 book two, section 10, in mind too-ish or so. And when he says, when someone's angry, seems to turn his back on reason with a certain kind of pain and with an unconscious contractual heart. But when someone does so of desires at an overpowered pleasure, he somehow seems more self-indulgent and more unmanly in his own way. So maybe like, oh, if you do love his bad stuff, I think you're almost some less of a man of some sort. OK, so I think that's the same kind of thing, OK? But let's thank you for calling your attention to that one. Can you summarize for me what the philosophical argument in that one is? Yeah, so you only read the rest of the section? Instead of reading it, try to just summarize what the philosophical point is that it's getting at it. So what Martin's does here is he compares two wrongdoings. Wrongdoing is done out of anger and wrongdoing is done out of desire. And of the two, he says wrongdoing is done out of desire. And wrongdoing is worse, simply because things done out of desire are done of your own accord and driven to what you do by your desire. Whereas things by anger are the result of likes that you've been paying at first, or as we know, anger is more of an irrational thing that happens not because you know, you're thinking straight or because you want something to happen. So interestingly, I think the opposite of Seneca or Seneca feels anger is the worst because it's irrational and it really feels the opposite because anger is irrational. The rational wrongdoing is worse. OK, very good. Very nice, solid contribution to the discussion there. So first of all, how does this observation and this argument stand with respect to orthodox old school Greek stoicism? I feel that it maybe should line in the as-march because shouldn't all wrongdoing just be the same? Aren't they all equal? Isn't all values equally bound? So it feels kind of counter-intuitive to like, he even says like in the first one, actually when he refers to what's the name Pheoprestis, he says, oh, this makes people like a true foster when he compares wrongdoing, as people rather commonly do make such comparisons, which feels kind of odd because it's very against me. Like, they call, they have all wrongdoings. Exactly correct. Now Pheoprestis was Aristotle's pupil. And he said to be a true philosopher here. And so we're doing something that I think the reference to Pheoprestis signals, OK, this isn't an orthodox stoic point. But there seems to be some point to that, that if I'm doing wrongdoing because of a desire, that's coming from me. And it seems more volitional. So I'm more responsible for it. So it's worse if it's happening. Whereas if I'm reacting in anger, the cause of that is external to me. And I'm reacting to it. And so I'm not entirely responsible for it. The object of my anger is more responsible for it. Now, anybody else want to comment on how this observation stands with respect to the orthodox view of stoics? Yes? I hope the orthodox view is that anger is a form of desire. Very good, exactly what I'm getting at. OK, so what is the implication of that for this? I guess what causes the feeling of desire is also more important when it comes to evaluating which advice is worse or which action to take. I'd say both are equally bad in terms of outcome, but in terms of the process, I guess, acting out of your own will instead of being led to that price is worse. Yes, but the problem is that if anger just is a form of desire, then there's no distinction to be made here. OK, I mean, it's not that things caused by anger can be considered different and therefore worse or better than things caused by desire, because anger is defined as a desire. OK, so what is happening? Can we still salvage anything? Anger is a kind of desire, and it has a certain kind of object. Somebody trips me while I'm walking in the street and that angers me, versus I see a really attractive person and I have an erotic desire towards them. Or I see a wonderful chocolate cake, and that object is really making me want to break my diet or whatever. OK, so as we analyze what's happening there with this theory of emotion, both of them have objects that are causing desires, and there's a question about whether there is control of a desire. And so this can't really work with stoicism. You have to redefine anger. And maybe this makes sense, because not everybody was shocked when I tricked everyone by getting you to define anger, and nobody said it's a form of desire, but then I showed you five different definitions that Sending himself gives, all every one of which is that it's a desire for something. Is there a difference, though, when what triggers my emotion is an inanimate object versus another person? Because I would be angry at something that I would want to revenge on a chocolate cake. In contrast to having a desire for chocolate cake. Well, and you shouldn't get angry also at your car not starting, but you do. And so I'm not sure that that distinction is going to hold up. I think desires are, in the paradigm case, for people, sexual interaction. And anger is with respect to people. And both of these are social issues. And so that would be nice if we could easily say, oh, but desires are always just for things like cakes and inanimate objects. And so it's not as bad as the special kind of desire, anger, which is always focused on people, because there's a very important class of desires as Dylan might well explain to us that relates to other people. OK, other points about this? Laura and then Boone. You could spin it to be stoic by kind of talking about the causal structure. So something happened that caused a response. So the structure is rational because it was caused in effect. So even though the emotion might be, I don't know, desire or stream, the rationality isn't in the emotion itself. It's in what caused the emotion. And then you could also make it stoic by saying that when you're angry, you acknowledge your anger. And that could be a form of overly twisted-weight mindfulness because it's seeing it. It's like acknowledging your emotion and realizing that it's there. And once you realize that it's there, you could change it. In both cases, you're saying. Because you're quite right that it's wrong to focus on objects. Because one thing we know from stoicism is it's not objects that bother us. It's our beliefs about objects that bother us. OK, but are you saying that's applies more to one than the other? Our beliefs are more important, say, in the case of anger than they are in the case of desires. I think they avoid it both. OK. Now, Boone. Yeah, I think that when you kind of refers to anger, it's kind of as an impulse rather than as a desire. So I feel that he might want to use different words when they express it. Because when I read it, I thought that you're given an impulse like if someone slaps you in the face, you're going to get angry. And that's like an impulse that kind of gives to you involuntarily. I would assume that you get upset or something like that. And it's the action or the desire to do something about that is the proper form of anger. But I don't think he's trying to say that. I think he's trying to say that the initial impulse that you get is what he's trying to say. OK, the initial, OK, but let's use technical terms here. Because initial impulse has this technical meaning of what we are oriented towards. And the epigrean view, pleasure in the stoic view, maintenance, self-maintenance of the kind of thing we are, rational beings, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, or 14. So I'm not sure that impulse is the correct term. I think you're talking about the object. Yeah. OK, but in both cases, the structure is there's a certain kind of object. Then there's a belief about that object. And then there is a reaction when that object coincides with that belief. But so you think there is a significance in the different kind of object. And certainly, there is a difference between somebody tripping you and somebody putting a chocolate cake on the table. So we can't get too metaphysically reductionist about this. But it seems to me difficult to say that the kind of vice caused by chocolate cakes is not as bad as the kind of vice caused by tripping or something like that. Go ahead. I mean, in any case, isn't a stoic supposed to have control over their anger anyway? So I guess I don't understand why Marcus Aurelius wants to make this. It seems unstoic to me. I think it's because anger causes bigger, I think we have a tendency to think that anger is worse because it causes bigger problems for people. And then so there's a philosophical point that's kind of interesting and kind of counterintuitive that says actually desire is worse. I mean, it's not a big problem for me if people are eating chocolate cake and violating their diets. But if they're doing battle on the street, that could be a problem for me. And so we perceive anger to be a bigger problem. And yes, yes, you're breaking your diet. But as long as you're not one of these guys that flies off the handle or something, I can live with you. So it's not clear to me why he wants to make that distinction, but this actually resembles, as you pointed out, Seneca making anger, in all vices are equal, yes. And there's lots of passages of Seneca with him going on about the equality of all vices. But then there's also some vices are more equal than others, it turns out. And anger is really the most inhuman and the most ugly and the most despicable and the most problematic and the most in urgent need of being addressed and things like that, which makes it out to be like it's worse. So it looks like there's a kind of at least Roman stoic topos about anger being worse. And then this is sort of counteracting that. So maybe if you bought into this, you would see more about the equality of these vices. You think that anger is so much worse than desire, but I'll give you a way to look at it where desire is worse than anger. And where that all ends up is that vice is really a bad thing, even if it looks prettier in one case, it's all pretty bad.