Mind & Desire

Gregory B. Sadler

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This podcast takes insights, arguments, distinctions, and practices from complex philosophical texts and thinkers and makes them accessible for anyone who wants to learn. It also provides advice about how to effectively study philosophy and apply it to your own life gregorybsadler.substack.com

17 jul

Episode 56: Designing A Class On Love, Friendship, Sexual Desire, and Pleasure

Thanks for reading Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy! This post is public so feel free to share it. Those of you who listen to me, or read my work, or watch me on YouTube or otherwise interact with me probably know that I teach occasionally, but not reliably you could say, for one of the local universities here in Milwaukee, Marquette University, which is a private Jesuit university. Although, the Jesuits really have very little role, and it’s more or less like most other places, other than having a chapel on campus and things like that. Now, in the past they had a lot more demand for people to teach philosophy classes, but in recent years the core curriculum, and not just for philosophy, but for theology, for I believe history, certainly for writing and other things, has shrunk somewhat. So there’s less classes.In the past I could count on fairly steady teaching for them, and we’re now in sort of a dance where whenever they need me, they get in touch with me and say, “Hey, can you take these sections?” And then after that, perhaps I don’t teach for another year or two. So, I got asked early on this summer, which is very unusual, to take on two sections of what they call Foundations of Philosophy. Now, that’s a fancy title for what’s basically an Intro to Philosophy class. It’s the one philosophy class that all of the students on campus are required to take, but it’s not very standardized. As a matter of fact, there is no common reading across the various sections. There are a few requirements, like you need to teach either some Plato or some Aristotle (in my case, I teach both). You need to teach at least one bit of what they call the Catholic intellectual tradition, which is very wide, so that could include a lot of people. And there’s a few other requirements as well. I don’t know that anyone actually checks on these to make sure that they are being covered in the syllabus, so you’re sort of on the honor system. And what I’ve done with the class in the past has typically been to have them read primary texts, which we go through fairly closely, and I give them a lot of my own resources: the videos that I create and the associated podcasts, handouts, lesson pages, and we talk about the texts in class. We look at certain sections, we discuss examples, how all of this might actually apply to their own life. And we spend a good bit of time on what you could call ethics, on the philosophy of the human person (or philosophical anthropology), on metaphysics, and on epistemology. In a semester, we don’t really have too much time to get into too much else, but we look at how different philosophers approach these matters in sometimes very different ways, and sometimes in ways that are influenced by each other or responding to each other. And I try to have them come away with some things they can actually use in their own life, even metaphysical things, you know, like thinking about responsibility and whether their actions are really free and what would conduce to making them more free, all of those sorts of things. So, oftentimes I’ve done a sort of general “Here’s some key ideas and thinkers and texts in philosophy.” But I also in recent years have been experimenting with a somewhat different structure and orientation to the class. It’s not one that’s completely new because I did this at Marist College with their Intro to Philosophy classes as well, and that is to focus on some classic and contemporary texts and thinkers that deal with, we’ll just say, love, friendship, sexual desire, and pleasure, and things like that, relationships in general. And so they’ll read texts like Aristotle’s famous treatment of the three kinds of friendship in Nicomachean Ethics books 8 and 9, or Plato’s Symposium, but also some other really interesting things like some of Montaigne’s essays, some contemporary work on, say, sexual relations and desire and pleasure and consent. And so it changes from semester to semester what it is that I include in there, but it’s usually got some fairly consistent readings that I want to have them engage with. And the reason I do that is because I think that this stuff can be very useful for them, and it’s good for them to know that there are resources that have been out there for, in some cases, over two millennia that they can draw upon and think more deeply about as their lives, which are, you know, just really starting out as adults, continue to proceed. So that’s what I’ve decided to do this semester with both of those sections of Foundations of Philosophy. And I’m just in the very early processes right now of looking at the schedule and what we can feasibly do, and what I did in the past, and maybe want to add to or subtract from, or change around in order a little bit. That means for me also thinking about what I’m going to need to produce resources about for my students, and then for the broader public. So, for example, I did get to producing videos on Montaigne and his views on relationships. I may actually incorporate some additional essays about those, which means then I need to produce some more, but I haven’t produced handouts on that, so I need to get cracking on that. But I also talked about Ninon de l’Enclos, a very interesting Epicurean early modern philosopher who has a lot to say about the relations between men and women, sexual pleasure and desire, how that fits into one’s life, and the question whether men and women can actually be genuine friends with each other or not, a big issue that people are still debating today. I never got around to producing material on her, in part because of my accident where I broke my hip last year. I was set to produce a whole series of videos and podcast chapters and never got around to it, but I think I probably will have my students reading those letters. Now, why am I telling you all of this? Perhaps you might be interested in these topics yourself, and I’m considering putting together sort of a, what should we call it... rival course? Correlative course? Shadow course? Within Substack for my paid subscribers as a sort of perk that they get to follow along with, that would essentially cover a lot of the same ground as my academic course that will be going on in these two sections at Marquette. Now, my students are always very interested in these texts, these thinkers, these topics. And when I say students, I’m talking about the academic students who are usually 18 to 20 years old in these classes. These are for freshmen and sophomores. Mostly interested in the topics, and by approaching these topics, they get interested then in the texts that talk about them, and the thinkers that wrote these texts as guides. But I think that this would also be of great interest, perhaps even greater interest, to older students. And that’s just about anybody who is an adult, because we continue to face these matters throughout our lives, even going into our senior years, where perhaps we might not be as actively engaged in sex and romance, but certainly friendship can play a major role, and we have to think about the other things that go along with it, like loss and grief and the death of ourselves and those who we care about, particularly other family members. So, these are some ideas I’m kicking around in my head. There’s a lot of stuff, you might say, jostling up against each other, and sooner or later I will put it into some sort of coherent form that will be reflected in an entire syllabus and course of studies, and then eventually take the shape of real, robust classes—whether just the academic classes or, as I’m considering, producing a class that would follow roughly along in Substack that people might find interesting to engage in, or valuable, or helpful for their own problems that they’re facing, or conundrums, or personal development, or however we want to put it. So that is really what is on my mind today. I thought I would give you a little glimpse into my own thought process about how it is that I go about conceptualizing and designing classes. Now, this one is more of a redesign on the part of the academic classes than a coming right out of left field, totally building a class from the ground up sort of approach that I’m not doing this time, as I would be if, say, I were deciding to orient the class towards a topic like how do we deal with and understand AI, which I’m not going to do. Although I will mention that I’m going to begin the class by talking about the issue of AI significant others that are being pitched to people and being actively used by some people. Whether these are real relationships or just facsimiles or simulacra of relationships, we’re going to hit the ground running with that question. So to wrap this up, maybe I will be also developing a class here in Substack that could be of interest to people. If it is of interest to you, then tell me in a comment whether that’s something that you would find worthwhile to check out. And we’ll see what happens in a month or two. Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe
26 jun

Episode 55 - Does Socrates Really Know Only That He Knows Nothing?

Thanks for reading Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy! This post is public so feel free to share it. There’s a rather curious and, if you think it through adequately, can’t possibly be the case idea that gets pushed out there about Socrates as a historical character, as a philosopher, and as the object of Plato’s Dialogues that runs basically like this: “I, Socrates, don’t know anything except for the fact that I don’t know.” And there’s a lot of different formulations, some of which you can find sort of close to what Socrates actually says in Plato’s Apology, which has less to do with knowing and more to do with whether he actually possesses wisdom or not. And then you can find all sorts of wild, crazy reinterpretations where people will assert that Socrates was wise precisely because he knew that he didn’t know anything, or things along those lines. When you see somebody put that out there, you can probably bet that one of several things is happening. The most common one, I think, unfortunately in our internet-saturated age, is that they pick this up basically as a meme, from somewhere in the original sense of Richard Dawkins’ memes, not just like a visual presentation that’s supposed to be funny or catch your attention or something like that. And they didn’t really stop to think about it. Or if they did, their thinking was quite superficial. They responded to it saying, “Oh man, that’s cool. That’s deep.” But it’s just the illusion of depth, and perhaps even of coolness as well. But we can put that aside for a moment. What’s important about that is it’s a response where people circulate around things that are meaningful, but meaning kind of removed from the context that it emerged from and deformed in the process. Another possibility is that the person is advocating for something like an ideal of intellectual humility, but doesn’t really have any sort of solid understanding of what that would look like. They love this quip or quote or idea about Socrates because to them it seems to represent the ideal of a person who is intellectually humble, who doesn’t make claims to knowing things that they don’t know. But again, they haven’t really thought it through very well because if they did, they would see some inherent paradoxes and problems in such a strong position as claiming that you don’t know anything at all except that you don’t know things. Or going even further, putting that forward as an ideal that other human beings ought to strive for, or validate, or think is better than other possible comportments. There could be other things as well that perhaps are connected to these two ways of approaching it. A person might just be a grifter and liking to throw things out there about Socrates and hoping to hoodwink people. Or you might actually be advocating for intellectual humility because you just want everybody else to feel epistemologically challenged by relation to you. What I want to do is consider whether or not this is an adequate characterization of Socrates. And I’m going to say as a reader and teacher of Plato for many years, definitely not. And to think a bit about why it would be bad for you to hold that this really is what Socrates was presenting or exemplifying for us. So let’s start with the Apology itself, where this essentially originates from. Socrates has a friend who goes to the Oracle at Delphi and asks the kind of smart-ass question: “Is there anybody wiser than Socrates?” And the Oracle says no. So Socrates wonders, “What the hell does this mean? I don’t feel myself to be particularly wise. And I live in a culture where there are other people who are being presented as wise and do seem to think that they’re wise. I think that perhaps they are. So let me go and try to prove the oracle wrong,” which is already a weird thing to do. If the god says X is the case, you’re gonna try to disprove that X is the case as your way of showing that X is the case. That’s a little strange to begin with, but let’s put that aside. So a lot of you know this story. He goes around to the politicians. He goes around to the poets. He goes around to the craftspeople. And he finds that they are not wise, at least in the respects that they are presenting themselves as being so. So the politicians don’t really know how to run society or who should be in charge or how to properly value the goods that are distributed in society, whatever it is that we want. The poets say all sorts of interesting things, but ultimately don’t really know what they’re talking about and can’t even adequately explain their own craft. The craftspeople, on the other hand, as we find out, they are wise or they do know something, namely the discipline that they work in. So plumbers know how to plumb. Medical doctors know something about the art of medicine. Shoemakers, to use one of Socrates’ favorite examples, really do understand leather and how to work it into shoes. The trouble with them is that they typically don’t stay in their proverbial lane and act as if, because they’re knowledgeable about one area, they’re knowledgeable about another area, or more broadly speaking, all sorts of areas. And Socrates says, “I went around and asked these people and learned these things.” Couldn’t you at that point say, “Well, he does know something, namely that the politicians don’t have wisdom”? Yes, indeed, trivially so. So to claim that Socrates were to say, “I don’t know anything except that I don’t know,” that’s complete nonsense. And even within the Apology itself, it seems to be undermined by the very implications of what Socrates himself is doing. He’s taking a lot of things for granted as things that he has at least some measure of knowledge of. Now you could respond and say, well, Socrates, or at least Plato, makes an important distinction between believing in something or opinion (doxa) and actual knowledge (episteme), or the various Greek words that we use to signify knowing, like oida. And yes, that’s true. So we could say Socrates, perhaps in a lot of cases where he is saying, “Well, we can rely on this,” or “We’ve figured this sort of thing out,” or “We know something in a vague sense,” maybe that’s just right opinion, sort of like what’s talked about in the Meno, also discussed in places like the Republic. But does that actually get you to the point where Socrates doesn’t genuinely know anything? Not when we start reading through the dialogues more carefully and widely. We in fact see in many of the dialogues, including in the dialogues that don’t culminate in some sort of resolution, Socrates will say along the line and get his interlocutors to agree, “We know that X is the case.” It just won’t be about the particular object of the text. So, for example, in the Meno, we don’t know what the definition of virtue is, but we do know that if we can’t say what the definition of virtue is, if we don’t have an adequate concept of it, then we can’t really say anything about whether it can be taught or not because we don’t know what we’re talking about, do we? And that’s knowing something. But we also do know some things, again, just to take the Meno as an example. We know that certain things are virtues. Socrates doesn’t tell Meno magnanimity isn’t a virtue, wisdom isn’t a virtue, courage isn’t a virtue, justice isn’t a virtue. We know that those actually fit into virtue in some way. We just don’t fully understand what the single essence that connects all of them together is. And if you read the Meno closely, you will see that Socrates will get Meno to agree that there’s even a sort of, whether you want to call it prioritization or hierarchy among the virtues, so that good actions based on some of the virtues actually require that we have two other important virtues: justice and prudence or wisdom. And that definitely seems to be something that Socrates takes to be knowledge. He doesn’t tell you that, but if you’re reading attentively, you see that actually happening. And when we turn to other dialogues, for example the Republic, we’re confronted with dozens of these sorts of claims about how things actually are that Socrates is making as somebody who presumably not only himself knows, but can lead his interlocutors and us, the readers, into knowing as well. He doesn’t say, “Yeah, this is just my best guess,” or “I kind of think it’s sort of this way.” It’s a lot more clear than that. So granted that this is the case, why would somebody actually want to focus on this idea of Socrates as someone who only knows that he doesn’t know anything? I think that has much less to do with Socrates or Plato or even knowledge more generally, and much more to do with the psychological dynamics of the people who are making those sorts of claims. I’m not going to go into any grand theory of that, but I will say that there’s something very attractive, seductively, temptationally attractive, to many people that this great icon of philosophy would be somebody who is so circumspect about the possibility of his own knowledge. And perhaps there’s a bit of hero worship or identification going on there as well, which... it’s a free country. If you want to do that, go right on ahead. I happen to think that that’s not something that is very good for you as a thinker, as a person, as a human being who wants to study philosophy. But you go ahead and see how well it suits you and whether it constitutes something like a hindrance or obstacle or veil that gets in the way of you actually making progress in philosophy. And see how other people take it when you bring that up. The people who you view as possessing good judgment, as being reasonably well-informed and well-read, reasonable people, do they like it when you recur to this image of Socrates, or do they v
15 jun

Episode 54 - The Limits Of Philosophers' Conceptions Or Imaginations

As I was rereading a portion of David Hume’s Treatise on Human nature to prepare some video and podcast episodes for a class that I’m currently teaching, I ran across some passages that, I won’t attribute entirely to Hume because that would be quite silly, but I’m going to unpack using Hume, because he provides a great example of something that we might call a philosophical vice or misstep or error. So what is this? I guess if we had to come up with a phrase for it so that we could easily identify instances, it would be thinking that your own capacity to imagine, or understand, or grasp something, is the final word on whether other human beings can do this or not. The particular discussion that I have in mind is where Hume assures us that there is no such thing as a self in any real sense, that it’s really a fiction and a bundle of perceptions. And he’s got an argument for this, which is that if we seek inside of ourselves (notice that we can’t get away from the word entirely, but that’s not a big problem), we never find an impression that corresponds to the idea of the self. So we can conceptualize or imagine a self, but we can never find any origin-point or evidence, or anything that we can look at and say “Aha! Here it is. And Hume explains this in a good bit of detail. A bit later, he will say that there may be somebody who will nonetheless claim that they do indeed have a self and that they are aware of their self. And Hume says: listen, I just can’t get what they’re saying. And I don’t think that they actually get what they’re saying either. Now I’m paraphrasing him. I’m not reading directly from the text, but that’s essentially what he’s saying. And I’m reminded another text that I’ve been doing work on recently, againbecause I’m teaching it in a class, Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat, where he insists in a pretty absolute way that there’s no way any of us human beings can possibly by use of our faculties, imagine or conceptualize what the subjective experience of being a bat would possibly be like, and yet nonetheless it does make sense to talk about facts having to do with bad-perceptions or bat experience. So other people have pointed out to Nagel: Well, maybe we actually aren’t all as limited in our imaginative capacities as you’re claiming that we are. And it is kind of weird that somebody would indeed make such a universal claim for all human beings based on their own, we’ll say, experience. And I don’t just mean perceptual experience. I mean the experience of using our minds to think about things. So if I can’t think of it, or I can’t conceive of it, or I can’t wrap my head around it, it therefore is nonsensical, or impossible, or pick whatever other adjective that you like. And to me, this isn’t something to condemn entirely because maybe there are cases where we do try to think things out and we realize that they’re absurd or they just can’t be the case. How do we tell whether we’re on to something? We ask other people: Hey, how does this work for you? Can you wrap your head around it? And maybe they say that they can, but then they can’t adequately explain it to us, and we suspect that maybe they’re engaging in magical or wishful thinking, or just not thinking things through well enough. So I’m not condemning or dismissing this out of hand altogether, but I do think we ought to be a little bit suspicious when a philosopher or somebody who’s philosophizing but isn’t actually a philosopher maybe even more the case when they say: Yeah, this simply can’t be, because I cannot make sense of it. I’m reminded of a rhetorical technique that was used by analytic philosophers, at least when I was coming up in graduate school. They would give you kind of a confused look, when you would try to say something to them, make some sort of claim or advance an idea or an argument. And here’s the catchphrase. They would say: I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about. Or: I simply can’t understand what you’re saying. And they would often say things like, this may make sense to you, but it makes no sense whatsoever to me. With the implication being: I’m the reasonable person, and you’re either a crackpot, or coming from some weird vector that I’m not going to entertain, or just not advanced enough in the study of philosophy. So I am the standard, so to speak. And you failed to meet the criterion, which is that what you’re saying could actually, with some difficulty, make sense to me. There’s many different variations on this. And now why shouldn’t we take it for granted that people who do seem smarter than ourselves . . . I mean after all Hume has a whole book that he’s written, and many of us don’t. We’re intruding into his book, so to speak, and checking out the topics that he has given much thought to and decided to weigh in on, kind of like guests or interlopers. Maybe we’ve written a book, but it’s not exactly on what Hume is talking about, so we’re in a lower position. That may be one model for how we understand what engaging another philosopher looks like, but that’s only one model out of many possibilities. The great irony is that Hume himself is somebody, like many philosophers, who has a great capacity to think about possibilities otherwise and raise them when he’s discussing other people’s contentions about things. And yet, in some areas, like whether or not we have a self, he simply can’t conceive of anything that would answer to what people have called the self. And this is so common, not just in modern philosophy, but in late modern philosophy and even in earlier engagements in philosophy. So I think this is something well worth dwelling on. Again, we shouldn’t just dismiss any sort of first-person , “I understand” or “I don’t understand” claims out of hand. But we also shouldn’t automatically take them as if they are the last word on the topic. And perhaps they should lead us to, on occasion, speculate about: well, why doesn’t this person see things as possibly being otherwise? And maybe another exercise, we could ask ourselves: what if they could see it as otherwise, this particular matter, and how would that fit into the rest of whatever system or structure or works and bundles of ideas that they have? That could be an interesting exercise on our own part to create a sort of dialogue within the philosopher’s works and thought. So this has taken us pretty far afield, but I thought it could be an interesting set of reflections spurred by some of the people I’m currently studying and the approach that they take towards possibility, and conceivability or intelligibility. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe
17 may

Episode 53 - An Occasional Compliment From Authors I Interview

Thanks for reading Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy! This post is public so feel free to share it. In one of my most recent interviews, I got a compliment that I’ve received several times, which I think is kind of telling. It doesn’t often come up when I’m having a conversation with somebody who is directly within, let’s call it, the world or discipline of philosophy But it does happen quite often when I’m talking with people from other fields. Most commonly it has come up when I’m interviewing an author who has not written a philosophy book, rather something that I think has philosophical depth, but is better classified as literature or something else within that spectrum. I suspect that this has to do not just with the disciplines themselves or the discourses, but with the sorts of people and platforms on which somebody will typically get interviewed. And it does happen to me to some degree in philosophy as well. Not so much with people in philosophy interviewing me, but people coming in from the outside, from other areas such as entrepreneurship or the world of ideas more broadly speaking, where they’re trying to advocate for doing things like that in a very public way. So let me tell you what the compliment in general tends to be. Obviously I’m putting together kind of a composite. It’s not verbatim from any one of the compliments. But it’s something like usually after the interview, in an email, or before we actually log off and stop recording. The person will say to me: You know, I really enjoyed this interview because you asked really good questions, and had follow ups that weren’t the sort of thing that I’m usually getting. I’ve come now to ask another follow up myself when they say that sort of thing, like: Well, are you usually getting questions that are somewhat stereotypical or banal, like where do you get your ideas from? or what is your book about? Oftentimes they’ll also say to me one other thing as well, which is: I get the sense that you really closely and attentively read the book that I wrote. So I think there’s something to unpack here, and it’s not something that I want to say philosophers are automatically good at. I think that it’s something where the sort of work that we do, the sort of things that we study, the texts, the discourses that we get in, although they have plenty of their own sorts of failings and what the French call a “professional deformation” of your mind or character. There are some things that philosophy-interested people, and I won’t just say people in academic philosophy, but people who are studying philosophy, often get quite good at. I think one of those things is reading attentively, and correlating things together, and looking for when things make sense, and when they seem to be in contradiction. And then probing a bit to see whether the contradictions are apparent and are merely tensions which are often quite rich, or when there’s something really problematic there that you would want to push on. Philosophers as opposed to other disciplines are probably geared on their own, and then within the discipline, to asking hard questions of other people and not being too squeamish about doing that sort of thing, which can be actually refreshing to people who don’t get that sort of treatment most of the time. That said, philosophers can sometimes be too adversarial, and maybe we’ll talk about that some other time, because I do want to come back to his main comment. So these sorts of experiences and encounters show you there’s something going on, because the author, the interlocutor is responding in a spontaneous, unguarded, genuine way. And they’re comparing their experience with you, and the approach that you take, with the more common sorts of interactions that they’re having, which we could describe as, I don’t want to say simply superficial, as if everything else is superficial and philosophy is deep. That would be going way too far. But we can talk about superficiality, or banality, or generic-ness, whatever we want to call it. You know, we could use the term basic that has become a pejorative in recent years. And all of these convey a sort of lack of fuller, deeper, richer engagement which was possible. If it wasn’t possible, nobody would actually miss it. But it is possible. So somebody who is coming at a book an author a topic in a way that’s not just different from how other people are doing, but having been trained or practiced, however you want to put it, in digging deeper and seeing connections and asking questions and following up, is going to be able to do that more often, more reliably, more sustainably than others who might actually blunder their way into it or happen upon it from time to time. And this has got me thinking that, you know, I’m I’m pretty fortunate in that I have spent the majority of my life at this point in time in the field of philosophy, either as an academic, as a student, as a professor, and an instructor. But also in all sorts of other ways that go beyond the academy and bring it into ordinary and real-life with the kind of people who aren’t necessarily going to college or even went to college, but can certainly can find value in the intellectual life in particular in philosophy and its myriad different subjects and approaches. That’s fortunate on my part because I get to experience not depth or interest or richness all the time because there can be, you know, boring stuff within philosophy. If you’re doing academic things, you’ve got the activities of grading, which are not always mind-blowing. Or setting up a curriculum, which isn’t always a treat. But you get to do more of that than the person who doesn’t get access to that regularly. And I sort of take it for granted. But I forge how many people out there are, you might say, starved for something that they’re not even sure they have a taste for, a hunger for. They just know that they’re not getting everything that they want. And so to come back to these experiences with authors in particular, but also with many other people, where they say that they really got something out of the interview, or conversation, or even just engagement. I think there’s a phenomena there that calls out to be explored in greater depth, but I don’t think can be easily turned into something like a full-blown theory. And we have to be very careful when we’re making these sorts of distinctions not to draw claims that are too generalized and sweeping about it. So I’m not sure exactly what I want to do with it, but I have a sense that there’s something important here that certainly goes beyond just my own personal anecdotes, that is well worth mulling over and exploring. And so I thought it would be great to share with you, and see whether perhaps some of you have similar experiences, or what you think ought to be made of this one. Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe
27 abr

Episode 52: A Practice For Getting Back To Sleep When Your Mind Is Active

Today I had an interesting conversation with a client and a practice you could say emerged out of it. A practice that I myself have been doing in certain circumstances that I’ll tell you about in just a few moments, which I thought would be useful for them as well. It’s probably best to begin by talking about the circumstances in which you would want to engage in this practice, and then I’ll tell you about it. Quite a few of us wake up in the middle of the night, either because we had a bad dream, or because we’re getting up to use the bathroom, or get a drink of wate,r or we’ve got a body pain that maybe we need to see to or stretch, or something like that. As you get older, these sorts of things are more common, but sometimes we’re also woken up by our own active minds, perhaps worrying, being anxious, mulling over things. I know that myself, even though I realized it was completely irrational, the night before the beginning of a new semester where I had classes particularly face-to-face classes, that I would be teaching to a new crop of students, even though I’d been teaching for quite a while, sometimes I would wake up and not be able to fall asleep, and it would undoubtedly be because I was anticipating this new situation that I was going to be in. So I was talking with this person and they said that they have been waking up like that, not regularly, but off and on for a number of years in the middle of the night and then having some difficulty getting back to sleep. And I think this is very common, or at least we read that many people struggle with this sort of thing. You’re now awake, you’re lying in bed and your mind is working and it keeps you from being able to drift back off into sleep. Why? Because there are emotions that are associated with what it is that you’re thinking about. And I won’t say that these are all necessarily what we would call negative emotions. But I will actually use a term that the Stoics preferred for the pathē, the emotions that are troubling. They called them, among other things, perturbationes. And the singular for that is pertubatio. And it means something like being shaken up, being upset, being steered around. They talked about these emotions as being perhaps contrary to reason or disobedient to reason. And they’re things that we feel. And so why do we feel them? Well, we could be thinking about the day that happened before or even the week and And it could be the totality of it or it could be a particular incident. And we’re ruminating on it and thinking: Oh, I should have done this instead of that. Or when I was in a conversation or a conflict with this person, I should have said this, or it wasn’t right for them to say that. Or we might even think about our own mistakes that we made, and feel embarrassed, or ashamed, or guilty about them. So that is the aspect of the past, probably the immediate past. Although sometimes people wake up in the middle of the night and they’re troubled by something that they did or something that somebody did to them years and years ago. But it’s more common that it’s something fairly immediate.: The other thing that people might be thinking about instead of the past is the future. What is coming up ahead? And it could be the day that is facing them and some of the challenges that they are anticipating running into. It could even be things that we think are going to be good, but we’re not quite entirely sure about and we could worry that things are not going to turn out the way that we want them to, even though we’re anticipating something that would be pleasant or even joyful the future could also just like the past extend off Quite a ways we could be worried about our finances, worried about our job situation, worried about the economy as a whole, worried about our eventual demise. All sorts of things can figure into that. We can be concerned for people other than ourselves as well, both past and future oriented. And you could even be focusing on the present. You could be thinking about: Well, what am I? What kind of person am I right now? Maybe you’re not entirely happy or content with who you are and how you evaluate yourself, and you think that you should be somewhat different than you actually are. That’s going to be upsetting to you. And that might keep you awake. I myself have been woken up in the middle of the night with thoughts like these and tried to struggle against them. And there are some things that I have found useful. Usually it’s not going to be going into a detailed analysis about what I think and feel about the past, and untangling all the different threads that are tied together, and seeing which ones are true and which ones aren’t, are false, and which I’m not quite sure about, or looking to the problems ahead. I suppose if I were better off perhaps, engaging in premeditatio malorum in the middle of the night would be helpful for me. But that’s usually not where I myself am, although I’m perfectly fine at doing that during the daytime. Instead, I will typically do one of several things. I don’t do the proverbial visualization that they call counting sheep where I suppose you imagine sheep jumping over a fence. That’s usually how it’s done in cartoons. You count them and eventually in the act of counting you doze off. When I was a kid,I tried doing that, and I found it didn’t work for me, even though the adults suggested it. What I do though is sometimes visualize myself as floating in a deep subterranean river that is cool, and I’m not drowning. As a matter of fact I don’t need to breathe, and I’m just being carried along by the current in a dark place. Sometimes that helps me slip off into sleep. Another thing that’s similarly a visualization exercise I’ll do is I imagine my cat companion, Sassy, who we lost some years ago, but who I was very close with, cuddled up in my arms or lying against my back or putting her paw on me and rearranging my arms into the configuration that she wanted them in. She slept next to me nearly every night. And I imagine being with her and the good feelings that we had together, the love, the companionship. Eventually that helps me doze off. And it also has the added benefit of letting me keep her alive in my heart, which is an entirely different story. But the other things that I actually find quite helpful for putting my mind on other objects than those worries about past, future, or present is to effectively create a new present in which my mind is examining something. And I do it myself with two kinds of literature. I like to read a lot of speculative fiction, as probably quite a few of you know. So I will take a plot from something that I’ve been reading and kind of explore it. Get into all the nooks and crannies of it and think about what did happen, what didn’t happen, what could have happened, the different characters. and how they could interact. And before too long, I find myself drifting off to sleep because that takes a lot of brain work at a time when I’m not really up for all that much of it. The other is I will also take philosophical texts and thinkers that I’ve engaged with before in the past, and I’ll bring to mind some things that they said that I found interesting and think my way through them.And similar to playing around with a plot, I’ll do, you might say, some variations on them. So I might think about Aristotle and his conceptions of moral virtues, and the things that he said in the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics among other places, and then muse a bit about who actually has these, and circumstances in which they would be displayed, and what mitigating factors there might be in saying that somebody is virtuous, or just on the way, or self-controlled, or lacking self-control. or vicious. And again, before too long, my present has been occupied by some complex, coherent thoughts. And I find that that enables me to get the rest that I know that my body and my mind actually need ,and it allows me to drift off and then wake up in the morning ready to do more thinking of different sorts. So I don’t know what you would call this practice, but it strikes me that it could be something quite useful for a lot of people. And I thought I would set down my own experience, and thoughts, and recommendations that you could easily, I think, turn into your own version of this. And it doesn’t have to be literature and it doesn’t have to be philosophy. You could imagine, if you’re a gearhead, an engine, and how you would take it apart and put it back together. You could imagine, if you’re culinarily inclined, the steps in putting together and producing a dish. I think there’s a lot of different possibilities for this, but it could be quite helpful for a lot of people, and it’s using the mind that you’ve been given to put it in somewhat of a better condition. Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe
12 abr

Episode 51 - When What Other People Do Just Doesn't Make Sense

Thanks for reading Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy! This post is public so feel free to share it. Today I had an interesting conversation with somebody who I would call a colleague, somebody working in my building who was hoping to actually get some advice from me about a situation that they had to deal with earlier on in the week. And it’s the sort of thing that comes up, at least in one respect that I’ll tell you about in just a second. 0ver and over and over again. I think that going back as far as I can remember, there have always been people (including myself at times) who had raised this sort of complaint about the bad behavior of another person. So here’s what it’s really about. They say: “I don’t understand why they did this, or do this sort of thing, or behave in this sort of way. It doesn’t make sense to me.” And that is a pretty common reaction to the kinds of situations where we feel like somebody has treated us or somebody else that we care about wrongly. We might feel hurt. We might feel disappointed. We might feel irritated. We might even feel afraid or sorry. We’re sort of resourceless. We don’t understand how this situation came to be, because here’s the crux. We’re attributing to the other person the same sort of motivational structure and evaluation of things, and the ways in which they see good and bad, right and wrong, their own responsibility, as we ourselves have. And if you think about that for a moment, you step back from the situation and you think, is this a rational thing to do? The answer very clearly, quickly and clearly, is No, because people are indeed different from each other, and they have been throughout all of history. I mean, whether you go to mythological stories, or whether you look at history, or whether you look at other things, or just consult your own experience, if you’re really being honest with yourself, people don’t always see things the same way, value the same things, behave in the same way. Their characters are sometimes established in good or bad ways, or not even really that well established. So it would be rather imprudent to hold on to a deeply set belief that I think many many people carry (I won’t estimate what the percentage could possibly be), and this deeply held belief is that at bottom we’re all basically the same. Now we are the same in certain important respects, but that sameness maybe doesn’t go as far up from the deep-down as we might expect it to. So when somebody does behave in a way that, as we say, doesn’t make sense, why would they do that? Why would they behave that way? It tends to catch people off guard because they’re experienced, expecting, desiring, planning even for a different kind of behavior that’s more like theirs. So for example (and this isn’t the case that we’re talking about here): You’re out with some people who have invited you to dinner. You could expect that: well they’re going to pay for dinner because they’re the ones who made the invitation. Or perhaps we’re all going to share the check in some sort of fair and equitable way. You don’t think, for example, that they would look at you and expect you to pay the bill, or push it over by you and kind of nod at it or ask you to do that, make a claim about missing their wallet or any of those sorts of things. That goes against expectations. And yet there are some people who will do that. How do we know that There are people who actually do that sort of thing. And some of us may have more experiences of that, or we might have to rely on other people’s experiences that they tell us about. But these things do indeed happen. People can be unjust. They can be ungenerous. They can be unfriendly. They can betray our trust or confidences. And those are the sorts of things that happen. So when we say, well that doesn’t make sense, we’re not asserting that it’s out of the realm of possibility. Not if we’re actually rational human beings. But we are caught off guard, because what they’re doing, what they’re saying, their attitudes, what they fail to do, seems incongruous or inconsistent with what we’re expecting of them. We could even say that there’s a claim made that what they’re doing is unintelligible, but I think that goes too far. It’s not unintelligible. It’s not as if we can’t understand it at all. And here’s where we’re going to get eventually to two practices that I think can be quite helpful in if you’re running into these sorts of situations for recalibrating your own attitude and mindset. So the first thing I want to say is that these sort of difficulties typically arise out of making a assumption over and over and over again. So it’s probably, as I said, deeply rooted. It’s probably something habitual. It’s probably something that one is doing, and carrying out processes of what we could call unconscious or implicit reasoning that then lead to an emotional reaction of feeling bad, feeling upset and saying: I don’t understand what’s going on here. And this assumption is simply that people in general and in their particulars are very similar or even the same as oneself in terms of what they value, what they think matters, how they expect to be treated and how they want to treat other people, how they understand situations, the amount of impulse control that they have. All of those sorts of things that go into making up a human being with a motivational structure and probably like a narrative of their life up to this point, what kind of person they are and how they’ve developed and displayed it. If we assume wrongly, without good evidence, that most people are going to be like us, well that may be the case if we are living a rather sheltered life where somebody else is doing the shock absorption and keeping us from having to deal with that or where we are indeed in a rather homogenous community, or where we have you might say a cognitive vice of having ignored evidence that is actually staring us in the face, well then we are setting ourselves up once we get into a wider world that includes people of all different varieties, some of whom may be very good and some of whom may be very bad, and other people who are kind of a mess in between, and some people who are rather kind of blah and who don’t have much character at all. When we’re in that wider world, we are going to encounter a lot of these situations where what other people are doing doesn’t make sense because we expect them to be like us. And I’m not saying that’s morally wrong. What I’m saying is that’s actually rather imprudent, not least because then you misjudge what they’re doing and you are setting yourselves up for feeling bad about things. It is indeed an odd conclusion for one to draw from experience of dealing with human beings. And I think that if you are going to pursue this line of thinking, applying it to yourself, you could say that. How did you arrive at thinking everybody was going to be like you. You had to not be paying adequate attention to how people do in fact behave and what they tell you about their motivations, whether in words or in the character And so that lack of attentiveness is something that I think has a root as well in a lack of self-knowledge on the part of the person who is surprised. Certainly a lack of self-knowledge about the fact that you aren’t paying adequate attention to the world that you live in, which includes other people of many different varieties, but probably also a lack of self-knowledge in other important ways. And this is what makes you vulnerable to those sorts of situations. So that’s one useful practice that I think can come out of this. Another one, as I was thinking about what might I say to that person who ran into that situation yet once again, is you can make distinctions, very important distinctions. And this is actually what I did in the situation the dialogue with the person as a matter of fact. We made some of these distinctions, not in a very formal way. I just did it through dialogue. So the first thing you can do is distinguish between what the person did or didn’t do, which is more factual. You can describe it in essentially factual language from two other things. One of those things is also going to be, we could say, matters of fact, the mindset that led that person to doing it, their motivational structure, the why. There’s the that, and there’s the why. And we’re going to put aside the why for just a moment, because the other thing that we can do is distinguish what it is that the person did or didn’t do from how we feel about it, how we think about it, how we judge it. And that last word leads us to realizing that what we’re talking about there is evaluation, moral qualities. We can say what they did was just or unjust, or it was good or bad or it was ugly or it was morally fine or beautiful or we can say it was harmful or helpful we can say that it was prudent or foolish we can do a lot of things with it. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. It’s just that we don’t want to glom these things together too tightly. We actually can make better evaluations when we realize that we’re making evaluations. We should evaluate. We just want to make sure those evaluations are actually correct. So you’re already starting to make some distinctions. And we go then to the motivational structure of the person. And we can, as I mentioned, realize that yes, the person doesn’t see things the way that we do, and that’s why they’re behaving differently than we would behave in those circumstances. So they have a different mindset, they have a different motivational structure, they have a different, we could say, hierarchy of values. Whatever you want to use to make sense of that, something that’s deeply rooted in that person, in their very character. And once you do that, you don’t actually have to let t
28 mar

Episode 50 - The Concept Of Digital Natives

A number of the ideas that people use to make sense of the world and try to formulate what we ought to be doing, make recommendations, set up their own lives, engage with others, are essentially fictions or myths. And I’d like to talk about one of them in particular today that I’ve encountered, now going back at least 20 years in my work as an educator. I’m sure many of you have heard these terms thrown around for about that same amount of time. And the term, and the concept, is that of “digital native.” Usually this is tied in with a generational sort of differentiation where those of us who, for example, grew up in Generation X without the internet, without all these websites, without mobile technology would be digital immigrants, as would definitely be the baby boomers. And then the millennials were supposed to be digital natives. And then, the next generation coming up under them, the current generation in college, Generation Z or Zoomers, whatever you want to call them, are also supposed to be digital natives. On its face, it seems like a plausible idea. Those who, as children, are being introduced to and engaging with a new technology should be a bit more savvy in using it. It should feel more intuitive to them than to people who are older adults who are engaging with it without having had the benefit of childhood. Sort of like people will try to say, you know, the time for learning languages is when you’re a child. By the time that you’re an adult, your brain has become too fixed and ossified to easily learn languages, which turns out to be a good bit of nonsense, and perhaps, I won’t say wishful thinking, because it’s actually a kind of pessimistic thinking, but maybe wishful thinking for the experts who then get to play at being experts about that and use it as an excuse for why they don’t know languages that well So coming back to technology, and in particular, the technologies that are associated with the internet and with phones, you know, mobile technology and all of those sorts of matter, what was being said roughly 20 years ago, maybe a little bit even further back by the so-called pedagogical experts, was that we now needed to take into account, in addition to all the other sorts of divides, like the difference between male and female students or difference between races or any other sort of background thing like that. We also needed to take into stock when we were designing our classes and assessment measures and even thinking about what technology we were going to apply and use, whether in the classroom or in our course management systems outside of the classroom. We needed to take into account this new divide between a sort of have and have not. Those who have a normal facility and perhaps greater insights into the newer technology and those of us who have to struggle with it, who don’t have the habits already baked or built in like these younger people do. I remember one particular incident that really drove it home to me, the mindset that is involved in this. So it was a pedagogy and professional development conference. And I think the session that I was in wasn’t even really about digital divides and digital natives versus digital immigrants or any of that sort of stuff. But the presenters ended up introducing that distinction. And then there were a bunch of other people in the session who in the Q&A and response part were really hammering this point home. I looked around and I noticed the demographic disparities involved in this. So this is when I was quite young as a professor. I’d been teaching probably about... 10 years at that point. So I was in my early 40s, out of graduate school, having a good bit of experience under my belt as a Generation X instructor. And the people who were leading the workshop and carrying out most of the conversation and seemed very, very committed to this notion of digital native versus digital immigrant divide were all boomers. I’m not going to say that all boomers are the stereotypical boomer or anything like that, but these actually were. They had all the wisdom that they were going to share with us younger professors who should be taking our cues from them. about how we should be dealing with yet another generation younger than us, our millennial students. And so boomers were portraying themselves as the ones who, they were part of one big “we”: them, the bosses, we, the underlings. And we were the digital immigrants who needed to be sensitive to and structure everything around the other generation of digital natives. I noticed that there were a few older millennials in there and they were seemingly a little bit uncomfortable. And there were a lot of people my age as well. And they were some of them just kind of keeping their heads down. None of them really wanting to raise the issue, which is that this whole digital native thing is kind of BS. Yeah. Now, why do I say that? Well, because our actual experience in the classroom, many of us using technology in ways that these educational experts were often not knowing about and perhaps not even suspecting that we might be doing, we knew that we instructors actually understood the technology and could use it more readily in than the supposed digital natives, not least because we actually had to be fairly conscious about what we were doing. And so we could raise an issue here about deliberate and conscious use of a technology and more intuitive use, and say that sometimes you’re actually better off thinking about what you’re doing rather than just responding in a gut way. But it went really far beyond that. What I noticed in my classes were that despite having cell phones, despite having grown up in an environment that included the internet and being on computers, most of my students really did not know how to use them effectively, even when it came to things like doing searches for information using a search engine, by that time almost completely Google, or writing papers and formatting them easily and up to standards in a word processing program, or how to effectively send emails. And that’s a very, very basic technology. A lot of them knew on a very surface level how to do these sorts of things, but didn’t really understand once things got tricky, what they should do next. or how to find information that would be useful for them, or any of the limitations of the technology that they were using. If they were indeed natives, they were natives who didn’t understand their own supposed special environment, as well as the people who came in from the outside, we might say, temporally. And so this entire narrative or dichotomy, or whatever you want to have it, ideology perhaps, of digital natives and digital immigrants who are very different, almost like dogs and cats to each other, or you know how “men are from Mars and women are from Venus. This all collapses when you look at it carefully. And I still see people making a lot of reference to it today. But indeed, it tends to still be boomers who are saying those sorts of things, and not people in Generation X, who perhaps had a better vantage point since we had a lot. more technology that we grew up with, but it was technology that we had to master. It wasn’t quite so easy to use when you got a computer. First you actually, back in the day, had to learn how to use an operating system like DOS or some other thing to program what you wanted. And then eventually, you know, we get all of the mouse and point and click and windows and pick whatever else you want to talk about. And things in some respects get easier, but also get harder to really know precisely what you’re doing with. I’m not going to say that younger people per se don’t know what they’re doing. But many of them don’t seem to be, if they are digital natives, natives who know more than just a city block of their environment. And that’s a big problem when we want to make these generalizations. So it’s something I’ve been thinking about today. I thought it might be interesting for people, to talk about and think about, and perhaps compare their own experiences or their own assumptions about this contested term. I will actually close this out by throwing out a modest proposal, which is actually quite a radical one when you’re not just calling it “modest”, which is that we should retire this term. It turns out to be pretty useless for picking out any sort of reality that would help us in figuring out policy or education or anything that really matters to us. Should we replace it with another term? Only if we’re going to make the concept better, fuller, more flexible than it currently stands. It’s really more of a mistake waiting to happen than anything else. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe
11 mar

Episode 49: The Practice Of Taking A Pause, Whether "Stoic" Or Not

This post is public so feel free to share it. Recently, I was a guest on another podcast, as I do from time to time, going on other people’s platforms and talking with them about whatever it is that they want to bring me in for. And in this case, the person wanted to talk about Stoicism and specifically Epictetus, and they hit me with a term that I wasn’t really familiar with but I could say “I think I know what you’re talking about”, especially after they cited a passage and explained what they meant. It’s not something that’s actually new, but the term that’s circulating around is relatively new it’s being labeled as the “Stoic pause.”. The general idea behind it is one that you can find articulated across the Stoic corpus. Seneca talks about it. Epictetus talks about it. Marcus Aurelius talks about it. And so do others as well, and for good reason. And it’s basically just this. Before you allow your reasoning processes or your reactions or your feelings or whatever it happens to be, to lead you to have a response, take a little break. Introduce a little pause temporally into the process. And for the person who was asking me about this, he thought this had to do specifically with the notion of handling what the Stoics call “impressions” or “appearances”, or even “imaginations”, phantasiai, and whether we give assent to them or don’t give assent to them. And that’s all part of the picture, to be sure, but it’s not quite so simple and straightforward as that in all the Stoic writings. There’s lots of passages where those people that I already talked about will say: ‘when you run into this, then pause for a moment and say, examine what’s going on with yourself.” It might be examine the impressions that are impinging upon you, test them to see if they are what they think they are. It could also be pause for a moment so you can choose what you’re going to do. It might be framed in terms of reasoning processes that we could call unconscious, or subliminal, or implicit, or below the level of our conscious thinking. But we are engaging in thinking nonetheless, as we can later reconstruct it. And if we’re paying attention, we can actually see what’s And a lot of our emotions from a Stoic perspective, particularly the emotions that they call the perturbationes, the ones that are getting in the way, “perturbations” is a literal translation of the disruptive emotions. They usually involve a set of judgments that we’re making, and we make those judgments because we have some appearances or impressions coming in, and then we think about those and we respond in turn. So this isn’t the be-all and end-all of what Stoic practice would be, but it’s very helpful to do. Really, we could say you cannot function without doing this, and doing it repetitively and doing it consciously, and over time with practice getting good at it. If you don’t do it, all the other stuff that you do is probably not going to work out very well for you. This is going to be one big deficit area. So far, so good, right? That’s an important idea, taking a pause, not just to take a pause and count to 10 or something like that, but to actually refocus your attention on: “Hey, what’s going on here today?”, and paying attention to what it is that you think, what it is that you feel, the judgments that you’re making, what information you’re using that might be a little dubious. All those sorts of things. That’s all great. Nothing wrong with that at all. It’s also not distinctively Stoic. And to call it the “Stoic pause”, I’m not sure who came up with this term, is a little bit weird and culty, and maybe a little bit too grifter self-helpy as well. Because again, it’s not the unique property of Stoic philosophy. It would be sort of like talking about “Greg Sadler’s soccer kick,” right? Everybody else plays soccer in the world. Of course, many of them call it “football” and we could change it to “Greg Sadler’s football kick”. Well, so many other people are doing it. You would hear that and you’d be like, why are you bringing Greg Sadler into this as distinctive? So there’s nothing particularly Stoic about this. All of the other robust virtue ethics that we can find throughout the centuries, not just in Western philosophy, but also in Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy, all over the place, are going to advise that at least at some point in time, you pay attention to and slow down your reactions, and analyze your own thought processes and emotions, and pay attention to habits and all of that sort of stuff. So just shifting back to the Western sphere and talking about ancient mediterranean and near eastern thought on this, well the Platonists advise doing that. You’ve just got to read Plutarch a bit and you’ll see that. The Aristotelians definitely suggest doing this. The Stoics do. The Epicureans do. Even the Skeptics who some of them don’t believe in much of anything, they certainly are suggesting doing that as well. This shows you that we’re already covering a lot of ground But it’s not just philosophy people. We could say that this is an important part of many religious traditions as well. And so you can find in the Biblical Wisdom literature some references to doing this sort of thing. We can say that it also pops up in literature as well. And speaking of literature, it even shows up in science fiction. I brought up in that particular session, that recording on the person’s podcast, that one prime example of this is from A.E. Van Vogt, who was a Golden Age science fiction writer, probably most famous for his World of Null-A and Slan, but he wrote a lot of other works as well. And he called it the “thalmic pause”, because he was saying you put the part of your brain that likes to make snap decisions on a sort of pause ,and you think through what’s actually going on here. He’s describing exactly the same process. Now, of course, if you know your history about this guy, Van Vogt had some philosophical training, specifically, he was involved with the Institute for General Semantics and Korzybski and those people. But there’s many other people who advise taking some sort of pause before making a snap judgment or a decision. I mean, we might even say that we see something like this going on in the very first book of the Iliad, because Achilles is hearing what Agamemnon has to say, and he’s getting angry, and he’s thinking: “I should kill this b*****d right here where he stands. I’m going to pull up my sword and do this jerk in. He’s not a very good king at all.” And Athena helps him to stay his hand. This might be a prime example of this sort of thing. And, you know, we have a great character in Homer who will often do that sort of thing, and typically only gets himself in deep trouble when he makes quick decisions, and that’s Odysseus. So it’s not as if this is a distinctively philosophical idea, let alone just a Stoic idea, but it is a really good thing to do. I think philosophies might be particularly helpful for helping us understand why we should do it, how it can be beneficial to us, and then what we should be filling that pause with, how we should be examining the thought processes and decision-making processes, the evaluations that we’re engaged in. So I’m not going to call this the “Stoic pause” myself, because as we’ve just talked about, it’s got a much wider base than just Stoicism. But if somebody wants to call it the “Stoic pause”, that’s up to them. They can certainly do that. But I do think it’s something that all of us would benefit from incorporating into our practice, even if we get away from our ordinary lives. And we’re just talking about studying philosophy. I’ll give you just a prime example of this before we end here. So you’re reading something and you think you understand exactly what the author is saying. And they write something that to you seems really, really stupid, and you find yourself thinking: “Why am I reading this dummy? I’m wasting my time with an idiot like this.” Well, that’s a great place to take a pause. You might actually be right. Now, you might be right in your assessment that they’re an idiot, and have gotten something fundamentally wrong, and then wrote about it. You might also be wrong at the same time, that it’s a total waste of your time. So you should actually look at the connection between those two statements, right? Because one doesn’t necessarily imply the other. But odds are, if they’re a great thinker, and you are reading them for the first or eighth time, and other people think that reading them is valuable, and as you’re reading them, your take is: “No, this person is stupid and their ideas are stupid.” Odds are that you’re missing something, and you’re probably bringing something to the reading that’s getting in the way. So you might want to take a pause there and think about how you are responding and whether it really makes all that much sense. And if you do that, you will probably save yourself some headaches and not throw away books that would be useful for you to refocus on. So you see that even outside of our ordinary scope of life, if you’re just doing study, this pause, whatever you want to call it. We could call it the “Stoic pause", the “Platonic pause, the “A.E. Van Vogt” pause, whatever you want to call it. This practice of pausing, and then filling that pause with the sorts of mental activities that are going to be helpful for you, this can be incredibly powerful. And you’re probably going to need to do this thousands of times over the course of your life in order to be happy. Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Gregory Sadler is the founder

This podcast takes insights, arguments, distinctions, and practices from complex philosophical texts and thinkers and makes them accessible for anyone who wants to learn. It also provides advice about how to effectively study philosophy and apply it to your own life gregorybsadler.substack.com

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Gregory B. Sadler
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2024 - 2026
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56
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© Gregory B. Sadler, ReasonIO / Reason at Work, LLC
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