Ep. 4 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Socrates and the Quest for Wisdom

[Music] you [Music] welcome again to awakening from the meaning crisis this is episode four so last time we discussed the axial revolution and in particular how it moved into ancient Israel we talked about the advent of the psycho technology of time as cosmic history as a narrative and which there is an open future and in which your actions the moral quality of your actions can determine that future in which you participate along with God in the creation of that future this brings with it the idea of progress moral progress the increase in justice and this is how we move from the less real world to the more real world for the ancient Israelites it's understood as a journey through time and space historically we talked about the kind of God that the God of the Bible is how he is in fact the god of this open future and particularly he intervenes moments as of moments of Kairos turning points where he tries to bring people back on course we talked about the sense of faith as the sense of being on course to being able to sense how history is flowing and unfolding how you are participating in that story how you are shaping it and being shaped by it in a tightly reciprocal manner and that sin is the deviation from that and what is needed is to wake us back up to bring us back on course and we talked about how the prophets represented that and they represent increasingly that vision that axial vision of the moral redemption of history we then turned to look at how the axial revolution was coming into ancient Greece and in particular two figures we looked at we're looking at the figures of Pythagoras and Socrates last time we talked about Pythagoras and how he represents an exaptation of that shamanic behavior of altering the state of consciousness entering into something like a soul flight but how for Pythagoras that had been allied with the psycho technology that was being emphasized in Greece rational argumentation the discovery of rational patterns in the world and Pythagoras of course is famous for discovering that music can be expressed mathematically he is at least associated his school with things like the Pythagorean theorem this idea that we can enhance our capacity to pick up on the real patterns in the world even if those are not readily apparent to us and by coming into a direct awareness of those patterns through our rational insight and faculties we can transform ourselves and Pythagoras changes the shamanic soul flight into a release a freedom from imprisonment in this world which he represented as being imprisoned in the body and we fly free and so soul flight has been turned into a radical kind of self transcendence in which we are liberating ourselves from the illusory world as we more and more conform to the rational patterns that dictate the structure of reality the other person who is going to figure and in fact is figures even more largely in the axial revolution in ancient Greece is the figure of Socrates Socrates and Pythagoras are going to be the two most important influences on Plato and if you were to put Western civilization on to two feet the one foot is the Bible the other foot is the works of Plato so Socrates is a very unusual figure there are as many interpretation of Socrates's as there are of people like the Jesus even in his time there were many differents Socratic movements groups of people who claim to be adherents and disciples of Socrates he is an enigmatic interesting provocative and maddeningly frustrating figure to try and get clear on so I want it understood that when I'm talking about Socrates I'm talking in about a particular interpretation that I share with other people I think it can be well argued for as I said whether or not this was the full historical Socrates it's very hard to know and in some sense this isn't that relevant because it's the Socrates I'm going to talk about that has become part of the cognitive and existential grammar of the West so getting into the figure of Socrates is kind of interesting a good way to start is to see how how provocative a person he was is to do his biography so as many of you probably know ancient Greece was a world in which people believed they could speak to the God through Oracle's the Oracles were human or or otherwise natural phenomena that represented how the gods were speaking to humanity one of the most important Oracle's is at Delphi and I've been to Delphi if you get a chance at some point in your life go to Delphi it will really put this app on your brain because the way the landscape is organized really does have a transformative impact on sort of your consciousness and your sense of self and your sense of place in the world so the situation that the Wright the site of Delphi is itself very transformative what would happen is a woman Pythia would sit in a cave or something similar to it again became always the caves like the association with shamanism remember that shamanism was associated with cave art ritual practices taking place in caves like in Pythagoras so she's in a cave she's sitting on a tripod there might be some intoxicating gases in there she's eating perhaps eucalyptus leaves she's probably going into some kind of psychedelic trance state that seems plausible and then what happens is people would because that's that's that is a cross-cultural thing we find that people are thought to have access to the gods by being able to enter into altered states of consciousness so what would happen is people would come in they would bring their questions they would pose questions to Pythia she would then speak on behalf of the gods and then after speaking on behalf of the gods the people around her would there would be males who would interpret what she had to say so the thing about being an Oracle is if you want to stay in business you don't want to give clear answers right so if I come to an Oracle and I ask a specific question I'd I don't want to give a specific answer I think there's a very good reason for that I don't think that people actually can foresee the future in any kind of supernatural manner so typically if you go to an Oracle and say should I marry Cassandra you'll get an answer or something like sometimes the spring comes early or should I invest in this project you'll get an answer like you know sometimes the squirrels do not gather too many nuts you don't know what to make of this and it might provoke an insight in you it might provoke a reflection in you and whether or not the events go one way or the other you can often retrospectively reinterpret them as having been consonant with the Delphic Oracle so the Oracle seems to be providing a foresight 'fl information but usually of course it's not so what happens is a bunch of Socrates's friends he's already famous when we sort of meet him in his biography a bunch of Socrates's friends decided to go to the Oracle and ask the Oracle a question about Socrates so they make the trick to Delphi and I in my mind I sort of picture this almost like half jokingly there they want to see what kind of crazy answer they're going to get from the Oracle about Socrates so they go all the way up to the Oracle and then they pose their question and the question they pose is there any one wiser than socrates and what they're looking for or perhaps not what they're looking for what they're expecting is some very [ __ ] dick obscure answer like you know the snow melts farther in the south or some bizarre answer and instead they get this answer no there's no human being wiser than socrates crystal-clear answer and so you can imagine how shocked they are so they travel back of course to relate this story to Socrates and here's here's something telling first of all that's just telling it enough itself that the Delphic Oracle would give such a clear answer now it's it's it's it's a qualified answer there's no human being wiser than socrates right but when they go back to Socrates Socrates is response is also profound interesting so if we're honest if we're honest and we found out from some sacred authority that we are very wise most of us would be very self congratulatory is like yeah I knew it and how do I know that because one of the most persistent biases have is that people believe they're above average intelligence and of course most people must be wrong about that because most people have well average intelligence but if you ask anybody is your intelligence average they will tell you know I have above-average intelligence more so of course even for ideas such as wisdom but Socrates isn't self-congratulatory he doesn't say yep I knew it all along there's the confirmation I so want now that's really telling enough itself because to quote a friend of mine Leo Ferrara we are entering the age of confirmation porn in which people are continuously seeking confirmation from their beliefs and and part of what's going on - the meaning crisis and the ever expansion of [ __ ] in our society is precisely because we have technologically enhanced through social media our capacity for gratifying our bias for conformation we'll talk about this later but we all carry a terrific bias called the confirmation bias in which we seek information that confirms our beliefs and we tend to avoid information that challenges it and part of what is going wrong right now in our culture is that through a lot of factors that are endemic to the meaning crisis we are accelerating and exacerbating our propensity for falling into the confirmation bias and I think that's what my friend Leo means by confirmation porn we have a kind of pornography if we take pornography to mean the gratuitous an unwarlike justified sanction satisfaction of a desire then we are living in an age of confirmation porn Socrates is a corrective to that here is a great temptation he has presented the word of the God that he is wise wiser than anyone else and rather than accepting it and giving in to that confirmation bias his immediate response is to challenge it now the challenge is tricky for Socrates Socrates is no atheist although he's going to be charged with atheism when he's put on trial but he does believe in the gods he's going to do something very important about the gods he's going to transform the Greek gods into moral exemplars but and what that means for Socrates is the gods can't lie the gods can't lied for Socrates and this is one of the ways he's going to transform the understanding of the gods and Plato along with him the Greek gods as they are represented in standard Greek myths aren't very accurate portrayal because those gods lie and they write they cheat and they betray Zeus cheats Zeus cheats on his his wife etc but for Socrates and this is part of the actual revolution the gods represent moral exemplars they represent ways in which we can self transcend and morally improve so for Socrates it's therefore axiomatic that the gods can't lie to him so the gods are telling the truth this wedding and this is something we're gonna come back to the way the Greeks Wed Definity divinity I should say to reality the truth and sacredness are bound up together is going to be really pivotal think about how much we separate those two in our culture but for Socrates they are interpenetrating so the gods can't lie they have to be disclosers of the truth but on this on the other hand Socrates has significant and profound self-knowledge one of the things I have tattooed on my back is know thyself it was inscribed at the Delphic Oracle but Socrates makes it his personal slogan for life there's been some recent things written about this and I think they've largely reflect reflected a misunderstanding of what know thyself mean know thyself doesn't mean become aware of your biography I mean we all are prey to that and we have a culture that exacerbates that narcissism we like to stroke the ego of our personal autobiography and store up treasure domin that we can point to other people that indicate our uniqueness and our specialness and why the universe should specially take care of and pay attention to us that's not what know thyself means it doesn't mean that kind of stroking of your autobiographical ego know thyself is much more a kind of direct participatory knowing it means understanding how you operate it's not it's if I were to use a literary analogy it's not like your autobiography it's more like your owner's manual it's how do you operate what are the principles what are the powers perils what are the constraints that are operating within you Socrates as we'll see thought that that kind of self-knowledge was central and the this is the core of the axial revolution the axial revolution is this critical awareness and sense of responsibility of zone cognition so on one hand the gods can't lie when they say Socrates as the wisest human being but on the other hand Socrates has deep self knowledge he has Socratic self-knowledge in which he is convinced that he is not wise and he is not willing to give up on either one of those and that's a telling thing about him that tells you something very central about him he holds these two together his existential self-knowledge and this disclosure from reality are going neither one of them is going to be given a greater Authority they're going to be held together so now Socrates faces a personal dilemma a dilemma that goes to the core of who and what he is how can it be that he is the wisest human being when he knows that he is not wise so this is a very deep dilemma that he set for himself it's a kind of profound problem that he seeks to solve and what that means is that Socrates starts on a quest he starts on a quest of trying to determine how both of those things could be the case at the same time now the quest seems to have evolved very naturally into a way in which he interacted with those around him what Socrates would do is he would go to people who claimed or would credited with being wise and he would ask them question he invented in fact what has become known as the Socratic method also known as of Linkous the Socratic method is a way of asking questions in order to try and draw somebody out we'll talk a little bit more about in Linkous in a minute but first I want to talk about the two types of people that we have good reason to believe Socrates was interacting and what that can tell us about the Socratic notion of wisdom and we're going to see how the Socratic notion of wisdom knowledge and this idea of self-knowledge is deeply bound up with how meaningful your life is so the two groups that Socrates the two groups of people that were accredited as being wise were the philosophers and the sophist if you remember last time we talked about pythagoras pythagoras actually invents the word philosophy it comes from two greek words by lia sophia this means right the the friendship love of wisdom so and Pythagoras creates a community around him you create a community distributed cognition in which you interact with other people in order to try and pursue wisdom a philosopher is someone who in concert with others is a lover of wisdom so Socrates is interacting with the philosophers and in particular one group of philosophers that come before him in fact Socrates is regarded as creating a revolution in philosophy precisely from how he differed from the natural philosophers and he is also doing the Socratic method with the sophist and you can see that this also comes from Sophia wisdom it's where we get our word sophisticated from the Sophists are also people who claim to be wise now the natural philosophers are very interesting the natural philosophers seem to represent a fundamental change in human cognition so I'm going to take as an example one of the natural philosophers who is considered to be the first example of it bailey's now because these guys are just as we're coming out of the dark age and they predate Socrates sometimes by a hundred a couple hundred years right or their boats a lot of what we have from them is very fragmentary we don't have very much in fact you can put most of Bailey's philosophy into three lines into three sentences I once taught this to a course of mine and one of my students went out and made a t-shirt in which they put all of the Lee's philosophy on one t-shirt because we that's how fragmentary it is let's talk about these three fragments because they reveal something very important one is all is the moist the next is the lodestone as sue K and this is important because this word sue K which we now pronounce psyche is going to be the basis of the idea of psychology as a discipline and finally everything is filled with God's which sounds very pre-action monic now what you have to pay attention to here is not what the LEAs is saying but what that what he says reveals about the kind of thinking he is creating what does he mean by this all is the moist of course there's controversy about all of this because it's fragmentary it's old but given how other people in the ancient world like Aristotle followed up on this a plausible interpretation is everything is made out of water everything is made out of water now that's false everything isn't made out of water it's not just scientifically fault its kind of metaphysically false everything can't be made out of water or we wouldn't be able to identify water on its own but put that aside think about this what surrounds ancient Greece water be digging into the ground what will you hit water what falls from the sky water what does everything need in order to live water what can take the shape of any container you put it in water see what I'm trying to get you to see is although Bailey's idea is false it's highly rational it's highly plausible what he's doing is using his reason and his observation to come up with a plausible explanation of what the underlying substance is behind everything by the way pay attention to this word this means stands under another metaphor it's related to lots of other words where we use standing to talk about understanding for example okay so notice what he's doing here he's not doing mythology he's not generating a narrative about some divine agent he's not saying this has happened because Zeus cheated on Hera and then Hera sought there's there is no story here there's no mythological narrative there's no right divine agents involved that's not how he's trying to explain or understand instead he's doing a rational analysis based on and he's trying to get at the underlying stuff that everything is made of do you see what I'm showing you what fail EES is inventing is there any other word for this he's inventing how to think scientifically how how this happens is obscure but that's what's happening he's inventing the kind of thinking that we now and I'm gonna say it again take it for granted as if it's natural but he's inventing it what does this mean the lodestone has su K so a lodestone is a natural form of magnet what's interesting about magnets is that they can move themselves and they can move other things around them the original meaning of this is of course breath or wind but what it ultimately refers to and came to refer to is write anything that's a living in the sense that it's self moving that it can move itself and that can therefore cause other things to move so I can move myself and therefore I can make other things move the magnet can move itself and it can make other things move I'm aware of sookay within me I see the magnet doing something similar and therefore I conclude the magnet and I both share Sookie he's wrong but that doesn't matter this is a plausible rational argument here he's trying to get at what we would now call the underlying force behind things now please remember that by the way that Sookie originally means your capacity for being able to move yourself and make other things move you may ask why does that become the word for mind psychology Minds ookay because the mind is that part of you which you can most move it is the most self moving part of you and it's where all of your capacity to move other things starts if I'm going to move this marker my mind first moves itself and that drives me to move the marker but that way of even thinking about me so that I can start a science of the psyche starts with Daly's and what what's this everything is filled with this seems so scientific John and then you're throwing this at me the gods isn't that a throwback to mythology I don't think so I don't think so see look what he's doing here now in turn I need to introduce a term I promise to try and keep the technicalities to a minimum what we need a term here right so ontology is the study of being the structure of reality ontological analysis it's when you use rap reasoning to try and get at the underlying structure of reality by getting at the underlying stuff and the underlying forces that are at work in it so theories is introducing the ontological analysis that drives the Scientific Revolution what are scientists doing they're trying to get at the underlying stuff they're still trying to do it right now they're trying to get at the underlying forces they're trying to see into the depths of reality they're engaging in ontological depth perception this doesn't mean right physical like this doesn't mean our normal perception into spatial depth what I'm seeing what I mean here is seeing with the mind into the depths of reality ontological depth recep perception now once you get that he's discovering this way he's discovering he's inventing this way of looking at the world it's gonna bleed into right here right now think about how powerful that way must be think of the power in that vision he gets an access to the depths of reality and what is he saying that provokes ah that provokes wonder that gives him a sense of connecting to what is most real it helps him to make the most sense of things and that's what it is to experience something as sacred so this is powerful stuff now Socrates was seems to have been influenced by particular one of these natural philosophers called an exaggerated who was in Athens just before Socrates annings a gross declared that the Sun wasn't to God for example that it was a hot rock and he got into a lot of trouble for things like this Socrates seems to have enjoyed more than enjoyed he seems to have been impressed by the natural philosophers commitment to getting at the truth but ultimately Socrates he rejects this not because he rejects reason rational analysis he's going to engage in that himself multiple times or argumentation his whole Socratic method as we'll see is all about argumentation what does he reject about the natural philosophers they don't help him with his axial project see the problem with the natural philosophers is they give you truth without transformation they give you facts they give you knowledge but they do not indicate how you become wise they do not indicate how you overcome self-deception they do not indicate as Socrates would say how to become a good person now it's interesting how much people say that even now even today sometimes in clear ways that are helpful sometimes in confused and mixed-up ways which are unhelpful but the idea that our scientific worldview while giving us all kinds of knowledge does not in any way train us for wisdom does not tell us how to become wise does not tell us how to transcend ourselves and become better people this is a common complaint and we'll come back to it about the scientific worldview Socrates sees it even then so here you have truth but no relevance the truths that are discovered are not existentially relevant they don't matter they don't enable the cultivation of wisdom the transformation and transcendence of the self now Sardi's interacting with the sophist which is famous is a lot more antagonistic this this when he talks about his relation here it's much more the language or the tone at least that's how I read it of disappointment he was expecting more and he found less here and it's not clear how much is the Socrates and how much this is Plato who's writing about Socrates but here the relationship is much more antagonist ik now who are the sophist well if you remember we talked about when the axial revolution is coming to Greece you get in the emergence of democracy and in Athens the democracy is direct democracy now before we get too far into this we don't want to over glamorize this yes Athens is the beginning of democracy but let's remember if I was a woman the last place I would want to do well in the ancient world as ancient Athens ancient Athens treats its women horribly just horribly Sparta treats its women better than Athens democracy is only for Athenian adult males women foreigners anybody else even if they're Greek they're not right considered to be worthy of participation in the democratic process and it's a direct democracy right everybody files into the assembly and votes on everything now what that means is as I've already mentioned your capacity for debate and argumentation is a root to power this is why it develops so powerfully in ancient Athens the better you are at arguing the better you are at persuading other people the more powerful and influential you will be what happens is a group of people invent a new psycho technology they invent rhetoric they invent ways of picking up on how language and cognition interact they find standardized skills that can be practiced and developed so that you can influence people increase the chance that your language will change their mind now the Sophists were only concerned with teaching the skills they basically separated the technology from any kind of moral commitment so for example a particular sophist might go in the morning to this aristocrat and help him argue for why Athens should increase the number of ships in its Navy and in the afternoon go to this aristocrat and help him craft an argument as to why often should decrease the number of ships in the Navy the sophist didn't care which was the case what mattered was empowering the individual to win the argument now how does this work and how can we relate it to our to our lives now so basically a good way to think about this is the sophist pick up on the fact that when we are communicating we're going to talk about this a lot later as we go on we are being driven by what we find salient and relevant not just what we find true or believed to be the case remember with the nine dart problem what stands out to us what's relevant shapes how we see things and how we understand them so let me give you a modern analog for what how rhetoric works a place where rhetoric is readily apparent advertising okay see the point about advertisement is to make use of the way your brain will associate things the way your brain finds certain things salient make things seem highly relevant to you in order to manipulate your behavior now what's telling about this and this is the point about the sophist is how much that can happen right in a way that is disconnected from whether or not it's true I mean you watch the beer commercial and here it is here's really attractive people and they all get together and they're all having a great time and it's this beer and here's the beautiful attractive people go into an actual bar that's not like that okay and you know you're not going to see the kind of broken-down lives drunk people now here's the thing you know that that's not true you know that you like if you like if you went into a bar and you actually saw something like that happening if when you wash your hair with shampoo you were suddenly in the shampoo commercial you'd worry about your sanity you know it's not true it doesn't matter it makes certain stimuli salient to you and so you buy the beer you buy the shampoo this is what I mean when I say your beliefs aren't the only thing driving you so this brings us to a notion I promise to come back to and I want to use it technically I'm not trying to be vulgar but this is important this is the notion of [ __ ] and the classic work is by Harry Frankfort on this his essay on [ __ ] it's 20 years old now his Frankfort is very interested in talking about the difference between somebody being a [ __ ] artist and somebody being a liar because they aren't the same they can overlap a person can be both a liar and a [ __ ] artist but let's talk about pure cases how does the liar work the liar depends on your commitment to the truth the lawyer tells you something I'll use P to represent some proposition the liar says P to you even though not P is the case because if he can get convinced you that P is the case you will change your behavior because your behavior is to some degree significant degree influenced by your commitment to the truth if you believe P is true that will change your behavior that's how lying works lying depends on the fact that in general people are committed to the truth because in general people want to be in touch with reality that's not how [ __ ] works see [ __ ] unlike lying works by making you disk disinterested unconcerned with whether or not what with what is being said is true when somebody's bullshitting you they're trying to get you to not find important or right central how true the claim is instead they're working in terms of the rhetoric they're trying to capture you in terms of how catchy it is like the advertiser how salient it is how much it grabs your attention so there was a famous example from this from the Simpsons and you know Simpsons has been aunt for a thousand years now and I think it's still on so this is from a long time ago and at the time it seemed so almost absurdly ridiculous funny but it turned out to be extremely extremely prescient because the example is a political example there are two aliens running for political office and they're giving a speech to Americans right and I mean no insult to Americans but I mean I think we're aware of how what I'm going to say is relevant to American politics right now and the speech goes something like this one of the aliens named Kang says my fellow Americans when I was young I dreamt of being a baseball but now we must move forward not backwards upwards twirling twirling towards freedom and everybody Cheers no it's meaningless it doesn't mean anything but he invokes youth baseball moving forward moving upward twirling and freedom and so if you're an American you get this rush you get this rush that rush is these are all salient things they're highly relevant to you you associate and identify with them and so you're swept up you're caught up in it now why does [ __ ] matter well part as I said at the beginning part of the way people articulate the meaning crisis is there's so much [ __ ] and it seems to be increasing we are separating relevance and salience from truth but there's a deeper reason and I think this is part of why it matters to Socrates look you can't although we use this metaphor for self-deception it's actually not a good metaphor you can't lie to yourself it makes no sense cognitive psychologists have been pointing that in philosophers and pointing this out you can't no not Pete and then say to yourself but P but P the trouble is you know that this is not the case and so simply stating this to yourself doesn't do anything you can't lie to yourself because you're in possession of the truth did I just prove to you that self-deception is impossible no not at all see you can't lie to yourself but here's what I would argue you can [ __ ] yourself why because lying has to do with believing I'm gonna come back to this again and again look believing isn't something you directly do here I'll show you pick a belief you would like to have I would like to have the belief that everybody loves me I don't believe that but I would like to truly have that belief so what should I do I should just believe believe you see televangelists doing this telling people believe but you can't you can hope that everybody loves you you can wish that everybody loves you but if I say believe it you can't do it that somehow belief works it's not a voluntary action you can't lie to yourself see self-deception works in a different way you know what you can do you can [ __ ] yourself how can you [ __ ] yourself because what you can do is direct your attention if I say pay attention to this finger you can and you can also choose to pay attention to something now attention and we'll talk about this later and it's how central it is there's two sides to attention you can direct your attention for example if I say your left big toe you're paying attention to it and suddenly it's salient to you when you pay attention to something it makes it more salient it stands out for you but you know what else attention can also be direct not only be directed by you to make things more salient your attention can be caught a sudden noise and you turn and you attend to it it was salient and it captures your attention so not only can you direct your attention your attention can be captured by what you find salient and notice what this means you can do you can direct your attention to something and make it more salient and because it's more salient it will tend to capture your attention and because you're paying attention to it you make it more salient which means it will more likely capture your attention do you see what's happening here these two things feed on each other I pay more attention to it it becomes more salient it becomes more salient it gathers my attention I pay more attention to it I'm more likely to be attracted to it and it spins on itself in a self-organizing manner until your attention is attached to something it's super salient to you it's highly relevant to you and you lose the capacity to notice other things that's how you [ __ ] yourself the salience and the catchiness of the stimulus has overtaken any concern you have for whether or not it's true or represents reality this is how you deceive yourself so do you see that's why Socrates is going to be so antagonistic towards the sophist they are the opposite the opposite of the axial revolution they are the opposite of that rational self-knowledge the attempt to overcome self-deception the sophist are promoting [ __ ] and when you promote [ __ ] you not only promote the deception of others you make yourself more vulnerable to self-deception you fall more and more prey to self-deception so the natural philosophers are truth without relevance the sophist and the propensity for the promotion of [ __ ] represent relevance disconnected from truth so notice here they have the power to transform people but they've disconnected it from the pursuit of the truth these people can give us knowledge of the facts but do not facilitate self transformation what Socrates wanted is he wanted both he wanted individuals who knew how to pay attention in such a way that what they found salient helped them determine the truth and that the truth that they found help them to train their attention to find salience Socrates wanted something like that so what do you would do is he would go about questioning people maddening frustration so Socrates would come up to somebody and say well what are you doing here and oh I'm in the marketplace well why are you in the marketplace well I'm purchasing something well why are you purchasing something well I want to get these goods why do you want these goods because they'll make me happy and nad then Socrates starts to oh so you must know what happiness is well happiness is pleasure Socrates I guess and these things give me pleasure but is it possible Socrates with us to have pleasure and still find yourself in a horrible situation that you really dislike well of course Socrates that's possible oh so then happiness isn't pleasure you're being coy with me tell me tell me Socrates would say what is happiness oh it's you know it's getting what's most important to you well that means that you have to have knowledge is it any kind of knowledge well no it's the knowledge of what it what's important what's truly important or what you only think is important I guess what's truly important Socrates okay so what's that knowledge of what's truly important called I guess that would be wisdom Socrates oh so in order to be happiness to find happiness you must have first cultivated wisdom tell me how you cultivate wisdom and what wisdom is and the person goes our they collapse they get to this point where they can't answer they fall into a state called aporia people compared it to being stung by a stingray or falling under a magician spell you don't know what's going on now here's what now you one went one thing you might say well Socrates is just a skeptic he's trying to show people that they don't know anything because he wants to show that the gods are right that nobody has any wisdom etc that's too simple I think something more sophisticated is going on with Socrates Socrates right Socrates is trying to get you to realize he's like he's like in coronating the axial revolution he's trying to get you to realize how much how much each one of us myself included how much were bullshitting ourselves all the time why because we pursue things we find things salient to us their happiness Fame its salient to us and we're pursuing it we're putting our efforts into it way before we understand it way before we grasp the truths of it we are always making ourselves susceptible to [ __ ] because we are being driven by powerful motivations that are salient to us that are greatly in excess of our understanding of their truth or reality we're always all of us bullshitting ourselves and the point and what that does is that provokes a reaction in people it goes one of two ways people either go ah and they don't want to be showing that about themselves and they become angry at Socrates or some people have an insight they realize oh oh I need to transform myself I need to find a way to keep relevance and truth tracking each other enabling each other and when Socrates realized that he was having this effect on people he had his answer to his dilemma he knew how it was that the gods were not lying and he was the wisest of human beings his answer was the following he knew what he did not know and we all say I know what I don't know I made note of a lot of it no no no he knew in a way that allows you to directly painfully confront your capacity for [ __ ] in yourself to really realize what you do not know is to realize I am pursuing her and I don't know what's going on I'm pursuing that and I don't know what's going on that's what he's talking about now many people think that Socrates dis concluded that that's it he didn't know anything no that's not what Socrates is talking about Socrates does claim to know things you can imagine how Socrates pisses people off so he is put on trial in ancient Athens there isn't a state that arrests you one one citizen accuses another you brought on trial you're put in front of fifty five hundred men it's always men remember very very very chauvinistic society and then the accuser presents their case the defendant presents their case and then they the jury votes on it so Socrates was accused by people that he pissed off of atheism which doesn't mean not believing in God's it just means teaching strange gods because as I mentioned he was concerned to make the gods moral exemplars now when Socrates is on trial it becomes clear that they will let him go if he sort of agrees to stop doing this philosophy stuff that he's doing stops pissing people off and then he utters something that's very famous and this is a statement of him deeply knowing something he says the unexamined life is not worth living a life in which there is no effort made to put these two together is a life that is not worth living because it is a life to use our terms that is awash in [ __ ] that is beset by self-deception and self-destructive behavior so Socrates knows what makes a life meaningful there's a kind of wisdom wisdom is to keep your truth Machinery and your relevance machinery tightly coupled together so that you don't [ __ ] yourselves see Socrates famously claimed to know taw erotica we're gonna have to talk about this later because it comes from erotic and for most of us all you hear when you hear erotic is sexual that's not what eros means right it's more much more broader term in ancient Greece what Socrates means is he knows how to love well and that doesn't mean romantic love but it means as Socrates knows what to care about he knows how to keep what he cares about with what's real he would do things like walk into the marketplace and say look at all the things I don't need he'd say how much time did you spend on fixing your hair this morning Oh about 20 minutes how much on fixing yourself Socrates knew what to find significant what to find important he knew how to properly care he also compared himself to a midwife he knew how to take that caring and that sense of what makes life meaningful the cultivation of wisdom and help people draw out give birth to their better self that's why he compared himself to a midwife this is what he knew socrates knew how reason and love go together you might find it sort of entertaining to know that Frankfurt who I mentioned a few minutes ago wrote a book called reasons for love what he also puts together reason and love things that we have been taught to keep as antithetical to each other for Socrates separating them which our culture regularly and reliably does is one of our greatest follies they need to be interdependent and intertwined with each other we need to rationally know what we should most care about so Socrates just put on trial he's found guilty he just narrowly loses so then after losing and it looks like part of the reasons were political and part of them he's pissed off the powerful and all kinds of things he associated with people that turned out to be corrupt but he loses by very narrow margin and then what happens is each side proposes a penalty the accuser has proposed death that Socrates should be killed and then this tells you something about Socrates Socrates says the following practicing philosophy has cost me I have to constantly work at it it's very demanding I'm not right wealthy I am dependent on other people people attack me it's been very risky the worst penalty could be for me to continue doing philosophy and in order to make that even worse the government should give me free housing and free food for the rest of my life so as you can imagine this pisses everybody off and Socrates is found in a much greater vote he's condemned to death now notice Socrates is so convinced that he has the right kind of know thyself not autobiographical but this that I've been talking about he knows how he works and how to train it to transform it so that he cares well and reduces his capacity for self-deception that he's willing to die for it he finds that meaning so important that he's willing to die for it now he's a very interesting figure for that reason but there's also other important things we should know about Socrates this the shamanic is still in Socrates because he could do the following he could stand in one place for 24 or even 48 hours meditating on his own thoughts he was terrifically capable of controlling his body's physiological reactions he could drink a lot without getting drunk he could into battle in winter without any right shoes on his feet he was famously brave so he and he had this divine voice whenever he was about to do something wrong he'd hear this voice that would tell him don't do it Socrates so once again you still find right the shamanic has been carried into the socratic in really important ways we're going to talk about later how those two are interwoven together now Socrates has many followers but there's one person who was present at the trial but wasn't present at his death when he drinks the hemlock and you know what I got to sit in the spot in Athens that corresponds to where Socrates was probably imprisoned at least that's what they said that person who was present at the trial then even offers to pay for Socrates his release but is ill and not present at his death his Plato and Plato as I foreshadowed is going to take Pythagoras and Socrates and put them together and advance even more significantly the axial revolution in ancient Greece thank you very much for your time [Music] you

Channel: John Vervaeke

Views: 208,015

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, religion, meaning, meaning of life, evolution, personality, artificial intelligence, psychedelics, lecture, existentialism, continental, analytic, university of toronto, U of T, jesus, jesus christ, carl jung, jung, freud, nietzsche, nihilism, shamanism, mental health, depression, suicide, socrates, buddhism, buddha, siddhartha, martin luther, aristotle, plato, sophist, philosopher, stoic, stoicism, therapy, anxiety, mystical, vervaeke, john vervaeke, mythology, myth

Id: Lhl51bZQlM8

Length: 57min 56sec (3476 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 08 2019