A SHIFT FROM MEDIEVAL TO MODERN THOUGHTS:

SOME SECONDARY NOTES

Two Medieval Approaches to God.

One of the hallmarks of philosophy is looking at one question from multiple different angles.
It's not enough to think about stuff for a while and come to what seems like a reasonable
conclusion, and then call it a life. You can't do that. Our thoughts about any subject should
be an evolution. The subject today is a topic we've danced around quite a bit; we've
covered little pieces of it, but today we're going to talk about it more. That's right, by the
end of the show today you're going to know the answer to the question: Does God exist?
Just Kidding, obviously. But I would like to talk about some common ways that people think
about this question and address them. For about a year of my life, most of my free time was
spent reading proofs of God's existence or non-existence. Not just philosophical proofs,
although I read a lot of those, I read forums, I read articles, I read hateful YouTube
comments, I read books. I called it my spiritual quest, you know, there are many
philosophers we've talked about that come to question what they think about the nature of
existence and the world they live in, and they go on some sort of spiritual journey where
they find themselves, I believe I compared it to John Travolta's mid life crisis in the movie
Wild Hogs. Well this year that I spent, was my Wild Hogs when it came to the question of:
does God exist? And what I saw was, like most things, the vast majority of the people are
emphatically on one side or the other. And one of the main lines of thinking I saw from the
Atheist side of things, not from the philosophers, but from the average person walking
around on the street, was they were "proving" God didn't exist or making fun of the idea of
a God existing based on a very limited view of what God is. These people are born into a
world where monotheism rules the day when it comes to religion, people are given a code
of ethics to follow and if they do a good job they're given VIP treatment in the afterlife.
That's the world they're born into. That's what "God" is to them, because that's the only
concept they've ever been introduced to because they've never studied it, and they call it
a life. Pathetic fairy tale, meant to keep humans in line, God doesn't exist. Well it isn't that
simple.Just like when philosophers use words like virtue and good and truth, and when they
say those words they mean something very different based on who is saying them, because
the individual definitions of them change, the word "God" is describing a concept that
changes based on who is saying it. How ridiculous would it be to think that when Plato
talked about God he had the same concept in his mind as a modern day Christian or Jew,
he lived hundreds of years before Jesus supposedly walked the earth. Some of these
people get so caught up in thinking "I'm so smart. I realize that snakes can't actually talk
and that a guy didn't build a giant ship and corral two of every species on the ship while
God killed everyone else on the planet, I know that's just a story." They get so caught up in
that phase that they quit, they don't look at it any deeper; they don't think about the
underlying concepts and whether they have merit. They don't think about the fact that
maybe they just disagree with the medium its being communicated through.Just think
about something for a second. Just on the concept of God, just on this show we've already
talked about several definitions of the concept. We've talked about God being the thing,
whatever it is, that brought this cosmos, into existence. Nothing more. Not interested in
whether you said a bad word yesterday, not interested in whether you cheated on your
test, to put a modern spin on it, the thing that caused the big bang. Later philosophers
would say stuff like, the totality of all existence. Think of EVERYTHING that exists as a single
unit, a unit that we and everything else in the universe are just aspects of. Couldn't that be
considered God? If you don't think the big bang needed a cause, you certainly cant think
it's pointless to entertain the possibility that it had one. We've talked about the Stoics and
their pantheistic view of God where god is the universe. You know, this thing, God, pervades
all things. That thing which is difficult to describe with words, but it animates all things that
possess life. We've talked about Plotinus and his transcendent "one". And guess what guys,
we've barely even gotten started with the concept of God. In fact, there are people, for
each and every one of these philosophers that dedicate their lives to understanding what
they meant by their concept of God. How they used reason to determine that something
transcendent like that must exist if you logically keep going, well what comes after that?
Now here's the point of all this. That's just "what God is". That's just one very small part of
what is laid out in these monotheistic religious texts. Just imagine being five years old and
your parents take you to church for the first time, and you're really excited and instead of
hearing the story about the man who built a giant ship and with God's wind at his back
managed to conquer this unconquerable task, imagine if you started diving into Plato's
Timaeus and started talking about the concept of a transcendent Good that can serve as
a wind at your back. How many Sundays would you last before you started convulsing on
the ground every Sunday morning like you're in Paranormal Activity, just so you can get out
of going to church. I mean, the philosophical concept of each virtue goes equally as deep
as the concept of God. People go to school for years to understand these things with any
sort of depth, and like Averroes pointed out in the last episode, can we really expect the
average person to go through that kind of schooling and understand the underlying
concepts of religion in depth?How many Sundays would pass before the pews start looking
like a Pittsburgh Pirates game? Make no mistake. When philosophers talk about the
concept of a God, they're thinking about it in a philosophical way. Today, we're going to
be talking about probably the most famous proof of God's existence in the history of the
world and it was put forward in the Middle ages where we're studying philosophy now. As
we've talked about before, monotheistic religions were powerful and in charge during the
Middle Ages. As a result, most of the great thinkers were members of these monotheistic
religions, and most of them used all their excess brainpower to make adjustments to Plato or
Aristotle compatible with this monotheism. We've seen Plotinus and his neo-platonism and
Saint Augustine who was heavily influenced by him. We've seen people like Philo of
Alexandria trying to make Plato compatible with the Torah. Plato's philosophy really lent
itself to being compatible with these new religions on the scene because of several things.
He believed in a creator, he believed in the mind and body being separate from each
other which then allows for the possibility of an immortal soul, many things were good about
it. But Aristotle was a tougher sell to the church. We've seen how the Islamic world and
beyond worked to reconcile Aristotle's philosophy with Islamic theology. But what was going
on in the West during that time?Have you Ever heard the phrase Greek East Latin West?
Well it refers to this period of time that we're in right now. When the Roman Empire fell it
broke into two parts, the very Greek Byzantine empire of the east and the Latin speaking
west. Philosophy continued in both areas, but the more historically significant thing to talk
about is what was happening ALL throughout Europe at the same time; it's what's known as
Scholasticism. People use Scholasticism as a way to categorize philosophy of the time, you
have a list of names known as Scholastic Philosophy. But really Scholasticism is just a method
acquiring knowledge and learning that focuses heavily on dialectical reasoning. Dialectic
is, if you remember, what Socrates used all the time. It's a style of doing philosophy that is
conversational. Some people have opposing viewpoints and argue against each other
being sure to use their tools of logic and reason as best they can, and hopefully at the end
of the conversation they are a little closer to the truth. Well, one of the guys were talking
about today is known as the father of Scholasticism. St. Anselm of Canterbury. And it's his
argument for the existence of God which would later become known as the "Ontological
Argument" is the most famous proof of God's existence in history. But I want to give it to you
guys in true dialectical fashion. I want you guys to have a conversation with St. Anselm and
let him convince you that God exists. But first, I want to talk about the way Saint Anselm
would have been thinking about things that exist. Simply put, he would've broken things
down into two types. Things that exist in our HUMAN understanding alone and things that
exist in reality.So lets think about some examples of these. What are some things that exist
only in our human understanding? Well that would be anything that exists in our imagination
that does not exist in reality. You can take your pick of the countless options. My little pony,
Harry Potter, if you have an idea for an invention and it exists only in your mind because you
haven't actually created it yet, these are all things that can be thought of as only having
existence in relation to a human understanding them. Now if you had that invention
manufactured; if you finally put pen to paper and got off of your parents futon and made
that invention exist in reality, then it would not only exist in reality, it would still exist in
your imagination too right? Well, at that point, your new invention falls into the category of
most everything we see around us. A lawnmower, a vacuum cleaner, a Honda Civic with
the muffler taken off of it, all of these things exist both in our imaginations and in reality.
They also all make recording this podcast nearly impossible. But there is another class of
things.
Things that exist ONLY in reality and not in human understanding. For example, you see
every once in a while some backpackers go deep into the Amazon rain forest and come
across some new species of bird or insect. A species that was buried so deep in the Amazon
jungle, no human knew that it existed, no human had understanding of it, no human had it
in their imagination, but it still existed in reality despite the fact that a human didn't know
about it. And there are all kind of examples of this. There may be galaxies and other
bubbles of the multiverse that we have no idea exist yet, but they still exist in reality. Really,
there could be things flying all around us all the time, beings existing in this same space
whose existence really doesn't affect us at all, we can't see them, but they still exist.Well
when we look at St. Anselm's famous proof of God's existence, we have to not let our
individual biases of what the word God means get in the way. Anselm is proving the
existence of the concept of God. He says himself:"I began to ask myself whether there
might be found a single argument which would require no other for its proof than itself
alone; and alone would suffice to demonstrate that God truly exists, and that there is a
supreme good requiring nothing else, which all other things require for their existence and
well-being; and whatever we believe regarding the divine Being."Now focus on what he
said there. All he's looking to do is prove that there is a supreme good that requires nothing
else for its existence, which all other things require for their existence and well being. He
could be equally proving the existence of Plotinus's transcendent "one" or "good", which
didn't have any human characteristics. What's important to point out, is that whenever
you're proving that God exists or proving that anything exists for that matter, the most
important thing you have to do is define terms, understand exactly what concept you have
in your head that you're trying to describe with words and then prove. You need to provide
a definition. And this is where St Anselm's Ontological argument begins and ends: Within his
definition of what God is. He's setting up the idea here:"Therefore, Lord, you who give
knowledge of the faith, give me as much knowledge as you know to be fitting for me,
because you are as we believe and that which we believe. And indeed we believe you are
something greater than which cannot be thought. Or is there no such kind of thing, for "the
fool said in his heart, 'there is no God'" But certainly that same fool, having heard what I just
said, "something greater than which cannot be thought," understands what he heard, and
what he understands is in his thought, even if he does not think it exists. For it is one thing for
something to exist in a person's thought and quite another for the person to think that thing
exists."So if you were having a conversation with St. Anselm, and you were one of these
people who "know" for a fact that God doesn't exist. He would start by setting a trap. He
would say, Ok, I hear what you're saying. God doesn't exist. But lets just talk about what we
religious people think of as God, would you agree that if, and only if, we're talking in theory
here, if God existed, he would be the greatest thing you could ever imagine? If this thing
existed, you as a mere human could never imagine something greater than him?Now, this
seems perfectly reasonable. I think 99.9% of people would answer yes here. He's not saying
that that thing exists yet, he's just defining what it is we're trying to prove the existence of.
And he does so by describing it as "That than which nothing greater can be thought." If
you're a Gnostic Atheist that claims to KNOW that God doesn't exist, you are quick to agree
to this, because you see it as him just shining a light on this delusional concept he believes
in. But it's a trap! He quickly makes that person feel a little stupid:

"Thus even the fool is compelled to grant that something greater than which cannot be
thought exists in thought, because he understands what he hears, and whatever is
understood exists in thought. And certainly that greater than which cannot be understood
cannot exist only in thought, for if it exists only in thought it could also be thought of as
existing in reality as well, which is greater. If, therefore, that than which greater cannot be
thought exists in thought alone, then that than which greater cannot be thought turns out
to be that than which something greater actually can be thought, but that is obviously
impossible. Therefore something than which greater cannot be thought undoubtedly exists
both in thought and in reality."
That's something he does a lot in his writing, he writes in tongue twisters. It's like something
Ron Burgandy would read before he goes on air. Good thing you got me to turn it into
English. What he's saying is: By acknowledging that God is "the greatest thing you could
ever imagine", you are acknowledging that God exists in your imagination, right? Again,
most Atheists wouldn't have a problem with that. They would say he ONLY exists in my
imagination. Remember as we talked about before, there is a difference to St. Anselm
between things that exist only in human understanding and things that exist in reality.Then
Anselm would say, well certainly it's wonderful to be able to imagine things, you know, you
can imagine that new invention of yours being made and on store shelves, but it's much
greater when that invention exists in reality right? Most people would say yes here. Things
that exist in reality are a little bit better than that same thing only existing in a day dream of
ours.Then he goes in for the kill. He says, "Well you agreed that God is 'the greatest thing you
could ever imagine', and you say this "God" that only exists in your imagination is the
greatest thing you can ever imagine, but you can also imagine that that concept of God
ALSO exists in reality, and wouldn't that be greater than ONLY existing in your imagination?
What he's saying is: if we define god as the greatest thing you can ever imagine, then you
CAN imagine that God exists, so therefore according to the definition you agreed to, he
DOES exist. Something funny that I've noticed as I've been re-reading all of this Medieval
Philosophy is that whenever one of these guys asserts something to be absolutely true, like
they preface what they're saying with obviously or certainly, most of the time that's the
portion of the argument that I take issue with. It's a weird psychological thing there, it's like
they're trying to convince themselves of it.When most people hear this argument for the first
time, if they're not invested in the outcome one way or another, I think they usually say,
"Hmm. Sounds good, but I think there's something wrong with it, but I can't put my finger on
what it is." For the record, this was my reaction when I first read it. I was incredibly open
minded to either outcome. I ended up reading it a few more times and thinking about it for a
week or so and I'll have you know, because I'm very proud of myself for this, I independently
arrived at the same conclusion that a guy named Immanuel Kant did centuries after
Anselm. He wrote the most famous refutation of the Ontological
argument, although my thoughts were no where near as justified as his and he did it with a
much different educational upbringing than me, so Kant wins by far. But what he says is that
the problem with this argument lies in two main areas, both of which are centered around
that initial definition of God. God is "that than which nothing greater can be thought". Why
necessarily is something that exists IN reality, greater, than something that doesn't exist in
reality? That sounds a lot like a bias inherent in a human that values existing over not
existing. The second thing Kant said is that Anselm is wrong to think of existence as a quality
of something. You know, you can't think of a banana as being yellow, thin, calorie-dense
and existing. Existence isn't the same as the quality of yellow. Without existence, the banana
wouldn't have the ability to be yellow, thin, or calorie-dense. If we invented a new fruit and
made existence a quality of it like being yellow or thin, what would happen? Let's say we
believe in a fruit called a Washington. Washingtons are small little green fruits that are round
and they grow on trees and they have an outer shell that you have to peel off to get to the
fruit, oh yeah and they exist. Based on our definition, if you thought that Washingtons don't
exist you're contradicting yourself because they, by definition, exist.One of the other really
popular refutations to it was done by a guy named Gaunilo who lived at the same time as
Anselm and was devoutly religious himself. He points out that you can use the same
argument to prove that lots of other things exist. His example was a Piland. He says he
believes in an island existing, somewhere out there, that is greater than any island you can
imagine. An island that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Everything about
the island is perfection. We can imagine this glowing perfect island, but if we defined it as
an island than which nothing greater can be conceived, then Anselm proves that island
DOES exist somewhere out there.But then again, there is a refutation to THAT argument that
says that there can't be a perfect amount of trees on the island or a perfect temperature.
There is no "perfection" when it comes to those traits, but there can be a perfect "goodness"
and "justice", and these are the qualities Anselm was proving the existence of with his
argument. Honestly, the best way for you to figure out what you think about it is to be alone
or with friends and think about it. This is the kind of thing I do all the time, and people
sometimes think I'm weird. When I'm in a setting where people are sitting around each other
and no one is saying anything, like in the car or at a dinner or something, I look around for
the person of the group that obviously thinks they're very wise and I ask them what they
think about some concept in philosophy or politics that is highly debated. See, I know both
sides of the argument, and the last thing this type of person is going to do is say "I don't
know". So it's fun to listen to their answer and either find the fallacies or offer the counter
argument in a respectful way and hear what they say. I've learned so much about how
people arrive at what they think the truth is just by doing this and I highly recommend it. And
come to think of it, now that I'm saying it, it sounds a lot like what Socrates did. Hopefully it
won't get me killed one day.Real quick, there's also a reading of Anselm that says that
because a quality of a perfect God would be that he exists in all possible realms, if there is
even a possibility of him existing, he must exist, but all the same fallacies are present in that
argument, they're just in different places. Just thought i'd mention it so that people didn't
think I'd never heard that reading of it.Now if this argument doesn't convince you that God
exists, at the very least let it illustrate that the concept of God is not a narrow one-
dimensional conversation.Almost 4000 years ago if you were born in Babylon, if someone
stole something from you, "justice" to you was cutting their hands off. You're born in today's
world, someone steals something from you and you have a very different idea of what sort
of retribution balances the scales. Just how you can't be born into modern times, allow
modern social conventions to tell you what justice is and then pretend to understand
everything about the term justice, you cant do the same thing with God either. It's not just
because it's not fair to great thinkers of the past, it's not fair to yourself. You severely limit
your understanding of anything if you experience something once and then pretend there's
nothing else to know about it.We talked about the period of time before Avicenna where
people read Aristotle once and declared it was practically worthless and then people like
Al Farabi were able to look at it from a different angle, update the examples and find a
way to make it compatible with Islamic theology. Well there's still two major monotheistic
religions left that could have found a way to make Aristotle compatible with them. Judaism
and Christianity. Well Christianity is done unquestionably best by next week's episode: St.
Thomas Aquinas. It's a huge episode. But first I want to talk about what many consider to be
the greatest Jewish thinker in history Moses Maimonides.The discussion about Moses
Maimonides and his philosophy is centered around something we were touching on at the
beginning of the show. Should we look at the Bible, or in his case the Torah, the rest of the
Old Testament and some other works, should we take those things literally? Should we look
at the stories in the Torah and the way that Moses described this monotheistic all-powerful
creator and take them to be a perfect account of what God is?Well, Maimonides thought
to do that was ludicrous. The first thing we have to understand is that Maimonides was
smart. Really smart. He was a highly skilled doctor AND lawyer. If you're a girl, he is the best
guy you could ever take home to meet your parents. And he applied his massive brain to
philosophy.Have you ever thought about the fact that when the Old Testament talks about
God they talk about him as though he has human characteristics? You know, God said let
there be light. He's speaking like he has vocal chords and a larynx? They always refer to
God as a He as though he has higher levels of testosterone than other Gods. They call him
the Father as though he impregnated something. They even use terms like create that have
a very human flair to them, so to the untrained reader, this God sure does seem like
something humans made up and they didn't think about it very hard. Well Moses
Maimonides thought this was a terrible mistake. Firstly, even in his times the Torah was written
by Moses a LONG time ago. I mean, Maimonides lived during the 1100's and the Old
Testament was written, most people believe around 1400 BC. So, if we use those dates,
Maimonides is commenting on a book that was: Maimonides was to the Old Testament as
We are to the New Testament. Maimonides said that Moses, when he wrote the first five
books of the Old Testament, had a giant task in front of him. See, we have to understand
that the people of his time weren't familiar with the monotheistic personal God outlook. He
had enough of a mountain to climb just relaying to people that this single God existed, let
alone everything else about it. He had to write it in terms that were understandable to
humans in HIS day.It's funny because this is really similar to what we were talking about at
the beginning of the show. I mean, what was Moses going to do? Go from zero to calling
God an "it" in three seconds? Similar to the way a church wouldn't tell somebody just getting
into things about Plato's Timaeus, was Moses supposed to tell the people of his time about
this perfect, infinite entity that was beyond any linguistic explanation? No! Maimonides says
he couldn't have done that, so that is why he wrote the Bible using personification. God is
not a He. He doesn't have a hand. He doesn't speak. These are all metaphors for what he
actually did that humans can understand easier.In fact he goes further than that. I mean,
when people that believe in God picture god, they must think of something. Do they think
of a homo-sapien? What does he look like? Maimonides doesn't just say God doesn't have
human qualities. He said that he doesn't have qualities at all. To have qualities is to have a
certain amount of plurality. And that begs an obvious question, one that goes all the way
back to Zeno and his famous paradox of Achilles running halfway to the finish line and then
half way to the finish line and never actually reaching the finish line because he has to go
half way before he can go the whole way. If multiple parts exist in ANY sense, the question,
"What brought those two parts together." becomes valid. God cannot actually possess
attributes because of this to Maimonides. He says:"There is no oneness at all except in
believing that there is one simple essence in which there is no complexity or multiplicity of
notions, but one notion only; so that from whatever angle you regard it and from whatever
point of view you consider it, you will find that it is one, not divided in any way and by any
cause into two notions"There are obvious similarities between this conception of god and
Plotinus's transcendent "one". Remember the first rule of the "one" is that you can't say
anything about the "one". This is the same thing Laozi and Zhuangzi said about the Dao. It is
beyond the unfair categorization of words. See, whenever we say anything, even words like
Justice and God, to bring it full circle, we're categorizing them. That is the object of
language, to convey a specific idea. Language wouldn't work very well if words were like
what they are in Hawaii, where one word means twelve different things. But language runs
into problems when trying to define or categorize something like God. God is infinite to
Maimonides. Maimonides repeatedly says God is indefinable or other similar things. The way
around this, what he thinks is that it's impossible for us to say what God IS, we can only say
what God is not. One time I was randomly walking down the road and a mother duck and
about seven baby ducklings were walking in a line across the road and a couple people
were really impatient, they honked their horns and swerved around them, so I went into the
road and tried to hurry the ducks up across the road and I held my hand up to the next car
that was waiting like I'm directing traffic or something and when the ducks crossed the
person rolled down their window to me and said "You're so benevolent!" and I was like
"Thank You!" at least I think that's what he said to me.So, I'm benevolent for helping the
ducks, but is calling God benevolent at that point fair at all? To put God's benevolence on
the same level as mine for helping the ducks is ridiculous to Maimonides. What he draws
from this is that anything the Old Testament says about God is a metaphor. To think it's the
truth is naive; you can't actually categorize God with words. In fact, outside of
understanding what it says in the Torah as a metaphorical representation of God, there are
only two other ways you can accurately say anything about God. One, is by what is known
as negative theology or a concealed negation. You cant talk about what God is, the only
thing you can talk about is what God isn't. If we were saying that God is benevolent, that
would be wrong because we use that same word to describe me with the ducks, instead
we would say God is not merciless. We can only say what we know he is not. The only other
way you can talk about God according to Maimonides is by talking about what God does
and then making inferences yourself afterward. You can say that God blessed me with a
certain quality, but you can't say things like God is loyal to his children or loving or anything
else you would infer from God blessing you with a certain quality, you would just say "I am
blessed." I'd like to end with a quote by Maimonides that has stuck with me for years he
said:"When I have a difficult subject before me — when I find the road narrow, and can see
no other way of teaching a well established truth except by pleasing one intelligent man
and displeasing ten thousand fools — I prefer to address myself to the one man, and to take
no notice whatever of the condemnation of the multitude; I prefer to extricate that
intelligent man from his embarrassment and show him the cause of his perplexity, so that he
may attain perfection and be at peace."

The Renaissance

The term renaissance means “re-birth”, but in order for anything to be “re-born”, there first
needed to be a death. We can see instances in our everyday lives where there are
figurative renaissances where nothing really bad happens when that death occurs. You
can go on a new diet and lose 100 pounds and feel like you're personally experiencing a
renaissance; the only death there is the death of your old, unhealthy lifestyle. You could
even end a long period of corruption in your local government where you fire a few people
at city hall and the city experiences a renaissance; the potholes are getting filled and the
lines at the DMV are only three hours long. But what died in order to usher in “THE”
renaissance? Well the answer is: between 30 and 50% of the ENTIRE population of Europe.
What died was an entire way of life.

We say “renaissance” in modern times and there is a pretty positive connotation associated
with it; we could easily think about it in a black and white way. It would be really easy to
just look at the Renaissance as the catalyst between modern times and the Middle Ages
and declare that the Renaissance was the good time period to live in and the Middle Ages
was the bad time period to live in. It would be really easy to look at the west during the
Middle Ages, see that it's called “The Dark Ages”, that sounds terrible. Who wants to live in
the Dark Ages? That sounds much worse in every possible way than the Renaissance. Well this
is a common misconception that I want to make sure we don't fall into because it's not that
simple and it comes down a great question, one that has been heavily discussed by the
greatest philosophers of all time and one that every one of us needs to ask ourselves: How
do you define human progress?

Most of us listening to this podcast live in pretty extraordinary times. Less than ever before in
human history people don't die of preventable diseases, there is less war, more
representation for the average citizen, a lower infant mortality rate, people are get more
value from the money that they make; the list goes on. Barring 5 countries or so, the
average citizen of every country is better off today than they were a hundred years ago
and were better off a century ago than they were a century before that. Despite all this, at
least in America, higher numbers of people than ever are on anti-depressants, anxiety
medication, mood stabilizers; what metric do we use to measure human progress? Is
progress defined by how scientifically advanced we are? Is it defined by how many people
have jobs? Maybe you think progress is defined by some sort of happiness index, where
progress means an increase in the percentage of happy people. There are people who say
that although modern America is obviously much further advanced in areas like science
and medicine that society as a whole has actually regressed from times when we lived in
small hunter-gatherer tribes. They point to studies where people go to places like Siberia or
Puapa New Guinea where people still live as our ancestors supposedly did and they find
that they have a much lower rate of mental illness and the average member is happier and
more fulfilled than the average American. The point of this is that the progress of humanity
can be measured in MANY different ways.

The Dark Ages were not PURE DARKNESS in every area of human life. To think of it that way is
a huge oversimplification. The term, “The Dark Ages”, is referring to a period in Western
Europe of intellectual stagnation and regression. The Dark Ages is how Western Europe
spent their Middle Ages. But just because there was intellectual regression doesn't mean
that there was regression when it came to every facet of the average person's life at the
time. Most historians don't like the terms “Dark Ages” or “Renaissance” because to talk
about the history of humanity in terms of only intellectual progress is not accurate...because
intellectual progress or regress is carried out by only a handful of people. 95% of people
living at the time had nothing to do with what thought was going to be prevalent in coming
years. To think of progress only in terms of the thought of the time period is a mistake. So if
you think of “progress” as the progression of human thought then the Dark Ages was a
terrible time to live, but if you take other factors into consideration it starts looking like the
not-so-dark Ages. There's actually an entire segment of the Middle Ages known as the
“high” Middle Ages. There were several steps forward in agriculture, they built those
beautiful Gothic cathedrals, but more than ever there was a feeling of unification in
Western Europe because they were all connected by one thing: the church, Christianity. So
when we talk about the death of an entire way of life, when we talk about the series of
events that took us from the “Dark Ages” to the “Renaissance”, please understand that
these events didn't mark the darkest period of a period of darkness, they marked the end of
a period of prosperity in many ways. The people were happy. And much like the Warring
States period in early China and the beginning of the Hellenistic Age in the Mediterranean,
this change from a period of prosperity to a period of widespread political unrest led to
what we now know as the Renaissance. Once again, it's only through lifting MORE weight or
increasing the intensity of your workout that you get stronger as an individual. And it's only
though adversity and political unrest that humanity really shines and is forced to do some
soul searching and make large steps forward intellectually.

To live during the high middle ages was to live during a time when Europe was so
prosperous that it was actually overpopulated. They were using almost every extra acre of
land just to be able to feed everybody. But then something happened that changed the
course of humanity. This may be the most important event in the history of human thought
and it really had nothing to do with thought at all, no one knows exactly how it started, or
exactly where it came from. This event and the series of events that follows it would forever
change the world and it is known as The Black Death. The current narrative is that it
originated in the plains of Asia, traveled along the Silk Road and eventually found its way to
Crimea where it embedded itself in fleas that traveled on the backs of rats on merchant
ships to the ports in Western Europe. This pandemic disease is like Finding Nemo. People
often mistakenly think of The Black Death as just “The Bubonic Plague”, but it was actually
more than that. Bubonic was just one form that the plague presented itself in, you also had
to worry about the Pneumonic plague, like pneumonia, it would destroy your lungs from the
inside out. And the septicemic plague which lead to something called Disseminated
intravascular coagulation, which...let's just say you didn't want that to happen to you. When
all was said and done, historians estimate that around 400 million people were killed by The
Black Death and like I said before between 30 and 60% of the population of Europe. This is
the account of one person describing it:

"The symptoms were not the same as in the East, where a gush of blood from the nose was
the plain sign of inevitable death; but it began both in men and women with certain
swellings in the groin or under the armpit. They grew to the size of a small apple or an egg,
more or less, and were vulgarly called tumors. In a short space of time these tumors spread
from the two parts named all over the body. Soon after this the symptoms changed and
black or purple spots appeared on the arms or thighs or any other part of the body,
sometimes a few large ones, sometimes many little ones. These spots were a certain sign of
death, just as the original tumor had been and still remained.”

Just imagine how it must have felt to look around you and see 30 to 50% of everyone
hopelessly dying of THAT with no end in sight. They weren't just killed, they died hopelessly.
Once you saw the tell-tale signs, the black marks start appearing or swelling around the
body, you had a week to live. They had no idea what caused it or how to treat it, it must
have felt like the world was coming to an end. Just imagine how it must have felt being a
Christian during this time. People today have a hard enough time reconciling a school
shooting with the existence of a God, imagine how people must have felt watching this
disease spreading to everyone all around them. The lives of people in Western Europe
changed dramatically and you hear the accounts of people living at the time and these
people were living in a nightmare. Here's one of them:

“All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried. At every church
they dug deep pits down to the water-table; and thus those who were poor who died
during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a
large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shoveled it down
on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of
earth, just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese. “

They had to bury people in such close proximity to each other that they compared it to the
process of making lasagne. This was actually a huge problem. One very important part of
dying as a religious person during this time period was being buried in consecrated ground.
So many people were dying that they actually ran out of acceptable places to bury
people, so they started stacking them on top of each other. We build skyscrapers to stack
more office space into the important downtown area of a city, these people had to build
skyscrapers of dead bodies. Now as you can probably imagine, this world that they were
living in was terrifying, and people started to change. One such change is described here:

"...Such fear and fanciful notions took possession of the living that almost all of them
adopted the same cruel policy, which was entirely to avoid the sick and everything
belonging to them. By so doing, each one thought he would secure his own safety.

There was sort of an “every man for himself” way of thinking that emerged from all of this.
People saw the horrific way that these people were dying and started staying away from
everyone that was sick so that they could survive themselves. People just stopped showing
up to work. I mean, why would you go to work if you might get coughed on by somebody
and have a week to live? When you think that at any point you could drop dead of this
terrible disease, why think long term? The problem is as a society we need people to go to
work. The paycheck and stability is their incentive to go to work, but the rest of society
relies on everyone else to do something productive that also helps them.

That's the beauty of society right? You hear someone every once in a while talk about: “I
don't need anybody, I'm just fine all by myself.” Well unless if that person is living in a shack
on the top of a mountain squirrel hunting all day, they are fooling themselves. This is one of
the things that makes society work, we rely on others to do their part so that we can benefit
from it and make doing our part easier and we're all better off for it. For example, just
eating breakfast, you might have some fruit that was grown and harvested locally, a spoon
that was made in Taiwan, a cup that was made in China, oatmeal that was grown and
packaged in Kansas, and orange juice from Florida. Society is a group effort and if the
people in Florida stopped making orange juice, we would have some issues. Well,
especially back in these times, the thing that society MOST relies on and one of the biggest
money making industries back then was Agriculture. Now between 30 to 50% of the entire
population dying and a large group of people that had this new found sense of apathy
about their role in society and going to work, the people in charge of these large
Agricultural productions, the people that pay peasants to work the fields and make them
money, they were having a really hard time “fielding” enough people to get the work
done.

So then the faithful law of supply and demand started to take over. Peasants became
increasingly more valuable as more and more of them died. The supply of peasants
couldn't keep up with the demand of work that needed to get done to feed society. When
a company today can't get enough people to willingly do a job for a certain salary, they
are forced to raise the salary, and that is exactly what happened in Western Europe during
the fall of the Middle Ages. Though it was completely illegal, the desperate times allowed
for peasants to shop around with other land owners to try to make a better wage. These
subjugated people were finally seeing what it was like to be a free citizen with a skill set that
people valued. What started as merely a pandemic disease that led to a population crisis,
quickly turned into an economic crisis as well, because the owners of these fields
couldn't afford to pay for the rising cost of their workforce. This threatened a complete
collapse of the Agriculture of the region, so what the governments did to try to combat
this was impose a wage freeze. Have you ever worked somewhere where someone gets
fired, and regardless of whether they're there or not the same amount of work needs to
get done? So you just have to pick up the slack and work harder with no increase in pay?
Well these peasants were dealing with that times a thousand and imagine if the
government made it the LAW that you couldn't get paid any more than you do now. This
wage freeze in coalition with several other small regulations and the massive tax
increase on citizens to fight the 100 years war with France led to peasants banding
together and attempting to overthrow their governments. So what started as a
population crisis, quickly turned into an economic crisis that then turned into a political
crisis.

Why are all of these events significant to philosophy? Because this was a paradigm shift on
the largest scale. People began to question the very foundation of the society they had
lived in for over a thousand years. These multiple crises are very similar to a couple of
examples we have already seen. During the warring states period in China, people like
Confucius and Laozi looked to the past to times when things were better to help find the
direction of the future of society. People of the time looked to the past and developed the
hundred schools of thought. During the Hellenistic Age, the death of Alexander and the
political chaos of the Mediterranean, philosophers looked to the past to times when things
were better to build a future that hopefully wasn't like what they were living through. Well
just like in those two examples, the people of the late Middle Ages looked at their society
that was seemingly coming to an end and looked to the past for times when things were
better. They wanted a new beginning. A bacterial plague had just spread across Europe
and killed hundreds of millions of people, and now an intellectual plague was spreading
across Europe in response. The mentality of many thinkers of the time is summed up by this
guy:

“I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money
arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.”

This is a quote by a philosopher who beautifully encapsulates a way of thinking that was
spreading at the time. His name was Erasmus. He wrote his most influential work right during
the years leading up to the protestant reformation. He was a Humanist. Now, humanism is
an incredibly vague term. It's not like Stoicism or Epicureanism, it is a broad category that
many different outlooks are a part of, but the similarity between all of them is that they look
at things through the lens of what it is to be a human, as typically opposed to what it means
to be a byproduct of a supernatural being. Humanism, during this time was much less than
what it would eventually become. But it emphasized moving away from the Scholastic
Approach that had dominated for so long, and moving towards the teachings of earlier
Greek and Romans.

We're going to talk about the reformation and more historical context next time, and by the
way if today's episode seems more like a history lesson than a philosophy lesson, it's because
it is. Trust me though, the biggest mistake people make when teaching philosophy is just to
have one name of a philosopher after another and zero context. The whole subject just
becomes one giant blur of names and ideas with no real way to link the information
together. We need to understand what it meant to be a human during that time to
understand why there are such giant shifts in the way people see existence. The important
part to understand now is that Erasmus symbolizes this new “intellectual plague” that is
moving across Europe. During the times of Erasmus, religion was not synonymous with faith
as is typically seen nowadays. In fact, for the last several centuries, people like Saint
Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Avicenna, these people applied their massive brains to
the task of fusing together faith and reason. They tried to create a synthesis between faith
and reason which for a time were considered opposites. Faith being Christianity, Judaism
and Islam and Reason being Plato and Aristotle. They had success, and so Religion and
Theology at the time was seen as a weird, conglomeration of Faith and Reason.

The interesting thing about Erasmus is that he doesn't fall into either of these categories that
great thinkers usually fell into, he falls into a really weird middle place on the spectrum. So
as the reformation began, the church and the leadership of the church were seen as
increasingly corrupt and evil. But how could this happen? Well, Erasmus thought that the
mixing of philosophy with religion wasn't a noble pursuit like they'd thought for the last
thousand years. He thought it was the reason why things were so wrong in the first place!

Erasmus looked around him and saw all the stuff going on and was like, “Cmon guys what
does this stuff really have to do with God.” There were many pardons that priests got for
committing crimes that were completely irresponsible, several ridiculous rituals, one of
which is where the spiritual leaders were somehow able to look at you and crunch the
numbers and figure out how long your soul is going to be in purgatory, disputes between
the Christian leadership where they argue about small issues that don't really matter to
Erasmus like the nature of the relationship between each aspect of the trinity, he was
opposed to scholasticism as a whole.

All of these things are byproducts of this relationship between philosophy and religion, and
to Erasmus these people ENTIRELY missed the point. People are focusing on all of these
unrelated things, over intellectualized things, when really the whole time, the point was to
just love one another. It was very simple. Instead of all these weird rituals where you access
God through some anointed medium like a priest or bishop, you don't need any of that, all
of that is a corrupted variant of what you should truly do which is form a more individual
relationship with God. He sums it up here:

"What hate required these things at your hands? In vain will they make their idle pleas, one
that he has lived only on fish, another that he has never changed his sacred hood; this one
that he has lost his voice by continual singing of holy anthems, and one that he has
forgotten how to speak in his strict obedience to the vow of silence. Our Savior will interrupt
their excuses and say: 'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, I know you not. I left
you but one precept, of loving one another, and that I do not hear any one plead he has
faithfully discharged."

What he's talking about there is all of the various arbitrary sacrifices that human beings have
declared are what God really wants us to be doing. He gives the example of a guy who
sang worship songs so much he lost his voice or someone that is so committed to his vow of
silence that he actually forgot how to speak. These people have missed the point. Theology
and philosophy had missed the point. True spirituality is something that is very personal
between the individual and God. This is the reason why he is representative of this
intellectual plague going around, this individualistic approach that was growing in
popularity. When we talk about the protestant reformation next time, we will be able to talk
further about this relationship between the individual and church authority, but when it
comes to calling out the people that have corrupted religion, Erasmus pulls no punches:

"They think to satisfy that Master they pretend to serve, our Lord and Savior, with their great
state and magnificence, with the ceremonies of installments, with the titles of reverence
and holiness, and with exercising their episcopal function only in blessing and cursing. (he
goes on) Their only weapons ought to be those of the Spirit; and of these indeed they are
mighty liberal, as of their interdicts, their suspensions, their denunciations, their aggravations,
their greater and less ex-communications and their roaring bulls that fright whomever they
are thundered against; and these most holy fathers never issue them more frequently than
against those, who , at the instigation of the devil and not having the fear of God before
their eyes, do feloniously and maliciously attempt to lessen and impair St. Peter's patrimony."

Yes, Erasmus had a problem with the church leadership and what religion had become, but
he had an even bigger problem with philosophers. Most importantly, these people sit
around and tell everyone that the goal of life and the thing that is going to make you the
happiest is to sit around and reason and to try to get to the bottom of the nature of things,
try to figure out what the truth is. These people say that to live in ignorance, is to live in
misery. Well Erasmus couldn't disagree more:

“Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in
folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't: it's human. I don't see why they call it a
misery when you're all born, formed and fashioned in this pattern, and it's the common lot of
mankind. There is no misery about remaining true to type.”

What he's saying is, how can you say that you're miserable as a human if you live in
ignorance of the truth? We are BORN in ignorance of these things. When we're grown up,
we don't all of a sudden know everything that is the truth. Living in ignorance is part of what
it means to be a human being. And as the old saying goes, “ignorance is bliss”. We, as
humans, are happiest when we live in ignorance and all of this knowledge these people
seek really only serves to complicate things and make their life worse.

The key to happiness, to Erasmus, is something that is laid out in the Bible:

“The summit of happiness is reached when a person is ready to be what he is.”

On Machiavelli

Please realize that if any one of us was born just a few short centuries before we were, we
could've easily found ourselves right in the middle of this horrific time period we're talking
about: The fall of the middle ages and the re-birth or re-hashing of human thought. This is
something that no matter how many times I read about this point in history I just, can't get
over it. Life was so different in so many ways, but eerily similar in others. The people were
terrified.We talked about the bubonic plague, we talked about how that turned into an
economic crisis and then a political crisis, but there are many layers to this parfait. The thing
about covering something like the Renaissance is that it's so multifaceted and so vague
regarding things like where the beginning was, when and where certain things caught on,
and the causal relationships between things; this thing we call the Renaissance had many
tentacles and many different storylines and to relegate them to a couple episodes is about
as impossible as it is pointless. We will delve into many different thinkers, many times coming
from very different parts of Western Europe and living through a different phase than the
last guy we covered. But with each episode you'll get a little more insight of the big picture.
One piece of the big picture, one piece that is crucial to understand because it qualifies
ALL OTHER pieces of the big picture, is to understand this period of transition and what it
meant to be human being living through it.Just imagine being born into the world and
being told from the moment you're old enough to understand the words coming out of your
parents mouths that you are broken. You are a flawed, sinful bag of skin and bones and
there are rules you need to abide by. Strict rules. You have impulses that tell you to do the
opposite of the rules, you will eventually break the rules, but luckily for you there is still a
way for you to get to heaven despite being so weak. The way to atone for your sins, the
ONLY way to atone for your sins, was through the Church. Through a sacrament. See,
apparently God said, at some point after he said, "let there be light" the only entity on planet
earth that has the authority or the know-how to perform a sacrament and therefore
receive forgiveness and God's grace and get the ticket into heaven was the church.
Somebody else could technically TRY to perform a sacrament, and it may FEEL like you have
been forgiven, but God only REALLY forgives you if the church does it. Conveniently enough,
the thing that relayed this policy by God was the church. In fact, they were also the people
relaying what the rules were to everybody. The average person had no way of reading
about it themselves; the Bible was written in Latin and none of the people spoke Latin
anymore.Just imagine if in modern times we were told that we need to corral ourselves into
a little herd of people, waddle on down to the local preaching hall and listen to a guy read
from the Bible in Latin and we hadn't faintest idea of what he was saying, we just had to
accept that our eternal fate rested on whether this guy was telling us what it really said or
not. How long would it take before somebody got a copy of the Bible and copy and
pasted it into Google Translate and saw if he was telling the truth? How long would we
stand for that? Well, needless to say it wasn't THAT easy back then. They certainly didn't
have Google Translate, but it was becoming VERY clear that this system where we just listen
to what the priest says in Latin and take his word for it wasn't going to cut it for long.The
reason why is because the entire world was collapsing around them. The church had a
complete monopoly over spirituality. These people living at the time were told that they
were being given God's grace and that it was only the church that could give it to them,
but yet they looked around them and they understandably asked well if that's true, why is
all of this bad stuff happening? Why is 30 to 60% of the population dying? Why are we
constantly at war? Why are people starving to death? Why is there all this infighting within
the church? But In fact, these people had even MORE reasons to doubt the authority of the
church on top of all this! Most notably the complete, categorical corruption and immoral
behavior of the leadership of the church. Top to bottom. Not just the Pope or the
archbishops, we're talking down to even the very low level priest that would be the head of
a very small congregation. There are stories of how most of these low level priests didn't
even know how to speak Latin themselves. So when they would read out of the Bible they
would just fake it, they'd speak in gibberish that sounded kind of like Latin and no one in the
audience was going to call them on it because they didn't know Latin either. They were
seen as corrupt. These priests weren't supposed to get married so as a loophole they would
take concubines, that was kind of seen as an immoral work around. There was a LONG
period called the Great Schism where the church wasn't unified under a single pope having
as many as three popes at one time; they were fighting each other for who was going to
be in charge. That was seen as a needless dropping of the proverbial ball and one that
made people question whether these people were as anointed by God as they said they
were. There was a growing confusion about transubstantiation. Transubstantiation is a really
cool sounding word that refers to the process of, well, you know in Catholicism when you're
at church and you get the wine and the cracker? Well these people were supposed to
believe that when some guy says a few Latin words that that wine literally transformed into
the blood of Jesus. The bread literally transformed into the body of Jesus. Even people back
then were wondering how that was possible. Now, people have written entire books on all
the various factors that came together to cause the protestant reformation, but the
important thing for us is to realize that there was considerable reason for the people of the
time to see the leadership of the church as not really knowing what they were doing, and
when they looked around them at all the bad stuff happening to them OUTSIDE of church, it
makes sense that they would ask themselves, What are we doing wrong? Why is God
allowing this to happen? Let me see what is in that book you're reading from.See, all these
different crises that were going on led people to CRAVE some kind of personal spiritual
experience. The priests at the time were not doing much preaching as we would expect in
church today where there is some reading from the Bible and then some overarching
takeaway message for the week that you can apply to your life. The function of church was
simple: Sacrament. To absolve you for whatever sins you committed since the last time you
went to church, so if you died you would go to heaven instead of purgatory. People
wanted more than that. They wanted a new, more personal version of religion to help quell
the fear that went along with the new pandemic disease crisis, the new political crisis,
etc.Now, remember what we talked about last time with Erasmus, this new Humanistic way
of learning and looking at the world through what it meant to be a human being; a more
individualistic approach. Well when the sum total of all these factors, most notably when
the religion of the day was looked at through a Humanistic lens you end up with Martin
Luther TRANSLATING the Bible into German, which effectively TRANSMUTED religion into a
more personal, fulfilling experience for people.This new humanistic approach really is the
story of the early Renaissance. The protestant reformation was the reformation of one
religion. But really, there were "reformations" of practically every aspect of human life during
the Renaissance. They weren't always immediately evident to the people living at the time,
but the culture prevalent in classical antiquity was SO FAR REMOVED from anything these
people had seen, that the intellectual progress couldn't help but go through huge
sweeping changes. So if I try to think of the two institutions that keep people in line the
most, the two that come to mind are religion and government, and it probably doesn't
come as a surprise to you guys that during this time period there were revolutionary thinkers
when it comes to the proper way to govern a society. One of the most notorious and most
highly criticized by later authors was a guy named Niccolo Machiavelli. You've heard the
adjective: Machiavellian. And if you knew what the person meant when they were saying it
you knew that it means, this is out of the dictionary: cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous,
especially in politics or in advancing one's career.But this would be misleading. That would
be like saying that something was Orwellian if it has to do with animals living on a farm
somewhere. Machiavelli was actually much less one dimensional than that, but people
take away a one dimensional interpretation of him because they judge him based on only
his most famous work. Machiavelli was a political philosopher. Plain and simple. Some
people don't like to even consider him a philosopher because he only really made
contributions in the area of politics, but I like to think of him as just more focused than most.
The concept that is really interesting to consider is to think of virtue broadly, and how
unspecific the term is in itself. When we think of virtue in modern times, we typically think of
how it applies to us on a personal level. We think of virtue and we think of things like
patience and honesty and courage and things like that. Now at this point it would be easy
to mistake the term virtue as meaning what the best way to live is. Sort of like a best
practices template for being a human being. You act this way and it yields the best life
possible; that's what virtue is. But that's NOT what virtue is, really. Virtue concerns itself with
what is right and what is wrong. Yes, if our goal is to live the happiest life possible, then the
RIGHT thing to do, the virtuous approach to achieving that is to be, patient, honest,
courageous, etc. However, if we change the end goal we're trying to arrive at, if we for
instance determine that we want to be the UNHAPPIEST person possible, then the right thing
to do, the virtuous thing to do if that’s the goal you want is to be impatient, dishonest and
cowardly.We've all heard the saying that you have to know where you're going if you want
to know how to get there. Well, that is the reason why there is no one, single framework of
being virtuous. That's the reason why what virtuous behavior changes from philosopher to
philosopher. Virtue to Saint Augustine is much different than virtue to Socrates because they
had very different goals they were trying to achieve. Again, there may be ideas of right
action that are common among people or more popular than other ideas of right action,
but there is no intrinsically "correct" way to do things because good or bad is defined by a
goal that is trying to be achieved.Now that said, we, as humans, have many goals that we
assign to ourselves. There is a decorum that is acceptable for each one of these goals and
we would consider certain behaviors right or wrong based on what we were trying to
achieve. For example, the decorum that makes a good stand up comedian is MUCH
different than the decorum that makes a good doctor. When you're doctor is reading you
your test results, you probably don't want him to put on the fuzzy red shoes and the clown
nose, unless of course he is Robin Williams in the movie Patch Adams. You don't want him to
start berating you or being sarcastic or pointing out ironies in your medical history. However,
you would want all of these sorts of behaviors if you were going out to watch some good
stand up comedy. Nothing is intrinsically bad about wearing the fuzzy red shoes, but we
CAN deem them bad when we have a goal that we're trying to achieve. The decorum of a
cheerleader is much different than the decorum of a library attendant. Well, this is a great
place to start from when talking about Machiavelli and his thoughts on the best way to rule
a society. Sure the average person walking around living their life should be honest and
temperant and things like that because they yield the greatest result for him, but the rulers
of an entire population have very unique problems they are presented with, very unique
circumstances, Machiavelli thought it would be naive to think that to be a great ruler you
could live with the same goals in mind as the average citizen, you don't have the same
goals, so because of that you have to act a certain way.His most famous work was entitled
"The Prince". This book was a handbook to a new ruler or prince, over a city-state or a
population and it gave them a blueprint for how to take control and maintain stability of
their empire. Stability is the most important word of all. Remember, Machiavelli lived during
this time of constant political unrest. Just during his lifetime the ruler of Florence, where he
lived, changed almost 10 times. You read Machiavelli's writings and it is very evident that
what he wanted more than anything was a stable, unified Italy, not this collection of city-
states constantly arguing with each other. See, what Machiavelli realized is that a ruler can
have THE BEST PLAN in the world, he can have a 10 year plan where at the end of it there is
going to be a complete utopia in his kingdom, but if his kingdom lacks stability, nothing can
happen. When a nation is unstable it doesn't matter how much prosperity you might bring
your people, that instability undermines the whole process. Therefore, the chief concern of
any ruler should be the stability of the state, and no matter what you have to do to achieve
that stability you do it, even if it is outside the confines of what the average person would
conventionally see as moral. Murder, deception, war-mongering, none of these things are
off the table.Machiavelli would say that people that don't understand what it means to be
a ruler would talk about things like human rights and that a ruler should set an example and
we should never spill a single drop of blood, Machiavelli would say that these are all noble
pursuits in their own right, but it would be naive to think that a ruler can actually be like
that in any practical sense. Just think about it. No country ever in the history of the world
has been founded on people all coming to a grassy clearing in the forest with a river flowing
through it and they all start holding hands and singing like it's Christmas in Whoville and they
all look at one guy and say "He is our leader!" and everyone starts cheering and things go
on happily ever after. Machiavelli thought if that sounds like a fairy tale then it's because it
is. Noe! Nations are founded on deception, espionage, bloodshed, you name it. Nations
are FOUNDED on immorality, how can we expect that immediately after a new ruler takes
power, if he wants to maintain stability of the empire that he can instantly live in a moral
way? Machiavelli describes it here:

"It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more
perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the
introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who
have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do
well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the
laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new
things until they have had a long experience of them. Hence it comes that all armed
prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed prophets have been destroyed."
Now don't jump to conclusions and think that this is the only way Machiavelli thought about
how to run a nation. His second most famous work was called "Discourses on Livy" What is
this Livy that he was providing discourse on? Livy was a renowned historian of Rome. He is
best known for writing an entire history of Rome. So Machiavelli, again turning to writings of
earlier Greeks and Romans for a new model, looked at the success of Rome and wrote
about how it would behoove new city-states to try to implement their system of government
and experience success on the level that they had. Rome, was a republic for most of the
time Livy wrote about them. So at first glance it seems like a contradiction for Machiavelli.
On one hand he is advocating a king or a ruler that shouldn't be bound by the
conventional idea of morality and then on the other hand he thinks a republic is the best
thing for states to model themselves after. There are many explanations for this apparent
contradiction, some people even go so far as to say that "The Prince" was a satire.
Machiavelli was just showing people how these sorts of rulers actually act so that they would
overthrow them and create a republic. That's probably not the case. In reality, Machiavelli
was probably talking about what he saw as two different stages in the development of a
state. First, a nation is founded on bloodshed and immorality and the goal of the state
should be to maintain stability whatever the cost. Then, through the creation of institutions
of control the state could eventually transform into a more ideal form of government,
namely a republic. Machiavelli's "The Prince" can be thought of as how that initial ruler can
best maintain stability and implement those institutions of control so that the state survives
long past his death. But the thing that ruler needs to remember is that without stability first,
the republic never happens. He talks about the contradiction in the way people typically
think about leaders here:
"How laudable it is for a prince to keep good faith and live with integrity, and not with
astuteness, every one knows. Still the experience of our times shows those princes to have
done great things who have had little regard for good faith, and have been able by
astuteness to confuse men's brains, and who have ultimately overcome those who have
made loyalty their foundation. You must know, then, that there are two methods of fighting,
the one by law, the other by force: the first method is that of men, the second of beasts; but
as the first method is often insufficient, one must have recourse to the second. It is therefore
necessary to know well how to use both the beast and the man."
Machiavelli says that as a prince you need to be willing to maintain stability by using both
methods of fighting. One is the law, which is typically used by men. The other is force, which
is typically used by beasts. The best ruler is one who knows when and how to use both. Yes,
you can kill people or even a group of people in order to maintain stability, even your own
citizens, but it might not always be the wisest move just because it solves the problem. For
example, if there are people protesting about your princely abilities outside of your city hall,
that is a problem for a ruler. So, there are multiple ways to stop that protest. You can invite
them inside take them out for lunch, make sure the media is there and make everyone think
you really care about their protests. You can use the law, as Machiavelli said. Or you can be
like a beast, round up the group of protestors, take them behind the courthouse and put a
bullet in their head.Now, all three of these solutions solve the problem. The question is which
one is the wisest? Machiavelli says that although the ruler should expect to kill some people,
not all cases warrant that response. For example, what if you take the protesters back there,
shoot them and then the population turns on you and has an uprising because they're
furious about that? You didn't do a good job of maintaining stability now did you? He sums
up the principle a ruler should live by here:
"I say that every prince must desire to be considered merciful and not cruel. He must,
however, take care not to misuse this mercifulness. … A prince, therefore, must not mind
incurring the charge of cruelty for the purpose of keeping his subjects united and confident;
for, with a very few examples, he will be more merciful than those who, from excess of
tenderness, allow disorders to arise, from whence spring murders and rapine; for these
as a rule injure the whole community, while the executions carried out by the prince
injure only one individual."
So in other words if you're going to kill someone make sure it contributes to the stability of
the nation. The act of killing a group of people should be to prevent future killing of a
LARGER group of people. If you kill people with impunity it will lead to the people hating
you, which is not the goal of being a ruler. You should appear to be caring and loving to
the population, not tyrannical. Killing people should not be based on ego or insecurity, that
was the mistake that people like Hitler or Stalin made. Killing people should always yield a
better long term outcome for more people. See, there are two ways to maintain stability: to
be loved or to be feared. Machiavelli says it here:
"Is it better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved? It might perhaps be
answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together,
if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved."
This concept of acting immorally in the interest of preserving the state is not something that
is exclusive to the way the ruler treats his population. This extends to your relations with
other nations and the expansion of your empire. Machiavelli talks about how stupid it would
be to be a leader of a state and be beholden to typical Christian morals. Imagine having to
be completely honest about all of your intentions, imagine having to never spy on what other
countries are doing because you don't want to steal. Machiavelli would say that to only use
diplomacy or tactics that are compatible with traditional ethics that individuals should hold
themselves to puts a nation at a HUGE disadvantage against every one else. And if some
nation is plotting a secret attack on you, and that surprise attack leads to instability, you
have failed as a leader. Because of this, Machiavelli advocates acting like a beast. He
gives two different beasts that you should model yourself after:
"The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves.
One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves."

Michel de Montaigne

For the entire life of Michel de Montaigne he was plagued by this terrible, paralyzing fear of
death. You know, it's funny. I think 99.9% of people have a terrible fear of death; the
difference between people lies in how effectively they've learned to ignore it. Really, it's not
something to be ashamed of. We are creatures programmed for survival, and a fear of
death is a great way for us to stay away from activities that might get us killed. But ever
since we've gathered together and built these fortresses that we call cities and have had
an unprecedented level of safety, that fear of death becomes much less useful than it
once was. The paradigm to strive for now, is to be a person that can appease that fear of
death. To achieve that level of tranquility that civilization SHOULD provide for people. This
was the task of all of the various schools of the Hellenistic Age, Stoicism, Epicureanism,
Skepticism, Cynicism, people have been experiencing this fear for a long time. But when
we're talking about going against processes in the brain that are as deeply ingrained as a
fear of death, that task of quelling it becomes much easier said than done. Some would
even say impossible.This fear of death is present at a different level in everyone, and for a
guy like Michel de Montaigne, it was probably much worse than any of us. One of the things
I love about Montaigne is that there is a level of disclosure and honesty in his writing that
you don't find with many other philosophers and it gives him a very unique feel. One of the
things he discloses, one of the things he is most open about is this fear of death that
troubled him for a giant portion of his life. He said:

"With such frequent and ordinary examples passing before our eyes, how can we possibly
rid ourselves of the thought of death and of the idea that at every moment it is gripping us
by the throat?"
But that all changed with a single traumatic experience.It's funny how as humans we're
shaped by these traumatic experiences. Most of the time the things we are most passionate
about as individuals or the causes we care the most about are not things we've reflected
on and arrived at introspectively, they're passions that arose from moments in our lives when
life smacked you in the face. Well this is almost literally what happened to Montaigne. The
story goes that he was riding his horse IN THE SLOW LANE. Being respectful and some guy
rides up behind him and wants to pass him. So he says "Go around me, go around me
please." and the guy tries to dart past him on his horse but instead runs directly into the back
of Montaigne which causes him to fly off of his horse and land several yards away, hitting his
head and mangling him up really badly. His friends rush over to him to see if he's alright and
it is immediately evident that things are NOT alright and that he is probably going to die.
Medicine back in the 1500's is obviously not what medicine is today. When his friends
scooped him up off of the ground and looked at him he was freaking out. He was vomiting
blood, he was scratching at himself, it seemed like he was trying to rip his own skin off. To
top it off, the whole time he didn't seem conscious of anything that was happening.Long
story short, Montaigne made a full recovery. In fact, he actually came out on the other side
of the experience a better person. When his friends told him that he was puking blood and
flailing around like he was in the exorcist; just the quintessential picture of PURE AGONY, he
was shocked. He didn't feel anything terrible like that. He didn't remember feeling any pain.
In fact, the whole experience wasn't so bad. To him, it didn't really feel like much at all it
kind of felt like the process of falling asleep. Now as somebody that feared death his entire
life knowing that nobody REALLY knows what it's going to be like, this experience gave him
some insight. He had experienced something very close to death. Based on his experience,
what was there really to fear? This turning away from arguing about all encompassing
catch all rules about things and turning towards the use of personal experience to arrive at
understanding about things is a hallmark of Montaigne's philosophy in every area. We will
continue to refer back to it throughout the episode.But let's not oversimplify Montaigne.
Saying "What is the point?" of Montaigne's writing is a little bit like saying "What is the point?"
of Led Zepellin 1. What is the point of the album Rumors by Fleetwood Mac. It's not like these
artists set out with some grand message in mind beforehand and then they wrote an entire
album with the purpose of delivering that message. No, they wrote a bunch of songs that
have meaning to them with individual messages. You listen to the songs; you get takeaways
from each one of them; two songs may play back to back on the album and may not
seem even remotely related to each other, but there definitely is a single intelligence that is
being portrayed through the songs. Rumors by Fleetwood Mac is not them writing
educational songs; one song after another laying out an organized system of how to
navigate the tribulations that you face in your relationships. The delivery method is not
systematic and it's not intended to be. Well, this is a pretty good parallel to Montaigne's
philosophy. We've seen other philosophers lay out an organized system that you can live by.
They usually have maxims and useful techniques to practice and all sorts of tools that will
lead you to the end goal that they've designated. For example, the philosophy of
Siddhartha Gautama was very clearly laid out with his Four Noble Truths. There was a very
clear practice regimin that if you followed diligently enough, you would remove yourself
from the chains of suffering and attachment. Some people like Epictetus had their
philosophy distilled down into books like "The Enchiridion" which means "The Handbook".But
although Montaigne offered what he thought was the most effective way to live life, he
didn't organize it as well as these other guys. He's actually the inventor of the "essay". The
word essay also means "attempt". And that's exactly what they were. For this reason, this
episode may seem less systematic in its approach. Because it's emblematic, of Montaigne.
The essays of Michel de Montaigne may seem rambling and tangential and he may start
making a point about something and then go off on a ten page anecdote about
something semi-related, but they are beautifully written and to this day if someone has
never read any philosophy before is the collection that I would recommend for them to
start with. The reason why is because he doesn't talk about what we would consider
metaphysics much at all and he talks about issues that every human being can relate to
and he does so in a very unique and candid way. Sometimes a little overly candid giving
me a breaking news report on his private areas and private activities. He says in the
beginning of one of his works:"I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion,
without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray...I am myself the matter of my
book."But he doesn't just offer up this stuff for no reason. When you read his essays you feel
almost like you're having an email exchange with someone who is one of your closest
friends that share these intimate details about their life with you, but it makes you feel a
little bit better about the fact that you have these problems too. Montaigne, if I had to
categorize him, is a very interesting mixture between all four dominant schools of thought in
the Hellenistic Age. His way to approach life is the sum total of different pieces of Stoicism,
Skepticism, Epicureanism and Cynicism; plus a whole lot more.But if there was one school
that affected his thinking the most of the four, it would be Skepticism. There are parts of his
essays where there is a very Stoic ambiance; there are passages in his essays you could
take out and say these are lost fragments of Diogenes the Cynic and aside from the writing
style people wouldn't be able to tell the difference. But, Skepticism is the foundation on
which all of his other thoughts are based. In other words, the reason why he is able to make
conclusions that sound very Stoic based on personal experience is because his skepticism
led him to value that personal experience as the most valuable data. There's a popular
saying nowadays that Montaigne would have loved: The plural form of anecdote is
data.Have you ever been talking to somebody and lets say you tell them that you read in
the paper the people at the local fish and wildlife office did a study where this river in your
area has the largest quantity of fish swimming through it in the country and that through
years and years of research they've found that you are more likely to catch a fish at this one
river than ANY other river in the country. And then the person your talking to says, "No! My
Aunt Beatrice went fishing there one time and she didn't catch anything. That article is
wrong!"Well, that would be a perfect example of ignoring the data and basing what you
think about the reality of the world, in this case a river, on anecdotal evidence. But it's
funny; what is the data really but a collection of anecdotes? For years, some guys at every
local fish and wildlife office around the country went down to the rivers in their areas and
recorded how many fish were swimming by. Each one of those measurements could be
considered an anecdote.Montaigne understood that the sorts of conclusions that people
were trying to arrive at when collecting data were sweeping ones. It makes sense: do
experiments and collect many micros to try to arrive at a macro. By collecting data, by
collecting lots of individual examples, maybe we can arrive at laws or rules that are always
the case. If, in theory, we could arrive at these sorts of truths through experimentation, we
might be able to use them to our advantage and understand the world we live in more
effectively. But Montaigne thought most of these sweeping generalizations that people
tried to make in science, medicine, law they were not useful. The reason why, among other
things, is that they almost always seem to be proven wrong. I mean, think about it.
Montaigne is living during a time where long held principles, things that had been held as
absolutely true for thousands of years were crumbling all around him. All of these truths
ended up being dis proven and replaced with another theory and then dis proven and
replaced with another theory; and the whole process to Montaigne was just exhausting.
Why waste our limited time on this planet agonizing over trying to come up with scientific or
medical rules that apply to every circumstance without exception? He trashes people that
spend their time doing this stuff quite a bit in his essays, this quote is one of my favorites
when he is talking about the medical sciences in particular:"Physicians have this
advantage: the sun lights their success and the earth covers their failures."There's always an
exception to the rule. Theories will continually be accepted as truth and then dis proven by
another theory; that process is going to go on forever. Montaigne thought that maybe the
solution is just to not over think things and to base things on the way we experience them as
individuals. Don't get him wrong: he understands the value of medicine and science, but he
wants to keep our focus on things that are immediately useful to us, not ethereal things like
what everything is made of or what the origins of the universe are. For this reason,
Montaigne didn't write much about Metaphysics. He was... just interested in other stuff
more. Maybe he felt that based on his own experience he wasn't qualified to talk about
these things that exist at a level of reality that he can't experience. Regardless, this
disinterest in Metaphysics because we lack the ability to truly know based on experience is
a great example of the skepticism that underlies the rest of his more practical
philosophy.Now if you think back to our episode on skepticism you can remember how
Pyrrho used a fundamental doubt about everything around us as a tool to arrive at ataraxia
or a freedom from disturbance. By reserving judgment about everything around us we
prevent ourselves from making negative judgments that might ail us in some way.
Montaigne can be seen as a less extreme variant of this. He actually references Pyrrho
several times in the Essays so it is clear he was heavily influenced by him. But instead of
reserving judgment about everything and walking around not really believing anything that
goes on around us, Montaigne thought that the most productive view of the world should
be one where we pull from the vast bank vault full of experiences that we have garnered
throughout our lives. I mean, after all: we are the catalyst for our experiences. My personal
experience of something offers a very unique insight into what I might expect to experience
in the future, an insight that I can't really be sure surveys can offer me or even the
anecdotes of other people. Really, how can I be sure that anybody experiences things in
the same way I do? This is another reason why even the PURSUIT of collecting these all
encompassing RULES without exceptions about the world around us is flawed. There is a
section that says, "For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time
and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits."The thing that
Montaigne feels most comfortable trusting is his own experience. This is the reason why he
feels comfortable making a conclusion about death after having his own near death
experience.That said, one of Montaigne's most interesting works is titled "To philosophize is
to learn how to die". Now, he wasn't the first to say that, it actually goes back all the way to
the Greeks. But it definitely encapsulates the aim of many of Montaigne's essays. Life, from
the very moment they snip your umbilical cord, you are decaying. You're getting closer to
death. You've heard people say things like "We're all dying." Because for every day you live
you get closer to the only inevitability that a human being has. Wesley Snipes proved LONG
AGO you don't need to pay taxes. So that should terrify us really, we are all slowly decaying.
Montaigne saw that people have a lot of creative ways that they deal with this inevitable
death that is coming. Some people exalt that death onto a pedestal to try to come to
terms with it. There was actually a very common way of thinking back then that
philosophers came up with to try to stifle this fear of death and it was to CONSTANTLY dwell
on your death. Think about it all the time. When you walk over a bridge, imagine the bridge
collapsing and you being crushed between to beams. When you are driving on the
freeway, imagine one of your wheels flying off of your car and you flying out the moon roof
somersaulting down the freeway being torn into pieces. The thinking was, by constantly
thinking about death, you would eventually come to terms with it because you were
exposed to it so much. This is how a lot of people conquer fears in today's world. If you are
scared of flying, fly a bunch around the country and eventually you will realize there isn't
anything to fear.But Montaigne thought this was dumb. You're just needlessly scaring
yourself by thinking about death all the time. That might actually make your fear worse
because now you're in the habit of thinking about it. You shouldn't exalt death. On the
other hand, some people exalt life. They try to distract themselves from death they exalt
certain worldly pleasures like glory and fame and wealth but these things run into the same
problems. To philosophize is to learn how to die because through the introspection of
philosophy we realize how baseless it is to exalt these things. Instead of trying to endlessly
rationalize things and instead of trying to have this intellectual approach to coming to
peace with our death, we should accept that we don't know. Wise people accept their
own intellectual limitations in the same way they would accept physical limitations. They
wouldn't come across a bear in the wild and think they could fight it and win. They would
recognize there are physical limitations preventing them from making that outcome a good
one and they would move on. When you remove all of this needless worry about death or
life you remove the need to fear death at all. You know, he famously said, "Nothing is so
firmly believed as that which we least know." The parallel to his lack of Metaphysics is clear.
Don't agonize over things we can not know, accept your own limitations and come to the
best conclusion you can with your current experience. He writes in a section of the essays
where he sounds like he is feeling very in touch with Stoicism at the time about instead of
intellectualizing things we should allow our own nature to prepare us for death.I wanted to
get an old person's perspective on death for the show this week to see if there is anything to
Montaigne's theory that our own nature prepares us for death and that we should trust it. I
didn't really feel comfortable going to Shady Acres Retirement Home and asking people I
don't know about something that they face every day and probably have an aversion to. I
wanted to ask a family member, because at least they are obligated to put up with me.
Now, I don't have any family so I had to use the second best option which was my wife's
grandma. This is the value you get from Philosophize This! everybody don't you forget it. But
anyway I asked her when she wanted to die. And she said, "I want to live until I want to
die."What a beautiful statement. We have a desire to live until our quality of life becomes so
bad that we would rather die than live. Now, in her case it comes in the form of
deteriorating health where one day she will be in so much pain or on so much medication
that she won't be losing much. Certainly not losing as much as if she died when she was 25.
Couldn't this be considered a way that our own nature prepares us for death?Now this
seems like an end point, but when I was first reading Montaigne this is where I started having
the most questions for him. Sure, you remove this glorification of life and death and you
arrive at a peace of mind that other people can only dream of. But how do I do that?
Especially considering the fact that it presents itself in many ways, some of which we might
not even be able to identify. Well, Montaigne doesn't disappoint. He talks a lot about all of
the individual ways this manifests itself in people's lives. As you probably expect, there are a
ton of things that humans worried about back then that people still worry about today.Why
is it that it is a stereotype for an old man to walk around naked, to dress in an absentminded
way, to talk to people with no reservations. The reason why is because he just doesn't care
anymore. He has lived on this planet long enough to realize that the embarrassment and
the desire for respect and all the various things that motivate people to follow social
conventions are really pointless. What else does he have to prove to anybody? He realizes
that even if everyone on planet earth rejects him he is still going to be able to watch The
Price is Right tomorrow.Well this is a form of wisdom to Montaigne. This is another way that
our own nature prepares us for death by removing these pointless anxieties that we have.
He sounds a lot like a Cynic during the parts of his essays when he talks about this dynamic
in particular. He actually goes on a multiple page diatribe about animals and how they are
much wiser than humans in many ways. I think everybody can relate to what he is talking
about. Who listening to this has never looked in the mirror and nitpicked something about
themselves and wished that their physical presence was different than it was. Do you know
how much I want cheekbones like Ashton Kutcher or Don Draper? How many of us do this
to ourselves all the time? Well, Montaigne gives example after example of people who hold
themselves to these brutal standards. He says that we despise our own beings. And is there
any condition that is really worse than that? You're imprisoned in this tomb of self-
proclaimed ugliness. We should try to recognize that we are animals just like your dog is an
animal. Your dog doesn't have a laundry list of corrections for his body. He isn't embarrassed
about anything. We should recognize that the differences between our brain and an
animal's brain do bring us certain benefits, but they also bring us needless anxieties, like that.
We should recognize social conventions for what they are, and while we may follow them
we should recognize them for what they truly are.If I had to try to distill Montaigne's
approach to life I might begin with a very Buddhist concept. The removal of attachments in
our lives that are brought on by our relationships with others. We constantly strive for the
approval of others. The problem with this, Montaigne would say, is that as long as you care
at all about what other people think of you, as long as you care at all about whether
people like you or not, you will never be able to achieve complete peace of mind. What
the Stoics would call ataraxia. What the Buddhists would call enlightenment. When we care
about the acceptance of others too much we are more likely to do things, not because
they are the wisest thing to do, but because the people whose acceptance we desire are
doing it. This always reminds me of the common thing that a child will say, "well everybody
else was doing it!" "well if everybody jumped off a bridge, would you?" This is a good way to
think about what Montaigne is saying here. We shouldn't completely reject the actions of
everybody else around us, but we should aim for what he refers to as "Solitude". But he
doesn't mean solitude in a literal sense, he means solitude in action. We should base the
decisions we make on more than just what everybody else is doing. We shouldn't be
tempted to fall in line simply because it is easy.For example, there are stoplights and street
signs all over the road. We follow those stoplights. They benefit us greatly. They keep us safe
on the road, they help us know where we are going, they help us know what speed is safe
in a certain area. But it would be complete madness to be enslaved to those stoplights
where no matter what happened around you you couldn't disobey them. If a volcano
erupts behind you and lava is flowing down the street, the wisest move would not be to wait
until the light turns green. Well Montaigne would say that it's complete madness to be
enslaved to the social conventions that seek the admiration of other people.Now it's time
for the question of the week, but I kind of want this to be the reflection of the week. There's
a fantastic quote by Montaigne where he challenges the way that we typically look at the
world by allowing us to look at it through the lens of a goose. It actually reminds me of
something I read in a Jerry Seinfeld book one time where he was talking about how if Aliens
came down and looked at our society, they would have to conclude that dogs were really
the dominant species on the planet and that humans were their slaves. The dogs get to sit
around and sleep all day while the humans go out and work 40+ hours a week to pay for
their food and pet them and they just get to lay around enjoying life. Well I want you to
think about your life in the way Montaigne asks us to think about how a goose might look at
his life. He says:
"Why may not a goose say thus: "All the parts of the universe I have an interest in: the
earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me; the stars have their influence upon
me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters; there is nothing that
yon heavenly roof looks upon so favorably as me. I am the darling of Nature! Is it not
man that keeps and serves me?"

A Scientific Method

So have you guys ever been to one of those really bizarre, dark places on the internet? Like
let's say you're watching a video, and then you click on a related video and you keep
clicking on the next related video and the next one smash cut to you six hours later, and
you're just watching Nyan Cat on a four hour loop. Well, deep inside the bowels of the
internet and one of these really weird places. There's a war being fought. It's the YouTube
video and comment war between fundamentalist Christians and science. Really, the best
way to describe it is a war zone. I mean, seriously, you guys should see some of these
comments. There's some of the most destructive, hateful things I've ever seen in my life.
Each one of these YouTube videos is its own unique, crazy battlefield. Now, this battlefield
is obviously an extreme caricature of what actually exists in reality. But you have to
acknowledge that the dynamic that exists and an extreme form on these YouTube videos
isn't completely unfounded. You wouldn't say that there's a war between science and
religion today. But you definitely have to acknowledge that the two don't agree on many
things. He certainly wouldn't consider science and religion friends in today's landscape.
Well, today's episode is going to take you back to a time long before this war on the
internet. When science and religion were friends. They didn't hate each other. But what
we're gonna talk about today is the beginning of that rift that we would identify in modern
times between the two of them. This is the moment when science and religion both kinda
like the same girl at school. And then science took her to the school dance. And although
religion pretended like everything was cool, and he said, he's happy for both of them, the
seeds of hatred were planted, and things were going to change forever.

Now, I could spend a long time talking about the history of the time period, and the
whirlwind of ideas and political events that led to somebody like Francis Bacon being able
to exist at all. But to be honest, volumes of work have been written on it. And it all isn't
crucially important when trying to understand Francis Bacon and what his contributions
were. What I will say is that it was a complete mess at the time, centuries old political
troubles, centuries old ways of thinking, colliding with new ways of thinking, different
methods of trying to maintain order and get everybody on the same page. But if you were
an outsider looking in on Europe at the time, the one thing you'd be certain of is that these
people were confused. Alright. There have been few instances throughout human history
where people have been more confused than these people are now. For a long time the
church had coexisted with science. But because of the insecurity brought on in the church
by the humanistic movement, and all these new interpretations of Christianity, the church
turned away from science, seeing it as a hostile alternative to the way that they explained
things. In response to this confusion, the world headed into what we now know as the
scientific revolution. People like Francis Bacon, thought that science and religion serves two
completely different functions, and that science shouldn't be seen as something that's
threatening Christianity threatening to overthrow it. In fact, he was religious himself. Science
should be seen as something used as a catalyst for human prosperity completely separate
from religion. Francis Bacon must have felt like an alien dropped onto planet Earth and
forced to live among the people. He looked around them and thought that people have
been thinking about things wrong for a long time. Not only did he have a vision of what the
ideal society would look like, he had what he thought was a solution to all of humanity's
problems. Not only did he know where humanity needed to go, but he knew how to get
there. But let me start here, with so much ambiguity about what the truth was. Europeans
have the time period increasingly looked for knowledge of all sorts. They can talk some one
of his works about the fact that people seem to by nature, desire to know things, it seems to
be something about humans. He says they want to know things for a myriad of different
reasons, usually completely selfish reasons. Like they want to be the guy that knows the most
about everything at the party that they're going to that weekend, or for All ambition or
glory, or even says just to distract themselves away from their personal life. In fact, when we
think of acquiring knowledge in modern times, we think of, I mean going to someplace like
the library, getting some giant, dusty tome, slamming it on the desk and reading through it,
laboriously for hours. But the pursuit of knowledge to people in the time of Francis Bacon
was a little more broad, they thought of knowledge differently. Knowledge meant any act
or behavior that was delving into uncharted territory in some way. See, to them, Columbus
was seen as a seeker of knowledge among all the other titles that he had, because he was
sailing his ship into uncharted territory and gaining knowledge.

Certain interpreters of Theology at the time were seen as seekers of knowledge, for the very
same reason, we wouldn't see those people as seekers of knowledge by today's standards.
But they were considered as such at the time of Francis Bacon. And when he looked at the
people of his time that were known as Knowledge Seekers, he thought they had it all wrong.
Not only were they looking for knowledge in the wrong way, but they were looking for
knowledge, for all the wrong reasons. He actually writes a lot about this, he breaks down all
the different types of people in his day that were pursuers of knowledge and all their
different forms and fields. One of the most obvious ones are people that he refers to as the
reasoners. And he has a couple other names for them. But above all else, they were
philosophers, we would think of them as rationalists. They were people that thought to find
knowledge, you used reason. And we know from studying former rationalists, that this sort of
knowledge always comes by way of them having arguments with each other, or having
some sort of verbal altercation that sort of conjures up knowledge from within, there was no
experiment that they performed that offered a new insight that they were talking about,
there was no external stuff happening at all. They looked within their own minds, they
argued with each other about the contents. And they arrived at what they thought was
knowledge. Now, if you look at it from their perspective, you can definitely see how they
might have thought that knowledge didn't really require any sort of reading from the
physical world to arrive at it. In fact, if you remember, this was the basis used by Plato to
make the case for why he thought we were born into this world with total knowledge, you
know, with a complete Wikipedia of the world in our head at birth, and that acquiring
knowledge was just the process of remembering it, of conjuring it up. Well, another
prevalent type of person that was a seeker of knowledge the bacon talks about are the
ones of the superstitious variety. These people weren't just the various faith based thinkers of
his time, they extended all the way to people like magicians, and chemists and people that
would put on a show for a crowd on a street corner, people that seemingly heal ailments
and the people in the crowd with their magic potion. Not because this magical realm was
so little understood at the time. These people were seen as seekers of knowledge, because
they were doing things that people really couldn't explain. And they were delving into that
uncharted territory. They were seeing as men and women, weird as they may be, that we're
harnessing the power of nature in some way for the betterment of man. And this is actually
a very important part of the thinking of the time period, for many reasons. But the most
important part is, look, as humans, we've learned to do a lot of things we've learned to till
the soil and plant seeds inside of it, and then collect an inordinate amount of food at
harvest time, we've learned to domesticate animals for our benefit, we've learned to
redirect rivers and streams to our benefit. If we can learn to harness the power of nature for
the betterment of man in all these ways, maybe there's a way for humans to be complete
masters of nature to be in control of nature, rather than the other way around. Well, these
magicians and reasoners were seen as people that were going on the quest of mastering
nature. Francis Bacon thought that three inventions have changed the world, and a lot of
man along with it more than anything else throughout human history, the compass, the
printing press, and gunpowder. And all these things were arrived at through a harnessing of
nature in some way. This is part of what bacon saw as the ultimate task of science. He
actually gives a great metaphor in one of his works. He says that the superstitious seekers of
knowledge are kind of like ants because they just wander around in a line. And they collect
things from the physical world to build their world to build their colony. The reasoners are
kind of like spiders because they just sit around all day, and they spin these overly intricate
webs made out of nothing but what is inside of them. Now both these methods to Francis
Bacon are flawed. The true pursuit of knowledge should be more like what a bee does It
shouldn't rely solely on the powers of the mind, or rely solely on material from the natural
world, it should be sort of a middle path between the two of them. Like a bee, it should
gather evidence through experiments from flowers in the fields. But then it takes that
material and uses its own skills to digest it, and transform it into something that benefits more
than just the bee itself. The bee does this in the form of honey, then he builds the colony.
The pursuer of knowledge should do this, in the form of discovering something beneficial to
all of mankind, not just the person that found the knowledge. See, that's the problem with
these magicians, and these glorified high school debate team coaches to Francis Bacon,
see, at best when someone has like a bad back, and they approach the alchemist or the
magician, and there's a crown around, and he mixes them a potion made from the
elements of nature that he's masterfully blended together and thereby harnessed the
power of when that potion works. The only thing that happens is, the magician gets a little
bit more well known among the people, he gets a little bit more liked, and he makes a little
bit more money. But how does that benefit society as a whole, especially considering that
when it doesn't work? What these people always said was? Well, I guess my powers are
weak today, I guess I'm not a steward of nature, as I typically am. But that's just today,
tomorrow, it's probably gonna work again. But how was that controllable? How can we
know what's working or not working? If we always have to consider how many Manna
potions the guys had in the last 24 hours, bacon had a better way of looking for knowledge,
he thought that we should look for negative instances and things.

Let's say for example, instead of doing 10 experiments, where you give different plants,
different levels of sunlight, and then from all that work, you draw the conclusion that all
plants need sunlight to grow. Instead of doing that, you should look for instances where
plants don't need sunlight. It's a much better approach. And it may seem confusing, like,
shouldn't we take this seriously, considering the huge benefit humanity stands to gain from
finding all this knowledge? Well, let's not project our times under their times. This certainly
seems very obvious today. But it truly wasn't back in the time of Francis Bacon. I mean, even
just a couple decades before, we have montane. We talked about it last time talking about
how searching for these overarching rules and generalities about the world might ultimately
just be a waste of time, because it seems like they're always going to be replaced by a
different one eventually. And look, we can understand why a lot of people may have felt
that way, including montane, especially montane. I mean, after all, it's very easy to look at
the metaphysics of the philosophers that montane was reading and most influenced by, it's
clear, they're arguing based on conjecture. Is the world made only of water? Or only a fire?
Is this rock I'm holding made of a combination of Earth and fire, or earth and water? Maybe
all three? How can you really know? Maybe there's a fiery substance that pervades all
things that brings them life? You know, I mean, you could see how this stuff could be viewed
as a complete waste of time, that was never going to yield any practical benefits. But this
was the genius of Francis Bacon, not only to realize that it could benefit all of humanity, but
to recognize the various faults in the way that people think about things that prevent them
from arriving at that knowledge. Because of the selfish motives that typically underlie why
people seek knowledge in the first place. Bacon thought that science shouldn't be
something that's relegated to one guy performing a magic trick on a street corner. It should
be a collaborative effort. In fact, he thought it should be financed by the government,
bacon thought there was nothing better to spend tax dollars on I mean, after all, what
could possibly improve the lives of a state citizens more than scientific progress? And should
we really rely on personal ambition to improve people's lives? They can thought it was really
scary to think about the fact that somebody could just find the cure to cancer, or some
other very valuable piece of information like that, and then just sit on it for years, reveling in
all the glory and fame that would come with something like that. In theory, if instead the
government discovered the cure to cancer, it wouldn't be something that people could
profit from either monetarily or emotionally. It would be public domain. And there are all
kinds of other examples. We can think of a million of them. So how about the fact that from
the 1930s we've had solar powered and electrical cars around in some sort of makeshift
sense, but they've just never sold. Now in today's world. We have an energy crisis. Every
president since Ronald Reagan has vowed to remove our dependence on foreign oil, but
for some reason, there still aren't any mass market feasible, purely solar powered or
electrical cars. Why is that? Now this could be just the nature of the technology. But in an
alternate universe, couldn't it also be what bacon was scared of? I mean, in this alternate
universe, someone could have patented the technology to make these things feasible a
long time ago, and then sold those patents to the companies that stand to benefit from
these trillion barrels of oil still in the ground. Now, I'm not going Alex Jones on everybody
here. What I'm saying is, this is a sort of thing that bacon was trying to prevent with state
subsidized research. But this wasn't the only vision that bacon had for society or for the
government. He actually wrote a book called The New Atlantis, it's a classic. He outlines
what he sees as a utopian society, the perfect society. This is actually very common among
thinkers. Now, listeners of this show will remember back when we talked about Plato's
Republic, where Plato outlined the ideal form of government. Well, a lot of subsequent
thinkers tried to do just that, too. They thought they had a better way. People like St.
Augustine, people like Thomas Moore, who was a friend of Erasmus that we talked about,
well, Francis Bacon's utopian society makes science their chief priority. He details out how all
of it would work, he gives fascinating accounts of how science would eventually solve all of
humanity's problems if we just let it one of my favorite concepts that he talks about, just
because it's so different from all the other ways philosophers have approached the subject
in the past, is when he talks about human excess. Now, typically, philosophers have all
arrived at the conclusion that things go downhill pretty quick, when humans have free rein
over a finite amount of resources. Right? Let's say that there's only so much food around to
feed a group of people, then some big guy comes in and eats half of it. And now there's
not enough food for the rest of the group. Humans should be temperate, so that that sort of
thing doesn't happen, we should regulate ourselves. Let's say some sheep need to be
protected in the pasture, and some kid keeps lying about a wolf coming around and eaten
all the sheep. Eventually, the wolf does come around, some sheep get eaten, and
everybody's mad at them. Humans should be honest. Well, these are the sorts of things
virtue aims to prevent restriction from certain behaviors. Well, bacon's approach goes the
complete opposite direction. He says that science is going to solve the problem of human
excess, because it's going to make human access an obsolete thing. Eventually, science
will make it so that there's so much food that people don't need to regulate how much
they eat, because there's more than anybody could possibly eat. Eventually, science will
make something like a lie detector, so that it doesn't matter if that kid's lying about a wolf
coming around or not, will be able to tell whether he's being honest or not. Science makes
the pursuit of virtue practically obsolete. Such a unique approach to this problem that so
many philosophers have tried to solve. But it's important to note, Francis Bacon realize that
this utopian society that he was envisioning, was a long, long way away. There was a
mountain to climb first if we were ever going to get to his vision, and it was going to be a
tough road, to fight this uphill battle for humans to think in a way that's unbiased enough
to yield these sorts of benefits for humanity. We needed to circumvent tendencies in the
very brains were using to find knowledge. They can thought that all humans have four
types of biases that prevent them from thinking in a scientific way, and we should all strive
to eliminate them. He says, quote, There is yet a much more important and profound kind
of fallacies in the mind of man, which I find not observed or inquired at all, and think
good to place here as that which of all others appertaining most to rectify judgment, the
force were of a such as it doc, not dazzle or snare, the understanding and some
particulars, but doc more generally, an inwardly infect and corrupt the state thereof. For
the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of
things should reflect according to their true incidents. Nay, it is rather like an enchanted
glass full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced. For this
purpose. Let us consider the false appearances that are imposed upon us by the general
nature of the mind. And quote, let's try to think about the four idols of the mind that
Francis Bacon lays out in terms of how we might use them today to make our lives better.
Let's try to create a scientific method for our lives. The first one is the least exciting of the four,
it's probably the most obvious, and it's probably the one that's least in our control, but we
should acknowledge it the first time Idol is what bacon refers to as the idols of the tribe.
What Francis Bacon was referring to is the flawed way in which we perceive the world
around us. He talks about human understanding as being like a, like a cracked mirror that
distorts the reflections that we see in it, like an oar put into the water, where it looks bent
because of the way our eyes perceive light, but it's actually straight.
Now, the significance of this is that just because we see things, or hear things or smell things
in a certain way, doesn't necessarily mean that our perception is based entirely in reality.
Now, the obvious example that we've touched on many times in the past, is that the world
is comprised of mostly empty space, it's made up of atoms that are 99%, empty. Right?
Now, we don't see it that way. We have senses that create a representation of the world
that's useful to us, that representation is made up of solid objects, it just wouldn't be useful
for us to see all the empty space. But that map of the world is based on a lot of
assumptions. And Bacon would say that those assumptions can get us into a lot of trouble if
we're trying to view reality on reality's terms. Let's think of a modern example. Let's say you
you're digging through a trash can, for some reason, looking for something. And then you
take that same hand, and you give a sponge bath to a very sick hospital patient. All right,
and then you look at your hands. And it looks like they're perfectly clean. Your senses are
telling you that it's perfectly okay to eat this giant bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos and then lick
the powdered cheese residue off of your fingers. Right? Seems like everything's fine. Well,
Francis Bacon wouldn't have endorsed that behavior, as well, for two reasons. One, it's
completely disgusting. Just use a napkin for God's sakes. And second, because your hands
aren't actually clean, they have germs all over them, you're going to get sick. Millions of
people died for what they thought were unexplainable reasons before germ theory was
developed in the 1800s. And they knew why they died. And it took this long, because
people trusted that biased map that their senses gave them way too much. What we
should do is be mindful of this limitation in our own lives. The second idle is what bacon calls
the idols of the cave. Now this is an allusion to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. And it refers to
our ways of thinking about the world that we've been conditioned to believe, based on our
own individual education or customs. There may not actually be evidence to support this
knowledge that we have, but it is what we believe. Now the examples in this category are
endless. You guys can probably think of 1000. But just for the sake of clarification, one that
everybody might be able to relate to is the way that a lot of modern Americans think about
their diet. All right. For the last few decades, brilliant marketers have conditioned people to
believe things like a low carb diet is healthy, or a low fat diet is healthy. They say this stuff
as though 90% of your calories should come from protein exclusively. Low Calorie equals
healthy and high calorie equals unhealthy. Well, that's nowhere near what reality is right?
Your body needs carbohydrates, or you're going to constantly feel lethargic, your body
needs fats, or you're not going to digest things properly, your brain won't function correctly,
etc. If we're talking about what a healthy diet is, as far as what percentage of your calories
comes from each of the three proteins, carbs and fats, that's completely dependent on
your lifestyle, just like the total number of calories you eat in a day, is dependent on your
lifestyle. Sure, a low carb diet is healthier than eating at taco bell three times a day, and
being massively overweight. And yeah, these diets help those types of people to think of
food in terms of something other than how they can treat themselves to something right
now. But these fad diets have also created a group of dogmatic people that oversimplify
nutrition, and what being healthy really is, Francis Bacon would definitely put these sorts of
beliefs into the idols of the cave. The third idol is what's called the idols of the marketplace.
Now, this is the most interesting one to me. It has to do with the preconceived biases we
hold regarding what we envision when we communicate with each other. For example, I
can say that I'm recording this podcast and I'm talking into a microphone. Now each
person listening to the show has an image in their head of what that microphone looks like.
Right? Just picture it right now. That image comes from the sum total of every microphone
you've ever seen in your life, combined with what you think my microphone may look like.
Now, what if I said instead of a microphone, what if I said I'm talking into a transmitter to
record the show? What if I said, I'm talking into a recording device? These different words
bring up different images in everybody's head of what's being described. But the actual
thing that I'm describing hasn't changed a single bit. They can recognize this. And he
realized that these individual biases that we hold about the connotations behind words,
could prevent us from seeing reality on reality's terms. This is a huge flaw in human thinking.
And it's honestly exploited by people all the time in today's world. The fact is, each and
every one of us would benefit greatly if we could just find out when we're being exploited.
For example, newspapers or news networks will commonly use certain words, when
describing something that make you feel a certain way that's in their best interest, they'll
direct and manipulate what you think about what they're telling you about. One really
good example that I recently read, and I can't remember where I read it. But it had to do
with the current debate on health insurance in the United States. Now, certain news outlets
that want you to like the current bill that's going to be passed, will describe it as healthcare
reform. Because there's a positive connotation associated with the word reform, that word
implies that there is some current flawed mechanism that's in need of being fixed. For you to
be against healthcare reform, you need to be against reform in general. Now, on the
opposite side of the aisle, they'll describe it as socialized medicine. Now, the thinking there is
that they're going to strike a negative chord with a lot of Americans that have an aversion
to socialism. That's not what America is all about. Now, the thing they're describing hasn't
changed at all. But the way that people perceive it has changed quite a bit. It's gone from
a bill that's our Savior, that saving us from a damaged system, all the way to a hostile
takeover of our American way of life. Bacon would point out that the reality of what it is got
lost somewhere in the middle, somewhere in the connotation of the words. The final idol
Francis Bacon talks about is what he called the idols of the theater. The theater implies that
the world is a stage, a stage on which many acts have already been performed, that
shaped the way we currently think about things. Now, when he said this, Francis Bacon was
referring to long accepted doctrines of thought, or philosophical systems, things that might
shade the way we view the world. Now, he considers these philosophical systems as
theater, because they're kinda like fictional plays where we create a setting that isn't real at
all. And we act it out as though it is, we can see this kind of thing in droves in modern times
all around us. But let's think about how much is at stake here. Being born into the world,
being conditioned into a philosophical approach to life, and then not questioning it.

Look, the reason why as a society, we deeply admire people like Martin Luther King, Jr,
Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, is because they questioned the philosophical systems
underlying the world that they were born into. I mean, how many women were born before
the 1920s in the United States, that were told that simply because of their gender, they were
inferior to men, and therefore not allowed to do everything that men could do? And how
many of those women just accepted that? There were millions of them that just thought I
guess this is just the way that it is? I'm a woman. I'm just not capable of doing certain things
well enough to be trusted with them. Well, what's that based in reality? Of course, it wasn't.
What Francis Bacon urges us to do, is to not allow ourselves to fall into a biased way of
thinking simply because we're born into it. And it's easy just to go along with it.