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[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis last time we finished our look at the axial revolution in India we took a look at what was going on in the buddha's state of enlightenment we took
Vervaeke traces how Alexander's conquests dissolved the Greek polis, producing 'domicide' and an age of anxiety that shaped Epicurean, Stoic, and Cynic responses.
Key Takeaways
- Alexander's conquests fragmented the Greek polis, producing widespread domicide and a loss of belonging.
- The Hellenistic age of anxiety arose from political disruption, loss of community, and feelings of insignificance.
- Epicureans, Stoics, and Cynics each offered distinct philosophical responses to mortality, anxiety, and social dislocation.
- Cynical provocation and Socratic aporia aimed to shake people out of conventional assumptions.
- Human sociality is a core part of humanity even as particular political forms vary.
What the video covers
- Recaps the previous episode on the Buddha's enlightenment, parasitic processing, and the Eightfold Path as a counter-active system.
- Contrasts the world of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, where citizens lived within a tight polis identity, with the post-Alexander Hellenistic world.
- Describes Alexander's empire, his divinized self-image, and his death at 33 followed by the fragmentation into four warring kingdoms.
- Explains the polis as an embedded existence, where ostracism was feared more than death or imprisonment.
- Introduces the concept of 'domicide' (destruction of home, Porteous, Smith, and Walsh), physical and cultural, as a central experience of the period.
- Characterizes the Hellenistic era as an age of anxiety, reflected in art shifting toward frenetic realism and tragedy.
- Shows how the Peloponnesian War and Greek decline thinned Greek culture, losing its depth as it spread.
- Presents Epicureans and Stoics as attempts to exemplify Socrates and respond to existential anxiety and mortality.
- Discusses Epicurean strategies for facing death and their view of what gives life meaning.
- Introduces the Cynics, especially Diogenes, as provocateurs who challenged convention, purity codes, and cultural boundaries, while noting that humans are inherently social.
Chapters
- 00:00Recap of the Axial Revolution in India and Buddhist Enlightenment
- 03:47Socrates' Legacy and Alexander the Great's Empire
- 06:47Life in the Polis Versus the Hellenistic World
- 09:53Domicide and the Age of Anxiety
- 14:13Greek Decline and the Rise of Philosophical Schools
- 17:27Epicurean Responses to Mortality and Meaning
- 31:20Diogenes and the Cynics' Provocations
- 52:00Purity Codes, Social Nature, and Closing Reflections
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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a look at some of the cognitive science in such awakening experiences and then we moved to interpret following the sage advice of Bachelor some of the Buddha's pronouncements trying to get beyond interpreting his pronouncements as propositions to be believed and instead
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understand them as provocations so that we may enact enlightenment and that means enacting the threat that we are facing and then enacting the psycho technologies that can respond to it we took a look at this in terms of ideas of
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parasitic processing reciprocal narrowing addiction and the opposite of an agogic acceleration as opposed to reciprocal narrowing and creating a counter active dynamical system the counter active system of the Eightfold Path for successfully dealing with parasitic processing so we saw that
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these higher states of consciousness these awakening experiences can bring about transformations that alleviate modal confusion parasitic processing reciprocal narrowing all many of the ways in which we fundamentally lose our agency in the world in a self deceptive and self-destructive manner I'd now like
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to return back to what's happening after the axial revolution and the West so Socrates was fortunate he had a great disciple in Plato Plato was fortunate and that he had a great disciple in Aristotle Aristotle had a great disciple but he
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was not so fortunate Aristotle's great disciple is not himself a great philosopher he is another kind of great he is Alexander the Great and Alexander the Great is an example of the kind of thing that predates the axial revolution the world
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conqueror alexander creates an empire and takes the greek way of thinking throughout most of the known world in a way that reestablishes and perhaps a dangerous manner the pre axial world Alexander is so glorious that the line between being a human being and being a
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god is blurred he creates a personal mythology in which he is a God man very much like the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt which might perhaps explain why Alexander was so readily welcomed into the courts of Egypt either way what
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happens is a twisting of the world because not only does Eris not only does Alexander represent they return to a pre axial way of being he also represents a fundamental disruption to the world in which people that found themselves let's
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compare the world of Aristotle to the world of Alexander now in order to do that we have to understand that Alexander himself does not live very long he dies in Babylon that most ancient of cities it's not clear what he
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dies of as a young age of 33 he has a child but the child of course is too young and is therefore quickly killed and his major generals fight amongst themselves and they carve his empire up into four smaller empires that are
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perpetually at war with each other for about 300 years so this period is known as the Hellenistic Iraq so if you're alive at the time of Aristotle chances are you live if you're Greek part of the Greek culture you live in a
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polis this is where we get cosmopolitan from it doesn't mean City it means a city-state right like for example Athens and its surrounding agricultural supporting environment or Sparta now you know many of the other citizens you know them face to face we mentioned
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the idea that you know Athens is developing democracy remember when we discuss the sophist and at least for the adult males and that's a significant defect in this society but I've already gone into that but you're participating in your government in a
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direct manner you live close to it's accessible to you the seat of that government you often know personally people involved in the government sometimes even the leaders themselves everybody around you speaks your language everybody around you has ancestors like you yourself do
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stretching back beyond memory who have lived in this place everybody around you has the same religion as you everybody has basically the same allegiances to this place see your polis just isn't just where you lived your polis is like
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such a tight relationship between agents and arena that one of the greatest punishments you could suffer in this world the world of Socrates Plato and Aristotle is to be ostracized which is just you're not killed you're not imprisoned you're not
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punished in any way you're just told to leave the polis and for many people they would rather die or face imprisonment than be ostracized because the polis was such an embedded existence for them their identity was so immersed in it so
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see look how deeply connected you are to yourself to your environment to the people around you to your government to your culture to your history Alexander comes and smashes all of that Greek culture is now distributed into Africa
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the Levant into Asia Asia Minor Asia property right down to that out to the borders of India you have Greek kingdoms Bactria that are integrating Greek culture with Buddhist philosophy and religion in what is modern-day Afghanistan now what does
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this mean well this means in the Hellenistic Europe people are being moved around and shuffled around and there belong they belong to far-flung empires you are now probably thousands of miles away from the seat of government you do not participate in
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that government nor do you know personally most of the people or any of the people in it the people around you might not have lived where you're living very long you might not be living where you've been living very long your
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ancestors might have been from Athens and here you are dwelling in Asia Minor the people around you speak different languages worship different gods notice how all the connections are being lost you don't have a connection to a polis
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you don't have a connection to a linguistic group of any great extent shared history shared ancestry shared religion you're experiencing a Porteous and Smith and Brian Walsh called domme aside we'll come back to this later when we talk about the meaning crisis today
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homicide is the destruction of home now there's two ways in which dama side can occur one of course is physical destruction of your house and that's important but there's also cultural dama side in which you have a house you have
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a dwelling but it is not very much your home now we'll come back to this being unhold again when we talk about our current situation but notice how often we will use the language of loss of home to
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describe our current situation where we often talk talk about how we now feel on in the cosmos so people are experiencing this radical sense of Dom aside they don't have deep connections to themselves to each other to their
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environment to their history to their cultural surroundings they have very little very little political participation they feel insignificant you can go to sleep in your part of the Ptolemaic Empire and your wake up and you're part of the solution Empire so
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this is known as an age of anxiety the Hellenistic period the art changes it becomes much more frenetic it becomes much more realistic it becomes much more organized around sort of extremes and tragedy the confidence that we saw in
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the earlier periods the period of Socrates Plato and Aristotle is gone Greece itself has suffered I titanic's of a war the Peloponnesian War Sparta defeats Athens the home of Socrates and Plato one of the places where Aristotle did most of his work Sparta is that very
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quickly itself defeated by thieves thieves are very quickly loses its hegemony so the Greek world loses losses and losses until of course it's overwhelmed by Macedonia and Alexander so whereas the Greek culture is spread throughout the world it's also thinned
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it loses its depth so there's a change that starts to happen you can see as I said in the art the the expression of this you can see it in what starts to happen in religions there's a lot of syncretism people are
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trying to create religions that integrate different cultural deities together a Greek deity for example in an Egyptian deity are integrated together and props into Serapis or something like that you also see the elevation of mother goddesses to pan cultural
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importance like the mother goddess Isis because of course when you feel dama side when you feel a loss of home there is nothing that means home more to you than mother and if you don't have that with your physical mother what you want
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is some right divine mother that can make you feel at home no matter where you are in this fractured homicide Laden world but philosophy also responds the axial age has left a powerful legacy with Socrates Plato and Aristotle and
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that project has not come to an end but it does undergo transformation in the face of the Hellenistic meaning crisis up until now the main thing that wisdom was trying to deal with was foolishness and that's not abandoned but that's now
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seen as insufficient so one of the great philosophers of the Hellenistic period is Epicurus and Epicurus famously said call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others so there's now a therapeutic aspect to wisdom wisdom is now importantly
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about dealing with the anxiety and suffering that people are experiencing in the Hellenistic era so a new model is created so we've seen the idea right of the sage as somebody like Socrates who provokes the axial revolution we eat you
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out of the cave all of these wonderful and powerful images and figures but a new metaphor emerges the philosopher is the physician of the soul a philosopher is somebody who can cure you of existential suffering this becomes crucial now many of these new
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philosophical schools the Epicureans for example and the Stoics take it upon themselves to try to exemplify Socrates they try to exemplify Socrates the Epicureans do this in a very unique way they do this and a useful way of and
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now analyzing their position is to take them up on their own metaphor what is their diagnosis of the disease that is afflicting people and what is their prognosis for the Cure now the Epicureans are very relevant to us
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because they in some ways represent a very secular alternative in the midst of what was still a very religious world and that is pertinent to us so the Epicureans diagnosed that our main problem is fear now that's interesting
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and there's something right about that but we have to slow down first and here's in order to get closer about how we should try and appropriate what they're saying the work of Paul Tillich here is especially useful especially the
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work he does does in his masterpiece the courage to be although he does not talk about the Epicureans very much he concentrates on the Stoics as we will as well he nevertheless brings up important distinctions this is the distinction
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between fear and a word you heard me use more often which is anxiety now these terms are often used interchangeably and we often and we also mix up the word anxiety with eagerness we'll say I'm so anxious to see you
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tonight that's horrible you shouldn't be anxious to see somebody that's means you're distressed right and you're suffering a loss of agency and you have a nebulous sense of threat that's that person's terrifying what you mean is you're eager to see
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them so first of all give up that meaning of anxious secondly we use these terms interchangeably and you know in everyday discourse that's probably alright because they do overlap in some ways but they're important it's important to at least
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talk about the polar differences between them fear is when you have an observable direct threat the tiger comes into this room I experience fear because I have an observable threat in a very important sense I know what to do I may fail in
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doing it but I know what to do okay anxiety is different anxiety is when the threat is nebulous you're not quite sure what the threat is and you're not sure what to do you don't know what to do so
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very often when you're suffering existential issues you experience anxiety this is why this is the preferred term used by coca gardener Heidegger although the regard does use fear in one of his books but that has more to do with something else so the
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Epicureans are often translated I think correctly I'm not talking about an autonomic and silastic point as talking about how we are suffering because we can't manage fear I think a better way of understanding it given this distinction and following on telic is we
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suffer because we can't manage our anxiety because they think the fears they talk about are not really things that are a clear threat where we clearly know what to do okay so according to Epicureans basically we don't control our imagination or in our
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thinking and so we suffer from anxieties that our ability to get a grip on the world so let me give you one many people are anxious about death in fact sort of prototypically people will often say well they'll often use the
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existence of death as a way of talking about how their how their life is ultimately meaningless I'm gonna die anyway so it doesn't matter I'm gonna die and it's terrifying I don't think it's gonna add I'm just afraid of death
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we know that if you expose people to triggers about their own mortality they become cognitively rigid they go into something very much like this parasitic processing they get locked down right now there's there's a couple things you can do you can pursue immortality and of
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course the religions of the ancient world and some versions of the modern world offer this I have very little to say for this other than as a cognitive scientists I think that is an utterly doomed strategy the evidence that your
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mind and your consciousness are completely dependent and emergent from your brain is overwhelming and one thing is indisputable your brain dies and when your brain dies your consciousness your character yourself died with it I know that's even I suppose antithetical to
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what many Buddhists believe but that's that's irrelevant so I think the strategy of pursuing immortality is not going to work it makes a fundamental confusion it confuses somebody something that's phenomenologically in like mysterious to you with making a conclusion
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look I can't experience my own death I can't imagine it because whenever I'm trying to imagine being dead I'm still consciously aware and so death is like uh-huh and therefore I conclude well this must be something about me that's
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right immortal because it's inconceivable that I can't be at some level but of course that's false and that points to what the Epicureans talked about right they talked about there's another strategy instead of trying to achieve immortality can you
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radically accept your mortality because it's indisputable that you're going to die now how do you do that well first of all realize that you can't possibly be anxious about your death and you say yes I am okay well give the Epicureans a
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chance first of all if what you mean by this your non-existence and you say I just I can't conceive of my non-existant well okay this is this is a standard move by Epicurus well what about all of the
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world before you were born do you have trouble conceiving of that no does it terrify you that you didn't exist then no so your non existence isn't itself terrifying and you say ah but it's it's the loss well the problem
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with that the Epicureans would say that's equivocal do you mean write reduction or you do me do you mean the absence and you mean well death is total loss and then they say - ah but you can't ever experience total loss they
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famously said the following where I am death is not where death is I am NOT what that means is if I'm aware that I'm losing I'm still alive and if I've lost everything I've lost awareness and I can't be aware that I've lost anything
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so that can't be what it means okay so it means partial loss ah so what you're actually afraid of is losing some of your agency you're afraid of some of the reduction in your capacities as you're dying but of course you're doing that
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all the time so what is it you're actually afraid of well the Epicureans say you're afraid of losing what's good okay well what does that mean here's where the Epicureans they are sort of very very modern right they say well good is ultimately you
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know something like pleasure and they got associated with hedonism and that's not quite right but they don't mean pleasure in terms of bodily sensation they mean pay attention to those things that actually give you the most meaning okay now what is it that really gives
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you meaning now the things that we are locked where most liable to lose as we age or as we're sick we're liable to lose our fame we're liable to lose our fortune right we're liable to lose our wealth and that's scary but then they
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say quite rightly but those aren't the things that give you the most meaning in life what is it that gives you the most meaning in life and here's where the Epicureans have a beautiful sort of beautiful answer and they pick
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it up from Socrates the thing that gives you meaning is friendship and they mean that very broadly so they were unique in their community they included women in their community not primarily for sexual relations but they considered that the
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ability to obtain meaningful relationships was crucial and with those and okay meaningful relationships not just the relationships but being able to exercise philosophy ah the pursuit of wisdom and self transcendence and the point is that as long as you are that is
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always available to you and that any of the pain you're suffering from the loss of any of the any of these things is ultimately manageable by you you can learn to manage it now whether or not you ultimately agree with the Epicureans
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right do you see what they're doing here they're refusing to accept I'm afraid of death they're saying wait wait wait wait are you do you really want immortality what you're actually afraid of is losing your agency which you've identified with
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these things but that's not actually where your ultimate happiness lies that as long as you have cognitive agency you can cultivate philosophical friendships and Epicurus did this right to his very last moment even though suffering from some horrible stomach illness so he
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exemplified what he's talking about such that when you die it doesn't matter to you so his disciples practical they would and Epicurus had other ways he tried to get us to not be anxious about the gods right famously crafting some of the
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first arguments that are used by modern-day atheists against you know being concerned about the gods I know I wouldn't say Epicurus was an atheist he's a non-theist he basically argues that the gods are irrelevant and therefore paying attention to them or being overtly
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concerned with them being anxious about them and their nebulous threat is not something you should rationally do so Epicurus his disciples would practice internalizing Epicurus they would write his sentences on their household walls on their household utensils they would
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practice they would form communities together where they would reinforce all of these practices where you constantly train in being able to accept your mortality now I think this is valuable to us and I think one of the things that
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any wisdom tradition should do is give us a way of responding to our mortality I would recommend that that project hasn't stopped I recommend Tillich's book the courage to be as a discussion about that from a more modern context
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and as I said to you we are not caught by the usual framing right either you believe in an afterlife or your life your current life is meaningless instead the Epicureans say there's an alternative strategy there's an alternative therapy for dealing with the
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anxiety and that is by learning how not just learning beliefs but learning how to live in the acceptance of your mortality now well I think this is relevant I don't think that their diagnosis is sufficient I do not think
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that the meaning crisis of the Hellenistic period was driven primarily or solely by a fear of more why because mortality has always been with us and always will be with us I think they're right that periods of chaos and Dom aside exacerbate we know
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this from mortality salience research right things that are making us feel more vulnerable tend to make our mortality and our terror around it more salient to us but I think there's another school that gets a better understanding of what was going on in
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the Hellenistic period and gives a more comprehensive answer and this is the stoic school now stoicism is very relevant because stoicism is a direct and explicit ancestor to some of our current forms of psychotherapy the current forms of psychotherapy that are
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the most evidence-based for being effective the cognitive therapies like cognitive therapy cognitive behavioral therapy rational emotive therapy etc directly come out of stoicism you read Aaron Beck's book for example on cognitive therapy he repeatedly states this and cites epictetus Marcus Aurelius and
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others so the way we are trying to deal with issues of anxiety and if you probably notice we have an anxiety depression crisis in our culture is we are very much putting into practice things that are resonated with the
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Stoics not as much from the Epicureans so that means the Stoics have a different diagnosis of the problem and a different prognosis for the answer so what's their issue they also believe we're suffering from a kind of anxiety
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a kind of suffering of a loss of agency and a distress around that because that's of course what's shared by all of these schools confronting the hellenistic crisis meaning crisis the crisis of dama side but they have a
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different interpretation of it now we have to do a bit of history there's a look there's quite a bit more history that comes out of out directly out of Socrates and flows into stoicism I want to go over this a little bit carefully
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with you so they have Socrates and we know one of his greatest disciples is Plato but he has another one and ticinese Plato wrote dialogues because he was trying to get us to emulate and eventually internalized Socratic and
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Linkous that question and answer process that Socrates made famous when intestine is was asked what he had learned from Socrates he argued he didn't argue he just simply stated he didn't make an argument he just simply stated that he
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learned how to converse with himself now that sounds like well I talk to myself all day long okay so that's exactly the thing this doesn't mean right your internal just talking to yourself it doesn't really and the problem with
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that is that talking to yourself is often what goes seriously awry in anxiety and depression this is what psycho psychologists and psychotherapists mean by rumination when that talking to yourself gets caught up in those parasitic processing spirals and it just spins out of control and
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destinies means something else he means he learned to do with himself what Socrates was able to do with he really learned how to internalize Socrates so although the Epicureans right pattern themselves on Socrates there they come out of Socrates right
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the stoicism is really something close to being a religion that's trying to internalize Socrates so that Socrates is basically and I don't mean this disrespectfully because the stoic certainly wouldn't Socrates is turned into a systematic set of psycho
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technologies that you internalize into your meta cognition so what became crucial for Plato as we saw was argumentation but Francis tonie's the actual confrontation with Socrates was more important both Plato and anticipated in the transformation that Socrates is affording Plato sees this
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Hopf eating through argumentation and this thing he sees it as happening through confrontation because and you can see how they're both right because in Socratic and lanka's Socrates comes up and he argues with you but of course he's also confronting you we talked
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about how he sort of slamming the actual revolution into your face so anticipation is and Diogenes epitomizes this this confrontation and by looking at the kinds of confrontation we can start to see what the followers are Antasari so Diogenes basically does something
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analogous to provocative performance art he gets in your face in a way that tries to provoke you two realizations those kinds of insights that will challenge you he tries to basically create aporia in you that shocked experience that you had when
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confronting Socrates that challenges you to radically transform your life but instead of using argumentation and discussion as Socrates did and Plato picked up on they were really trying to hone in on how to try to be as provocative as possible right so
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famously you know about one of these it became a card in the Tarot and it became a album cover for Led Zeppelin you have the man right with with the lamp walking wandering about the Hermit with the lamp well this is Diogenes he
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walked into the marketplace carrying around a lamp and looking and looking and looking and looking and everybody said well what are you looking for and then he just kept looking and looking what are you looking for what do you
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what is it what is it and then he said I'm looking for one honest man and then everybody gets got pissed off at him because they are so intrigued by all this looking and questing and then when it comes
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something that right and they're pissed off because they know he's right because they're in the marketplace and everybody's lying and cheating and stealing right but they don't want to know that they don't want to pay attention to that right now that sounds
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sort of yeah that's kind of cool and creatives yeah but there are journeys does other things that you might not find so cool or courageous well they're courageous at least but they're not you don't find them cool Diogenes also famously came into the
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center of the marketplace and masturbated in public and most raw we're all going like ooh ooh all right how are these two things possibly related well here's how they're related right the group of people that start to take
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shape in this tradition are called the cynics it's not our modern meaning of the word so I'm gonna use a capital C because this just means you know being suspicious that everybody has an ulterior motive or a secret agenda
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that's not what is meant here this means actually living like a dog because Diogenes also famously lived outside of Athens in a barrel so let me tell you one more stories and we'll try to connect all of them so Alexander the
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future emperor of the world on his ascendance into godhood comes to visit Diogenes so you can imagine here's the whole like all of this entourage and error and here comes Alexander to visit Diogenes and he comes up to Dodge and
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easy says um I can give you like half of the world what do you want and all Diogenes says is could you move a little to the left you're blocking my sunlight so why is he living in a barrel
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why is that it that his answer to Alexander why does he look for one honest man why does he masturbate in like what is going on well the cynics had a particular understanding of the Hellenistic homicide they had the idea
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that what causes us to suffer isn't what we set up is what we set our heart on it's not just a particular that we set our heart on our life and we're afraid of losing it in death we can set our
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heart on all kinds of things that ultimately will cause us to suffer why well their idea is when we set our hearts on the wrong things those things will fail us and that's how we suffer you can see some similarities to some
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aspects of Buddhism and to some of the asceticism that the Buddha first practiced himself so the cynics came to the conclusion that what the Hellenistic period was showing is that many of the things that we take for granted and think about what
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that mean where it means we take them as being part of the structure of reality are actually not fundamentally real they don't have staying power they're not permanent they're actually man-made they are historically culturally dependent and they are temporary and when we set
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ourselves on these things the current of events can easily and readily wash them away and then we are left bereft our hearts are torn from us and that is how we experience Thomas I'd okay so what should we do then
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well you should learn not just acquire a set of beliefs progenies isn't just believing things he's living in a certain place in a certain way right you should learn how to set your heart on the kinds of things that are not
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man-made are not contingent that will not be swept away by events what are those kinds of things well one it are the laws of the natural world so this is why this dodging Eve's lives in a barrel he wants to live as much as he can like
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an animal in one sense in another sense he doesn't want to live like an animal at all but he wants to live as much by natural law as opposed to man-made law he doesn't want to be invested in
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man-made cultural institutions or practices cultural political value systems because those will end and then if we have set our heart upon them our hearts will be broken so you want to as much as you can live according to the
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patterns of nature because those are not man-made and those will not disappear with the change in history or culture now if it was just that then of course dodging ease would just live like an animal but the cynics also said in
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addition to natural law there are moral laws there are moral laws as to what is a proper way to be a good human being now and you may say but isn't that all culturally relative and of course that's
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a big dispute but one of the things that the cynics did was to try and make a distinction between moral principles that are culturally based sorry moral principles that are not culturally based and purity codes that are culturally
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historically based and they are similar to each other in ways such that we can often confuse them together so a good way of understanding this is in terms of more modern language of guilt versus shame now again we use
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these terms interchangeably and we shouldn't because having a distinction between them is useful guilt is your distress at having realized you've both broken a moral principle shame is your distress at having violated a purity code let me give you an example if as I
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was delivering this video there was some sort of malfunction in my clothing and my clothing suddenly fell down I would be deeply embarrassed I would experience shame why because I violated a code a cultural code which is I'm supposed to
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be fully clothed in a public discourse and I am alright but if that happened have I done anything immoral well so you would say no you didn't do anything immoral you didn't do anything wrong so I don't feel guilt I feel shame right
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sometimes they can be against each other right you may be made to feel ashamed even though you're doing something that you believe let's say in a justified way is morally right many people who supported blacks during the civil rights
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movement were subjected to terrific amounts of shaming even though they didn't experience any guilt in what they were doing see purity codes are designed to keep the categorical boundaries that make a culture in a particular historical period run the way it's running
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they are highly tied up with the invested power structures who are usually highly invested in keeping things running the way they're running so we have lots of important boundaries that are protected by purity codes so for example just to give you one more
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example just to make it clear none of you I hope would be distressed my me doing the following here's some water okay imagine if I do the following I collect lots of saliva in my mouth lots of it just tons
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and tons of saliva and then I spit it into the glass yeah until there's gobs and gobs of saliva in my glass and now that I swirl it around just imagine it come on and then I drink it and now
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you're going air now notice if I mix the water inside my mouth and swallow you're fine with that but if the saliva comes outside of my mouth into the glass you find it repellent okay that's because there's an important purity code here
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the purity code is this is the boundary of John and things inside this are John and pieces of John should not come out into the world John should not spit John should not fart John should not burp John should not cut his fingernails off
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and leave them in front of you John should even not leave his bed unmade because he's leaving his impression behind and that's yucky okay that's a purity code now very often we confuse purity codes with moral codes we confuse
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purity codes because we confuse our disgust reaction that's often purity code based with a moral judgment that should be based on reasoning and evidence please listen to me very carefully with what I want to say first I'll give you something
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non-controversial both of my parents are dead but suppose they were alive I don't want to see them having sex I don't I would go ooh is that a moral argument of course not there's nothing immoral with them having
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sex that's why I'm here in a similar way and please hear what I'm saying I might not want see two men having sex that doesn't mean that that is anyway a moral judgment on my part a lot of the waves we have persecuted
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gay people is because we have confused a purity code disgust reaction with a legitimate moral argument the people who started the process and we're still pulling them apart today right now right here right now were the cynics what
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Diogenes was trying to do was get you to pull apart the moral code from the purity code he did nothing immoral by masturbating in public but although lots of people were doing stuff that was culturally acceptable in the marketplace
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most of it was immoral do you see alexander comes to him and offers him power and fame but those are all the things the stoic say are no good because sorry the cynics they're no good because if you set your hearts on them those are
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man-made human defined and therefore your heart will eventually be broken set your heart on what won't get broken so the cynics developed this very powerful provocative way of enacting Socrates and trying to get us the cynics are trying to get us to realize what
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we're setting our heart on and to pull apart our automatic disgust reactions from moral reflection on what we're doing now a Dodge eni's has a disciple cradies and then creatives has a disciple Zeno this is not the Zeno of Zeno's paradoxes
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this is a difference you know now whereas the cynics tended to be sort of hostile to Plato because of his emphasis on argumentation Zeno was deeply influenced by the cynics but he also really liked Plato he saw that there was
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value in the argumentation and he realized that there's deep connections between your ability to rationally reflect and your ability to use your reason so what he wanted to do was integrate the rational argumentation and reasoning of Plato with right the
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provocative aspects of the cynics so he crafted a way of life that put the two together and then he would walk up and down a stoah this is a covered colonnade in Athens teaching this new integration that's what we get the name stoic from
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stoic doesn't mean being you know stiff upper lip and tolerating the decline of the British Empire or stuff like that means something much more sophisticated so Xena's insight was there's something deeply right about the cynics but they're getting something wrong right
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they're concentrating too much on the product and not enough on the process right they're concentrating too much on what we're attaching our heart to rather than the very process of attachment itself because the stoic said yes particular cultures in history are
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variable but being social isn't human beings are inherently social yes particular political cultural and historical institutions and traditions are variable but it is part of our humanity to be social we shouldn't be leaving the polis because notice that
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Diogenes and Socrates have to actually enter the polis to practice their philosophy so Xena said it's not what you set your heart on it's how you set your heart and this is always a hallmark of rationality one of the crucial and
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this is good like even recent work on rationality Keith Stanovich and the hallmark of rationality is learning not to focus just on the products of your cognition but find valuable and pay attention to the processes what process what is this process of setting your
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heart on right well it's something they've already talked about it's this process of Ko identification it's the process by which the agent arena relationship is set up it's the process by which you're simultaneously assuming an identity and assigning an identity
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and you're doing that all the time unconsciously now the Stoics say ah that process of CO identification is where your identity is being formed that's where your agency is taking shape but if you mindlessly Co identify if you do it
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automatically and reactively you will if you'll allow me the acronym you'll Mar that whole process it'll be open to all kinds of distortion self-deception self-destruction you can see here again the axial age ideas so what do we need
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to do well we need to pay attention to this process we need to pay attention to how we're assuming and assigning identities we need to do it in such a way that we can strengthen our agency in the
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face of the threat of dama side so what I want to explore with you next time is what the disto acts actually advocate as practices and how are these currently being taken up in our own psychotherapeutic endeavors to deal with
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our own version of dama side and the meaning crisis thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you you
Topics:Hellenistic periodAlexander the GreatdomicidepolisEpicureansStoicsCynicsDiogenesmeaning crisisJohn Vervaeke
