On the Practical Necessity of Having Demons (Session 8)

Hello and welcome to the eighth session of On the Practical Necessity of Having Demons by Reza Nigaristani. I'm now going to pass the mic. Reza, please take it away. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone. I hope that you are play free. so on so forth uh so today we are going to talk about the problem of evil in the you know at the later stages of middle ages by way of bruno and espinoza i have reservations but

Who's the victim today? I am presenting on Spinoza. Oh my god, Ekin. You probably should have thought twice about this. It's one of my favorites. Because I'm bringing the axe on your head this time. Bring the axe. Bring the axe. Should I start or should we wait? How about this? Does anyone have any urgent question, heckling, you know, swearing at me?

I mean, if you want it, just get it out of your system. No one has one? I'm so really disappointed in all of you. Okay, Ekin, let's start. All right. Before I start, I want to ask just, you know, generally, how many of us have read the ethics before slash are familiar with Spinoza, at least historically? If you could nod, I suppose. We only read a Stanford entry on Espinosa.

That's it. That's all we can do. We don't have time for that kind of shit. OK, so we have the British empiricists. I'm just going to go just brief historical position. So we have the British empiricists, Berkeley, Hume, Locke. And then in response, we have this other group, the rationalist, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. The big idea for Descartes is that the only true substance is God and everything apart from God, human souls and human body depends on God for its existence and substantiality for being substance is defective. God is absolute substance. Spinoza takes Descartes point seriously.

There is only one thing which essence explains its existence. whose nature it is to exist. The only thing of which there is true is a totality of that which there is, the totality of everything, the one substance, which is nature as well as God. From God's infinite nature, unlike Leibniz, Spinoza opposes division. He upholds the doctrine of univocal imminence. There's only one thing for which explanation lies in itself for Spinoza, God or nature. Nature, the totality of which exists in extensive space and god the mental ingredient mind nature the totality of which exists is res extensa and then we have the immaterial facet in god uh so nature is not a byproduct of god's activity it's

important to understand but a self-explanatory thing and it's a perfect entity in a sense nature is equipollants to god the latter is identified with the whole array of natural things so if we call the totality of everything there is nature, then we have to say there is no super or supernatural entity, and therefore God must be consistent with the totality of what there is. So this is Spinoza's sort of way of solving Descartes' problem of how mind and matter interact with one another. Descartes, you know, it's been pretty much accepted that his mind-body dualism is an unsatisfactory answer. And Spinoza coping with this problem says in developing that the one substance is infinite It not only contains everything, this is the idea of infinity

But that God or nature, this single substance slash totality has an infinity of attributes But only two of these attributes are intelligible to us Thought slash consciousness and extension The others have to be taken by faith for Spinoza So every wrinkle in the total fabric of the one substance, these wrinkles are self-subsisting things, various identifiable items, chairs, tables, apples, etc. These are temporary contours taken by the fabric of what there truly is at once conscious and extended at the same time. thought slash consciousness and extension are not two utterly separate things, but one and the same

thing viewed from different directions. And we should note that the ethics on spools is a Euclidean demonstration of axioms and determined derivations. Stylistically, this is the way that Spinoza writes this book. Just a little bit of biographical information. Spinoza was deplored in his own age, particularly his, it was questioned his sincerity to religion. At the time, he was dubbed by many the awful atheist Spinoza. And it was not until the romantic movement of the 18th century with Herder and Goethe that Spinoza really came into his own. Leibniz, on the other hand, of all the post-medieval thinkers, was lauded and he was far more technical. He was a mathematical

physicist, quite genius. And much of what he thought can be bridged with Bertrand Russell, Frege, the early Wittgenstein. In fact, Russell only wrote one monograph and it was about Leibniz. So there's two kinds of emotions for Spinoza, passive and extensive. Emotions are the most important facet sort of for Spinoza's ethics, at least in the beginning. Instead of active, passive are externally caused by our situation, by our circumstances. Active emotions, on the other hand, are self-caused. Active emotions are triumph over passive emotions, and only one emotion

can be overcome by other emotions for Spinoza. So we need active emotions to control passive emotions. Active emotions are connected to reasons and when we strive towards reason or rationality, we are able to approach active emotions. Now there's this big idea called the connectus, the persistence to exist. According to Spinoza, desire is the essence of man, and not just man but at all organic sentient beings the desire to go on to continue living the desire to persist self-preservation is sort of at the heart of spinoza's ethics and he identifies this as the essence and he not only talks about man sentient animals as well but desire is the free primary emotion according to spinoza to persist in one's being and this sort of relates

to what will be called utilitarianism in the philosophy of ethics, that good things are what are useful for us and bad things are what are not useful for us. And then thereafter, consequentialism, which sort of unfolds by way of Spinoza's determinism. Spinoza brings good and evil down to pleasure and pain. Here, Spinoza is inspired by Epicurus and the Stoics. It's also true that Spinoza holds no specific normative ethical position that would not regard substance except for with the conicist doctrine which was prevalent in the philosophy of the early modern period as a concept but from his conicist-based meta-ethically conceived concepts of good and evil

one can also abstract an ethically functional and prescriptive constituent for an ethical theory, though rationalist, the result of Spinoza's ethics is not some transcendental ideal or criterion of morality as was found in Kant, nor is such an ideal the basis of his ethics. Spinoza builds his conception of moral agency through naturalistic anthropology, identifying moral ideas and moral acts as ideas and acts in the first place, thus not granting morality any special transcendental place, but identifying it with human nature as part of nature. So humans act mostly in accordance with their deeply rooted desire for self-preservation, such as amongst other things, for it to manifest, and according to Spinoza, no thing cold through its own nature

seek its own annihilation, but on the contrary, that everything has in itself a striving to preserve its condition and to improve itself. The striving or conatus is not conceived nearly as some attribute or a thing, but rather as the thing itself, i.e. it is identified with a thing's own existence and nature. Spinoza writes, for although the thing and its conatus are distinguished by reason or rather by words, and this is the main cause of their error, the two are in no way distinct from another in reality. It is this conitis that is the source of every conceivable human faculty and ability, including emotions, reason, will, and morality. The starting point of morality can thus be found in things existence itself, and this is contrary to Kant putting it at

the boundaries of reason. For Spinoza, man is imbricated with practical reason and is this idea, which is the mental aspect of the conatus in su esse preserva which means to preserve the self and that's what constitutes the individual man as a finite node in natura naturata nature as is already created for the passive participle of nature which is contraposed by natura naturam the active participle conatus as a volition for acting of which we are conscious is a conscious tendency related with a causal profile, an act of willing towards another state. We should note that Spinoza's conception of conitus will be greatly influential to Leibniz. For Leibniz, active force contains a certain actor, entelechia, and it's the midway between

the faculty of acting and the act itself, and it also involves something like conitus. For Leibniz, active force is not just a capacity, but rather a driver, a tendency which will always realize itself, it always leads into genuine activity as long as there is nothing to impede its actualization. This conitis informs Leibniz's interpretation of the law of inertia, according to which a body has a tendency to preserve in whatever sequence of changes it has begun. According to Spinoza, a few more points, the body can't determine the mind. The mind can't determine the mind can only determine the mind and bodies can only determine bodies so they run in parallel in their own realm and if bodies experience pleasure the mind does too and vice

versa if the mind experiences pleasure so does the body when the body is asleep the mind is also in a state of torpor spinoza sees the mind and body connected running in parallel but also distinct My apologies. My apologies. Is there, okay, so I have a lot and I'm sure that our fellow friends also have a lot of ideas to talk about. Could you be able, Ekin, to bring this back to the idea of ethics, what we are talking about?

Sure. Spinoza's ethics obviously is not just limited to ethics, even though he does. Consequentialism and determinism in and of itself is an ethical doctrine. There's a few important facets of love and hate for Spinoza. Love is pleasure plus an idea of external cause. Hate is pain plus the idea of external cause. And he understands that there can happen at the same time and be directed at one and the same object, consider love for someone. We can find freedom and overcome our emotions for Spinoza. So to increase the power of our activities to follow a rationalist path, a path of reason.

He still understands this as an emotion, but a self-caused good emotion. Reason is caused by itself. Man is to man a god, he says. And it's reasonable to set up a democratic civil society for instrumental and normative purposes. Here Spinoza's Ethics, which was published in 1677, was quite possibly influenced by Thomas Hobbes' 1651 Leviathan, because his view of morality is cognitivist in the sense of believing that the state and progress of one's cognitive abilities directly affects one's morality. At times, it even seems that Spinoza, cognition and morality are regarded as one and the same thing. The more rational a person is, the more active she or he is in the context of moral agency, which implies that rationality and moral agency are fundamentally identical.

So the moral concept or the moral agency is not based on the autonomy of reason, as in Kant's ethics. The only thing that can be ever termed autonomous in the strictly metaphysical sense for Spinoza's substance would be absurd to state autonomy as specific to human reason. Rationality, moral agency, the activity of the mind as a whole emanate from the faculty of conceiving of adequate ideas or the faculty of understanding. And while the faculty of understanding is a necessary precondition of morality, it is also considered as morality's and the highest virtue that a human being is capable of. So one important thing, and this is what the concept I'll end with,

is determinism and the ethical implications of determinism. So, you know, the causal interactions in which a body participate that are attributable to the action of that body increase its power of perseverance. It is, in contrast, passive with respect to those that diminish its power. For Spinoza, strict necessitarian determinism is consistent with a genuine distinction between action and passion, between doing and suffering and act. Spinoza is obviously not a fatalist. He doesn't believe that everything is externally caused, but he is a very strict determinist. There are internal causes and external causes, but these are in a sense prescribed and advanced,

so we don't have access to them. But if we had access to every single physical interaction in the world, every single mental interaction in the world, and we're able to map these out in a cause and effect schema, we would in effect have a map of how the world will unspool. Man is subject to the same laws as nature and embedded in nature. Just like everything else in nature, mankind is more or less unfree, although free to control their emotions. So what does this- That I think is a very good- Yeah, I can understand. You know, kind of what you might call to be conclusion. I think at this point, let us open it to-

to the horde so they can stampede upon it. Well just on that end point I had one sort of immediate thought which was like whether I mean in Spinoza like presumably a mode of a substance namely mankind can't have an adequate idea of substance or can't fully understand substance and in this sense it's Or is this like, am I getting this wrong? No, you see, this is one of the reasons I actually don't identify myself as an Espinosa. So be it. I think that Espinosa

was a great philosopher, but Perhaps every single philosopher during the 16th century, 17th century, 19th century, early 20th century, they were the kind of philosophers who were great on ideas, but not great on distinctions. And to be a philosopher is to, as Plato would have ever always said, is to carve at the right joints. You see, many of Espinosa's idea about Konatus, about the striving, actually comes from his understanding of the will.

He always talks about the will, this and that and that and that and that. But yes, you see, this is one of the worst, I think, ideas brewed up in philosophy. that people cannot distinguish between free will or free choice and rational will. Free choice doesn't exist. Yes, Spinoza is right in that account. But rational will is a different thing.

Rational will is something that you construct over time and it absolutely has nothing to do with nature, you being in nature or that kind of stuff. I feel this is why the resurrection of Espinoza today comes with a lot of baggage. And that kind of baggage... Yeah, but Leibniz has a pretty robust conception of what you call... No, Leibniz doesn't have it either. I don't think so. I mean, the first philosopher who actually managed to eject himself out of this kind

of what you might call to be metaphysical slumber, Alahum, was Kant. Kant takes both ideas. He takes rationalism and empiricism. But you need these guys to have Kant. You can't have Kant without this. Yes, yes, but we are actually living in 21st century. 21st century philosophy. We cannot simply bring back Espinoza without actually explaining why it is important to bring him back. Or for that matter Kant or Leibniz or all of these goddamn philosophers.

No, we have to have it. You see, the whole point of ethics and for that matter philosophy is to bring back certain kinds of ideas, resurrect them in your own contextual history for a reason. You can't just simply say that, oh yeah, they were good back then. Yeah, they were good back then, but how about now? Well, I think the reason that some find Spinoza attractive, and granted, you know, most who would call themselves Spinozas don't take his wholesale doctrine. Maybe a few continental philosophers, but no serious philosopher should. But the person who asked you a question on substance, I'm sorry, I don't know their name,

But to answer like their question as part of why it makes Spinoza attractive, Spinoza's big idea is that substance as a whole is imminent and we don't have access to it. A lot of people today look at certain ideas in physics, superposition, quantum physics as extracting a kind of imminent that we have an observer effect. So when we look at particles, they behave differently than they do. Yes, but not all physicists do that. You see, actually, the history of science in 21st century shows us that any sort of immanental recuperation of stuff, of substances, is just a bad idea.

You know, yeah, there is a nature. Well, what the goddamn fucking thing is nature? I mean, would you, as a philosopher, tell me what a nature is without using the certain kind of vocabularies that make nature even more mysterious than what it already is? You see, these are the kind of stuff that we should not buy into anymore. This doesn't make Spinoza a bad philosopher. It's just that we should understand that within the spectrum of philosophy, we have matured

even more by virtue of sciences, by virtue of certain kind of development, so on and so forth. And to that extent we should take these kinds of Espinoza ideas with a grain of salt. You see, the more I have read Espinoza, the more I have realized that Espinosa really doesn't care about ethics. The word ethics, the title ethics, his greatest book, is just probably one of the most misguided titles ever in philosophy. Someone, some editor should

You can't call it intelligence and spirit and get it out. But not ethics. You see, it really doesn't hold together. How can you actually say there is an ethics if you think that will is such and such a thing and you cannot distinguish it it only comes from nature and not from the human mind these are these are actually serious philosophical problems i actually don't think that's like that's that big of a problem and it's for the same reason that you know contemporaries uh such as thomas

Nagel are able to separate things like sansa slash epiphenomena slash qualia from actual problems of determinism. We can feel like we have rational will and we can act and create laws. To feel, okay. But that doesn't mean we actually have it. Yes, to feel something is separated from something else doesn't mean that it's actually separated. You see, you can fool yourself as a philosopher, but that is not a great way to do philosophy. Why? Why not make that separation? I mean, we can say that C-

No, that separation is not up to philosophy. You see, I actually do believe that philosophy is an organ of integration, to put stuff together, as Salah said, you know, show how things in the broadest possible sense hang in the broadest possible sense together. But... That doesn't mean you don't integrate them. If I feel a certain thing, that doesn't mean... To be honest with you, really, a philosopher cannot do that. A philosopher cannot integrate stuff, cannot distinguish between stuff. That unfortunately is a very old idea that has been passed around for too long and we

should stop it as philosophers. No, this is not our task. This is not something that we can ever do properly. properly. If we try to do it, it's just a bullshit task. No. We philosophers have a more modest task. That more modest task is that, let's say that in the contemporary context, I see that there are such things, there are such distinctions, there are such possibilities integrations, I'm going to actually make a philosophy out of it. That's what we should do.

But to say that a philosopher can actually properly distinguish between x and y is to mistake the job of philosophy. That's not our job. And in fact, if you are going to do proceeding to do that kind of job, that's just charlatans and par excellence. That's not, that's up to science, that's up to peoples of expertise. We philosophers don't have that kind of expertise, unfortunately.

You see? Even the analytical ones. I'm not talking about the continental ones because they have zero. But I'm talking about analytical ones. There is absolutely zero expertise of that kind in analytic philosophy. There's a few who have it. Ned Block has it. Well, those people who have it most probably have a certain kind of scientific background. Well, do you know the field of experimental philosophy? That field is one where it's quite different.

Experimental for our peers who maybe aren't familiar, it doesn't refer to weird philosophy. It means experiments, philosophy that's based on... Yes, yes. I'm aware. You are, but some people here are experimental philosophy and they probably think Nick Land or some bullshit. Let's not insult Sid Land at every occasion. It feels good, but we shouldn't do it. I think, so you see, I would love to hear the response to your presentation.

But you see, the main problem that stands in a Spinozistic ethical sense, and also holds true in earlier times like middle ages or even prior to that is that ethics is a nebulous category so if everything is nature If will, the will, is of nature and can only arise from nature, then how can you go on

and make ethics? How can you distinguish between the good and evil? You see the problem of will, so far we have explored, is the greatest problem. Without understanding and refining the problem of the will, such as you actually delegate it to the proper category, there is no such a thing as ethics. Ethics is just bullshit.

Will is the core of ethics, but what kind of will? And that's where enlightenment begins, my friends. Enlightenment ethics is really what you might call to be the sublimation of the idea of will. That will, there are so many kinds of will, natural will, free choice, so on and so forth, what kind of will are we talking about? What kind of will should we construct in order to jump aside the very idea of ethics?

If you want, I mean, you know, there's this whole branch of ethics called consequentialist determinism that takes up this problem. basically to make it pretty simple for people who maybe aren't familiar with analytic philosophy and meta-ethics as a branch it means that if we accept that we don't have free will then how can we posit blame and responsibility on things but that is the whole point of the whole discussion there is no such a thing as a free will right that's what i'm saying so how can we how can we look at people who raise that's that's that's like espinoza's idiocy he thinks that will is just free

will um it only comes with cant who actually says that you guys you know maybe we should actually be more careful with this idea of the will. Not every kind of will is a free choice, individual free choice, so on and so forth. Some other kind of will are coming top down, right? That's the rational will. The rational will is what is the core of ethics, not individual will and now we are seeing the consequences of this shitty espinozism

in liberalism where people think that their free will actually matters no it doesn't matter it's just a fodder for no liberalist market that's it Yeah, I mean, I agree. But so what I think a contemporary Spinoza's two takes of consequential determinism would say is there's no free will, but we have to impose laws and regulations on behavior crimes, for instance, rapes, thievery, and so on. We have to cannot be. But the whole thing is that, yes, definitely so, but they cannot be natural laws. So essentially,

You see, Spinoza is that kind of guy who wants to sublate everything in nature, right? Yeah, well, that looks good on the paper. You know, I love it. I mean, who doesn't love it? No, just let nature do the dirty works on behalf of us humans. But that is not really a very good philosophy. precisely because precisely because the very idea of causation is it in is in itself not something that is coming from nature

There's this letter or this piece of writing that appeared in 1797 called the first program of an idealist system. It's in Hegel's handwriting, but it's been debated whether it's actually Hegel's or not because he would have been rather young. Anyway, he wrote to Schelling at the time, who had asked him, how do we construct a Spinozism of freedom? And Schelling said to Hegel, I have become a Spinozist. And then Hegel, in response, tried to construct a Spinozism of freedom, which sort of takes

up this problem. It begins with a puzzle over ethics. And it's one of the few programs where it tries to accept determinism, but acts as a system itself that imposes something like what you're saying, the rational will, and it unites the determinism of Spinoza or Leibniz's fatalism with Kant's formula that everything has to be subordinated to freedom. And I think that sort of gets at the heart of what you're talking about. Yes, yes. I think you see a 21st century, 20th century philosophy had a great response to these kinds of what you might call to be vulgar Espinozaism. We cannot fault Espinoza

for coming up with such ideas. I mean, we are always in a historical moment. We can only make philosophical theses according to the moment, and that doesn't make us stupid or idiotic. Espinosa by any means is a genius of philosophy. But the thing is that we are the kind of people who are living in the 21st century. What time is it? It's June 24th, 2020.

To think that Espinosa gave us the actual recipe is actually the betrayal of Espinosa. That's not how philosophy works. Philosophy works by way of piecemeal progression. And for that matter, and so has ethics. Yes, Spinoza came up with such and such ideas, particularly his ideas of determinism were extremely revolutionary at that time. They were like weaponized grenades against the

last vestiges of scholasticism. But today we have a better idea of determinism. We can actually distinguish between causal determinism and logical determinism. They are not the same. Human mind is a species of logical determinism and part causal determinism. It is not all causal determinism. So this is what Carnap would have said, you see this is what enlightenment looks like. You have to, in

In order to have a better ethic, better political struggle, better ideas of what kind of demons you want to have or you want to fight, you have to come up with better distinctions among concepts. All those philosophers, yes, very great. Plato, the king of all philosophers. But how many of you want to read Plato again? Yeah, yes, yes, yes. I want to read Plato again too. But do I actually take everything he says for granted?

No, probably not. The same goes with Espinosa, the same thing goes with Kant, same thing goes with Hegel. No. If you take philosophy as a history, which is being built as we speak, then we shouldn't actually take these kinds of theses for granted. It's counter to the fact of ethics. So, Z, is it your time to answer to Ekin?

I think I'm supposed to present on Bruno. I don't know. I know. And by the way, don't pretend that I didn't read your Twitter. So there is a whole kind of belligerence here. They're going to unfold. Love you. Go on, please. Okay. So Noah's going, like, there isn't someone who is waiting to respond to, to, can no I think that let's just move on okay I have some notes I'm going to base myself on them I also like use this because sometimes you can't hear me so I like your video drum poster I feel

like Bruno is a very fitting philosopher with a... Yeah, the other poster I actually stole from Reza's timeline. Don't worry, don't worry Zee. Once you actually deliver this presentation, you won't be alive. I will have those posters both. Okay, so Bruno is quite usually, quite frequently remembered for, as a kind of enlightenment martyr that got burned at the stake for being, you know, a scientist or something.

But it seems quite likely actually, that his condemnation was more related to his connection to magic and to the Hermetic tradition, than to science, which at his time, wasn't seen as such a menace to religion. He was instructed in many things, and extremely confident, about his intellectual capacities which put him into trouble with a lot of different people. But he was also very well known as one of the greatest memory specialists of his time, knowing very well both ancient and medieval traditions.

You should add that he shouldn't have sex with so many high society women, because that was also what the cause yeah you know when you're so good at the art of binding you can't really help yourself but yeah so um i i i mean we were talking about in the in in the chat whether like because i think the text for Bruno was defined. So it was supposed to be like his, some of his texts on the art of memory. We couldn't find the text itself called art of memory, but I'm

kind of basing myself on, um, Shadows of Ideas, and some, like, of, of, um, Francis Yates, uh, comments, and, and also, like, trying to connect that to, to Bruno's thought in a more general sense. So I'm trying to present, like, mainly on his art of memory, and trying to connect that to our discussion about demons and all that. So I'll try to put it in this, like, more general background, okay? So his, probably his most important philosophical move consists in extracting what he considered to be the philosophical cosmological consequences of the then recent Copernican revolution.

Bruno concluded that if the earth was not the center of the universe, then it would be impossible to think, as Aristotle did, that the universe was finite, and that forms existed in their pure state in the heavens, while matter existed in its maximum informity in the earth's depths. Instead, Bruno concluded that the universe was infinite, and that therefore all possible worlds actually existed at all times at some part of the universe. God for Bruno was the total actuality of this universe considered at once. His God is not pure form, neither pure matter as maybe we could consider to be the case in Spinoza,

but a point of coincidence between all matter and all form, once you abstract, you know, the whole universe as an extension. So God is the perfect unity. God is the One. This perfect unity of God allows for the kind of Gnostic project, that of knowing potentially the entire universe and thus approaching the condition of God. Bruno's art of memory is of a key importance in this Gnostic project. It's not simply an instrumental technique to remember random things, but a kind of preferential way of advancing in the knowledge of the highest possible forms.

For Bruno, memory and imagination seem to be modes of participation in forms themselves, which can be higher and pure or lower and less pure. Certain images have advanced magical powers because they synthesize lower images and thus allow the mind to rise to higher levels of abstraction. The arts of memory, so are procedures to develop and organize the imagination, obtaining accordance with the highest possible forms at any given stage of the intellect. So, in that sense, the art of memory is for Bruno essentially, and in equivocally, a magical procedure. Yet, as Francis Yeats shows at the end of her book on the art of memory,

there is a kind of continuity between Renaissance magical mnemotechnics and early modern science. Especially, she traces the decisive importance of Lowe's and Bruno's mnemonics to someone like Leibniz, including the importance of that in his discovery of the infinitesimal calculus. It would seem indeed like there is a necessary magic or mystical moment at the root of scientific discovery, or as Arthur C. Clarke suggested in his third law, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. magic. This may be equated or approximated with Thomas Kuhn's moment of revolutionary

science as paradigm shift. Bruno seems to mark, in that sense, the exact point in the history of thought in which magic and science are indistinguishable, thus the ambiguity in the interpretation of his death, in, in, at this day. It would seem one important question at this point, would be the one already raised in our previous meeting. Can we consider this intersection of science and magic as a unique moment at the root of modernity, which we have surpassed, or does magic remain as a kind of unconscious of science until today,

or at least at some exceptional moments in which a paradigm shift is needed? And finally, I would like to make a quick remark about how the central theme of this seminar, that of demons appears in in bruno bruno is in a way an animist for him all things in the world are to a more or less intense degree inhabited by demons demons for him are simply the spiritual portion of any individual thing his sense of demons is closer to the ancient one than to the christian one demons are simply all the spirits of nature

some are good some are bad many just mind their own business and also are our demons all demons just like everything else are part of god but though demons are present in material things of all kinds, they aren't themselves essentially material. As I said, they are the spiritual part of things, or the formal part, in that sense they are forms, more or less perfect, but in any case they are the form that acts in different things. Just like the human soul or intellect is the form of the human body, every being is inhabited by one or more spirits or demons and in that measure has some type of

intellect, weaker or stronger, more or less intelligent, more or less sensible, etc. Superb. This is actually one of the really great presentations. Thanks. I'm almost feeling... Please go on. Please go on. Yes, my apologies. Yeah, but it's pretty close to the end. So demons then do not, yeah, and this is what I would like to put into discussion with our conception of demons, because demons then for Bruno appear not as material constraints which resist conceptual forms of cognition, but rather they are forms themselves,

and as such they allow someone with good knowledge of forms to not only know but manipulate things. Having demons entering into commerce with demons in Bruno's sense has a practical necessity which is not simply negative in the sense of resistance but active since demons are the very formal actuality of things in the world. If God is absolute actuality, demons are partial local actuality. In the context of Bruno's art of memory, the images and schemas which are used to organize and develop the imagination are techniques for interacting with demons Magic or demonology, inasmuch as it means action through demons A magician for Bruno is defined as a wise man who has the power to act

Doesn't for Bruno oppose science in the sense of being action against the laws of nature On the contrary, magic is simply action which takes into account the forms of nature in order to cause certain well-defined results. Of course, what remains pre-modern in Bruno is his pre-Kantian belief in the possibility of the gnosis of forms as such, even if his gnosis is involved in a practical procedure of building always better and better schemas of the imagination. So to conclude, I just wonder if this technique of memory in which you're kind of drawing schemas of forms in order to get in contact with them in a practical way, which is interested in acting in the world, could, if it was separated from a belief which seems present there, that those forms are like definitive and like immediately knowledge of eternal forms.

and instead they are taken in this actually pragmatic way, which magic kind of implies, if then you could see his project as a kind of self-reforming one in a more radical sense. So yeah, that would be it. Thanks. Superb, superb. Okay, so I have a very short memory. I first want you to elaborate about that point that you talk about science and magic. Remember, almost three or four minutes ago?

So my idea of science and magic is that they are absolutely not distinguished for a certain time, for a very, very long time, actually. But the thing is that science, in a Hegelian sense, sublates the idea of magic, such as the magic becomes part of it. You know, the excitement of discovery, so on and so forth. But before that, magic was more like this idea that, for example, if I remember correctly, in

in Magic and Experimental Sciences, I think this is volume three, or volume two, I can't remember really, by Thorndike, Lin Thorndike, he talks about this as well, where you see that everything that we saw in the Middle Ages was just magic. We didn't have science, but then how comes that science simply springs forth? From what kind of origin?

Well, because magic is not the kind of magic that these people, these historians are talking about, such as Giordano Bruno, is not the kind of magic that we, for example, we common people think. It's not the kind of magic that, oh, I'm going to turn this plant into a human. Well, yeah, that might actually be scientific too. you follow the roots but what they meant was a certain kind of constraints understanding of the constraints of how cosmos works how things are being held together and that understanding of

constraints created a different kind of pattern and that was science. You see for example, one of the greatest examples of these magicians who is now considered to be a scientist, but he was at that point just a theologian, really a low-life magician. Nicolore. Nicolore was this Catholic bishop, you know, saying bullshit about God and all that kind of stuff.

But he understood something really interesting. That, okay, if I actually look by way of a telescope, primitive telescope, into the skies, I know there are certain kinds of things happen. So he writes formulas about what has actually happened. He actually says that these are God's works. God's works. But then, you see,

Then Copernicus reads this bullshit Catholic bishops memoirs. I suddenly understand that shit. Magic is cool again. I'm going to use those kinds of magical stuff. but with the understanding that I can test them. You see, that's the very definition of enlightenment. It's not that enlightenment is against magic, or for example ethics against those kinds of demonulatory

or all of that shit and jazz that came before. No, it's just that we are given certain kinds of technologies or techniques such that we can say for the first time that these methods, however misguided they were, we can compare them with observational evidences or data. And that's when the explosion happens.

That's when you are in the Enlightenment and not in the goddamn Middle Ages. you also said something about um determinism what was it see about what determinism um i'm not sure like uh I don't think I used that word. I wonder which part you'd be referring to.

I'm just trying to catch you for all the tweets that you have posted. I would say that the same thing can be said about determinism, the problem of determinism. You see, the problem of determinism is the very problem of ethics. But we should actually understand what determinism is before to make an ethics out of it. You see, if determinism is simply causal determinism, then I don't think that either Espinosa, Kant,

through Hegel can tell you to be the nice and not naughty boys. You see? The very idea of determinism is simple as that. When we are saying something determines something else most probably we are confusing x causally determines y with x logically has a consequence which is called y so the first one is the causal determinism and the second one

is a logical determinism. And the strange thing here in the philosophical canon is that you can't have actually causal determinism without logical determinism. So you need first to have a mind in a platonic sense in order for you to have a nature. that's a kind of like fucked up scenario rational scenario that Plato puts forward I was thinking Reza whether I mean I'm not sure if this is what this distinction implies but I was wondering if

you could put that in relation with this idea that magic is about determining things through like interference in forms because then it would seem like maybe you're trying to do like a kind of a logical intervention into the kind of causal chain yes you see you see this is the whole point uh that you know when magic is being taken as magic as something supernatural it's just I'm not going to touch it. But the thing is that with magic, if you look at it as an anthropologist or as a historian, then you see that virtually every sort of magic, what has been called magic

in Middle Ages is actually what we might call today a non-standard form of inference, like abductive inference, like hypothesis making, like world making, so on and so forth. And that's why you can't simply say that, oh, magic is bad. Yeah, magic is bad when religious people talk about it. I want to whip them. But no. From a perspective of tool making and methodology, it is the very root of science and ethics.

If you tweet about this however, you will be in a lot of trouble my friends. Okay, how about having a bathroom break and then we will come back. Good. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

So any squaring Reza, I published my first article in the analytic philosophy journal. That's bad. That's bad. Why is it bad? They were much nicer. I suspected that the

review editors would be harsher, but they were actually... Where did you publish it though? The Journal of Value Inquiry. It's like... For the fun, for the fun, for your value reason, do this once. Publish an article in Elsevier and see what kind of comments you get. Oh, shit. that feels feeds the soul to be honest with you i don't know if they would publish anything outside

of medicine though i mean no that elzheimer is a very good one i mean like the kind of blind comments that you get oh my god i wish i didn't actually exist as a human being Have you stopped publishing articles? Are you no longer interested in... No, I'm really not interested, no. To be honest with you, you know, why do I actually need to write another goddamn paper? Well, I mean... Why I can play video game? Playing video game is better than publishing essays! I don't know about that.

well because you are my friend you just want to get to the university well i also don't have a video game system i i used to have that kind of uh you know obsession to get published but the more you actually get published, the more you understand that, shit, this whole thing is like one goddamn Monica Bay movie. Everyone wants to kill each other. Explosion it is. I don't want to be part

of that anymore I really don't I mean what is good about it really in my opinion only good about it is you get peers to look at your work whereas peers who the fuck are the peers but when you're writing a book you would like to have your arguments sort of like tested out by other people right like to get some people like people more stupid than you yes most probably I don't think everyone is stupider than you know. Yes, not everyone. But there is a certain kind of mafia mentality that absolutely I don't want to deal with anything. I think that's more common with like critical theory

and continental journals in my experience. No, believe me. That's why I asked you to publish, try to publish an essay in Elsevier. See what you get. Isn't that just happening? and then and then and then come and come to the class and tell us what kind of you got no i i to be honest with you to have a good life to be good to your students to be good teacher is far more interesting than and basically dealing with these kinds of people. I don't have time for them anymore.

There was a time that I envied them, but no longer, unfortunately. all I want to have is my garden my console so I can play video game and bunch of you know nerves as my students where I can actually tell them once in a while that I was serving breakfast That's all I want. Anything else is just shit. It's academic scam, to be honest with you.

But absolutely, you have to go to academia. Because if you don't, then you don't get a job. You will end up like me, a loser. You have to do it. Well, you have a nice garden, a nice house. I would probably just stand up homeless. Philosophy can always be learned everywhere. Are we discussing Reza's palace?

Palace? Yeah. You know Reza, when the communist revolution comes, you will be expropriated very quickly. I know, I know, but I can tell you that I have actually managed to build a certain kind of cult where we are going to make mungulags and the first people who who go to the moonblacks are not the right-wingers, but the left-wingers, those people who didn't behave. It's always best to play the low-key card

when it comes to politics. The long con is what is important. So, my dearest friends, thoughts and ideas, particularly with regard to Spinoza, the question of the will and the question of evil and Bruno, of course.

We have become scapegoats, we as our federation, our federation board, myself, and it's unjust. I can't hear you. Can you turn off your volume a little bit? My apologies. I'm you my man has a lot of that kind of Promethean breathing

That's good, that's good. Go on now. So, I would like to hear sort of the, I guess, the end of the discussion about metaethics and sort of determinism and sort of how this, how one could sort of salvage Neospinosis potentially. I don't know, I found it to be an interesting... I don't think that it does salvage Noah Spinozzi. No, no, no. Well, I mean, fair enough, but I mean, I would be interested in hearing sort of the case for for doing that, because most of the time, new Spinozzi is thrown around into sort of, you know, in this sort of call for

for imminence and materiality and whatnot without actually sort of taking this sort of problem. Well, the question is simple as that. What is determinism? Let's, obviously, the Spinozist wouldn't believe in logical determinism. All they want is causal determinism. That's not true. What is causal? That's not true, Reza. There, one can, there's... Would you be able to tell me what is the version of a Spinozistic logical determinism? Yeah, any type of probabilistic or Bayesian objective consequentialism looks at both. It embeds one and the other. There's not like this harsh distinction that's made at least contemporary.

But the Bayesian thing is not really causal in any sense. But it's causal insofar as what appears is a cause, but when we analyze with scientific instruments, there's a probabilistic... I know that's what you're saying, but you're saying there's this harsh distinction. I'm saying this harsh distinction is not something people actually... Well, yes, for Spinozistic people, there is, there is. And look at Twitter. Look at Twitter now. I mean, fuck Twitter. But the idea of Spinoza's consequential determinism is we look at the consequences, and that's how we make ethical judgments.

But we don't take the visual consequences to be... But the thing is that with Spinoza... Wait, wait, wait. Both of you, please. There comes a certain kind of ideal nature. Yes, please, please, please. My apologies. No, no, don't worry. I'm just sort of fascinated about sort of hearing both points. So please let the other person finish their point, both of you, before. Yes, my total apologies. My apologies. I'll just make a point that this will be a short one. If a consequentialist wants to evaluate a given action, say action A, he looks at the consequences of A and those of not A. And then afterwards, he assigns a certain probability to these consequences and then decides for one or the other option into the future.

So it uses both the logic of logical determinism and embeds that into the causal profile of what's going on visually. But it doesn't see what's going on visually or the billiard balls is knocking into one another as the final cause. Of course, there's ways to look at kinetic energy, to analyze motion on a macro and micro scale, that logical determinisms are embedded within the causal profile of what appears to us a billiard ball knocking into another one. That would be a very good and generous idea of Espinoza, but unfortunately it is not. You see, section three, page six in ethics.

Do I need to read it? No, probably not. You can watch it or you can read it. There is this understanding in Espinoza that everything is of nature. By that he really doesn't mean some sort of Schillingian idea of nature. Schilling is far more, you know, complex. You can't just say that Schilling is, for example, you know, this kind of nature is, so on and so forth. Yeah, Schilling is a vulgar philosopher, but he's not that kind of philosopher who simply thinks that nature is just nature.

But Spinutzer thinks that nature is just nature. He really thinks at the end of the day that there are some causal problems that can only be addressed with a foundational account of nature and not the mind. That's just stupid, to be honest with you. That's why I think that many people today who are embracing Espinoza are not understanding

the consequences of his philosophy. He's as stupid as fucking Kant. Kant is also stupid. I mean, this is a guy who says to you that, you know, okay, let us have some regulative judgment, such as God, for us to have an ethics, right? But then he pretends that these regulative ideas are actually constitutive ideas. All you can say to such philosophers is go fuck yourself.

I have no other response to such philosophers. I think we should take all such philosophers, in fact all philosophers for that matter, with a grain of salt. But the thing is that these purported new Spinozists, we're now using this term in a in a rather and precise sense, but they are also cherry picking Spinoza to some extent for ideas. Certainly, yes, these ideas do have consequences, but it's not a sort of wholesale adaptation and importation of Spinoza's philosophy in general.

But then you might ask, what are they in fact? Yes, indeed. Who are we talking about? That's the question, right? Who are we talking about? I don't know. It doesn't matter who we are talking about. We are not going to make examples. No, no, no. It's not astronomy. It's a hypothesization of a certain kind of tendencies that might eventually come from Espinosa. I mean, if we think of Espinosa as those who endorse determinism, as I tried to elaborate earlier with the model of superposition, observer effects, and quantum physics writ large as something that is affected by...

No one... Ekin, what are you talking about? Quantum fucking physics? I'm saying... No one thinks about quantum fucking physics. People are just one to understand what causation is. There's definitely those, I mean, I've actually spoken to lady men and ross who have endorsed the model of uh spinoza's imminence oh my god i mean their justification is that the model of imminence that we can get from spinoza is that when we observe certain phenomena in our experimental modalities those in the quantum physics realm our observations do not track with what we in our formulas of representatives in our formula of mathematics

and so no to be true. And yes, and yes, and yes. My man, James Ladyman, whom I truly love, and he has this interview where he talks about that, you know, guys, all we have is representation. Right, I mean, that's a very non-Spinoza's position. Spinoza... Yes. No, no, really, please don't bring James Ladyman as an example because he's not that kind of man. He's actually quite very, very conservative, philosophically, ethically, so on and so forth.

Yes, he's a very good philosopher. What does that mean? Borges was a great writer. But man, did he ever write a story about women? No, he didn't. It was shit to begin with. well within the realm of spinoza studies and uh interesting ideas from spinoza that we have not talked about there is one that i wanted to bring up and this is actually something that believe it or not, Deleuze talks about only really in detail in one of the lectures that he gave.

And it's recently been published. And this is a distinction between two types of affect. I don't know how many people here are familiar with something called affect theory. I quite dislike this rendering of Spinoza, where it reduces affect to sensation. But Spinoza had a picture of affect and specifically two types of affect affectus and affectio in Latin. This is the distinction that is made that has often been elided and it's all been reduced to the word affect. But this is a way to determine continuous variation of causal actants. Affectus is the determination of continuous variation of acting. And then this other notion affectio has been defined as the

nature of the modified body, affected body, affected thing in nature. And Spinoza says then affectio indicates that nature of the modified body rather than nature and the modifying body envelops the geometrical portrait of observation and that the body cannot determine the mind to thinking and all modes of thinking have a, he says God as its cause, but you know, I mean, it's pretty, it's a putative God. The reason he uses God is he has to keep at least the appearances of religious thinking of his time. Anyway, I only mentioned this because I think that, you know, say what you will of Deleuze. Yes, yes, yes.

This distinction was one that he actually went back to the Latin writing of Spinoza and noticed something that so many Spinoza scholars for decades had allied, which is Spinoza actually talks about two different kinds of affect and it's usually just been translated as affect instead of the Latin. Yes, this is actually what I would call the classical problem of middle-aged, later scholastic, earlier Renaissance kind of ethics, the kind of ethics that Espinoza thinks about. These kinds of affectio or apex really means nothing.

It is a certain kind of upgrade upon the old way of understanding affection, but it's not a really great way. Do you know why? Think about it. because for every cause there's an equal and opposite reaction so there's not just one body that's affected both are affected that's what i would think that that's one that's absolutely one But also, it's the very idea of causation that these people have at this point.

You see, the very idea of causation that they have, by virtue of which they understand the meaning of affect, is fundamentally inefficient. it is simply like is as actually let me let me tell you this it is as fundamentally idiotic millennial has to say that a butterfly flapped its wings and we got

Cuban Revolution on our hand. I mean that's just shit to be honest with you. No, we need to come up with a better idea of determinism. Because determinism is the very core of my apologies, Paul. Please go forward. No, I think I was going to ask what you were about to say, because I would be interested hearing a little bit about, on the one hand, precisely what the sort of idea of affect during

causation during this time was, and precisely what is wrong with it, sort of aside from the stupid example with the butterfly, and also how it can be replaced and with what it should be replaced with because I just don't know anything and I reckon other people might not. I see, I see. You see, obviously, for example, one of the greatest books that I actually recommend about these kinds of haphazard idea of determinism and causation is

is Hobbes and the air pump. That's a really good word. It sheds light on this very idea of causation that was the case back then. But you see, even though we are using that kind of causation,

a kind of causation, even now, we are not doing it all the time. time, we are actually doing some other kinds of stuff, putting some other kinds of constraints and these kinds of accounts, some kinds of causation. And to that extent, I would say that if there was a kind of Elizabethan play where on one side it's Hobbes

and the old latest scholastic people and us, I would say that they were better than us. You know why? Not because they had better idea of causation, but because they had a better verb, idea to explore what it means for something to cause something else. Whereas us are just like a bunch of dodos, right?

who are simply trying to figure out, oh, why is that I am this kind of person rather than others? I think they had far better idea of causation. Because the idea of causation, even if it was not perfect, was something more akin to the idea that, you know, naturalism plus rationalism. Whereas we want a certain kind of causation that is just free-floating.

And unfortunately, that is not going to happen by any means whatsoever. I think that our generation is just fucked. Don't get angry. deal with it. Another thing that you should take into account is

The idea that what is will? Yeah. So philosophers usually throw it around as if it was nothing. The question of the will is the ultimate question. What is it? How does it work? So on and so forth. That's something every revolutionary should answer to. Otherwise, you are not a revolutionary. I think a good question to ask is also, was Spinoza a cognitivist?

talk about cognitivism in general, which I presume you would identify as a cognitivist, at least a weak cognitivist. For those who are not familiar with the term, cognitivism is the view that there are knowable truths about the world, whereas non and anti-cognitivism are rejections of that view. You see, the problem here arises and that's why I am not Espinoza. Alcan Espinoza says that there is a novel truth

about this freshet planet and then goes on and says that hey my friends there is no such a thing as a will without actually distinguishing between free will and the rational world that's why i think spinosa is probably one of the most conservative philosophers that I have ever seen in my life. Contrary to all the fun that is going on right now.

No, he's not really a great philosopher. Yes, he's a great philosopher, just like Kant. But Kant also was conservative. I mean, who is Kant? He's a proto-incel. He never got married. You can make meme of Kant as this guy, the incel guy, the incel guy. But no, there is no fault about such philosophers. The thing is that we should take this idea seriously. We cannot just simply go on and try to make our ethics, make our philosophies by way of

these people. We should understand ourselves as part of the history. be part of the history is when you can actually make a change. Reza, as somebody who has very limited understanding of what you're saying for the last seven and a half weeks when you refer to rationality. My apologies. My total apologies. No, no. I would ask you, maybe could you give us a cogent, terse description of what you mean by rational will?

Okay, so rational will, if I understand it correctly, by way of Kant, Hegel, and other people in 20th century, to have a rational will means that you understand for the first time that you don't have free choice about picking apple versus pear versus I don't know and I got them berry or so on so forth all such things are not part of a rational way the job

of the rational will is to come up with a plan with the understanding that even if I didn't have free choice I still can live freely in a Marxist sense. Spinoza says that I mean his conclusion in the whole project is that yes he does that he does that he does that but but he does it by way of so much what you might call to be you know the stuff like is like what if

if you really want to say that then why the fuck do you always talk about will as something that didn't even exist always demotes will to nature no well i have a very simple answer to that because the way will was used prior assumed that it was free it was freely chosen and it was outside of a causal profile that god yes yes absolutely absolutely that's why uh i said that i don't uh fault espinosa but then you know we are not in the time of god damn espinosa are we we are in 21st century

we can be better than that and that's what i want to see you know to to be espinoza is so easy to be something better is something of a matter of objective practical achievement. Please. At the risk of being an entomologist trying to pin you like a butterfly onto a piece of cardboard, your answer about the rational will seemed very vague to me. And I'm wondering if you could just crisp it up for me to be able to understand, because you've appealed to it in every class many, many times.

Sure, sure, sure. So if you could please just give me a little bit clearer sense of how to do it. Would you be able to tell me what part of it is actually vague? I mean, it starts with some... Sure. The way that you just described it, if I could repeat it back to you, was you're operating under the illusion that you can pick a pair versus an apple. this is an illusion of free will. And then you immediately turn to rational will as the thing that would allow you to plan to live as if you were free, even if you're not. But I don't fully understand, is that a social construction? Because in the past seven and a half years-

It is construction par excellence. Okay. So you've appealed to the collective previously. Is this an individual rational world that we're talking about no absolutely it's a function of language or is language uh a system is a function of language but language in mind we have very is always collective i mean you can't find language as individual you see language is never individual right and in fact that's the whole point uh so yes uh i understand this but but think of this uh when i say that i'm going to pick for example a carrot or a pear or an apple

Obviously, I'm not talking about certain kind of individualistic sense of what I mean apple or pear. Everything that I have at this point is just collective, right? otherwise how can I as a man or a person pick this or that x over y that's the whole point that essentially the rationalist will is something quite

sinister at the end of the day. Why? Precisely because with the rationalist will, you can pick X or Y, even if Y was your most favorite fruit. So I have a little bit of familiarity with the term. And as far as I'm aware, it comes from the philosophy of absolute spirit and more specifically the philosophy of religion and Hegel. It's not actually a term that you would find in Kant.

Hegel's the first to use the term rational will. And it comes out of a discussion he has about freedom as the impulse and determinacy for rationality to be realized. And he poses that conversation in relation to slavery, saying that slavery contradicts Christianity because it's contrary to reason. And then he gives three different forms of reconciliation with immediateness and worldliness. The first one he gives as an abstraction of things in the world. The second reason he gives is reconciliation in between the relation that one can have with an external object, an external reason. And the third is an appeal, and I'm quoting here, to the ethical realm, or the principle of freedom that is penetrated into the worldly realm itself.

and that the worldly, because it has been thus conformed to the concept, reason, and eternal truth, is freedom that has become concrete and will that is rational. The institutions of ethical life are divine institutions, not wholly in the sense that celibacy is supposed to be wholly by contrast with marriage or familial love, or that voluntary poverty is supposed to be wholly by contrast with active self-enrichment, or what is lawful and proper. Similarly, blind obedience is regarded as holy, whereas the ethical is an obedience in freedom, a free and rational will, an obedience of the subject towards the ethical. Thus, it is in the ethical realm that the reconciliation of religion with worldliness

and actuality comes about and is accomplished. Yeah. The same thing can be said about the problem of ethics. You see, obviously, you know, shit kind of people. There is nothing more rabid, more basely, what you might call to be fucked up, than

we humans. What? This is actually the Hegel's story. So Hegel always starts with certain idea of sense, sense, certainty, sense certainty. Of course, Deleuze really, really mistakes this idea of sense certainty as if it was just some sort of like trick. Hegel wants to make certain kind of a story about this. We all come with an account of a certain entity.

And at that level we don't have conceptual capacities, the kind that we have, by way of which we talk to each other. But the great lesson is that at a certain stage, if you manage to build upon this sense, certainty, you get something like a monkey, like me. How exciting is it? It's really exciting, I must say. And then let us build on this monkey. Just add a

a little bit of language. What Hegel calls the design of Geist. Just give him a little bit of the sign of Geist and man, that monkey becomes the god itself. And that's the Hegelian idea of ethics. And isn't it the very idea of education? How we should treat people, children or animals?

Come on now. I have like a bunch of, I think, different ideas that are kind of mixed up to understand this notion of Will, or rational Will. it seems to me like it like if you want to take it in scientific material this way you would have to consider what I'm trying to do is precisely try to clarify this kind of approximation that I have in mind but what I mean is just

that it would seem you would have to have a kind of either and what what they call in systems theory emergent capacity that would create a next level in which a different mechanism starts to work which is able to over determine or over code as it appears on the list and the level that comes below that or I was wondering if this has to do with what you were talking about in terms of logical causation or one time JP made a presentation in which he talked about Johanna Zyb and she talks about upwards causation, the downward causation. I

I haven't had the time to go into that yet, but all these things are kind of things that come to my mind when I think about this question of how can you have, like, how this fiction of freedom can actually have consequences, like real consequences. because you are not free in a causal sense and then you have this fiction that creates a logical mechanism that actually is able to organize some kind of causal relation in the world. So how should I think about that? Sure. I would say that, you see, then it comes to the grand thesis of philosophy.

Do you believe in the empirical devices of your existing world? Or do you actually willing to make another world, namely a counterfactual universe? I would say what you are referring to here is a counterfactual universe. It is not the god damn... shit universe that we are living in. Contrafactualism is a certain kind of philosophy to doctrine and without it I don't think that

we can simply say anything about anything. I think girls times it is now now boys have had a lot of time

go on now uh okay can you hear me yes Sorry, I just joined this class last week and still catching up on everything. And it's like 12.30 a.m. here. So apologies if I seem a bit dazed. No, no apologies needed. No apologies. Any person who lives in the monstrous parts of the world doesn't need to have an excuse. Yeah, I guess I was wondering what do you think about Spinoza's conception of evil? Since I think we've been discussing a lot of things.

Spinoza's idea of what exactly? Evil. His idea of evil, it seems. Oh, evil, evil. You see, Spinoza really is a great philosopher, right? But his idea of evil, I think, I might be wrong, of course, is something of evil. what you might call to be a Twitter account. Such as, you know, I, you know, I have...

You need to get off Twitter. Twitter is investing your brain. I love Twitter. You can't go 30 minutes without talking about Twitter. I love Twitter. and he always comes with this idea that okay we have this kind of stuff about nature but hey if you were participating in this nature then no no no no no so this is just like espinosa Like if you actually post it on fighting Twitter, then most probably you don't have any sort of reprieve

at this point. You don't have any sort of blessing. It's just like bad posts coming your way. So there is this kind of stuff. And that's actually quite interesting precisely because it shows that the problem of ethics at the end of the day might not actually come from nature or something or this or that. It actually comes from you. how you see yourself in a certain kind of context of nature

and if you see yourself in that kind of nature where that idea of nature fully impinges upon your any sense of will and yes you're fucked as his pinoza would say you are essentially what uh cans or sellers call um help me help me uh again uh spiritual what

spiritual you're saying in content sellers there's a term that begins with the word spiritual he for for rob robots a spiritual something yeah spiritual material or something like that that's what you become it's a term that i know hegel uses spiritual material but he uses it when he's talking about the sensible on ordinary consciousness yes and yeah essentially um so yes i think the best thing to do

at this point is just forget philosophy philosophy is not a very great discipline it can be very great when it is being taught in a very, you know, kind of, you know, democratic framework. But otherwise it is not really. Any sort of philosophical decision most probably will lead to a catastrophe. My friends,

that's why you shouldn't read philosophy. It's philosophy as if you could do something better with it, rather than doing something actually with it. Otherwise it's just shit. I don't want my friends and my students to become goddamn fucking philosophy

students, what the fuck is this? It's bad! It's against ethics! Do you know why? Because as long as you have certain kinds of axioms, that you have made your mind on on those hands, you will always, no matter how good willed people you are, you always go for those kinds of actions, nothing more. And here, my friends,

If you don't have any sort of, you know, kind of echoing, we probably should stop at this point. Trashwoman called us a boys club, by the way, Reza. You are the worst, I can. You are the guy who wants to go to the philosophy department. Well, Trash Woman called us a boys club. I don't know who Trash Woman is, but there's this person who commented on our chats named Trash Woman, and they said that we're a boys club.

The philosophy, philosophy, absolutely. Wasn't this already like a known established fact? It is, but then, but then, if it is established by then how goddamn all of you are in this goddamn class. What are you doing here? You could do gardening, you could do some gaming, other kinds of stuff. Unbelievable. This is why I hate all of you.

No, not all of you. Some more veteran people I love. I think the only solution is if Reza transitions, like after I saw that picture on Twitter, I can't get it off my mind. I want to see a picture so Reza makes for a fine woman. Didn't you see that? No, no, you will have to show me. I've seen many, you know, like face apps of people becoming feminized, but not resized. Well, my friend, if I actually turn into a feminine face app person, I would be more

bitchy, that's what I am actually now. So do you want me now as a male or do you want me as a bitchy person? Perhaps not. The question solved. Reza, before we finish, I have a question. Do you see aesthetics as opposed to philosophy? And do you give it upper hand if so? So the idea of aesthetics is, you know, comes hand in hand with philosophy.

But yes, I would say that in a certain time and age, like for example early 21st century, aesthetics is actually against philosophy. Philosophy should fight aesthetics. But that is not really the whole of the story, let me tell you. wait Reza is this your sister or is this not your sister I have to now that I've been no no no this is the whole point like wait no no no I'm talking about your picture on twitter that someone just sent me is this your sister or is this not your is this your face with face app

because you would make for such a beautiful woman if this is really your face oh my god you're I will execute. No, I'm not going to execute anyone. I'm going to simply send them to the moon. Okay, let's go on. So we were talking about what? that's the philosophy yeah but of course in western tradition but because in eastern one it's there is no really clear distinction the philosopher is a scientist is the poet etc you know at least in the past

I think I think it is precisely because the idea of philosophy, the Western civilization, was never captured correctly, was not refined correctly. I would say that yes, there is such a thing as the fight between philosophy and aesthetics. Not in the foundational sense, but in the sense of the common reasoning. People say, oh, this is aesthetics, this is

philosophy, some sort. No, I would say that philosophy is the only thing that we have. Without philosophy, we would be just drooling monkeys. Philosophy is absolutely the ultimate idea. It is the idea from which emerges humor, laughing, and being a bad boy or girl. That's what philosophy is. Philosophy is a good thing.

Everything else is on the back burner. And this is why philosophy is the organ of ethics, other than, for example, religion. Who wants to have Muhammad as his daddy if we have Plato? Why? This isn't maybe just dragging things back quite a bit to Bruno again, but I was kind

of interested and maybe it's slightly related. Like I ended up reading Did you just tell me that I urinated? I misinterpreted your accent. Go on, go on. I'm just joking. I thought it was in the chat and I was looking at the chat because the chat, it would be more consistent with the chat than what I was. Yeah, sorry. Sorry, maybe related to what we were talking about earlier sorry um no um have you actually watched uh that's you know um you probably know uh jean maria volante right the great italian actor

He played in almost 1974, 75, I can't remember, as basically, you know, The Martyr. You should watch this. It is one of the greatest movies of all times. You see, the thing is about with Bruno, he wasn't that kind of guy that we talk about these days. He wasn't a martyr, you know, he was a Flander, first of all.

He was arrogant and all that kind of shit. But, nevertheless, he had ideas. Ideas for which he shouldn't have been fucking burnt at a stake. So, watch this movie. It is absolutely great. It shows Bruno as that kind of flawed man, like any of us. But he is also a martyr. If I understand it correctly, he also- Remember like Mark Fisher, Mark Fisher. Remember Mark Fisher.

Mark Fisher was not always a good man, just like all of us, but he was something else when it was required. And that's why we remember Mark Fisher rather than fucking Nick Land 200 years from now. I also wonder if like the thing with Bruno wasn't that as a good Prometean idealist, he believed that he was immortal he didn't care whether he died as long as he was right because he did right he did believe in in

methampsychosis and like he didn't think he was going to die he was just like he couldn't leave his ideas behind and continue living as a body but he could leave his body behind living as ideas regardless of his ideas i would say that giordano two thumbs up or actually maybe three thumbs up. He was one of the greatest men ever lived, ever lived. Absolutely. The man simply started to talk about his mind.

And he had the courage to attack the church. The only person who around that kind of time did the same thing was Menachie. You know, the Heiressiarch, the one that is cited by Carlo Ginzburg, Menachie, worms and cheese. That was, these people were absolutely fearless. I'm still kind of curious about

the kind of the two sort of competing vectors that Francis Yates draws though, where she's talking about on the one hand you have like this kind of image-based like idea of the art of memory and then this is kind of competing with or like antithetical to what some of the humanists like Erasmus and it kind of follows the tradition from Quintilian to like to Erasmus and others and through Low and I was just kind of curious like relating back to Damwon's question around like the kind of tension between aesthetics or art and philosophy like you know whether I mean I kind of I don't know I forgot like the kind of hook

of the question I was trying to ask really but I understand I understand you see to be honest with you, as someone who is actually a humanist, I think that for a great part, the legacy of humanism was just a sham. I mean, look at Erasmus. What the fuck are you? I mean, get a life you wipe us. But the thing is that you should understand that the history of humanity is a history of history in a Marxist sense, such that you no longer take human

for granted, you will start to build it up. So there comes with it a kind of constructive notion of what human beings and that's when people get angry, you know? I mean, you don't even need to talk about that poor guy. Think about Diderot. Oh my God, Diderot is even worse. Oh, has any of you read Diderot? Oh, I wish no such thing on my enemy.

I'm not going to think on my enemies. Can't be as bad as Proust. So, my dear great friends, who is going to present next session? Next session unfortunately is a very, very interesting session. I will reply to it personally. So.

What is the next session? Because it says it's just this one continued for next week, I think. Unless I'm mistaken. Ah, yeah, that's the whole point. That's the whole point. It is this session plus some more jazz. How about that? No one? What jazz? What's coming? Like, do you want us to read something or? Well, I think that, no, we don't need to read any exo-oriented material. I would say

that all we have at this point is good. It's just that who is going to get cancelled by I think you have a stop about Agustin, Aquinas, Bruno, or Espinosa. Time for bravery, my friends. I mean, I've already done a presentation, but I don't mind doing another one because

I enjoyed reading the other. Okay. You go, you go first. So who's going to be the responder? I'll respond. I'm happy to. American. Okay, good. Thank you so much. Anyway, I hope you're play free, not mad, and not basically depressed at this point of time. I love you and take care of yourself. Cheers.

Bye, Reza. Bye, bye. Thank you. Have a good week. Bye. Bye. Bye. Carl, what are you doing there? It's still there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I am. I am. I was reading the ethics. Well, everyone else was talking about I don't know what. By the way, did Mo actually contact you?

No, no, he didn't. I asked him what you were talking about and he didn't know. So I don't know what you were talking about. No, I actually asked Mo that you are going to be, you know, a moderator and you get paid. Okay. That's fine. That's fine. I might go for two. No, I'd be happy to do that. Yeah, sure. um and i have had certain kinds of students who are just like you know kind of the most i would say a sneaky kind of people and you definitely are one of them

But that's what I recommend you. It's time for you to take some sort of responsibility. Oh no. That's basically the worst. By the way, can I ask you, since a couple of weeks ago you said you would send a text on what was it Hegel and sort of transition in sort of how something about the reason I don't know I don't remember but I sent you an email about it. Wasn't Hegel and skepticism? Yes exactly yes sorry. Okay okay yes okay let

Let me just give it to you right now. so there is hmm my apologies one sec oh no worries no worries

Okay, what I meant was this book. One sec. I'm getting to it. Mm-hmm. Check out Philosophy of Science.

Again, rationalism and skepticism by Theodoris Dimitricos. So the spelling is D-I-M-I-T-R-O, R O uh sorry D M I T R A K O S. Okay yeah great thank you.

He's absolutely one of the greatest. I mean, my grasp of Hegel is quite poor to begin with, but I think it's an interesting recommendation. Did you catch any of those classes with Andre and Regito? Yes, I did. I was in them. But no, I didn't really put in the effort that I would have had to, to sort of actually grasp the logic without you know any real background. But did you talk to him? Did you talk to him? You see to talk with Andro is a different thing. I mean not outside of the class no not really. He is absolutely one of the most

well-rounded people that you can ever come across with. He seems he seemed to be extremely knowledgeable and happy to share. He's a total nerd, all I can say. But he's also a very, very great person. Just send him an email and in a blink of time he will send you a lot of information. he is always there he's really a good person yeah i think i'll go ahead and do that then thank you

absolutely love you and take care of yourself yes you too take care of your garden have a nice week bye love you bye bye Thank you.