Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 79: False Imagination, Natural Understanding, and the Examined Life

Transcript
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Okay, and apparently the sun is not diminishing at all, at least in the course of our time. And Thomas, you know, found that, says, well, this sounds reasonable, right? But maybe it takes longer than many, many, many generations of men, right? For a change to take place. So Thomas is aware of the fact that, you know, Aristotle's reason for saying that the sun is eternal is not, what, necessary, right? I'm sure Aristotle's learned too, right? But it took until, fight soccer at least, to get us an explanation of how this is. It's still hard to understand, you know, because when you stop and think, you know, of all the energy we get from the sun, the warmth of the sun, right? And we're supposed to be, what, about 93 million miles from the sun? You draw just a kind of sphere there, you know, with a diameter or radius of 93 million miles with the sun as a center. It's almost nothing that the earth is occupying, you know? And yet that sphere is going on in every, or the whole sphere. It's incredible, you know, you see? It must be something far different from one and every fire, right? You know, you see, you know, people, right? But anyway, fight soccer has been interesting things to say. But he has been interesting things to say. And one thing that he's very interesting, he says that when we imagine something, we make it actual in our imagination. And can you sense or imagine, in general, any kind of ability? Even my ability, say, to walk and my ability to talk. Do you really sense my ability to walk or talk? No, it's not actually doing it. It's what I do because of my ability, right? And only reason can, what, figure that out, right? Because only reason knows one thing to another, right? It's like the Shakespeare thought is there, right? It means there's a ability to discourse, to know one thing to another. An ability has to be known through the act which is an ability. But ability is not the same thing as act. Now, that was in a sense of trouble with, what, Anaxavius, right? He's trying to understand matter, and he knows you can't get something out of nothing. So everything you've got out of matter must already be in matter. But he's imagining it to be actually in there rather than in, what, ability. And then he went through all these problems because to get everything in there, he's got to make them, what, infinitely small. And then it gets in a contradiction with something. Well, as I think I pointed out at that time, that in the most advanced part of modern physics, as far as the study of matter, in, say, Heisenberg's time, right? The study of elementary particles. The common way of speaking was that of, what, Anaxavius. And for the similar reasons, right? They saw that out of every elementary particle, you can eventually get all the other elementary particles. You can't get something out of nothing. They are an action plot. Therefore, every elementary particle is inside of every other elementary particle. And so, as Heisenberg says, the well-known formula was every elementary particle is composed of all the rest. But then the elementary particles are beginning, what, smaller, smaller, and smaller, right? Because inside of each elementary particle will be all the rest, and inside of each one of those, all the rest, and so on forever, right? As Heisenberg said there, I never believe, you know, so go on forever. Okay. But there may be something, you know, before that, I don't know, because the quarks, who knows? But anyway, that ran into contradictions with the experimental fact that each kind of elementary particle has a definite mass and size and so on, right? But why was that the well-known way of speaking, you see? They're trying to imagine everything that you can get out of an elementary particle as being actually in there, right? And just as when out of the water, I guess, by, I don't know, electrolysis or something, they got, what, hydrogen-oxygen, right? They said, well, water must be composed of hydrogen-oxygen. Well, maybe it is in some way, I don't know exactly. Maybe it was, huh? But if you get out of the elementary particle, all the rest, it must be composed of them, right? So, the inability to understand ability, not the absolute inability, but, you know, the difficulty, right, of understanding ability. So, not understanding ability, they think that when you cut a line and you get a point, the point must have been there already, right? How can you get as many points as you want to, the top limit, and then for infinity, by cutting a line, right, if there weren't infinite points already there? That's all. Well, by the, you know, it would be easier, in a sense, if, it's easy to understand how you get chairs out of the next room, if it's actually chairs in the next room, right? How you get chairs out of these trees out here, right? It's easy to understand the way chairs are in the next room, or chairs are in this room, than the way chairs are in the trees out there, right? Because they're owning ability, right? There's a chair in ability, what else do you mean? It's kind of hard to understand, right? But the difficulty of understanding ability, especially this ability to be, is, as Aristotle points out in the second book of wisdom there, the difficulty is in the thing itself, huh? You see a dust in there when he's thinking about the first matter, you know, and he doesn't know what to say. If I could say, he says, it's something that's nothing, or nothing that is something, I would say so, but he knows he can't quite speak that way, right? You see, but he doesn't have the advantage of Aristotle and so on, right? But he's puzzled by it, right? So it's this, what we call sometimes, to use Thomas' phrase here, false imagination, right? False imagination is the main cause of deception on the side of our knowing powers, right? And that means what? It could mean imagining something other than it is, right? Which you often do, right? Or imagining, or trying to imagine something that cannot be imagined, right? So when people think about the soul, the soul cannot be imagined. So the poet, even men in general, will be kind of, what? Imagine the soul to be a kind of air-like substance, right? In the shape of the, what? Man. Yeah. And sometimes, you know, they do this in a movie, too, you know, and you have kind of that shadowy thing going out of the person. But this is the way Homer represents the souls down in Hades, and they're brought up in the Odyssey, you know, on the way back, you know, you've got to have the blood and all this to get them to come up. And they're kind of like shadows of the former cells, right? And even the great and noble Achilles said, you'd rather be up plowing the ground than be down here in this kind of, you know, substance-less existence, you know? And even Dante, you know, poetically has to represent the souls as, what, these ghost-like things in the shape of men, huh? And so he goes through purgatory or something like that, and he sees the soul of somebody new. He recognizes it as being, you know, your soul, because it has the same shape and thing, and he wants to, you know, hug the person he hasn't seen for some time. And it's hugging the air, and it's very frustrating to get the person to hug, right? But I think the average person imagines the soul to be that way, right? See? And so they're being deceived, in a sense, by what? False imagination, huh? In this great dialogue, the Parmenides, Socrates is represented as a young man, talking to the great Parmenides. And they're talking about the universal, and Socrates is trying to imagine the universal, like there's a big sail covering all the individuals under it. Oh. You see? And getting into all kinds of problems because of this, because the only part of the universal would be over each man's head, right? So if man is covering us, maybe, you know, one of us has got an animal over us, the other guy's got a rational over us. One's rational without being an animal, one being an animal without being. But all kinds of problems arise because he's trying to, you know? But, you know, if you run into the modern magicians, they can't understand the universal, and they want to substitute class for a universal. And a class is something you can imagine, right? A multitude. And so any time there's some kind of thing that cannot be imagined, and you try to imagine it, if you follow your imagination, you're going to be deceived. And that's why, you know, if you look at Thomas's commentary on the De Trinitatia, the great Boethius, the great Boethius, the great Boethius, the great Boethius, the great Boethius, and the great Boethius. Thank you very much. You know, it has a section there, and you can't judge by imagination here, right? That's the nature of the angels, or in E. Forza, the nature of God, huh? And Thomas has a nice whole article developing that idea, you can't resolve the imagination. Well, that's true in logic, or it's true about talking about the soul. And when Thomas is talking about the soul being indivisible, it's not indivisible like a point. It doesn't have any position here or there like the point would have. But you can be deceived, even in geometry, by false imagination, even though things there can be, what? Be imagined, huh? And this, you see something in the Latin there, the falsigraphic was, right? The falsely drawn, right? You know, men imagine that two lines would always have the ratio of a number to a number, right? Then they find out this scandalous thing, right? Mm-hmm. That the ratio of the diagonal, let's say, to the side of the square, is not proportional to the ratio of a number to a number. It's just a terrible discovery, right? Shocking discovery. And, you know, they had to, you know, rethink all their geometry, right? Until they get this great fifth book of Euclid there, right? You know? Where you can still have ratios of portions that aren't expressed in, like, numbers, right? And my favorite example is the one from, I guess in the book three, right? Was a magnificent theorem there. And it's the one where he's talking about, if you draw, you know, a circle, and you draw, let's say, the radius there to the point there in the circumference, and you draw a line that's right angles, right? To that radius, huh? Yeah, you can't fit a line in. Yeah, that straight line begins with, it said to touch the, what, circle, right? At that point, but in the other point does it touch it, right? Now, if I had never studied Euclid, I think I would imagine that at that point where the touch, starting there, I could draw a straight line between the circle and the, what, straight line, right? And the reason why I'd imagine that way is to say, well, above that, what, point between the circle and here, there's space, right? Yeah. And because, you know, space is infinitely divisible and so on, right? Surely you could draw a line in there, right? Mm-hmm. You see? And there I would be falsely imagining. Mm-hmm. And I would be deceived by that, right? Mm-hmm. I think I told you a little, a little story of, you know, my politician friend Roy Monroe. When I got out of college, I'd never read Euclid, say, I didn't go to TAC, right? So, I didn't have a trivium, you know? They said it's lousy, whatever, I want to call it in high school. I'm going to apologize. I don't do that. So, when I graduated from college, my health teacher said, Dwayne, go out and buy Euclid. And I said, why? Go out and buy it and read it, he said. He didn't give you a reason why. Go out and buy it and read it. Okay? You know? So, I went out and I started reading. He said, hey, this is very interesting. I like this stupid geometry. In high school, so, you know. So, I'm really getting caught up with it. And so, I'm talking to my, one day, to my politician friend there, Roy Monroe, and I said, what do you do these days, Dwayne? He said, oh, I'm studying geometry. He kind of laughed at kind of a half-snear, you know? And I said, well, it's kind of interesting. So, I lived into this theorem of graduating, you see, you know? And I was talking about how, you know what a rectilineal angle is, right? And you could, you know, buy a stack and make it smaller and smaller, like the scissors closing up, you know? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, see? So, could you draw, you know, the curved line, the straight line, an angle that would be smaller than any factor in your angle, right? Well, of course, it seems you couldn't, right? Because these could be made, you know, as far as you want to make them, right? You could eventually get them different in there, see? Well, here, you get an angle, what they call a horned angle, I guess. It's like a horn there, the thing, which is smaller than any, what? Rectilineal. Yeah, that sounds really impossible because of the visibility of this, see? And so I heard, see, he was a beast, right? Right. And all the things stop, see, you know? It's a little bit like, you know, you should have that in the life of the mind, that kind of satisfaction, you know, if someone is scaring her. And all of a sudden, all of a sudden, a taste of wonder, you know? My, my, uh, I'm from the marketing remarks, I guess. I used to have this, this, um, power kidder there for St. Paul, or for Minnesota, really. Uh, Killebrew, I don't know if you've ever heard of Killebrew. Killebrew? See, yeah. Yeah, they've got a big man, right? And one time, I guess the fans are razzling him, you know? Full of brew, full of brew, you know? I got the whole plate, you know, and whacked the ball away out of Baltimore. And all of a sudden, just like that. All that, locked against someone, stopped, just like that, huh? Mm-hmm. And I guess there was a time when, when, uh, B.A. Ruth, I don't know if they were cheering for some reason or other, you know? He got up to the plate and he said, And he pointed right there, you know? It's one of those on the ballpark right there, you know? Bwack! Right, knocked him right out of the ballpark right there when he said that. You know? All of a sudden, you know, it just stops like that, huh? I mean, it's kind of amazing to see that, you know? So, uh, it's because it's not so hot as a finger, right? But, I mean, when I showed that to him, you know, he's kind of full of one beer, you know? You know, it doesn't make fun of me anymore, for a second, but, uh, you've been, huh? But, anyway, I'm back to this because, um, when, when, uh, when Thomas explains, Aristotle doesn't spot out there, but in the mathematical example, Aristotle takes for wonder at the end of the bringing to wisdom, being in my physics. And, uh, um, I guess it's an example of the Morite, the one of the, uh, incommensibility, right? But what's remarkable about this is that when these things are contrary to what you'd expect, then they would tend to arouse, what? Wonder, right? And, uh, this, uh, eraser just fell to the floor, right, huh? Okay? And if this thing should fall on my hand and fall to the floor, you wouldn't wonder about it falling to the floor, would you? Even though, in fact, you don't know why it falls to the floor. See? But if I left go of this, instead of falling to the floor, it went up. Then you wonder why it went up, right? Not just because you don't know why it went up, but because it's going up is contrary to what you'd expect, huh? Mm-hmm. And so, um, Thomas is making the point that, um, although we can, in some sense, wonder about any cause we don't know, right? We especially wonder about the cause of some effect, which is contrary to what we would, what? Expect. Expect, yeah. We're interested in that he sees that, because, um, Einstein makes the same point again, um, um, in his, uh, here are these books, the Harper Torch books, you know? Mm-hmm. Uh, there's a whole series of different thinkers, you know, but this one's called Einstein, you know, scientist, philosopher, dot, dot, dot. Mm-hmm. And it's really a collection of essays, mainly by scientists, but some philosophers about Einstein, right? Uh, and then the great man, at the end, can make a reply to all these papers on him, right? Mm-hmm. And, uh, so, you have that in Einstein, but you also have, you know, a little autobiographical sketch of Einstein, where he talks about, what, wonder in his own life, right? Mm-hmm. He talks about two kinds of wonder, but the kind of wonder here that's like this, he's talking about the wonder that a magnet had when his father brought home a magnet, right? Oh. And what he wondered about was that the magnet was a body, but it seemed to move other bodies without coming into contact with them. Uh-huh. And he expected that one body could move another body only by coming into contact with it. Mm-hmm. And so he wondered about this, right? Mm-hmm. And he makes the point that people don't tend to wonder about something that happens all the time, even though they don't know the cause, right? Mm-hmm. And apparently Newton, you know, knew that he didn't know the cause of the stone falling to the ground. Mm-hmm. His editor, you know, apparently tried to get the impression that he did know. Mm-hmm. So when Einstein went to England to give his talk on Newton, he said he admired Newton for what? More for knowing what he didn't know. Oh. Like you admire Socrates, right? Mm-hmm. And for what he did know, right? Mm-hmm. And among the things that Newton knew he didn't know was why stone falls to the ground, why the animal falls to the ground. Hehehe. Hehehe. Hehehe. As it goes up, right, Newton knew he didn't know why, see. We don't wonder about why things fall to the ground, although Einstein was trying to find out why they do. But he didn't, we don't usually wonder about that because it happens every day, right? Well, it's something contrary to what we expect. Then we begin to wonder, right? That's what matters about this theorem. It arouses my wonder because it's contrary to what you might expect, right? That theorem that I kind of expand on, that fifth theorem in book two, where you realize that a rectangle could have even less area or less perimeter and still contain more, what, area, right? That's kind of what the average guy would think, right? If I was more fence to, you know, enclose my rectangle, I must have enclosed more land than you did, right? But you're a dummy. You put it like that. And I did like this. And I used less fence and my kids got more room to play than your kid does than his. And I don't know, is it Heath or somebody there mentions, you know, how these crooked geometers in ancient times they would sell land by perimeter? Oh, no. And so I'm giving you a land with more perimeter than the one you have. And you're actually losing land. And I'm gaining land, right? But I seem to be the generous guy because I'm giving you an even trade there, right? And they even discussed how people would estimate the area of an island by how long it took to sail around the island. It might be more indentation than what it was. So you could actually take longer to sail around a, what? Smaller. A smaller island, right? But that's a little more naive, you know? But it's a good example, you know, of how, you know, what Thayde's supposed to have said, you know, that the philosophers who wanted to make money, they would know how to do it, right? And the geometry wanted to make money, right, out of his mouth into these things. He could. And buying and selling land, which is why a lot of people make their money, right? You know, in our civilization, you know? They buy land and sell it to advantage, right? So even in, but I was starting out this example here, because many things you learn from that, I wonder, but I would say that even in geometry, you can have, what, false imagination, right? Even though geometry is a science where you can, what? Use your imagination. You can resolve the imagination, right? I think my brother Mark used to, you know, talking about the fifth postulate, you know, some people want to call it the parallel postulate. Well, it's not about parallel lines, this is the fifth postulate. It's saying when a straight line falls upon two lines and makes angles less than what? Two right angles, those lines will meet, right? So why do you have a postulate about lines meeting rather than lines going on forever and never meeting? It's because you can resolve the first. Yeah, you can imagine two lines meeting. But lines that go on forever and never meeting, you can't imagine an infinite line. Anytime you imagine something, you make it finite. The imagination, see? So you wouldn't be able to resolve to the imagination, which is the way you judge things ultimately in geometry. I don't know, you were supposed to write a book on the falsigraphic list, on the falsely drawn. Oh? Yeah. And I don't know if we have it or not. I've heard about it, but it's mentioned, you know, in the notes there, Heath, you know. But I had a very good student years ago. I used to get hundreds all the time in falsely. But he went to Dartmouth there, graduate school in math, you know, in math. He said one of these things, you know, puzzling over it, you know. One of these things, you know, that pretends to be a demonstration, you know, but, you know. I don't know if I figured out what's wrong with it, you know. It makes you kind of fearful. You know, it's because I'd be deceived, you know, about these things, huh? But I wouldn't be deceived about that thing, I think I would, you know. I think, you know. If you go back just to your senses, you could be deceived. You've got to do the proof. We used to argue about whether it's obvious the straight line can be bisected. You know, there's a halfway point in a straight line, huh? Because obviously in some numbers there is not, right? In an even number you can divide it, you know, halfway, right? But an odd number, no way to divide it. Once, I mean, in the two equal halves, right? You know? So is it obvious that a straight line can be divided into two equal parts? Every straight line? It's easy enough to prove, but... Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's a proof to bisect. Yes. You're assuming it's continuous. And, again, I never thought of this before. It's in Book 6 here that Aristotle proves the nature of the continuous of the infinitely divisible. But in geometry, I guess it was just assumed. Although that is a demonstration, isn't it? Yeah, geometry, yeah. Yeah, the bisect, yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I've heard some people, and I've argued with people about this, you know, I mean, they're assuming, you know, that we already know that it can be, you just want to know how to do it. Or does the theorem itself teach us that it can, that there always is a middle point, right? Think about that a bit, huh? Go back here now to the last paragraph here. In the last paragraph, in a way, he's reasoning from one and the same body moving, right? As the moderns would say uniformly, right? Furthermore, from the customary reasons, it is clear that it can be said that if time is continuous, distance will be also. For it has gone half and half the time, and generally less and a lesser time. For there will be the same divisions of time and distance. He's thinking here now of what? One and the same body, right? Right, huh? Okay. And it's a little bit like the first one there, right? Where he had two bodies equally fast, right? And we said, for the sake of clarity, he has two bodies, and he can say that, okay, one body goes this distance in this time, right? And a body equally fast is going to go in less than that time. An equally fast body goes that distance. An equally fast body will go in lesser time, lesser distance, right? Mm-hmm. Okay? And vice versa. Well, could you take this with one body going uniformly at the same speed all the time, right? That if it goes this distance in this time, then in this time it's going to go what? Less distance. Less distance, right? Okay. So if the time is divisible forever, right? Okay. And vice versa. If it goes this distance in this time, it's going to go less than that distance in what? Less time. Less time, right? Okay. So you do it with just one body itself, right? Mm-hmm. Doing that, huh? So. So maybe I'll stop there, huh? The end of the third reading, huh? I'm going to stare a little really damn my son's birthday there. My little thing for him. My youngest son's birthday. I'm going to bring up a recently developed picture of me talking to the youngest grandchild, you know? So I'm the oldest grandfather, so I'm a little bit older than the other grandparents. So here's the oldest talking to the very youngest, right? Mm-hmm. What's very interesting, you know, about talking to the little baby there is that you really talk for a little bit to them, and they try to talk back, right? Of course, they don't have any words to talk, right? But they get kind of excited a while, and they go, and they start to, like that, you know? You know, like they're trying to communicate, and I don't know what they're trying to communicate exactly, but they really are, you know, in a very human way, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, reacting to that, huh? You know, you realize how important that kind of stimulus is for a little baby, you know? Mm-hmm. They found, you know, in these hospitals, you know, where the mother is, you know... You've been killed or something's happened, right? You know, you know that the nurses have to do this baby and hug the baby and so on and That without that the baby doesn't even develop properly physically alone emotionally, right? You know It's kind of an amazing thing, you know, you know, and You know going back to the idea of the natural here a bit See You know is it something like a smile or a frown you see are they natural science, huh? Okay, I think I think a smile is of course a Hey, um Can mean more than one thing I think, huh? So Smiling smile is just a sign of what joy right or pleasure, right? Okay? Sometimes a smile is a sign of amusement, right? Okay, and Sometimes smile is a sign of what affection or love right now Okay, so I mean it's not as simple a sign that you might want to think at first, right? See to me a smile is much more interesting than a laugh, right? Because a laugh is is more, you know type tight with the with the Laughable, right? Okay, but a smile is a little more what? Ambiguous you want to say that, right? You know You know sometimes when a person is speaking and someone the audience is smiling and I don't know whether they're amused at what you're saying or Or whether they enjoy what you're saying or or they love you or what what it is, you know Is this something you know, you know that they wonder about the Mona Lisa's smile? I don't think I like the Mona Lisa myself, but but I mean you know there's something very rich about a smile, huh? But is a smile nevertheless a natural sign of these things now if you frown, you know look angry? To a baby the baby will start We'll start to you know whimper right away. You see and and as if they kind of what you actually know that, right? See and you smile at the baby, and you know, and they get didn't they smile back and they didn't they really? I mean, but they're learning to smile you see Just like they learn English, you know, or is a smile something natural that they would do you see? See, I bet you do the baby most of all what's very interesting about them is also that I know sometimes you know, I'm looking behind somebody else and then I catch their eyes like that They're looking up at you and they're smiling at you, you know They're looking up at their mother and smiling at their mother, you know, it's kind of amazing to see that, you know, you know, and but Of course they always talk about the first smile of baby gives you in the morning, you know, so it's very, you know It's been a while since they've seen you here, you know Really, yeah, so they know with with this one's you know the firstborn that family they can be Talking to him, you know, and so I just took the expression of my face and I kind of remember that thing It's right. It's really kind of interesting to see, you know You know, lucky all day they show what's going on in their own mind, you know, but But they really know you're talking to them that you're, you know, and they want to respond in some way And then of course, you know, then finding that their attention is bad, of course, it can't be too long You know, so, you know, how soon they're distracted like that, you know You know, and rest a lot and you come back and you start again, you know And they really get to be a little tense, you know, and smile and try to talk and so on Sometimes My my my wife or my Don-in-law, you know, they'll be over there, you know, so you know, they hear the baby talking to me, you know, and so it's really kind of an amazing thing It seems to be a smile and a frown that these are natural signs, huh? I don't think you could, uh, you know, you know, people talk about, uh, white and black, you know, and I guess there are some Cultures where white is associated with sorrow, but some were in black with you, I had so hard for me to see, you know But but but white and black are not as natural as as a smile on the frown, I don't think, huh? It's like, uh, but they have some place with the bride, it's dressed in black It's a groove that's dressed in black I don't know what that says about the thing That says that But, uh, but the, uh, the, uh I think the smile and the frown are really natural You've got to put on to every little bit of nature you can, you know, given this crazy modern world, huh? The, um Why do they give up that natural understanding, huh? Is it just, uh, pride and, you know, revolt, you know? They want to be, they want to be free to imagine things But it wasn't at first simply to try and, uh, they wanted to prove something so they could know that it was true They wouldn't believe them, they wouldn't believe, uh, natural understanding But if someone said, you know, there is no natural understanding, right? There are no statements that we naturally know, right? Well, if there's no statements we naturally know, then really no statement could be known, right? Oh, yeah So they couldn't really know that there are no statements, huh? Mm-hmm Um, now, so, so, apart, you know, this element of pride, you know There's pride to be in any age, right? I mean, you know Why should the moderns be more proud than the ancients, right? You see? You know? Um, but is there something also that might encourage this pride, right? And maybe not, and even operate somewhat independently of the pride, huh? So is there some reason something else there, huh? Don't you think a lot of it has to do with moral? Because then you listen to nature, then you'll be hearing some moral responsibilities Yeah, yeah, if you descend to that, yeah I'm giving an exam to the introduction of philosophy students tomorrow, right? And we just got through it, the apology, right? Of course, the most famous statement in the apology And the most famous statement in the whole of Plato is in the apology, huh? The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, right? For a man It's okay for a dog It's okay for a tree But not for a man, see? And why is that, right? See? Well, it's because the examination of life is made by reason, right? So an unexamined life is one that has not been examined by reason, right? Therefore, it's not a life based on reason Therefore, it's not really a human life, see? So I said So I was thinking a question, you know, or a sub-question Not that I want to grade it, just what they say, though So I said So after asking the question about this, I said Now, are students living an examined life or unexamined life? I had a student just in the office where I came down here They should have taken an oral exam I said, what do you think? Students on campus here are leading an examined life or unexamined life? And she said Yeah, unexamined life, he says They mentioned it all their life, but for now, they're leading an unexamined life But you see, you know, if you read the Apology carefully, you see The two parts of the speech, the main speech Touch upon those two things, huh? Because in the first part, Socrates is talking about He's been going around examining people, right? Because of the Oracle Delphi and so on But then in the second part, he says that he's been examining the Athenians Mainly about their preference for the goods of the body And outside goods over the goods of the soul, right? So he's really been examining them upon the life that they're leading, right? And so I usually pull that out And then we reason out, you know, that Socrates is correct And the Athenians are mistaken, right? Okay, a lot of other things we've taken up in the course And then I say, well, then the life of the Athenians And they agree that the life of the Americans is like the life of the Athenians Then the life of the Athenians is based on a mistake, right? I say, that's a bit annoying to have somebody going around And pointing out that the life you're leading is based on a mistake, right? That's a little bit irritating, right? Especially when I go on living that life, right? And so, no wonder they, you know, put them to death, see, you know? So, see, that's a good state to begin, you know? To have your life based on a mistake So, see, that's a good state of the Athenians So, see, that's a good state of the Athenians So, see, that's a good state of the Athenians So, see, that's a good state of the Athenians So, see, that's a good state of the Athenians So, see, that's a good state of the Athenians That statement, the unexamined life is not worth living, is kind of an exhortation into practical philosophy as far as philosophy is concerned, right? Maybe an exhortation to do an examination of conscience, too. Don't get too close to home. At least I'm a practical philosopher. So one reason why you might deny statements naturally understood, as I mentioned before, how after philosophy had been developed and you had a lot of philosophers and books, you could start anywhere besides at the beginning. Earlier you kind of had to start at the beginning with your senses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you did that, then you might come to think that you kind of could start anywhere, perhaps. Yeah. You see, Michael Kahn, I think, has a couple of interesting proportions, right? He's saying, you know, he admits in some sense he has to learn from nature, right? He gives two proportions, right? He's very good that he does this, right? Just like we asked, I was talking about the reason and the emotions, huh? And he says, what should be the relation of the reason and the emotions? He said, should reason be to the emotions like a master is to a slave? Or should reason be to the emotions, he says, like the father is to a son? That's a very good way of setting up the, what, conversation, right? You know what Aristotle's reply is, don't you? Yeah, like the father is to the son, right? That's very interesting, huh? Aristotle's thinking of the Greek family, right? Where the relation of the father to the son is different than the relation of the master to the slave, right? Okay. And two differences are this, that the master rules the slave for the good of the master, not for the good of the slave, huh? Okay. Or the father rules the son for the good of the son, right? Okay. That's one difference, huh? And the second difference he gives is that the slave has nothing to say about what he's going to do today, right? The son has something to say about what he's going to do today, right? And the father may say, well, you can't do that, or he may say, you can do that, right, huh? But there's a little bit of leeway there, right, huh? Okay. Within reason, the father may allow the son to choose certain things, right? Okay, you see that? So there are two very interesting differences, but it's hard to see what the relation can or should be between reason and the, what, emotion, right? Okay. And what Aristotle's concluding eventually is that reason should rule the emotions as the father rules the son. That it's for the good of the emotions that they be ruled by reason, huh? And secondly, that the emotions have a certain, what, leeway, right, huh? Okay. Now, I sometimes, you know, use that other proportion that they use, you know. You see, reason is to the emotions that the father is to the children. I think it's a matter of experience in family life that where the children get some discipline, right, but the parent's not tyrannical, even as children, they're happier. But the children who are allowed to run ragged, right, they become extremely restless, right, and dissatisfied with everything and so on, right? And so I see that in poorly regulated families, right? The children are actually, you know, emotionally speaking, unhappy compared to those in families where you get, you know, a firm discipline, but they get the love and so on, right? And the same thing happens to the emotions, right, huh? See? The reason the world of the emotions prevents certain excesses in the emotions that are emotionally, what? Ossetting. Ossetting, yeah, deranging, yeah. You see? You see? And I think you can see that. Okay. Now, Kant has, I think, some very interesting proportions, right? He says, to raise the question, should reason be to nature as a student is to his teacher, okay? Or should reason learn from nature like the judge or the lawyer learns from the witness? Okay? That's a very beautiful setting up with the question, right? Okay? Now, he contrasts these two. He says, the student comes into class, right? He sits down, and he listens to whatever the teacher has to say. Right? Okay? And the student doesn't decide what the teacher will say today, right? Okay? He listens to everything the teacher has to say. Okay? Now, is that the way that our reason should learn from nature, in the way that the student learns from the teacher? Now, or should reason learn from nature in the way that the judge or the lawyer learns from the, what, witness, huh? The witness doesn't get up in the witness chair there and say whatever he wants to say in the court, right? No. He opens his mouth and he applies it to a question that is put to him by the judge or by the lawyer, right? And he answers that question, right? Or those questions, and that's it, huh? Do you see? So the judge doesn't listen to everything the witness might want to say today, right? What he has to say. He listens to only what the witness has to say in reply to those questions that he and the judge or the lawyer sees fit to him, right? So what should be the relation of our reason to nature, in the sense, learning from nature, in the sense, kind of admits we can. What should we learn from nature like a student learns from his teacher or a judge from the witness? Okay? Now, having said it up very nicely, huh? Kant says, this is the way. Okay? This is the way man should learn from nature. Not this way. Okay? Now, I think it is, there's some truth in what Kant is saying as far as experimental science is concerned, huh? An experimental science, we, especially as it develops, we perform an experiment, huh? Make an observation to answer a question we have in mind, right? We're not just going out and observing whatever nature is doing or could do, right? If a definite question went to be answered, right? And when it says, put this question to nature like to witness, okay? Okay? Now, Erwin Schrodinger, huh? You know who he is? He's a famous physicist of the 20th century, Austrian. He's the physicist who perfected, what? Wave mechanics, huh? Okay? So he's responsible for all the mathematics and wave mechanics. He showed the mathematical equivalence of wave mechanics and the quantum mechanics of Heisenberg, right? So there's something called the Schrodinger equation, you'll need. Okay, so he's a famous physicist, right? But anyway, in this beautiful collection of essays that Dover puts out, it's, in the course of the time, it's had one, one title can just slap a title on these collection essays, right? The edition I have of it says, science, theory, man, you know? Okay, but it's a collection of different essays, a lot of interesting things in there. But one of the essays is entitled now, is science a fashion of the times? Kind of strange for physicists, and a world famous physicist, to be asking the question, is science a fashion of the times, huh? Well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And he's not explicitly referring to Khan at all, right? But he's saying that we don't perform every experiment we could, and especially these complicated and difficult experiments, huh? It's because we have a particular idea and a particular question that seems interesting to us, right, that we decide to perform this experiment rather than some other one, right? And if we had asked other questions, and performed other experiments, right, other things would have come to mind, right, and have dominated our science in a way that's different than it is now, see? I think it's kind of interesting, and it's kind of a reflection of this, huh? And one time we had a book there by a trial lawyer, right? It was about going to court and questioning witnesses and so on, right? And he says, if you go into court and start asking the witness questions at random, the witness is likely to say something against your case, but a harm the case has helped, right? So he's saying you've got to go in there with a plan already, what you want to do? And that plan will dictate asking the defendant these questions, but not those, see? And that's the way the trial judge, the trial lawyer, develops this case, right? Okay? You see, every investigation, the courtroom takes the direction of the questions asked, right? He asked some of the series of questions that might have gone in a different what? Direction, right? You see that in congratulatory hearings and things of that sort, where one guy might take a different question than somebody else, right? And something much different picture emerges, you see? So this question, you know, was science and fashion time? It has some connection with this fact, right? This is the way you are. Okay? Moving from nature, huh? Now, if you ask me, I would say that we should first learn from nature in this way up here. We should first listen to nature as the student listens to his teacher, and see how far we can get doing that, right? And the eight books of natural hearing, that's the actual title of the book, huh? Not physics, natural hearing. Perhaps part of the meaning of calling these the eight books of natural hearing is that you're listening, right, to nature in these books as a student would listen to his, what, teacher. And that's kind of, you know, applied in those words to a barcladish, right? It is wise, excuse me, I want to say, wisdom is to speak the truth and to act in the court of nature, giving ear there too, right? And as Aristotle and Thomas often say, right, the ear is the sense of, what, learning from another, right? The sense of the student, right? So it's saying you're, you know, very kind of people are speaking, giving ear there too, right? Teaching and pitech are giving what? Attention to nature as a, what? Teacher. Teacher, yeah. Now, how can you listen, though, to nature like the student listens to the teacher? The student listens to everything the teacher has to say. How can you listen to everything the teacher has to say? Right? Well, the answer is, in general, I can. You can't listen to everything nature has to say in particular. You can't study every kind of insect, right? Can I? Every kind of plant, right? No? I can't listen to everything nature has to say in particular, but I can learn to listen to everything nature has to say in general. That's what the philosophy of nature is, huh? A general knowledge of the natural world, based on our common experience of it, right? So, I think it's a beautiful, a set of two beautiful, right? Proportions to raising the question. But, having said that, I don't say one or the other, right? I don't say, this is the way we should learn from nature and not that, right? I don't say, this is the way we should learn from nature and not that. I say, in the beginning of our study of natural things, we should learn from nature in this way. Later on, we have to maybe learn from nature in this way. Do you see? Okay? I forgot, this is the only way to learn from nature, right? You can check that, right? See? Because his whole experience is that of an experimental scientist, right? And so he goes on to his example there of Galileo, the, you know, climb and plane, and some other people, you know, some three or four famous experiments, right? You know? Where you're putting a definite question you're trying to answer, right? You're proceeding in the second way, right? Okay? So he's caught up in that successive experimental science, right? And it may be, in fact, that this is what's on here, right? Now, was the first question regarding reason to the emotions is also from Kant, or... No, it's in Aristotle, right? Okay. I was making a comparison here that, you know, we have to understand things about proportions, and Aristotle raises a very good question about reason and emotions by these two, what, proportions, right? But there, Aristotle doesn't say you should sometimes do one thing to the other, right? Well, sometimes the saints always say you have to overcome the emotions that are kind of violent sometimes, right? But for the most part, it's a reason should rule the emotions, like a father, a son, right? And that's why we, you know, should use the fine arts, you know, good music, good literature, right? Because there are the... there's something that kind of appeals to the senses, right? And therefore, you're ruling the emotions not in a tyrannical way, but you listen to them a bit, right? Because you know what they like. You see? But you're still ordering them, right? Okay. But here it seems to me that the truth is not in one of these and the others, but there may be truth in both of these, but we should learn first from nature as a student learns from a teacher, secondly, in this second way, right? So they're quite different ways of learning. There is a lot more truth in the... and finally in the first one, all the principles and things like that, so there's a lot more truth in the first, although there is something in both, that's true. But now, as you try to know nature in particular, it becomes more difficult, you know, more in detail. And now the question is, going back to what I was saying before, about the complete dependence of philosophy upon the natural, right? And how we know what we don't naturally know in philosophy to what we do naturally know. But is that still true in experimental science, see? In other words, that water is, let's say, H2O, right? So that's true, right? That water is H2O. Do we understand that or know that to what we naturally know? There's something kind of strange about this because, you know, I think the great scientists realize the central place of what they call the hypothesis, right? And that boos everything, right? And you could say that hypothesis is the soul of experimental science, right? And that they rarely perform experiments at random anymore, see? Just, you know, let's do this and see what happens, right? Don't do that, right? They have a theory, I mean, a hypothesis in mind already, right? Which is just a question they want to answer, right? And they design and conduct an experiment to test that particular thing, right? Okay? So the experiment, now sometimes, of course, when they conduct an experiment, something happens in the experiment, you know, that...