into music. And this was a famous tyrant that so the Epicureans and Stoics claim that the wise man will be happy even in the Bull of Phalaris. And Kant, in a rare moment of humor, says, yeah, but the the super high volume at which the sage screams, I’m still happy, I’m still happy, shows that they’re lying because obviously they’re not happy and being tortured. So he just thinks that it’s like a dishonest dogmatic claim that is belied by obvious human nature. Right. So I would say to him that his claim that people can ever commit an act of self sacrifice without a motivation of love is also lying. That’s what I would say back to Kant, because I agree with Frankfurt that all the voluntary necessities ground out in the voluntary necessity we call love, which is a different thing than a sense of duty. It’s more I think the Stoics are talking about a sense of obligation that comes close to what Frankfurt calls the unthinkable, which is I use the example of my older son lives with me. I love him very much. And now I can think in the sense of running propositions and making inferences and imagining pictures about kicking him out because my apartment would be so much cleaner and I would have so much less frustration and all kind of, you know, and all kinds of and I can I can I can. But it’s unthinkable to me in that. And this is what goes back to the foot. I can never assume the identity that would actually make the agency that would cause that action to appear. I can’t actually put I can’t assume that identity that would enable the agency that would bring about that action. And it feels to me more like the Stoics are talking about something like that, that once I am properly participating in the right identity, I can’t assume other identities. And that’s the sense of obligation that comes out. That’s what I wanted to put to you as a possibility there, because that that that that right, that can that can link up with much stronger notions of appropriateness. And you know what I’m thinking about here. I’m thinking about relevance realization, which isn’t at the level of preference. It’s at the level of constituting your agency, which is this fundamental fittedness of you and the arena so that agency and personhood are possible. And I think the Stoics are talking about identifications at that fundamental level of agent arena relationship that afford personhood. And then once we identify ourselves with that, we we we fall into the unthinkable. But the alternative identities become unthinkable to us, not that we can’t, again, think them, but we can’t we can’t come to assuming those identities such that that kind of because that’s also what struck me in their example of, well, you would naturally honor your parents. And it’s like, but what is that? Right. What is that? Is that a sense of duty or is that a sense of, you know, they are literally your relationship to them is literally constitutive of your personhood in a profound way. I don’t know if I’m being clear. I’m trying to propose a different way of thinking about this. So I’m. You’re using a few terms that the Stoics would not recognize, such as personhood and identity, right. But they do talk a lot about persona. So let me let me say a little bit about that. Maybe then you can maybe that’ll help us kind of zero in on what you’re talking about here. So the Stoics. Well, Cicero introduces this Cicero reports about this notion of a persona. OK, now he again, he’s writing 300 years after the founding of the Stoics. It’s very hard to trace back how far this term goes. Yes, yes, yes. I think there’s some recent work that shows it goes pretty far back. But a persona is at this time, its main meaning in Latin was a mask and a theater mask. Yes, yes. And that was the literal meaning. And then the kind of extended, more abstract meaning was that it’s a kind of role that you play. Yes, yes. And and we find a similar term in the Greek Stoics, which is prosopon, which also can mean mask or face or role. OK, so the Stoics claim that. That one way to figure out what your duty is, is to think of your various personae and they can be organized into four categories. So the the first persona is. You as a human being, which carries two important components. Number one is you are a social animal and you’re a rational animal. Yes. So you’re so you’re constituted to be rational and to cooperate with other human beings. One of the axioms or or dogma to basic doctrines of Stoicism was we are born for the sake of each other, not for ourselves. And the second persona is your nature. And now this is. You know, some people are naturally very fast or very tall or short, or some people are naturally sarcastic in their humor. Others are naturally serious, right? The Stoics believe these were natural character differences that you should also align your actions to. The third persona is things that are given to you by chance. And they included their your wealth, your reputation, your social status. Your social status. They think they think these are all very unstable things that are largely the result of chance. And then the fourth one is your. Maybe your profession or vocation, but really, I think it’s the sum total of your choices of who you want to be. OK, and the Stoics said that. You need to align all your actions with all of these personas. So if any one of these personas contradicts an action you’re contemplating, it that cancels the action. You can’t do it. And and they they believe that that if you if you narrow down the options available to you by so you rule out everything that goes against your rational, social human nature, you rule out everything that goes against your natural disposition and everything against the choices you made and everything against what’s given to you by chance. If you filter out all those things, you will be left with one or two or ideally one, but just a very small number of options and then you’re going to be much closer to finding your duty. So does that maybe with that context, you can. That sounds very similar to what I’m proposing to you. Exactly. There’s this there’s this there’s this there’s honing in, you know, this sharpening up of relevance realization. And each one of those has to do with, you know, you might call a dimension of the agent arena relationship and then you you are making like you’re basically identifying your right roles or ways of identifying characters, a way of identifying your powers or we either these are all dimensions of identification. And then once we sort of do what you just said, the winnowing out the ruling out what’s ruled in is what we are obligated to doing. But that like that that doesn’t feel like to be like an act of will. In fact, you presented as an act of deliberation. When I take it for content. Well, again, I keep using con. Maybe that’s the problem that I’m coming here. I have to contain a notion, but I’m trying to get at something here because there’s a notion of proper fittedness, like the fact that we were born made for each other, that seems to come before choice and that is actually making everything we’re talking about possible. Yeah, so, well, two points, I guess. One is that the notion of a will is very problematic and and arguably is a late innovation. So, yeah, one of the one of the final writers. Well, so this the Stokes talk about something called pro-hierosis, which is also an Aristotelian term, and it literally means like pre-choosing. Yeah, yes, like, yes, yes, yes. The mental like the kind of mental choice before you actually make the choice. And in late writings, especially the commentaries of Simplicius, it seems to be like the will. And in fact, in early German translations that Kant would have read of Simplicius, it’s translated as ville or friar ville, like will or free will. So but so that’s a can of worms. But as to your point that it doesn’t seem that this this deliberation process that arrives at your duty doesn’t seem to be an act of will, but seems to be a kind of algorithm or whatever that’s. No, I wouldn’t say algorithm. I think that’s unfair to your proposal. It’s more it’s more like it’s a self-organized. It’s like very much what I talk about in relevance, realizing it’s this self-organizing process that basically excludes, makes you ignore, find non-salient, non-relevant all of these options. Just like what I’m trying to say is, you know, how you’re trying to solve a problem and there’s all these options and then you have the insight and the solution comes out. And then you are you are you obligated. It’s more like you find yourself identifying with the way the path of resolving the problem, achieving the goal. That’s what I’m trying to. It feels more like that kind of process. I see. So is the question then where does a sense of obligation come in? Yeah, where does the sense of obligation come in? And maybe a little bit more about what’s the phenomenology of this sense of obligation, right? Because, like, Frankfurt says, we have we like, I think it would wrong for me to say I feel obligated to take care of my son. That does not sit with the phenomenology of the fact that I love my son. And that is why many of these things are unthinkable. And all of these other things just get winnowed away. And this is what I must do. Right. But it’s not like to say that love is an obligation seems to be mistaking it in some way. And I’m not necessarily I know the Storks are not talking about love. I’m talking about I’m trying to talk about this sense of participatory identification, which seems to be something other than what we typically understand as making a choice or making which seems to me to be central to the notion of obligation. I see. So, well, you’re bringing up a lot of different points and I’m I’m trying to figure out which one should I respond to first. Well, I want to give you the time. I’ll stop talking for a bit and you can go through the points as you wish. I do not want to be doing anything remotely like Gish Gallup with you. I just want to I laid out an argument, but I want you to like respond to it point by point as you wish. OK, so I think there’s two main points I need to respond to. First is the four persona method of deliberation is not. Like not all scholars, most scholars don’t think it pertains to duty like I do. OK, and the reason is that so Cicero has this book called On Duties. And in one section of it, he talks about the virtue of decorum in Latin, which is kind of like the English word decorum, it means propriety. OK, right, right. And and so for him, the four persona method is a way to determine what is according to your decorum to do. So what is what is propriety demand of you, let’s say. Yeah. And so for that reason, people have said, oh, that’s not duty. It’s propriety. But it’s in a book called On Duties. OK, right. Oh, right. Right. OK, OK. And OK. And at some point, Cicero says that the nature of of the of the decorum in Latin is such that. Although mentally different from oficium duty, it’s kind of coextensive with it. OK, so. My argument in the book is that the Stoics believed that all the virtues point to your duty, one of the few surviving fragments we have of Panaitius, who is an earlier Stoics Cicero is drawing from one of the precious few fragments we have of his says that that the each virtue is like an archer aiming at the same target. But the target has different colors and each virtue aims at a different color. But in the end, they’re all aiming at the same target and shooting in the same place. Yeah. And and the thing is that in different situations, it’s easier to think of one virtue versus another. Like, it might be easier in some cases to think, what is the courageous thing to do now? And in other cases, courage might not apply. It might be, well, what’s the temperate or wise or just or decorous thing to do here? But the point is that they all should point to the same thing. So if you can find well, if you think of two virtues, like what would be the just thing to do, what would be the courageous thing to do? And they point to different things than you’re you’re not thinking properly. You’ve got to reassess. But if you do think properly, then even finding one, where does one virtue point to will point you to your duty? And so I think the point of this decorum passage in in the book on duties, which is why he puts it in the book on duties, is that decorum is the most kind of it’s like an intuition pump because he says, if if if you’re watching a play, Cicero says, and and the character of Odysseus or Atreus or whatever comes out and behaves in a way that’s not befitting to Odysseus or Atreus, you immediately know this is this guy’s a bad actor or like this is a bad script. No, Odysseus would never do that. Or Spider-Man would never say that. Or it doesn’t matter. Like we we we have such a fine tuned intuitive sense of personae. And so I think that the decorum passage is a intuition pump to help you find your duty, but it still falls under the virtue of decorum, which doesn’t sound like a very obligatory notion, but it can help you. It helps you if you’ve already accepted the framework that whatever your virtue or virtues point to is something that is obligated. And then that’s the second point, which is where does the sense of obligation come from? And this is one of the million dollar questions of ethics, which is what are the sources of normativity? And scholars still debate that there is no consensus view about that. And I think one of the one of the weaknesses of the ontological ethics, which is duty based ethics, is that. It’s hard to find. Like the deontologists, like the stoics and like Kant and the Kantians, they like to talk a big talk about duty. But if you ask them about what is really compelling you to do that, it’s like, oh, reason, you know, like there’s. Yeah, yes. Isn’t something that’s intuitively compelling to the average person to latch on to as a source of obligation in either system. OK, I think that’s a good response is that I give you enough time to lay out the points that you want to address, because I think that’s an excellent response. So. Well, that that brings up two things. One is. That argument is very similar to the sort of Socratic Platonic argument, which was brought up by several scholars, the unity of the virtues, which isn’t that they’re they’re all parts of a system. There’s the idea that no, no, each virtue is just a way of being wise in that particular context. So how you’re wise in this context is to be kind. How you’re wise in this context is to be just. And that so you write it, you have the basic Sophia for neesis, but Sophia flow through for neesis and you get a virtue in a particular situation or context, and that sounds exactly like what you’re talking about with all of the virtues are pointing towards duty. And this brings up the next question. Give me a minute to do the two points. I mean, could it be that the only real duty we have, especially because there are rules, is the duty to be wise? And then again, is that a duty or is that just loving the good? The way Plato would say. And that’s how you would actually get all of that. And the reason I mention that is because one way of seeing stoicism is. You know, the project of kind of internalizing Socrates or internalizing the sage and the points you talk about, how about, you know, the shift from the fact that the sage becomes more and more of an ideal figure with time, I totally get that, but that’s not problematic for the proposal I’m making. In fact, there’s some way, some senses in which an ideal sage is better for internalization than any particular historical figure. And so. How much is this ability to actually carry out one sense of duty dependent? I’ll try and make it a single sentence. How much is this capacity to find one’s duty actually bound up with the project of internalizing the sage? I mean, it’s constantly through, especially Epictetus, right? Socrates is constantly drawn in. The sage is constantly mentioned repeatedly, you know, as Tistanis, who starts the whole tradition in the cynics and into the stoics says what he learned from Socrates was how to have a dialogue with himself and that sort of thing. And then if our only duty is the duty of wisdom, doesn’t it ground out in like philosophia, the love of wisdom, the love of the good? I know I’m actually really challenging things because your book is so deep. No, I love it. I love it. I love it. I mean. Again, each one of your questions like has so many potential points of departure to it. So. I guess you could you could make the case, I mean, the stoics really believe in the in the unity of virtues, perhaps more than any other school, so I think you could it’s not wrong to say that they believed that you could express your system as boiling down to a duty to be wise. But. I mean, I think the question is still if an average person were talking to a stoic and said, but why do you have to do what your cathaycon is? I think that’s the isn’t that the key question or are you onto a different question, I still think that that’s like the main million dollar question. No, I think the main million dollar question I would want to ask the story is why why should one be wise? And then I think the answer is something along the lines, the Socratic line of, well, the unexamined life is not worth living, right, that it grounds out in what makes you know, Kant said the only good thing is the goodwill. But I think there’s a sense in which the stoics falling upon the cynics think the only thing that always the only thing that’s always good is wisdom. Everything else. And you even talk about that in the book, like like there’s certain things that might be reprehensible, but they’re the they’re the they’re the right thing to do, not in the moral sense, like like in Cicero and the tyrannicide. Right. Right. But but but that they are the wise thing to do. I see. Like I want to when somebody asks me that question, I want to say something like, well, wisdom is not optional. It’s not it’s not optional. That’s that’s where I get that sort of fundamental sense of obligation. See. So. OK, I’m going to try to do something that. Would never fly in a flawsy department, OK? Which is that’s fine. Which is to try to kind of reverse engineer how I think the stoics got to this position that wisdom is not optional. OK, yeah, I think this is very speculative. I’m just going to say that up front. There’s no way to find that. But yeah, at some point we’re I mean, we’re not trying to leave the exegetical question behind. But at some point we want this to to to to to jive with the existential question. Yeah. So first, the Stokes come on the scene when Plato and Aristotle had already argued that the four virtues are the cardinal virtues, which means that if you have wisdom, justice, temperance and courage, that you have all the virtues, because all other virtues are contained in the four cardinal virtues. That’s why they’re cardinal. And they argued that these are very interrelated, that there’s a kind of unity in the virtues, that you can’t be one without the others. And especially Aristotle argued that, you know, the goal of life is eudaimonia, which is often translated as happiness, but it’s really just a good life, a meaningful life, you might say. Yes. So the Stokes come on the scene and and oh, and sorry. And Plato had also argued that we can rationally infer that there is a God who is benevolent and rational. And the way we can do that is because we live in a beautiful world and only a benevolent God would have created a beautiful world. And we also live in a highly structured, complex, organized world. And you can see this by if you look at the astronomers and the very complicated mechanisms they have to create that simulate the motions of the planets and the stars, then like, why do we think that you need to be Archimedes to build that? But you don’t need an intellect to build the actual thing that is being modeled by those models. And so so they had already agreed that, well, they had already argued that there is a benevolent, rational deity. And it’s possible that Socrates or Xenophon, because Xenophon reports this, believed that there was a kind of consciousness beyond humanity, because there’s this one passage in Xenophon’s memoirs of Socrates where Socrates says, like, how can you believe that humans get this piece of soul or consciousness? But there’s nothing out there like, you know, if we partake in this rationality, mustn’t there be some greater consciousness is a modern word, but, you know, some greater spirit or rationality out there? OK, so that’s the kind of context. Then the Stoics come. And they. I think they maintain all of those various positions that I just enumerated. And they want and they also maintain the idea that, as Aristotle said, eudaimonia is the goal in life, so a meaningful, happy life. OK, and. Now, they kind of expanded their view of God, so they had this view of, you know, one of the most fascinating texts from Stoicism is the is the Hymn to Zeus. Yes. By, well, the name is escaping me right now. Is it Cladestes? Or I can’t remember. Something like that. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cleanthes. Don’t worry about it. Cleanthes is Hymn to Zeus. Yes. Oh, great. Yeah. It’s might as well be from a Christian. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Theological treaties. It’s. So. God is nature. God permeates nature and everything in the universe is unfolding according to a rational plan. Now, the Stoics also like to argue for every point on various fronts. They argue for things on a theological front, on an anthropological front and on a psychological front, and so they also do they also do an anthropology here and. Which is the famous cradle argument. Sorry, this is like bringing a lot of things, but, you know, one of the time, Jack, this is cool. One of the key, perhaps the most important debate among the philosophical schools in antiquity was what is the highest good? Because they all agreed that you need to have some highest good at the pinnacle of your ethical system, otherwise you have no value ranking choice making mechanism. And the question is, what’s the highest good? And. One of the ways they disputed this was to say, well, what what do we observe in infants like in baby animals and baby humans? What do we see is the natural tendency that might point us towards the highest good? And the Epicureans said, well, the natural tendency of an animal, a baby animal or baby human is to avoid pain and seek pleasure. And the Stoics said, no, the natural tendency of a baby human is the baby human instantly has a sense of self and. You know, wants to preserve that sense of self, so a baby human is. Is already like kind of from birth, afraid of losing a finger or being injured because they have a sense of of self and of their own kind of constitution. Now, this was an unresolved argument, but the point is that they did do this kind of anthropological debate, but the Stoics believe that the that the baby human already has a sense of its own wholeness and is very, very afraid and concerned to preserve that the integrity of that wholeness and that as the baby grows and becomes a toddler and then a child and then a teenager and then at some point around 11 or 12 years old, rationality fully blooms. The the growing human kind of extends that sense of wholeness to the family and the community and then. The universe, the cosmic polis and there’s this kind of every. Every duty, so they already have a duty at birth of self-preservation. But as they. So that’s the first Cathagon or a fic, yeah, that as they expand their circle of conception of what is the whole that they belong to, they add more and more duties to their. Mental toolkit, let’s say. And. This and then the wise person realizes eventually with all this complicated philosophy that the only real way to happiness in life, to eudaimonia, to meaningfulness is to participate in the rational. Mechanism of the universe, because if you resist Zeus and this is not the mythological Zeus, this is the stoic, rational, spinoza, ask God, if you resist Deus, see the Natura, like the next. Yes, then you’re going to be miserable. So the only way because you’re fighting against the inevitable, you’re waging war against windmills, the only way to actually be happy is to sync up with the rational mechanisms of the cosmos. And these can be rationally discovered by philosophical, psychological, anthropological arguments. And if you do all those calculations carefully, then you will realize that you have to do that, you have to cooperate, that you are basically your mind is a piece of the mind of Zeus. This goes back to the Xenophon’s, yes, yes, Xenophon’s Socratic argument. So your consciousness is just a piece of a greater consciousness. And you have the ability to do part of the work that Zeus does. And in so doing, you are kind of you become like God. And you have divine happiness and to do anything other than that is going to make you miserable. Right. And just to add one final joke, my favorite objection from Plotinus, which I have on the front page of my book, is that later, like Platonus and others said, oh, this leaves no freedom for the if the human’s job is to just figure out what they must do in line with with the rationality of the cosmos, then we’re like a robot that just finds its one task. Right. Plotinus says the stoics reduce humans to rocks that are just rolling around according to the to the shape of the rock. Right. So they reduce humans to rolling stones. Well, I guess and first of all, the joke, first of all, that was excellent. Thank you for that. But the joke that puts that that that that’s sort of bringing the point up that the Plotinus and the Neoplatonus, they were like Eros and the desire for oneness, the desire for connectedness, which the Platonists think are as important as the desire for ataraxia, right, which is important to the stoics. That that sense of inner peace, that we don’t want inner peace at the expense of not fitting in to reality as the stoics are talking about. So that’s a quick point about the about ataraxia. So you’re right that the stoics cared about ataraxia, but they they use a different word because even though the stoics and Epicureans are often saying the exact same thing, they always have different terminology. And so the stoics don’t actually use that word. They use the word Eorun, which means good flow. Ah, well, that’s better than yes. Yes. So thank you for that correction. Yeah. So that goes to what I like. The that sense of oneness and connectedness. They’re not talking about this, but but it’s helpful. Like, as you know, I do work on the flow state and the flow state is a state of deep participation, oneness, connectedness, and you don’t feel like you are choosing. But you also your agency doesn’t feel like it has been diminished. You actually feel that you’re at your very best. But but it’s exactly the opposite of I’m choosing this, I’m choosing that. And right. And this is this is the thing that I think is that Plotinus is trying to get at. And this is what I was trying to get at. And and is it that far from the notion of flowing with nature? Because the so it’s talk a lot about joy, too, which doesn’t seem to be what the Rolling Stones would be doing. Oh, I love that pun. That’s very funny. But even in the case of joy, they don’t even in the case of joy, they don’t use see this kind of this is really annoying about the stoics and about content. They have to use their own terminology for everything. Right. Since the stoics want to argue, you know, famously, the stoics are in favor of apathy, not English apathy, but apathy, so the lack of pathos, the lack that they think that all all strong emotions, pathy are mistakes. Yes, yes. So the the stoic view of human psychology is that our mind is an uncompounded entity. There’s no like subconscious. There’s no id or super ego. It’s just it’s just your reason. That’s it. And your reason is built to be a rational calculator. Now, most humans are not. They don’t function well as rational calculators, but when humans are not rational, it’s not because they have an subconscious part of their brain that’s taking over or an irrational part of their brain, it’s because their uncompounded rational mechanism is glitching. And most humans are in a state of the rational computer glitching. And every time you glitch or every time you feel a strong emotion, that’s a glitch because you’re failing to realize that everything that’s happening is happening for a reason. And so now they don’t want to deny that you can have positive emotions, but they don’t want to also use the standard names for those emotions because they’re trying to argue that those are bad. So they write they come up with this new term like a pathy, like good path, you know, good, yes, they. And so they have like special words for like the special kind of joy that a sage feels, which is much less violent, a disturbance of the body than just joy. That’s well said. And I propose it to you. I forget. I think it was Becker who wrote the new stoicism. He proposed to think of it as the joy of agency because the thing you lose, the stoic notion, pathos is you’re no longer walking down the hill, you’re running down the hill and you’re losing your ability to direct yourself. So this sort of joy of agency, this sort of autopoetic joy of agency. And so. That’s exactly the joy that I experience when I’m doing Tai Chi Chuan and I’m in the flow state, that joy of agency where I’m flowing with the situation and I’m well fitted to it and my actions feel graceful and at one. And I’m not claiming the stoics are Taoist. That would be ridiculous. But I’m trying to get at the phenomenology again. I’m trying to bring something from outside and say, like, is. I remember that Stephen Batcher proposed in his book on Buddhism, the Exist, Alone with Others, that enlightenment was the flow state, but comprehensively, like the sage or the enlightened one is the person who knows how to enter into the flow state no matter where they are and to end. Is. Do you see what I’m trying to point at? I mean, I see a few things you could be pointing at. So, OK, ask questions then, because you made it you made an interjection noise. So I wanted to hear what you’re saying about that. Well, so I think it seems that. I think I remember you saying in one of your many interviews or lectures that. That some people can get into a state of flow where they’re just extremely productive, right, where you’re like, yeah, yeah, a musician just composes five songs in a row or an author writes half a book in one sitting. But you also seem to be referring to certain exercises that get you into a flow state. So I’m not sure which of those two are you talking about right now? I’m talking about I’m talking about the flow state and I’m talking about a virtuosity, right, that that that’s revealed in the flow state. But if you’ll allow me to pun a little, it’s the virtuosity in this flow state is the virtuosity for virtue, as opposed to the virtuosity for playing tennis or martial art or something like that. And that. There are, yes, there are exercises that can get you into making that more afforded, and those are practically useful. But I was actually pointing to the state itself. And I’m wondering again if this because you were describing something like that, right, and I’m trying to get at. So what’s the kind of state that the Sage is in, basically, is that? Yeah, and it looks like for like, I don’t think there’s a deep difference between internalizing the stage and being able to get into the virtue flow state, if you’ll allow me to coin a phrase. I think that’s exactly what you think about again. You think you did earlier about the perfect alignment of all your persona so that you know exactly what to do in this situation. That sounds like it in a lot of ways. Yeah, so. By the way, the virtue flow state would be a great name for a podcast. Yes, just laying that out there. Yeah, yeah. So we do have some descriptions about some very brief descriptions about the Sage in the epitome of stoic ethics that we have from the ancient world. So just to fill in some information for our listeners, while we don’t have any complete early texts of stoicism, we have three later epitome of classical stoicism. One of them is found in Diogenes Laertius in the Life of Zeno. It’s embedded like a quick summary of all the stoicism. There’s another in in the anthology of Stabias, who was like a sixth century AD Christian writer. And then there was one in one of Cicero’s works. So and in those epitomes, we have these very, very dense sequences of definitions, of claims and of doctrines. And one of the. Key things about the Sage is that. This brings up the topic of indifference, I guess I can go there. So the stoics believed to get back to the highest good, they believe that the highest good was virtue and that. Which can be thought of also as order, because they thought that virtues are the activities and mental states that lead and promote order. So. There were three main candidates of the highest good in antiquity. There was virtue slash order. There was pleasure and there was the avoidance of pain. And the stoics believed that. Only. Sorry. The stoics believe that only virtue slash order as the highest good can support an ethical system. If you if you don’t maintain that and you do one of the other candidates or anything else, you would destroy ethics completely. So the only viable thing at the top of your value system has to be virtue slash order. But. So in order. So then. So that’s the that’s the good. That’s the good for the for the. For the stoics. But what they do that differs from earlier thinkers is that they say we’re no longer going to call anything else good. So what most people think are goods like money and wealth and good looks and good reputation. Even good food, none of those, none of those things are good. We’re going to call those indifferent because they are indifferent in terms of good or bad. And but we will allow that they are preferred indifference. So it is even the sage or especially the sage will naturally prefer money to poverty and health to sickness and good reputation to bad reputation. But they don’t reach those things don’t qualify as good or bad. They’re almost neutral in terms of their value. OK. Or in terms of their relative value to good or bad. Sorry, this is kind of complicated. But now the paradox is that a lot of scholars think that when the when the stoic sage acts and makes choices, he or she does not think in terms of good or bad. He or she only thinks in terms of preferred indifference and dispreferred indifference. So so the stoic sage is like, according to this interpretation, is like this perfect computer that’s entered this flow state and is just making hundreds of decisions an hour, always choosing things, indifference of preferred value over dispreferred indifference or indifference of negative value. And that it’s just like, like just like constant filtering of the preferred over the dispreferred. And that is the kind of flow state of the sage, which is wisdom and and happiness and virtue all the same time. What do you think? Well, I think the sage doesn’t exist, according to the stoics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that. So I think there is no evidence that any stoic claimed that any human was a perfect sage. I think the sage was a intuition pump for them. But that being said, I think that if you follow their arguments to infer how a sage would act, that does follow that the sage is acting in that way, because. The. How do you decide what you should do? How do you deliberate? Right. Yes. Well, for us, mere mortals, non sages, we we often will think of the good and the bad. Is this virtuous? Is this courageous? Is this wise? Is this just? So all those things are part of the good. So we are thinking in terms of good and bad to decide what to do. OK. But sometimes that’s not enough to narrow down our options to one final duty or aficion or kathekon. OK. And so. You know, like if I’m going to if I’m trying to decide whether to have chicken or lamb for lunch, thinking of virtue is not going to help me, probably. OK, so then I go into the indifferent mode and I say, OK, what would be a preferred indifferent? So neither lamb nor chicken is like a good. OK. But one of them might be more conducive to health than the other. And health is not a good either, but it’s preferable to be healthier than than not healthy. So, you know, which of these two options would contribute to my health better and also, you know, if one is way more expensive than the other, which of them is going to contribute to my bank account being in a good state? You know, these are all so I’m going to take these into account that I’m going to make a choice. Now, that is not based on good or bad. It’s based only on indifference, but it’s sometimes what we have to do to figure out what to do when virtue is not helpful. And for the stoics, those decisions matter just as much as I mean, it doesn’t matter if you have to decide what to do based on indifference or based on virtue. It’s equally important to find the right thing to do because you being a perfect rational computer is how you help Zeus’s plan for the universe. It’s how you participate in the divine collect, it’s how you stay happy. OK, now the sage, the thing is that when we mortals use virtue as a deliberative guide. We do that because we have we don’t know what virtue is. So if we knew what virtue is, if we knew what the just thing to do is already and we knew what the brave thing to do, if we had all that knowledge, like as a sage does, we wouldn’t have to linger on that step of deliberation. We would just go right to the indifference calculation mode. OK, we only use that step because we don’t always know what virtue is. So we have to think, hey, but what would like what would Socrates do? OK, but what would, you know, what would if it’s a scientific question, what would Einstein do or we have to use these intuition aids? So it follows, I think, that the state that the sage, according to this stoic system, since the stage, since the sage already knows perfectly what virtue is. They don’t have that stage of deliberation, they just go towards the indifference calculation mode, and so their whole life is just like filtering preferred over disreferred indifference. That’s interesting. That’s very interesting. So and then and then, sorry, one last quick point. I think it’s also true that. The stoics believe that any duty that’s performed. Even if it’s arrived at through a consideration of virtue, can be also analyzed as a correct selection of indifference. So if you jump into the river to save a drowning baby because it’s the virtuous thing to do, that can still be seen and analyzed as a correct indifference selection because because you have chosen the preservation of life over death. And life is not a good and death is not a bad life is a preferred and different. And death is a disreferred and different. And you’ve made that correction. You’ve made that selection correctly. So even though you did an act out of virtue by thinking about virtue, it can also be analyzed. So every correct action, every virtuous action can be analyzed as the correct selection of indifference. And so when the stoic stage. Spends his or her life correctly selecting indifference. Those are all actually virtuous actions. It’s just that the rational method of. Make of choice making doesn’t have to involve. Thinking about virtue because the sage already knows everything there is to know about virtue. So that’s that sounds like something like an ontological flow state. A virtue flow. What’s the degree to which human beings can experience this? Is it just a regulative ideal to bring in Kant again or is it is it something that we can approximate to at least for periods in our life? I’m not sure. I mean, I think that again, I don’t think the Stokes. Father were. Sages, I mean, they thought certain people approach sagehood like Socrates was almost sage, I guess, yes. And. You know, there’s this famous line from Seneca that Socrates came. Socrates was just portrayed almost like a Jesus figure. He was. Sent to us to deliver us from the fear of death. You know. So I’m not really sure how. How close the Stokes thought people could get to this state. I think they thought that different people had different aptitude. I think they thought some people could. Become almost extreme Stokes and live a life where they are abused and beaten and tortured and they still shine like the purple embroidery of a robe and thus set an example to the rest of humanity and they can be happy. Others just kind of get by. Yeah, I don’t know how to answer the question. It’s really tough. OK, well, fair enough. I mean, I just because that’s some of the I mean, all of these all these traditions have the sort of almost semi divine figure. I remember one person saying that with the figure of the sage, the ancient world had found its proper God. And, you know, and of course, you have Lao Tse and Taoism, you have Siddhartha, the Buddha in Buddhism. You asked most Buddhists today, is anybody actually enlightened? Oh, very few. And that sort of that sort of thing. So I’m not going to pressure on that point. The reason I brought that up is I wanted to lead it into another point, which is. Given the particular. And you use the word, so I’ll use it again, too, the religious framework that ultimately grounds and makes this possible, is Stoicism possible for us today? I think it is for a lot of people. I don’t think religion is going away anytime soon. No, no. And, yeah, I mean, this is actually just one point. It’s not just religion. Yeah, there’s also a particular view of the universe that is right bound up with that religion and is that viable for us today. That is right bound up with that religion and is that viable for us? I’m glad you brought this point up because it’s something I want to talk to you about. And if we run out of time, we’ll have to do it in the next conversation. But because I know you’ve had some fascinating debates with Jordan Peterson and also with Lex Friedman about the role that God or a belief that might play in your morality and an ethical system. So, yeah, you know, there’s a lot of interesting background there. I want to bring up just the F’s novel, the Brothers Karamazov here. Right. OK, excellent. Excellent. And I think I think the three brothers represent three moral systems. In fact, I think they represent the three candidates of the highest good that Cicero identified. So Alyosha represents the highest good being virtue slash order. And Demetri represents the highest good being pleasure. And Ivan represents the highest good being the avoidance of pain. Hence why he’s so concerned about the suffering of the unjust suffering of so many people around the world. Right. And I think most modern academic. Ethics, you know, the ethics you find among modern Western luminaries and academics and professors is that of Ivan, it’s a rational secular ethics that sees the elimination of suffering in the world as the highest good or the near highest good. And I think that what Dostoevsky wants to show in that novel is that that’s not a psychologically sustainable position, that if you have that position, you’ll go mad eventually. And only Alyosha who has the spiritual, who has God as a part of his morality, can avoid going mad. So excellent. I think maybe the Stokes might say that human psychology cannot function in the long term sustainably without God being a linchpin in their system. Wow, that’s such a first of all, that’s a really astute interpretation of the Brothers Karamazov. That was fantastic. I hadn’t thought about it that way. And then the argument there and that the argument ultimately has to be presented dramatically and dialogically and not just propositionally, I think that’s also part of Dostoevsky’s point. And that’s I’m in deep agreement with that as well. Jack, this I mean, this has been such a rich conversation. And I want to thank you. Like you allowed me to probe and to and to explore. And you came back every time with thoughtful and often profound answers, which again, just recommends this book to everybody. This book is, I think, excellent and profound. And I just wanted to thank you for this, Jack. It’s been wonderful. Well, thank you so much, John. I mean, it’s I’m honored that you read the book. It’s been a great pleasure talking to you. You also made me you challenged me and ways that will help me in my future thinking about this. And if I can just say a few points, that book is prohibitively expensive, which is a feature of a lot of academic books. It’s not my choice. I don’t get a single penny from it. And if anybody is at a university or has access to a university library, you can get it for free in digital format through your subscription. And I also want to tell our listeners that you’ve been on my show and hopefully you’ll come back on my show. So if you want to hear us maybe pick up some of these threads in the future, check out those episodes also. I’m definitely coming back, Jack. So that’s that’s that’s a done deal. Thank you. Thank you.