On the Practical Necessity of Having Demons (Session 3)

Okay. Hello and welcome to the third session of On the Practical Necessity of Heaven Demons by Reza Nigharistani. I'm now going to pass the mic. Reza, please take it away. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone. So, we talked in conversation format about the problem of evil in ancient times. Now, this is where we actually start our anthropological study of what it means to live with a demon. So today we are going to talk about a little bit of archaeological, anthropological stuff

about the origin of demons in ancient cultures and how down the road they affect the trajectory of ethics so to speak not only in during their times but also in modern times so this is i would say the first session from which we actually embark on the action on the project of this seminar So, maybe as always we should start with if anyone has a question from the previous sessions

and if no one has a question then we'll go to presentations and then answer and then I will take it from there. So with that said, any comments, slander, accusation, swearing? I'm fine with all of that. I have a fundamental question, Reza. I hope that is a slander too. Yeah, maybe it's an interpretation thing. Why did we have to read that text actually? In relationship, for example, to the concepts which we covered last session, Platonian formal,

which is timeless, which is not context sensitive, so forth, so forth. And how can we connect this to... I would say that it was more like, you know, good movies always start from an irrelevant scene, right? You know, you see someone is hanging from a cliff, right? And it's trying to struggle to come back to the surface. And then this is like for like two minutes, and then the story goes on and on and on and on. And then finally, you notice that, oh, this guy who was hanging from a cliff was that guy in this story. So this is more like this.

So we have to start from a certain kind of more or less comprehensive Western purview or scope about the problem of evil, which is neither too hard on evil nor too anthropological soft on evil such that we can go through all this long way and then come back to it later close the circle so to speak the montage is the key always good stories always good come with a good

montage. Put some person in peril at the beginning of your story, completely irrelevant to the context, then pretend that it never happened, then carry on their story, and then close the circle. And that's also the problem of ethics. Dear friends, Nikita, the man who has a permanent smirk on his face, which I love.

I was that by the way a problem of ethics constructing that lot of film. Can you elaborate a little bit on that. I had a probably naive question from last time which was you made a kind of a distinction between a narrative and plot and saying like that plot is something that is constructed from mundane combined with something ethereal in a way and that was the power of it that could probably lead to a kind of an ethical worldview in a way together with that when you were asking about a part of a narrative which

could be kind of operable for us. I was also thinking about like the narration part of it, the communication part of it, which indeed forms this roles of narrator and someone who something is told to and probably kind of has this potential for ethical production. I know that makes sense. Yes, narrative is also potent for what you might call to be ethical atmosphere. The reason that I brought it, you remember that I mentioned Zola's metaphor that life is bigger than people, right? You

You can translate it to say that the collective is bigger than the subject. And the true realm of ethics is not individual per se, but the collective that contextualizes and gives rise to that very individual. This one, the collective, is what you might call to be the plot, where you don't hear always the moanings, the complaints, the needs and desires of persons in literature, right?

like Zola's novels or even Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. But then you get also a different kind of storytelling, which is that of narrative, where basically ethics emerges from the self-reflections of the individuals unto themselves. A good example of this is Italo es Vero, the conscience of... I always forget this goddamn title.

One second. Zeno. The conscience of Zeno. Zeno, yes. Yes. That's a good example. That's a very good example of the limitations and the constraints. It's not that it's not possible, but it's limited. The limitations of an ethics that merely emerges out of individual voices. It is truly one of the masterworks of European literature. It is essentially, it starts with simple problem.

How do you quit smoking? then chain smoking in European culture was associated with cheating. So he's both a smoker and a kind of a, not always, but often, a philanderer, a cheater. And he just doesn't like this. Not because he feels that morality is under moral laws.

No, he just doesn't like it. He just doesn't feel a good person. He doesn't feel that he can do that much within this framework. But he always and always fails. So the novel actually unfolds from this idea that he tries to quit smoking, and he writes his ethical confessions and cigarette rules. Each cigarette roll, each note that he writes on them is an Augustinian confession that should lead him out of his addictions, self-sickness.

Who has read Italo Ezravo's book, by the way? I've read it. This is, it's Wayne. Superb, superb. Yeah, that first chapter is extraordinary. Magnificent, magnificent book. It does bog down a little bit in the middle, but then it gets good again at the end. Yes, yeah. Well, the thing is that obviously it's a work of modern literature. Modern literature means that you are going to write a thousand pages. obviously a lot of stuff can be very very boring and let's not talk about Proust here we are talking about the Talo as well but as somebody who used to smoke four to five packs a day for 17 years that first chapter is like very personally meaningful to me oh absolutely

me too me too you can see it already it's just that I that's a kind of demon that I actually prefer to live with rather than to admonish or expel. Any more questions before we go to presentation? Asya, Martina, Georgia? I actually am going to do the presentation, so any questions?

Okay, okay. So you are going to be tortured soon. So no need to torture you. Yeah, I'm the victim of the day. Okay, please take the microphone and start. Okay, I have prepared for you. Let me see on my screen. Can you show me? Okay, I'm going to be a little bit. Can you see it? Yes, yes. Okay. I've tried to make it full screen. Wait a minute. Okay, nice. So... Now you're... Okay, okay. It came. Yeah, so the thing for today, if I'm not mistaken, is...

the problem of fancy and evil and how it used to be neutral and how it turned into unneutral through the religious notion of evil. And all of this had to be like faced through the book of Arda Viraf. So I have prepared this diagram in order to communicate better with you and through the aspect that societies work through imaginary representations. So I have tried to somehow approach these representations. So we start from here, the book of Arda Viraf, and the whole book starts at the point where

Zartost or Zoradoustra or Zoroaster had established the relationship for like 300 years. But then the wicked spirit, the cursed evil spirit, the Weakened One, aka Asemok, has sent his spy, of short, like a messenger. The spy was Alexander, the conqueror. And this move has caused an extreme upheaval, a religious, societal upheaval in traditions and so on. And so the whole book tries to re-establish the relationship, the position of the subject in this situation, in this relationship.

And so it is made clear from the very first page. If you cannot see, I can zoom. It becomes clear. Yes, please zoom. Please zoom on the right side of it. So it becomes clear from the very first page is that the divine, there is a clear confrontational opposition between the sides of the divine. So there is the good aspect and the bad aspect. And the whole book tries to resolve this because in the same realm, there is no distinct belief, no law, no clear law, no clear representation, no clear categorization.

So there is this hero, Arda Viraf, who will embark on a spiritual journey with the help of some narcotics to visit the kingdom of Beyond and try to find out the truth of what happens and bring it back to his people. And through this journey, it becomes pretty clear that the main theme of this realm, Beyond, is the either-or theme. There is a clear hierarchy in the very distinct levels that reach steadily upwards to the heavens, the good, and downwards to the heaven.

So this whole book revolves around a conceptual apparatus that tries to regulate social, moral, legal and ritual aspects of life through a ladder machine. And according to my interpretation, it has to do with divine logistics of some sort. There are the three main axes of the Zoroastrian religion that are thoughts, words and actions. And according to those aspects, your rates, we provide you a classification that will be in use in the afterlife. It will decide your position in the afterlife. It is very interesting that God appears as a singularity.

However, demons, or at least the punishments of demons, appear in an extreme multitude. They cover the 60% of the text. And also the descriptions of heavens and the levels of heavens appear very abstract. Like the first level is if your thoughts were good. The second level, if your words were good. The third, if your actions were good. And of course, heaven includes all of those plus your faith in the Zoroastrian religion. And also it appears quite peculiar to me that thoughts come up as the first level because to act well is okay, one level of difficulty, but to think well is probably supposed in

my mind to be like of the top level, how do you evaluate the good thoughts. And so some remarks, because of this cessation between the bad and the good, there exists only repetition as an infinite present experience. It is a continuous reconstruction of a duality that is no longer, it has been split. So, again, according to my interpretation, this equal to us being in the realm of history. And here is a small diagram of what happens. In the center is the unitary subject that is responsible for the equivalencies of thoughts,

words, and actions. And the society is aligned as an observant other, that is the voyeuristic surveilling recording eye. And according to the actions, the correlations of the subject, there is only one path and one destination, whether to the pious or to the wicked in an ascending course or descending accordingly. So this has to do with the interpretation of the Arda Viraf. But since we were talking in previous lectures about the faceless demons and the nameless demons and so on, I have tried to find any texts in my memory that bring me in mind such

situations. And the first text that came into my mind was the Hesiod's Theogony. It is a text about how Greek gods came into being. And I put it like in a contrapunto, like the system of artograph represents the closed frameworks while the Theogony stands for open representations. And the book starts with the quote, first of all, chaos came to being, which for me is very interesting because chaos did not exist. It came to being, it was created suddenly. And again, in comparison with the situation that the book of Ardavirav describes, in this

text and in this tradition, we have divine courses instead of divine logistics. According to Posidonius, a Hellenistic philosopher, the whole air and atmosphere is full of immorality, So we exist in the context of ends, not either ors, but ends. And the subject has to orient themselves. So the machine becomes a navigating machine. There is a singularity, which is the mirror, the fate, the portion of the whole, the lot. whole, the lot, and the deities and humans are multitude and all succumb to the faith's

law, or at least according to the Sion. So in this situation, through the union, one is entitled to their personal demon as assignment. There is a permanent evolution, open dialectics of remembering, forgetting, successive deformations, a unity of constant appropriations. So, again, according to my interpretation, we can say that we are in the realm of memory instead of the realm of history. And of course, such an open system can lead to the final accusation in the Socrates apology, where the subject is capable of introducing new demons,

the kina demonia, as we say in Greek. So we have a situation where one subject can introduce new demons. Of course, they have to come in dialogue with whole community about the reality of those demons, and they can be punished, as it happened with Socrates, for those new demons. But there is a dialogue, there is an openness in the system. And again, according to Socrates, the way he defines the demon is something that always forbids me to do something which I'm going to, but never commands me to do anything. And again, a small diagram to represent this openness where the subject is, in this case,

assembled and responsible for a feedback, and the connected others, not the distant, observant others are the associating, limiting, and providing resources. So this is my main analysis for today. I don't know, I probably should stop now and start the discussion. Well, Georgia, I think this was, I mean, let me tell you from the diagram, you can do two things with this. either sell it on Twitter or Facebook to garner some philosophical clout or simply just sell it to people to get some hard-earned cash.

Regardless of that, regardless of that, it was absolutely a fantastic cross-cultural presentation. So you are a Greek? Yes. Okay. So, okay. Sometimes only Greeks can look into the Middle Eastern cultures. Yes. That was absolutely fantastic. I must say this. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you. So before I start to comment on Georgia's presentation, and then we go to the answer, the response,

does anyone want to talk? I mean, I had a question. Georgia, could you explain the observant other again when you were sort of running through, yes. This concept came to me in the exact moment where the whole community around, I don't remember the name that describes the, like not priests, but something like that. And they decide to send someone to this realm of beyond. And they all stand around him and they give him the narcotics and the wine and food.

And this idea came to me that there is a whole community, like a panopticon around the subject that expects from the subject to take full responsibility of what is to be done. And that's how I came to the observant. So in terms of what is to be done, if I remember correctly, you introduce two certain kind of ultimate schema at the end. One was from the perspective of the individual memory, and one was from perspective of interlocution, namely collective memory. Is that right?

Or you want to add some comments on this? I mean, if you can elaborate a little bit because... Sure. What ought to be done, I mean, maybe I shouldn't say ought to be done because ought is always a collective qualifier. But what you might say that what should be done from the perspective of an individual comes from two fundamentally different directions. One, what you might call to be individual memory, you know, the kind of, and the kind of demons that kind of individual memory harbingens, brings into the fold.

And then the second one is a different kind of thing. It's not coming from individual memory, so to speak, but it comes from a doubt, interlocution with the collective, namely tapping into the symbolic medium of collectivity. And obviously mediums of dealing with these two arena are too different. So as the kind of demons, the kind of conceptions of demons and evil, defilement and sin that come with them individual versus collective yeah I agree

with what you said and I also had a thought that came from the which I believe is related to what you're saying where it is not commented at any page I mean I have explained a little bit what happens in the heaven this is the level of good thoughts, of good words, of good actions, and heaven and the above. But it is not resolved at any stage of hell, what happens to a human that has sinned according to the law, but had good thoughts or good actions in general. This is something that is not revolting. I believe it has to do exactly with this, with the relationship between the personal and the communal.

Yes, absolutely. Georgia, there was an interesting example that might speak to that, where the man and the wife are separated, they're torn apart by the angels and the demons, and the man goes to heaven ashamed of himself, and the woman stays in hell, but only has to deal with bad smells. That is the interesting part because also the man that goes to heaven appears to be very sad. It's very like it's not heaven if this is what heaven is for him. Yeah but so the woman there was basically had committed good acts in some respects and bad thoughts and others or some combination of the things that would put her into one part of hell

and the man had done the same. And so there was this corresponding sort of psychological and temporal experience that was perpetuated when they were finally separated that was different than almost everybody else. Everybody else seemed to be sort of outside of time and at least in hell empty of psychology, whereas for whatever reason those two, because there was this sort of inter mixture preserved those very human phenomenological experiences. Wayne and also Giorgio, I think you should understand the book of Ardabirath was written, it's not a canonical Zoroastrian text, it's not Avesta, right? So Avesta is a very

ancient texts. The book of Arda-Birof or Arda-Birof Naame was written very very late during the Sassanites. Now post-Christianity. It's not as if it was influenced by Christianity. No, it was actually my apologies, influenced by early Zoroastrianism, but with an imperial, state-wise kind of moral code. So the thing is that many people, for example, Iranian historians who have analyzed the book

of Ardabirav, they think that it has extreme Manichean elements, good and evil. But I don't think that is true, really. I would say that the book of Ardabir Raf is more like this, that there is a difference between theoretical reasoning and ethics, the kind of ethics that goes with it, and practical reasoning and the kind of ethics that goes with it. So if you actually manage to get clout or honor in one side, for example, theoretical reasoning, it does not essentially translate for you to getting clout or honor or reward

in the other dimensions, such as practical reasoning. And this is the whole point of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism, the main idea is that the mind is comprised of theoretical sides and practical sides. And it is not so obvious from the status of the law how you can connect the theoretical with the practical. precisely because to connect the theoretical to the practical is not that of theory or practice.

It is the job of ethics. So Zoroastrianism became so popular, in fact, as a proto-monotheistic, organized monotheistic religion precisely because it was the first religion that could tell you certain kinds of codes of conduct such that you can relate your theoretical convictions with your practical convictions back and forth. And that's why Zoroastrianism became the most influential

monotheistic religion before even Jewishism or Christianity were a thing. But of course, this is a very later text. This is after actually Christianity. But it still encapsulates some of the early Zoroastrian, you know, in the Avis, Zoroastrian convictions. Reza, can I ask you a question about the timing of the text? So at the beginning, when they're referring to Alexander the Accursed, they also are calling him the Roman. which does that time stamp this after the founding of Constantinople where they're just sort of associating the Greek speaking Roman Empire with this previous incursion from Greece

so my apologies I when was exactly Constantinople was founded fourth century fourth century yeah probably so you see obviously the contextual history of Ardogar Afnameh is that it is written in the Sassanid era. It's post-Christianity, right? Whereas Avesta is pre-Druadism, most proper, according to some archaeologists. It's still not vetted though. So if this text is coming post-Christianity, You should see the contextual societal history from which it is emerging.

Obviously at this time, the Sassanid Persians are fighting the Roman Empire. So the Roman empires from the Persian perspective seem to be the grandsons of the Greek culture. So it is very, very easy to call Alexander Roman, precisely because the Romans actually do take pride to call them the second Greeks. Right? So that's the historical perspective on this.

I have a question related to this text, could be there to George or Reza or anyone like, there's a specific part, like I think most of the time the demons appear either as a kind of paradigm for wrong action and thinking and practice in general, the torturers, but there's a point here when they're going to the Chinwad Bridge, it's in the beginning, chapter 5, where it says, We shall show thee the reward of the firm believers in Ormazd, and the archangels, and the good which is in heaven,

and the evil which is in hell. And the reality of God and the archangels, and the non-reality of Arriman and the demons. So, there's this sort of parallelism between the belief and the good practice in good or in evil, but also the reality of God and the Archangels and the non-reality of the demons. So I wanted to know if you have any thoughts about, like in our project of researching the function of the demon, what's the meaning of this non-reality?

Like, are demons non-real? Not real. Yeah, okay. I think that with reference to this particular text, as I mentioned, that you should understand where it comes from. So it comes from not merely pure Abbasar, namely ancient Zoroastrianism. Ancient Zoroastrianism is fundamentally different, actually. than the Book of Arda-Girav, namely no Zoroastrianism, or for example, Zoroastrianism as we understand it today. You see, ancient Zoroastrianism goes through different stages of metamorphosis.

One of them is Manichaeanism, namely the eternal fight between bipolar opposites. But it is not as, even when I'm saying Manichaeanism, I don't mean it in a today's understanding of a fight between the opposites. No, it's actually more complex, but let us just for now pretend that yes, it is that kind of fight. So within this text, you get a Manichean vision of what you might call to be early religion, the fight between evil and good.

within this fight demons are not essentially the harbingers of doom precisely because the game is rigged such that certain kinds of demons can always go back and do the bidding of the gods. It brings back us to this idea that

even if you are a psychopath, you can still be a good human being. So Ardhaviraf actually does not prevent such kind of people or admonish them. The kind of people that it admonishes are the people who are constantly are what you my call to be one-dimensional when it comes to practice. Because for Manichaeanism, and

this is a Manichaean text, to be one-dimensional in terms of practice is the very recipe of you ending up in hell. However, there is a different story here. This text... Yeah, sorry. Yes, please, please call. No, no. Please go on. I just wonder if you could sort of anchor what you mean by one dimensional in practice with an example or so on, because I'm not sure Okay, for example, what you mean by that.

Okay, one dimensional in practice, like in the sense that you always need within the Manichaean doctrine, the codes of conduct. However, as Georgia was talking about, you can still think badly about someone, but do some good. You see, the Manichaeanism in the Ardha-Viroth, fused with the Zoroastrian worldview, is the bifurcation between thinking and practice.

Theoretical reasoning, practical reasoning. It does not actually bottom-up ethics, so to speak, into mere practical reasoning, in the sense that you can have so many bad thoughts. You can, in fact, make good practice out of them for the good of the humanity. but also the converse. You can have zero theoretical thoughts but many many great

practical thoughts. Does it make you a good human being? Probably not. There is something here that I wanted actually to bring up later in the session. This is something that is borrowed from the ancient Mesopotamia. And Greeks actually invested in this quite heavily. The idea of conning intelligence, what the Greeks called Metis.

So what is conning intelligence? Conning intelligence is simply a form of navigation between theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning. Such that, for example, let me say that... Let's argue about this controversial example. is a kind of Western European conning figure, right? He has a good heart, bad practice, good ethics.

So he thinks that there is an injustice in this land. He takes the money from the rich, gives it to the poor. So you can think about the kind of formula that we have laid out here in terms of Robin Hood, but also this is just a simplistic example. There are better examples, of course. So what is exactly the case with Robin Hood in terms of moving back and forth between theoretical convictions and practical convictions?

You see, obviously he is transgressing the law, the code, but does he transgress ethics? Will the idea be somewhat that in doing this Robin Hood is also a figure who kind of functions as a way of updating what that kind of, that, the like normative conceptions that that society holds or something, or is this, because I feel like there's a tension at the same time because he's kind of acting on his own, sort of, he's meeting out justice on his own kind of interpretation of what justice is, right? But presumably this is normatively grounded,

though not reflected in the laws. But is it really the case in the actual story? because in the story, he goes around and talks to different people. Like think about some video games. I just played Red Dead Redemption 2. Right, so you are an outlaw. You can be a total fucking psychopath, which I absolutely love to play that. I mean, who doesn't want to kill people? But then there is a different alternative where you go on and meet different individuals in your own society.

And from there, you garner a certain kind of knowledge as how society works. to the best of your theoretical knowledge of society and to the best capacity of your practical reasoning, you go on and transgress the current order of things. Isn't it the path of a revolutionary? David Kasher, Somewhat, but what if you, you know, taking a very contemporary example, what if you talk to people maybe online or in text and the kind of consensus that seems

to emerge from that is that the lockdown sucks and like David Kasher, Well, okay, now you are trying to trick me. Yes, of course. This is the whole point that you see the rob as I mentioned Robin Hood example is a naive example precisely because it does not take into account or maybe it does but in a very minimal sense the historical context from which it emerges right so So obviously, if you are thinking of yourself as a Robin Hood, going to talk to people on Twitter, then you end up on the alt-right Twitter account.

Why? Precisely because the whole point of ethics is to reflect upon the condition that allows theoretical and practical reasoning to emerge to begin with. Robin Hood had that but the so-called Robin Hood of our ages, no they don't. To understand what capitalism does to your idea of theory and practice and what are

you're constrained and how you should navigate them, that's the idea of ethics. And I think that earlier religions, before the rise of organized canonical religion, they had something of that too. But nevertheless, it went kaput. Nothing of it is left anymore. Andresa, ancient Zoroasterism is one of them, right? Because I'd like to,

a question popped into my head. the selection of words titled from Nietzsche for his masterpiece. You know that Nietzsche always thought that Zoroastra is an evil person. Essentially Zoroastra is the antagonist of Nietzsche's ethics. Nietzsche fights with Zarathustra. that there is some sort of hidden evil in Zarathustra that Nietzsche's entire work is dedicated to. I'm sorry, namely overcoming Zarathustra, right?

Overcoming, but yes, what is in Zarathustra in that ancient sense that Nietzsche wants to overcome? That maybe should be a challenge for the best paper of this seminar. What is wrong with Zarathustra that Nietzsche so much wants to overcome? Not because he has a fucking beard. It's obviously for a different reason. Cool animals.

Okay, let's move to the answer. And Georgia, magnificent again. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, I think I'm supposed to answer or provide a brief response. Oh, Carl! Yeah, no, first of all, I just want to say that sort of, that was a beautiful presentation, Georgia. Unfortunately, I haven't got anything to match it, so I'm not even going to try, but I think I would just like to sort of highlight some questions that I have from both from the text and in response to your presentation and also to what Ressa said now. I think one of

the things that I read a bit differently is probably, I really read it as the incipiency of moralism and the sort of, or maybe a halfway point between the great monotheistic religions as we know them today, and perhaps the ancient ethics that we have been talking about in so far as certainly there is this, I certainly find this sort of Manichean distinction where we have not on the one hand side the one and on the other the multiplicity of demons, but rather the one of the good and the one of the evil. But in addition to that, we also have this vision that Ressa mentioned of people or agents or subjects who are

not yet quite unified, so we don't have this tallying of sin that we do have in Christianity to a different degree, but we have this distinction between, as Ressa said, practical and theoretical reasoning. But I struggle to see that we can, I don't mind the distinction per se, but I struggle to see that we can support that distinction with this text. Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun

Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun Jan-Jun and practical reasoning from that, and I would be quite interested in hearing how that can be ameliorated. Karl, do you know that the Book of Ardabir Afname is actually considered to be the most evil book of organized religion? Yeah, I would absolutely think so, because this is a, you know, this is in the sense that it's Dante-esque, right?

It's like it's in the same genre as the Divine Comedy, and it's a very clear idea. It's a horror story in the sense that it tells you precisely what will happen if you fail to live up to what has been stipulated that you must do. It's moralism through and through. So from that perspective, I certainly would believe so. Yes, and I think that you brought up some really great, great idea that, you know, at this point, religion is not about tallying. It doesn't hold a leisure for you to tally the sins or the negative versus the positive on the leisure columns.

It's just that if you actually do something that does impinge upon the core ideas, you're already in the hellhole. And that makes it far more horrific than, for example, Bible, Talmud, or I don't know, Testament, so on and so forth. Yeah, this is why I asked about what you meant by singularity of practice. Well, yes, certainly. I mean, considering the time it was written in also, I think it's very much a book written

by a religion trying to defend itself and trying to sort of maintain and sort of perhaps save its core ideas. And there is this kind of... That is, of course, the very idea of every organized religion, though. Well, certainly. But sometimes we're more pernicious than others. Yes, yes. From a given system of thought. Of course, there is always a great way to, what you might call, to be, fight against the idea of religious ethics or religious morality. I don't think that any person has actually shown it better than even Nietzsche. Nietzsche, I don't think that

really a sense to religion. Nietzsche simply tries to optimize religion, core and ring, you know, kind of give it some stamina, some, you know, health packages, so on and so forth. But I would say that Adolf Grunbaum had this very idea that if you really want to fight any sort of religion, always target its cosmology. Because cosmology is where theory and practice do converge. You can't have a cosmology if

you don't have practice and theory. So the best way to assassinate your legion, just go for their cosmology, reveal it for what it is. Reza, but isn't it somehow exactly the thing that Nietzsche does in Das' Spokes, Arthussra, specifically in this book, not the others, with regard to going for the cosmological aspect of a religion in general? Yes, he does. He does. But the thing is that, you see, Nietzsche's, this is of course some Nietzscheans in our class or outside might say no.

But I would say that Nietzsche himself replaces one cosmology of the religious creed with another. Isn't it the whole point of the transvaluation of all values? I think Ray Brasier's critique of Nietzsche is top-notch on this point, showing that Nietzsche's transvaluation critique devolves into the most dogmatic values.

The idea that there is no value ultimately coincides with the religious, the fanatic religious idea that in every part of the world, in everything, you can find a value. The same thing about the thesis about the mind. The very idea that the mind is everywhere coincides with the naturalistic fallacy

there is no such a thing as mind. Should we go for certain kind of drink, bathroom break at this point, if you haven't taken it? Okay, okay. So how about this? Five minutes, sharp, and then we will reconvene.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. So,

One other thing that actually came to my mind is that when it comes to these kinds of Manichaean texts about good and evil, we should take them with a grain of salt precisely because in ancient cultures also in modern culture as we see it and good and evil are not context insensitive or context independent they are always context dependent So, for example, let me, those of you who want to, you know, just consult with some ancient

texts, let me, it is kind of considered to be one of the most classical book on the study anthropological study of demons in uh fertile crescent uh it's uh but it's called the devils and evil spirits of babylonia of course the the title is a little bit too uh restrictive it's It's actually studying archaeological and anthropological evidences from the Firthal Crescent, from Levant, so on and so forth.

It's written by Reginald Campbell Thompson. some of the texts here are actually good examples of this anti-manichaean stance precisely because majority of these texts are talking about for example a person taking side with the demon either by giving him a sacrifice giving her a sacrifice wearing an amulet trinkets

in praise of that deity in order to ward off another evil deity So you see, the idea of evil, as we move forward, particularly to the modern times, one of our examples is Dostoevsky's, the demons. we notice that evil is not against good evil

is actually against evil that's the problem of ethics the kind of good that we see in the colloquial sense as opposed to evil is actually not the good or good. It's just another evil or demon in disguise. And that's why I think reclaiming ethics from the ancient anthropological times and then carrying it to the modern times is something that we should strive for.

rather than simply take the presumptions of the organized Martheistic religion for granted. So that's one. The other one that I was going to talk about... I forgot. Okay, please go on until I come off with something. I found it interesting how even in heaven and hell there's some room for this sort of contingency and like they're not like like pure black and white and I found like this chapter 68 like quite an

interesting part of it where it's talking about the sort of the man and the woman who the woman who was like a man's wife and she is saying she she why did you go to heaven and I went to hell when you taught me and you you were sort of um you were you were responsible for for my actions in this sort of uh dominant fashion so it's like it's like he went he went to heaven feeling guilty and she went to hell but they're not like they're still like this this room for like an interior life in these places um and and like so even though she she she was perhaps not responsible for the fact that she didn't maybe know better because she wasn't taught she's still going to

hell so there's some like there's not like some absolute like moral um like reflection of one's interior character and then like like the sort of like if a heathen who doesn't like hear the in a christian sense like the who hasn't been like exposed to like the doctrine like whether they were to go to like purgatory rather than heaven or hell it's like something like that yes of course you see essentially in the first seminars all we want to do is just to get rid of this idea of the absolute context dependency of moral laws or ethical laws. There is no such a thing as fundamental context

dependency. Everything is context, sorry, context-independency. Everything is context-independent when it comes to ethics. But even when we endorse something like that, the con- that Rules rather than laws, rules of ethics, rules of self-navigation and self-cultivation are context-dependent. How much does this give us, really? It's just a theoretical idea, right?

and at that it's actually a very meager theoretical idea what the fuck am I supposed to do with this to me not be a psychopath to not kill every pure innocent citizen in Red Dead Redemption 2 Not just out of the fear of the lawman, but precisely because I choose it to be so. But I choose it to be so is not the problem of free will, it's the problem of the rational

will. And the rational will is always collective. And the collectivity of that rationality and that will comes from elsewhere. So, how to get out of this trivial theoretical core upon which we have landed, all of us? We somehow, more or less, agree that this is the case. Yes, ethics pertains to context-sensitive rules rather than context-insensitive or

context-independent laws of morality. Sure, that is a piece of consciousness, but how does it ever translate to something that we can actually use in order to evolve our ethics? Answers. Sorry, this isn't an answer. It's more just something in addition to that question is, you know, at a kind of scale, at a global scale, you know, in terms of questions around

context and questions around normativity and like how this is being communicated to individuals who act, is there not a further challenge of how one can act in a way that is not merely local or is not constrained by its local limitation in such a way that impinges upon the kind of... Definitely. So I would say that this is challenge two. I call it challenge two precisely because it's not as fundamental as challenge one. And what is the challenge one? How are you going to fight the naturalization, not only fight but also cope with the naturalization

of all ethical principles? For example, here we have, have any of you read Scott Atron, In God We Trust? One of the most skeptic, best skeptic trolls that you can ever encounter in your life. say some bullshit, it comes with a 300 page book to utterly decimate your claim.

So Scott Atron is an anthropologist with a background in neuroscience and cognitive sciences, has written some really, really great books in biology, in archaeology, in anthropology and so on and so forth. So the book for which he became extremely famous is a book called In God We Trust. So from the title you might think that, oh, this is one of those new atheist people, right?

No he is not. He is far better. He actually snipes the shit out of God, even if God is high in the heaven, simply by using common sense science not technical science but common sense so uh one of the things that he i remember i think it's chapter three or chapter four of that book when he talks about the problem of demons and shadows and the dark things, you know, the outside, CCR US style, right?

Oh, you are all getting excited now. He's actually going to put his dirty paws on all of this stuff, showing that, God, these are actually more boring than putting a seed in your garden. So the way that he deals with this kind of stuff is saying, I am not going to say this, from a Scott at the paraphrasing, I'm not going to say that none of these things matter, you know, all this talk of demons and the outside

and libido, materialism, and so on and so forth. No, let's actually pretend they are good, They're solid materials, yes. But, then test them by way of this very simple challenge. See, this is Escalade Atran's trick in all of his books. He's not your classical disenchanting scientistic philosopher, right?

He's actually saying that, it always comes up with this humble opinion. Let's pretend that this is good, okay? This is a solid content. But then let us also pretend that how much of this salt content can we rot away using common sense science? Like for example, you say that, oh there is a substance called ether, right? Eskal Atran would say that yes, yes, there is ether, definitely so. It's all good. It

smells really good too. But then, let's see, not using high technical scientific discourse, but just simply use the common sense scientific discourse. See if ether actually stands at the end of the day. The same thing he does with these kinds of stuff, with these kinds of religious stuff. He says that, okay, let's pretend that these are all real. And you know

that his upbringing is actually anthropology, before he went to the cognitive sciences. So first you will say, okay, you said that there are shadows, demons, so on and so forth. Okay, I would say that yes, according to these canonical texts, there are shadows and they are all actually real entities from the manifest image, from the common sense image. But then let's really think about them.

Where do they emerge? Where did they emerge in the first place? So he has three explanations, what you might call to be triple folk explanation, as usually understood. meaning they are commonsensical but they are not essentially true. So the first Fulke explanation is what he calls Fulke mechanics. So at the dawn of time, sapiens, the great apes,

develop highly technical perceptual systems. Perceptual systems do investigate, do focus on highly, you know, abrupt movements in space and time. Like for example, from a neuroscientic perspective when you see a person at night your brain is actually more interested in his or her shadow than he

or her precisely because the shadow creates sudden movements. Sudden movements are things that we are brought up with, they are predatory movements. Any sort of sudden movement is a singularity in a cognitive sense. We want to pounce on it, you know. Like for example, if, I don't know, Jasper or Daman I am making a movement at night. I am less interested in them if I am a predator, which I am an evolutionary predator. I am less interested in them than their shadows. Because their

shadows create erratic kind of movements that attract what we call in neuroscience attentional global system. Attentional global system is the core of your natural consciousness. It gives attention to deformation and distortions which create singularities out of the patterns that you see regularly. Like for example, a good example of this would be that every day I see this guy come to my

house, sweep, say hello, so on and so forth. But then I see some other guy that doesn't hold a sweep. comes with a gun and he goes around the house. That creates a singularity for my global cognition. Instantly triggers me. So that's what I meant by that. So, the idea is that demons, in this sense, from Scott Atron's perspective, it's not that

they are not deprived of the anthropological, mythological context, but they do have, in addition to those contexts, evolutionary contexts and triggers. And you should be very careful when you are talking about the problem of ethics without the problems of the evolutionary triggers such as this, folk mechanics, that we do see shadows and we get spooked like a horse at night.

We see certain kinds of stuff and we get spooked. Folk psychology. Ghosts, demons, so on and so forth. And then worst of all is a problem of what you might call to be folk dynamics. economics. How to put all of this together. So you have had this data about certain kind

of shadow that is lingering at night, certain kinds of belief content that you inherited and now you turned it into a demon. So Scott Axelon tries to essentially give a kind of semi-naturalized idea of what it means to encounter with a demon in naturalized psychological sense that demons are nothing but encounters of the self with its outer realms, with limit conditions, where self

ceases to exist, where perceptual cognitive apparatus ceases to exist, and the darkness, the shadow, prevails. Okay, go on. After all these hours, it's still 2.38. How am I supposed to talk for another hour? This is just unbelievable. Cruelty. God. This process that you just described, would you say that it's the same process as what

in the Paul Ricoeur, Richard Kearney text, it begins with this, the idea of how to move from the possibility of evil to the actualization of the evil, like from fallibility to fallenness. Yes, yes. You see, this is something that I actually I will try to find that text for you. Essentially, the problem of evil in that kind of Recorian sense is about the idea of counterfactuality of evil. But the counterfactuality of evil

is also the counterfactuality of the self. How to see yourself in different worlds, confronted with different kinds of constraints. Yes, I would say so, But, I would also say that with regard to any sort of counterfactual scenario upon which ethics is actually being built, you can no longer talk about your individual experiences.

You see, okay, let me give you an example. So one of the great examples in the history of science is the counterfactual accounts of causation, right? For example, what causes, what X does to Y such that P happens, P being the pattern, the causal pattern, right? Within the canonical history of philosophy, there is actually no solid solution to this

problem. The only solution that we do have inside science and philosophy is the use of counterfactuals, matter-factual scenarios such as if this would have happened then what might have arise out of this. Within this scenario things actually become extremely extremely gnarly. You can never say that x might be the cause of y or z might be the cause of t or so on so forth the causal

connectivity that you had in your colloquial world view essentially breaks goes kaput and so all you have at this point is testing mechanisms to test what happens if I put put X for example X is sulfur in Y. Y can be water, mercury, so on so forth. So there comes a different kind of idea of ethics. Idea of ethics by way of counterfactuals

as you mentioned it, is not essentially the kind of canonical ethics that we normally understand. That kind of ethics is more like a testing procedure. It's a procedure to test hypotheses of theoretical and practical reasoning. Like for example, I am a pregnant woman, I have been inseminated by a demon. I want to go back to my family. What does happen? So there are various scenarios that you can use as counterfactual points here

in this narrative. Ethics belongs to the counterfactual scenarios. Morality belongs to what you might call to be canonical causal connectivity, so causal links between X and Y. If X happens, Y will happen also. Whereas ethics does not take that thing into account. Ethics is all about counterfactuals. That's what kind of X are we talking about, what kind of Y we are talking about, what kind of links in what kind of context between the two we

are talking about. I have a pretty general question, but like a recurring theme for me, like all around this whole discussion, is the following. Like, I feel like the way we are talking about demons here, like, okay, they're appearing as these faceless shadows, which present an obstacle that is indispensable, that is necessary for the cognizing subject to reform its own cognitions.

but I wonder if there isn't a kind of taming of demons at play in the sense that they appear strictly as this phase, this medium in the progression of cognition, but they don't have any kind of active or self-sufficient property as you would see in like demonic magic where you would actively be the medium for the demon to act. It feels like a kind of still, like there is, I would like to understand how this is related to the whole monotheistic religion in the sense that it feels like

a kind of monotheistic Gnosticism that would see, I think this relates to that non-existence of demons that I mentioned before in the text. This idea that demons don't have their own self-righteous existence, but they only appear as this kind of mediation. In Georgia's diagram, there was this opposition between singularity being God and good, and demons are on the side of multiplicity. and like it's kind of it's inserted in this paradigm where multiplicity is false and non-existent and it's only an appearance that is part of the path towards the truth of

singularity and I feel like that's kind of anti-daemonic feel. Yes you see to be honest with you, this is the whole point that the theoretical and practical side of demons can be a singularity. What singularity in what sense? I'm not going to go on the monotheistic side that's saying that there are no such thing as demons because all demons are merely variations within what has already given to us theoretically and practically. No, I would say that demons

are for the most part in the mythology, folklore and anthropology, are outside of the self, outside of the capacities of the self. But then a new question arises. So if something that is outside of you, How can you bridge a gap between who you are, what you are, here and now, and that which is outside of you?

here. By tackling the very tools which I use to perceive here and now. I mean, it somehow reminds me of your previous seminar, practical schizophrenia. Could we relate that? them to somehow to each other? It's very raw in my head. Sorry. Well, my initial idea is that, yes, you see the problem of demons is essentially the problem

of investigating the self. Not the self at its core, but also what it can do. What it can do namely navigating the outer realms of itself so demons in majority of cultures come off as the outer realms of the self itself what is a demon if not a limit condition of you yourself right positive in a collective condition why why would the demon be only a limited like that's that's saying that demons aren't real right but uh you were asking before like um how do i react to

to this non-com how can i relate to the demon it feels like the only way you could relate to the demon by knowing it or by making it into a stage of knowledge, but could also enter into an alliance with the demon, you could be the means for the demon to enter into action. Well, a question for you, for example, you see, okay, let's say that there is a demon, go total Hollywood on this. Demon Pazuzu, right? He's actually one of the most obscure, from an

archaeological perspective, demons of all time, but also he's a double killer. He is a demon that can bring famine upon people, but also can ward off what you might call to be evils of other demons, create cure amulets for individual people, so on and so forth. So let's talk about such a demon. A demon who is not just evil in the Christianity sense.

A demon who is only evil by the virtue that he is highlighting, the limit conditions. of the society in which a person can live or natural conditions in which a person can live, you know, a form, for example, so on and so forth, but also being on the side of the individual to get rid of certain other kinds of maladies that might be too often to repeat.

So, with regard to that kind of demon, and this is not a Christian demon at all, So, how an agent should react? Should he avoid him? Should we cooperate with him? Should we actually ignore him?

There are all these choices in the ancient demonology with regard to the demon Pazuzu. He's essentially a force of nature. You see, demons are anthropocentric ideas of the forces of nature as applied to human beings. That's what makes them interesting, but also distorted at the end of the day. There are demons that are totally personal, like a deal with the devil is a very personal

deal. It's not like universal in account to all the humanity. It is one vs one relationship. Do you have an example of this Georgia? No, not yet, no. But I'm thinking mostly like in narratives where a demon introduces himself and perhaps they have like a large plan of prevailing in the whole humanity, but in order to come in contact with one person, it is always personal. Like there is a deal, there is a problem. This is what I wanted to say. In ancient times demons, even though demons are actually what

you might call to be the avatars of collective societal maladies and so on and so forth from today's perspective, but you hardly ever see in any sort of mythology or anthropological texts, the demon is interested in decimating the entire population. No, they are actually interested in certain kind of person. And it's not kind of person like me and you. It's It's the kind of person where they can actually show their true powers.

You know, the power of the overkill. But with that said, demons are not by any means part of what you might call to be anti-anthropocentric members. It is yet to be shown that whether demons are part of the humans or not. Looking at the ancient texts, the emergence of demons, most probably demons are fundamentally

anthropocentric to begin with. There are not the forces of the beyond. There are just us navigating at the outer rims our own selves. Losers to begin with. Reza, since you mentioned loser, I'd like to go back to the question you posed. regarding what is, how does an agent confront Pazuzu, for example. Isn't the outcome of this confrontation somehow predetermined with the knowledge that Pazuzu is a double dealer demon, somehow as doomed?

and when you think about that parallel to the idea that demons are the forces of nature which are which inflict humankind that unfortunately the answer is yes I wish it wasn't but you know I always wanted to have some demons in my back pocket really good demons but unfortunately Unfortunately, any person who has read certain kind of anthropological accounts of demons sure realizes that demons are nothing but some sour loser human beings.

And that's how the problem of demonolatry, like ideology, demons, converges upon the problem of human morality. Because demons are not different from us. They're just us orbiting on a different planet. I'm trying to find exactly where I found it, came across it. There's some papers sort of describing how maybe intersecting with this conversation, like how, how like schizophrenics

who, who feel that they're being like, the delusions of them being kind of haunted, like cultural specificity of their delusions is so Chinese schizophrenics feel like their demons are related to Confucian mythology and an American schizophrenic might be more inclined to feel like it's the CIA that's watching them. So there's something in the demons reflecting our outer world, in our imminent circumstances. Yes, the thing is that, well this one of the point that actually Scott Atron

makes in his book in later chapters, that the reason that demons are actually attractive to us precisely because they replay or reenact the kind of calamities that either we have gone through or we expect to go through with regard to society in general. so demons are us ourselves dealing with the problems of the fucking

goddamn society and some of them recommend solutions right some of them are common solutions and some of them are not yes Yes. Yes. Vareza, what would you say about the activity of invoking a demon? The active practice of it? Because mostly I think the demons encounter a demon. But what about when you are actively bringing it in or letting it come in?

As a person who does not believe in any sort of supernatural entities, I do believe in demons but in a very ethical sense. I would say that you can always invoke demons by... I don't want to fucking look like a psychopath at this point. Okay, I will say that this, that you can do that by simply two things.

One, be who you are, truly who you are and then navigate the outer world as an individual as someone else. I'm going to give you the trick at the end though. Two would be always remain in the bounds of the social. That's where the demonic is strong.

The demonic has never come from the outside. The demonic is always there. The demonic is within the sphere in which you cherished, from which you grew up. So, what does it give you? What does this formula give you? Who is going to be more demonic? Well, obviously a sociopath. Do you know who sociopaths are? Let me give you an example from my gaming experience.

Reddit Redemption 2. So, the game mechanism actually gives you a fundamentally insane idea of how you can bolster your honor system, being a good person, and also being a goddamn fucking psychopath. What does that take? Well, like every psychopath, you should always abide by the law. only psychopaths abide by the law good people abide by the ethics

psychopaths abide by the law precisely because he can do certain kinds of side business killing people raping women so on so forth on the county But when he comes to the city, he can say hello to everyone. And it would be just okay. That's the whole point. Ethics and morality are two polar opposites. Morality is exactly like Red Dead Redemption 2.

You can kill so many people on the outlands, but when you come to the city, please make sure to say hello to everyone, because it gives you honor. Ethics is a different kind of thing. Ethics means that if you actually meet someone in the wilderness, help them. If you can't help them, put them out of the misery and don't fucking ever go to the fucking city. City is where your ethics will be corrupted. Those people who go to the city

and become part of its echelon, its good citizens are the first people who get corrupted. You're either a city dweller or you are a true ethicist. I would say that Plato had already put this forward too. Raza, I'm sorry. It's just that this, I don't know if you think it would be pertinent to

talk about this in terms of how you make the contractual binding to the void. And probably this reminds me of your, a very early text, yours, I hope you don't hate me for this, but Differential Cruelty, where you talk about how you bind yourself to the void and that there's two ways to do it. One is the sadistic that might be this psychopathic way of binding into the void that is an imperative, and the masochistic way of doing this bondaging or binding to the void, which would be, as you say, this ethical thing of being subjected by the context. I don't know what you think of this.

I would say that you see the problem of ethics is the problem of non-place. Where do demons Demons emerge in the first place, the non-place, deserts, mountains, bottomless wells. That's where demons do emerge. Why is that in mythology and anthropology? Precisely because these are non-places, because these are no man's lands.

But how do you actually navigate a no man's land? You don't take a train ticket to a no man's land. You actually get a mule as slowly and as slowly you navigate it. what ethics is. And if this is a really stupid metaphor, then the joke is on me. But I think it does highlight like there is a commitment. I mean, you have to oblige yourself.

Absolutely. Yes. It's not only, and it's also, I don't want to call it sacrifice because the word sacrifice is from the Western perspective, it's fundamentally distorted. But yes, there is also a sacrifice in an Eastern tradition. You have to give certain kind of your own self. You won't be the same kind of person once you make this mission, once you go through this ordeal. The same thing about Odysseus. Is Odysseus the same person after he does his voyage? No, he is not.

Can I ask just a question about just going back to the idea of the city being the kind of site of morality and the non-city or the steppe or the desert or something being the kind of the site of ethics? I mean, just thinking in relation to, I guess, the stoic. Just to make it a little bit, thank you very much. I didn't mean the bipolarity between them. I didn't actually want to pit the city versus desert. I would say the desert can be also a non-place. It's just about the mood of navigation.

Ethics. Ethics is about how to navigate. a territory of laws and codes. I guess what I wanted to ask was, would it not be in and of itself an important ethical challenge to navigate the city in an ethical sense rather than in a moral sense? And that would be an ethical challenge above and beyond the kind of thoroughest exit. That, of course, is the very idea of communism, isn't it? Yeah. Polis, being served for the greater of the good of all collective humans.

But there is also, in our darkest fantasies, in our demonic fantasies, we can say, Oh, there is this brilliant Greek city. How about incinerate the shit out of it? Because it's not worth surviving. You see, revolutionary fantasies, and we will come to this when we come to Dostoevsky's demons, revolutionary fantasies are exactly about this, about what we can do with the

city, with the palace. Are we going to incinerate it? Yeah, well you good, oh my God, please, please put so much more oil. But then there are also kind of like, you know, more benevolent stories where you say that, oh no, we are going to turn this city so such that even this city is not our utopia. We can, from there, like a map, go to another point and do something else.

So these are these are actually entrenched in the utopianistic communist idea. But I would say that all of these storylines lack one and one single thing. It's the very idea that, okay, if you are going to do something to the city, then what can you reconstruct from it? So one thing that is really, I would say, is part of the idea of evil in the revolutionary tradition,

is when you burn down everything to the ground, and you try to build something new on the ruins of the old world. That is never going to happen. The very idea is to preserve, but to what extent? This is a methodological question, of course. To preserve something from the old and then build something more out of it. These are the questions that every revolutionary in history has encountered with. And with regard to their own agendas, they have answered to them respectively.

Sometimes they say that burn it to the ground. Sometimes they say that save it. Sometimes they say that let's just, you know, work with what we have at this point, so on and so forth. As a clause of the Stalinist, I would say that burn it to the fucking ground. There were times where I thought that it is good to preserve certain kinds of items, certain

kinds of edifices within the history such that we can build upon them. But then it hit me hard that those edifices might be sick, might actually put us in the very direction from which we tried to escape in the first place. Sorry, folks.

That feels like such a general claim, though, for so many. I mean, I feel like you know specifically what you mean. You know, I mean, and it also seems like it's easy mode, right? Like, that's kind of like revolution on easy mode of like not to deal with the kind of the thickness or the complexity of existence. If you mean by easy mood or easy mode, sending 300 million to the moon gulags, yes, that's definitely easy. Genuinely, that is, yeah, I mean. I don't have any problem with that, to be honest,

if I had power. No, that's why you do. It's easy for you with this. Well, that is always easy. You see, this is the whole point. I think you actually propose a very dilemma in the ethical realm. So, different ideologies have different ethical creeds, ethical doctrines, so to speak. Libertarians, liberals,

communists, Stalinists, so on and so forth, fascists, how are you going to ever get the job done in any of these This is a practical question. I know that so many people don't want to answer these kinds of questions because it's politically incorrect. But yes, you come to a certain stage where you have to make certain kinds of theoretical

and practical choices, certain kinds of odds. But isn't this presuming a kind of singularity of that question, right? Like it can't be settled on, you know, isn't there a shift or some slippage between on the one point you saying that there's these kind of, there's this like major... No, I'm saying that even if there was no singularity, even if there was no singularity, And if none of these kinds of doctrinal creeds were prophets yet to come, you still have

to make a choice. What kind of choices are we going to make by which means possible? kind of demons you want on your saddle. You see, this is what I, this is the whole course, essentially, I thought of it as a kind of a tongue in cheek opposition against politically correct idea of what it means to be a self, what it means to do political activism, what

it means to be a revolutionary. These things are not hard, I mean easy. They come with a price. The price of them are extremely heavy. You either take side with the const or you just end up to be what you may call to be a liberal of the worst kind who says that, oh, they're all right.

They have all their own ideas. Who am I to decide? Well, fuck that shit. No, Stalin is the way to go. I'm just joking. But I'm trying to simply make a case here that this kind of behavior to ethics, that all of this stuff are right or maybe they are not right but then we have to have a kind of middle way but then what is that kind of middle way could you please tell me i mean you could just do re-education camps instead of going to the gulag you know well yeah oh now i see that you are far

more extremist than me a re-education camp yes yes my friend you know I actually, to be honest, yes, I would love to send so many people to re-education camps just for fun, but unfortunately it's not going to happen. So we should actually come up with a better plan at this point. I have one. Oh, those people that I just wanted to send to the re-education camp.

Oh my God. I have already made so many lists of those. And then forcefully being taught intelligence and spirit, right? No, no, no, no, no, no. That's just disgusting. I'm not going to subject them to that kind of torture. I will just subject them to read all works of Plato. That's even worse. I have a question. Before arriving at this, well, today's text and the bipolarity of good and evil and

Soroastrianism and there was this text which was cancelled from the syllabus because the book was hard to find but this about the spirit possessions which we Vincent Crapanzano yeah and this subject and what was called Tales of Possession from the Middle East and North Africa is it Are we going to, is that a completely cancelled subject? Are we going to go into that? No, okay, it's up to you. I actually think that we should still go with it, even though we don't have the text.

You see, the thing is that I tried really hard to find the text, it wasn't available. I had a hard copy, but unfortunately it's left in Iran, so I can't retrieve it. It's actually a really good book. It's one of the best books on a spirit position, one of the greatest anthropological studies on a spirit position. So what is a spirit position? It is a communion, it's a communication, it's a submission, so on so forth. So the whole book runs around these topics.

So if you don't mind, we still go with this, even though we don't have the actual texts. I actually checked on Amazon. It's the use copy is not expensive. You can easily buy it. Can I ask a question that's a bit more, well, perhaps. Karl is always the one who's coming with the sharpshooting questions.

Well, who knows? Who knows? But what I wonder is that if I take everything to be, if I sort of get it right, we discover in ancient Middle Eastern religions, sort of early Soroastrianism, a problem between a tension between practical and theoretical reasoning. And this I take it to be a genuinely philosophical problem, but the question is how do we make it into a genuinely philosophical problem and not a problem that is derived from essentially the psoriastrian cosmology? and what do we have to commit ourselves to in order for this to be a philosophical problem that is in some sense perennial, if that makes sense.

Yes, I would say that I have zero answers to that. But I would say that the origin of the problem is actually philosophical rather than religious. That essentially, this is why Mao Zedong piggybacked on philosophy, precisely because this is the preenal question of philosophy, how to commensurate theoretical reasoning with practical reasoning, particularly in the realm of ethics. So religion comes up with what you might call to be a kind of...

I don't want... How many of you are religious in this class? I don't want to insult anyone. Okay. None of you are religious. So I would say that religion, particularly organized religion, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, came up with this idea that the idea of the ghost in the religious sense, not in the secular our sins, the spirit, the mind, which converges upon God, finally resolves this, what you

might call, to be opposition between theoretical and the practical. But then we see that the road that religion took gave rise to certain either kinds of problems which were not even secular ones. Some would say that the question is still open. It's just that religion failed to answer it. And by that I mean that philosophy also failed, but philosophy at the very least didn't actually

create a certain kind of gang mobster shit out of it, like religion. I mean, now we're almost sort of in Heideggerian territory again, aren't we? It's about retrieving the original question to ask it again. So how is Heideggerian, to be honest with you? I think Heidegger is fundamentally on the religious side that he thinks that religion, not in the monotheistic sense, par excellence, but religion nonetheless was an answer to

this preemial question of philosophy. Well, I mean, more in the sense of sort of, in a sort of methodological way of sort of digging through history in order to recover or retrieve the original question of philosophy, which I mean Heidegger takes to be the question of being, but for us here seems to be the question of reconciling practical and theoretical reasoning. Yes, to that extent, yes, of course Heidegger talked about this, but was he adequate in addressing the same question?

I mean- Yeah, that's a different matter, but... Yes, yes, that's a... Well, of course, yeah. But then, if it doesn't matter as long as he addresses it, then I would say that, how about fascist philosophers? And by that, I don't mean Heidegger. I just think that Heidegger is just too meek to be even a fascist. I would say that Evola and so many other people, they also address this question.

I would say that this question cannot be answered at all. On the grounds of reconciliation between theoretical and practical reasoning, the moment that you simply assume that there is a convergent way, certain kind of ways that allow you to link between the theoretical and the practical, most probably you are in the business of occultism.

No, that's not going to happen. This is the preneal question of philosophy. This is where philosophy should strive for. It is not a tealist. It is an object of a striving. That's what ethics is. Reza, we are almost at the end. Shall we discuss what reading we want to do for the next seminar and also assign presentations responses? I was going to say Asia is going to but then I remember. I gave a represent for Asia.

Okay. Oh, so many people to pick one. Reza, let's first decide the text. Maybe there are volunteers regarding the text. Well, that's the whole point that the next session, unfortunately, we don't have a text because that text, I can't find it online. That's the whole point. Yes. Reza, I had proposed to present the Velen Flusser text on the history of the devil. If you're into it, I can do it next class.

I don't know. Superb. So we have our first victim. Who is the second victim? Oh. The second presentation. Saphide has got new glasses. Maybe Saphide should go. Is it supposed to be a response or a second presentation? Response. I will, I have the pdf for that book in English and I'll send, I'll try to send everybody. It's Willen Flusser's The History of the Devil. Yes, yes. Okay, good, good, good. Good, good. If you get to Wilhelm closer on me,

no, no, no, no, that's not a good idea. Essentially, Wilhelm closer, you know, is this kind of superbly knowledgeable person, But with a superbly knowledgeable person, like in what we call in our generation, a nerd, he should be extremely aware of this person's ideological upbringing. So he's not even a phenomenal logistic person.

He's a phenomenalistic person. Oh my God. Do I want to invite him to my house? No, absolutely not. So, final questions before we go away. You know, I have to kill some innocent citizens and read the Redemption.

Anyone? Anything? By the way, one thing, my apologies. There is this book that I highly suggest. Sure, some of the translations are dodgy, but it's actually quite a very good book. It can give you a certain kind of insight into ancient Mesopotamian culture. It's called The

devils and evil spirits of Babylonia. It's obviously looked like some book that is being written by David Icke, but I assure you it's actually a very respectable book. It's called, it's written by Reginald Campbell Thompson. So it is actually the translation of poems, ancient poems found in ancient Assyrian and Babylonian texts. It's really good. It's fantastic, actually.

Okay, so who was talking about something? who was it Georgia wasn't you wait but is who is presenting and who's responding them Am I? Oh, yeah. Who is a respond? Responder. I think we feel the responder. I can respond. Superb. Zad, that text is in Portuguese, the original one.

So if you want to read the original, it's better than. Yeah. Oh, okay. So only Portuguese people. With good haircuts. Okay, my friends, I love you. Take care of yourself. Be safe. Bye bye. Good hunting, Grissa. Love you. Bye bye. Bye bye. Thank you. Ciao, ciao. Hey Reza, quick question. Yes, please.

Do you have any idea how the book that we...