 Why it matters whether the problem with emotions like anger or in general lack of tranquility, whether we conceive of that as disrupting our ability to assess true propositions or whatever, or whether we need to think of this as going the other direction causally. That's something to do with how we're thinking about propositions that affects whether we have emotions or not. Now, why is that an important thing? Why was I dwelling on that point at length? It seems like such a minor detail of the theory. Why did I keep coming back to that point and sort of obnoxiously saying, no, you're wrong, you've got it exactly backwards, which you were very good supportive of. And I think I know from subsequent discussion with you that you understand the reason, but I'm wondering if other people clued into what we were talking about. It's a rather fundamental point about the stoic theory of emotion. Why would it matter which direction we were talking about? Okay, Alex. It's kind of the key difference between epicureanism and stoic philosophy, because one of them is the end for one and the other is the end for the other. So, anyhow, you look at that situation, you would be going towards a stoic end or an epicurean end? Well, I don't follow you. How is it epicurean? What does it have to do with epicurean? Wasn't the discussion between... We didn't actually talk about epicureanism in that discussion at all, I don't think. Maybe I'll take another comment. Right, the question is why, let's try to be as exact as possible, there was a claim that the problem with having emotional states is it means that we become irrational and don't ascend to the true proposition so we can't live in accordance with nature. And I said, well, that sounds good. That all sounds like stoic slogans, like living in accordance with nature and controlling emotions and so forth. But the model actually goes in a different causal direction, opposite of that. It has to do with not ascending to the right propositions, producing emotions. Now, why is it relevant which direction that goes in? Why does that matter and why do I insist on that? Yeah, because I think when we were talking about that being ascended to a position by living in accordance with nature was simply a by-product of living in an emotional state. You don't pursue having the right attitude and propositions but simply the by-product of pursuing living in accordance with nature. So therefore it's not causal but it's not the intent. I think that's what we were trying to get at last time. Well, so whether I ascend to the propositions is a by-product of the emotional state that I have. Is that what you just said? Yes, yes. I think that's what you just said. So then in your view, this is sort of similar to what Daniel said. It goes like this. I have an emotional state like anger and then I have these propositions. It'd be good to have examples of what we mean but if I'm in that emotional state then I end up ascending to false propositions and that's bad because I need to affirm true propositions in order to live in accordance with nature. Okay, so let's say that the proposition is somebody insults you and you're angry, right? Well, why don't you actually give an example of a proposition? So that's a sentence or something. You gave an example of an action, somebody insults you but we need something like somebody insulted me and that's a bad thing or it's bad that I was insulted. So a proposition is an attitude based on something else. Is the proposition like a virtue? Well, proposition in general is just a sentence. It's just a predication of something of a subject. Okay, so it's a linguistic entity and in the Stoic theory it's a lactate. It's a sayable. It's a thing that's said but it's a really simple thing. It's a subject and a predicate. Okay, but certain subjects and predicates combined in certain ways, some of them are true and some of them are false. So if I say that it's raining right now and it's not raining then that's false. If I say it is raining right now and it is then that's true. And why is it true? Because truth means saying of what is that it is and also it is saying of what is that it is not. So a proposition isn't a spooky, scary, logical thing. It's just a sentence. Now the relevant ones as far as both virtue and a motion of concern are sentences about values, about things being good or bad. Okay? And we seem to have a pretty plausible thing here that we don't like anger, for example, because anger makes me a scent to false propositions like I become angry because somebody insulted me, insulted my having shaved my beard because when I came in and you asked this mocking question of me then I could have thought this student is insulting me at night because I became angry and then I think this is a bad thing and so consequently I do something unjust like failure in the class or refuse to accept the revision of your paper and so then I don't live in accordance with nature and so that's why the Stoics don't like anger because it makes us a scent of false propositions and when I ascend to false propositions I don't live in accordance with nature that is I'm not virtuous so I'm not giving the end of life. Now that sounds like a pretty plausible story to me and it's using a lot of great phrases of Stoicism and of ancient philosophy but it's actually not the theory and if this was the theory then the work we read last time on tranquility to soul wouldn't make any sense like what he's saying to do and so forth would have no value and no worth and would be totally in vain so it's a nice plausible sounding theory that somebody could defend it's just not the theory we're talking about so we need to understand the details of the philosophical account of how it works and all propositions relate to emotional states how that relates to living in accordance with nature So I think if you're going this way saying that our emotional states determine what propositions we ascend to that kind of undermines the whole view about what nature is and what wisdom is because so they have the view of human nature and they have the leading part of the soul and then the final part or that God being like somebody I didn't hear that You pulled the rational leading part of the soul There aren't parts of the soul That is the human soul the hegemonic soul So actually that's pretty important is that you lapsed into a non-Stoic psychological theory there there's parts of the soul So parts of them could be rational parts of them could be irrational and then there's an issue of trying to modulate the irrational one like use reason to control the emotional state or modulate it so it's just the right amount of emotion and you're right that's a peripatetic Aristotelian account of emotion based on platonic, tripartite psychology Now the Stoics reject that view of the soul Let's just start with that point There aren't parts of the soul But they did think that the leading part of reason determined what propositions we ascend to Okay good, now that's true and that's on the path to understanding why they can't hold this model of emotion and why they need to hold a different one Now Luke, you've been very patient I keep avoiding eye contact with you but go ahead and say your piece No, I mean if emotional states proceed our ability to ascend to rational propositions and Seneca's exhortation to use the propositions or the virtues which are forms of propositions to modulate our emotional states in a cheap train doesn't make any sense because if we're already pissed off we can't ascend to the virtues which will let us be less pissed off so it doesn't operate this whole mechanism Exactly, so that is the key reason So you've now got the psychology right that I've got this leading part of the soul and I need to think of myself as the one who has control of which propositions I ascend to and so it must be a matter of which propositions I ascend to that produce the relevant emotional state and the reason that's important is exactly as Luca just said because the Stoics in theory have a cure for these diseases called emotions these pathological affections or passions called emotions they've got a therapy or a cure for them a cognitive behavioral therapy now what does that mean? It means we change the cognition so we change this part of the equation we change the part that has to do with which propositions are being ascended to and thereby change the emotional state and so the emotional state, Toran, is a byproduct of what propositions we ascend to you had exactly the backwards model that Daniel did according to which ones I ascend to was just a byproduct of the emotional state if that was the case then there would be no point of attachment where Seneca's advice could do anything I would have to be in an antecedent emotional state in order to make any use of his propositions but then they would be worthless to me because I would already be in the emotional the relevant emotional state so now there are theories of the emotions that go that direction and so they work on trying to directly affect mood and emotion and that sort of thing and that is the great promise some people would say triumph but I don't think we're there yet but promise of things like pharmacological solutions to psychological problems that maybe we can just directly modify the person's mood and emotional state and then they'll be able to reason more clearly and so they'll see, for example, that their lives aren't so bad and they'll ascend to different propositions and accordingly won't be as depressed or whatever or have the same kind of anxiety but insofar as there's a sort of psychotherapeutic solution where through talking and rationalizing and reasoning about things we can produce different emotional states we have to see the causal arrow going in a different direction here so one thing I'm still confused about that in it going from propositions to emotional state is doesn't that contradict the stoic point where it's not that we're moving distress and pain in the final end, is that virtue is supposed to be the final end that's supposed to be the highest good so if you're saying that this isn't a diagram of means and ends means and ends are a matter of what we're consciously doing what we're pursuing and we're actually talking about a different kind of causality here not that kind of final causality about being motivated by goals and things happening in the future but actually what efficiently produces the other thing which one actually produces it now, under any of these models that's to make sense I mean even the parapetetic one the goal is to live in accordance with nature but they have a different concept of the value of emotions and they think that having the Aristotle for example thinks that you should have the right amount of anger you don't try to eliminate or extirperate anger you try to have the right amount of anger because there's to be something wrong with you if you don't have anger in certain situations like suppose you witness some injustice or something if you're not angry about that something's wrong with your character right and so that's not the Stoic view but if you had a view like that then you take the emotions as more primary to our agency and you try to modulate them and so forth Stoics don't try to modulate emotions they try to get rid of them now as some people are writing papers on it's complicated because they not only try to extirperate them but they try to for example developing self-control to feel emotions in the right way and there was another title that captured this emotions extirpated and approved by Stoics okay so there are these there are these positive emotional states but they too are products of reasoning in a certain way and so as crazy as this theory sounds the idea is that you can reason your way to not just not suffering from bad emotions but all the way to happiness and success in life that's what it's about is just reasoning in the right way and that you can always do that and it's always within your power even if you're being tortured on a rack you can still assent to the right things and not assent to the wrong things and so live like a god so it's really crucial to understand the difference between those two and not to just sort of muddle the idea of emotions propositions living in accordance with nature together but see actually what the substance of the theory is but now are there other comments or just resting all those on the table go ahead so as I understand that you could have propositions that you believe to be true or propositions that you kind of have knowledge of to be true and so the ones that you believe to be true would kind of lead to the states that are more irrational like the passions or whatever that's all you end up and then the propositions where you have knowledge of to be true would lead to the you have to be happy where that's kind of the rational side yes that's correct you've got the terminology correct and that's because of course it's only opinions that can lead to emotional states and it's only knowledge that can lead to the good emotional states now why do I say that it could only be that that we could only use the term opinions for one and only use the term knowledge for the other can anyone think of just that epistemological point let's just concentrate on that to be using and insisting on that terminology to me opinion, knowledge, it's all the same right no why is it that you couldn't have a case where knowledge produced the bad kind of emotion but an opinion produced the right kind of emotion why does that not make any sense Esther is it true that this isn't a quarter of what nature yes it's because if I am producing a bad emotion that I am necessarily embracing a falsehood having a false value statement for example that he insulted my beard and that was a really bad thing and therefore I'm hurt about it yes and therefore I'm outraged and angry about it right and everyone's going to be made to suffer for this so and that's false so it obviously can't be knowledge because knowledge can't be false knowledge can only be true girls it's not knowledge but opinion can certainly be false and so if I have so it must be the opinion that I have this proposition or this judgment you know that's another way to think of propositions judgments we could just call them that they're judging that A is B that's what a proposition is it's just a judgment that A is B and A either could be B in which case and I could judge it that way in which case it's true or A could not be B and if I judge it that it is then I'm ascending to something false so I could certainly have an opinion that malicious insult and so forth I could have an opinion that it's bad I can't have knowledge of it because it's false and knowledge can't be false but opinions can be false so if I ascend to that then I could suffer from this emotional state called anger okay so that's very important now Chester you were raising your hand too no I was just saying like if it's synagogues we would just say if there's a proposition that empty your emotions that's the knowledge so I'm sorry could you say it again so if there's a proposition that like empty your emotions like just get rid of all your emotions is that the true knowledge well tell me this magical proposition that's going to get rid of all of my emotions so there's no knowledge so there's no knowledge isn't the optimal emotion state of so it's just empty of emotions yes so if there's no proposition well except as Mutzi and some other people have pointed out they do though there's a lot of rhetoric about completely getting rid of emotions there still are these approved emotions we don't even really call them emotions so yes let's say in general the goal is apathy which means apathy not suffering not experiencing these emotional states that's the goal yes but it seems to me that the question was is there some proposition I can ascend to that's just going to allow me to immediately achieve this goal of apathy of not suffering from any emotions no of course there can't just be one proposition for that why can't there just be one proposition that would dispel us from this disease of emotions why couldn't it just be one proposition that's the question what is the minimum number of propositions that it would have to be let's put the question that way ideally what are the minimum number of propositions that would rid me of every emotion yeah one per emotion that's very good and so how many kinds of emotions are there very many no I mean infinitely many maybe or maybe there's just one but actually I think there's a more definite answer didn't I give a handout that actually lays them all out okay so there's four right so I would need at least to always be ascending to the true propositions in each of those four categories now each of those divides into a number of subcategories and that may be infinite there may be infinite shades of different kinds of anger there's hatred, there's anger, etc and I mean there's an infinite number of continuous variations within that field of that emotion but it all comes down to the same thing believing that something bad is present to me that isn't and so as long as I never ascent to a proposition that has that form and that that content gets filled in then I should never experience that emotional state but that happens all the time people insult my beard they insult my threadbare clothes and and my anger about students not returning books that I've loaned them and every day there's constant sources of possible anger in me believing that bad things are happening that aren't actually bad and so that's maybe not infinite but indefinite number of propositions things that could anger me okay so but there is a definite answer to that if it was really just there's an unlimited number and the four kinds that they give are just sort of examples but there's an infinite number of emotions out there think about the consequences of that if that was really infinite then we could never pin down which true propositions would answer to those possible false propositions so we could never hope to ultimately control emotions through cognitive behavioral therapy because you can't traverse an infinite sequence of propositions so that's a really scary thought I mean maybe it's true but if so then hopefully we're going to come up with some very good drugs to deal with anger there are some pretty good ones but they're not perfect by any stretch yeah I mean couldn't human emotion be like on a I guess a limited spectrum kind of like I mean with human eyesight there's technically an unlimited amount of frequencies yeah and I think something like that's their view yeah because we only have like a well there's an unlimited amount of frequencies and colors we only have a limited spectrum this obsession that they have defining each emotion so if you look at that they gave you each one is not just a name of an emotion it's a definition of what would cause that emotion the reason they're obsessed with definitions is not just because they're like really pedantic people that you know try to act like walking dictionaries or something it's because they're trying to define that is to limit the scope of emotions and if they couldn't do that because there was an infinitely vast field and the mind was really that you know that extensive and maybe it is but if it was then there'd be no hope of defining every single one so there'd be no hope of figuring out on a rational basis how to avoid it and so of course that's a possibility though I mean let's not always convert to stoicism it might be that the reason why we're basically no farther along in treating depression and anxiety much less fear of death and belief that life is short and things like that maybe the reason we haven't been able to make any advancement over ancient philosophy about this is just because there is an infinite number of things it is irrational it is absurd and we can't just define our way out of it and think about things differently and have different cognition of it or I guess just continuing with the comparison I made with color it's like there's technically like an infinite amount of shades of red starts turning orange but there's still like a set amount that we would still call red or like there's like on a spectrum of emotion there's probably many different kinds of anger but we could still call it anger yes and as I said I think that's something like their like their view but we better hope that you know propositions are very definite things they predicate one thing of another so unless we've got really good fuzzy logic or something where we don't just need very true false statements we're going to need very definite definitions of each thing along that spectrum and I don't know how good our definitions are of the one millionth shade of red or whatever as long as we can still define it as red I guess we're okay just like we need to be able to define anger even if we can't define every infinite subspecies of it but I think they shade into each other and it's not it's not that big of a deal but maybe it is maybe it's like when I say it's not that big of a deal you know white beige whatever just painted out whatever you want that is not how my partner would see the remodeling of our house okay so sometimes these things matter and sometimes they don't okay so any other comments about that I mean I'm sorry to digress but if we don't get this point we're sort of missing the whole value of the theory yeah well wasn't that one of Cicero's main criticisms of stoicism that they were creating all of these definitions to define things and if you are defining these things that are going to be the solution to these issues and you yourself are defining them and isn't that kind of like a well um isn't that kind of what like a circular reasoning well I don't think they would agree that it's circular it would be circular if I mean we this could be a circular diagram if we thought propositions cause emotional states and then emotional states affect propositions then that would be circular they bite the bullet and say it's a unidirectional thing okay now and so what was Cicero's criticism about stoic definition, mongering and terminology and so forth cause that isn't it it's good that you noticed that he was criticizing them on that score but what was the criticism have you ever been saying that their technology just wasn't better than the ancients like the old yes yes academic, oristotelian you know old fashioned academic philosophy he's basically saying that their terminologies weren't more useful yes they created variations unnecessary variations of terms talking about things like cataleptic fantasy you know graspable impressions and sort of talking about just appearances or something right and he doesn't like that creating a massive technical vocabulary that nobody that he doesn't really seem able to grasp and certainly not able to translate into Latin that inferior language of philosophy so that is actually the complaint is that the stoics reinvent terminology but that's not specifically a criticism about their theory of emotions because there they just do use the conventional terminology so if you look at the terminology on the handout that I've given out twice now you'll see it's all the standard stuff about you know distress pleasure, anger, things like that those aren't they didn't rename anger right and insist that you call it rage or something like that or call it rage anger or something and create neologisms like they do in their physics and in their epistemology they just use absolutely standard terminology for these things because it's a diagnosis of what's happening what people are complaining about I get too angry I have fears of this and that and I have desires for such and such so they couldn't very well come up with an obscure vocabulary on an issue where they interface with the non the people that aren't devoted to the school but they could benefit from their therapy yeah modern equivalent of this is cognitive therapy and I remember when last quarter I took a class, a college class and somebody came in who actually is a he gives CBT to patients and the main focus of his terminology was we called a hexaflex and what's important is that it sounds sorry? a hexaflex it sounds really you know superficial I'm just trying to amologize the point is that there is this kind of disregard of emotions the different destructive emotions that people have I thought it was a square there are six instead of four there was overlap there are emotions more than cognitive states the six cognitive states there is a lot of overlap between a lot of them that he posited and so therefore in this modern kind of sense of sort of thought it isn't probably defined by one emotion it's kind of an overlap by not to be overlap you move on and just be able to treat the emotions and move on you don't get so caught up in the definition of things well that's more and more departure from the stoicism if you don't get caught up in the definition and you don't try to limit and figure out exactly what the proposition in this person's mind is so I understand it a little bit differently that you actually do need to become conscious of what the thing is but then counteract it with other propositions so if I'm thinking that everybody's trying to insult me I need to start thinking no they aren't they're just they don't care, they care about their own lives or if they slight me or something that's because they're having a hard day or something like that then I replace these false thoughts with true thoughts and then so I don't go off on the tangent of the false thought and I certainly don't ruminate about it over and over again thus producing the emotion but it's I to me it's not as promising as a solution to say oh well just don't think about it anymore just move on don't think about that proposition it's sort of like don't think about an elephant in the room right now it doesn't it doesn't really work I mean if we could just stop thinking about things no problem but actually stopping thinking about things stopping thinking stopping this train of thought is almost impossible it takes you years and years of dedicated devotion to studying meditation techniques in order to be able to like stop your mind from thinking for 30 seconds you're constantly thinking whether you like it or not and the stoic idea is so you better start getting that thinking in accordance with nature in the sense of the thinking is ascending to true propositions and then you'll be happy because of it if that thinking which is more or less inevitable almost impossible to stop filled with falsehoods then you're going to be mentally ill essentially to varying degrees and you're going to be foolish so therefore we have developed these techniques that have to do with giving to people to think about them differently