Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 102: Aztec Philosophy w/ Sebastian Purcell

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Episode 102: Aztec Philosophy w/ Sebastian Purcell · Tales From Aztlantis

0:00
SPEAKER_02: Jovita Aguidar is a Chicana icon.
0:04
SPEAKER_02: Born in 1885 in Laredo, Texas, Jovita was a pioneering journalist, teacher, and activist whose work left a lasting impact on civil rights and education.
0:16
SPEAKER_02: She used her voice to fight for the rights of Mexican Americans through her family's newspaper, La Crónica, where she tackled issues like racial discrimination, women's suffrage, and poor working conditions.
0:31
SPEAKER_02: In 1911, she helped organize the first Mexican Congress in Texas, advocating for bilingual education and labor rights.
0:40
SPEAKER_02: The conference motto was the bold, Todo por la raza y para la raza.
0:46
SPEAKER_02: During the Mexican Revolution, she provided aid and support to refugees and wounded soldiers.
0:58
SPEAKER_02: Today, she is remembered as a trail-blazing journalist and organizer who uplifted her community and paved the way for future generations of Chitana leaders and writers.
1:12
SPEAKER_02: Que viva Jovita Idar.
1:17
SPEAKER_01: You must excuse me.
1:18
SPEAKER_01: I've grown quite clear at.
1:31
SPEAKER_01: Honesty to yourself and honesty to others.
1:35
SPEAKER_01: That lesson will stand you in good stead all your life.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: Now I'm catching on to why that's so why that's so.
1:47
SPEAKER_02: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Atlantes, where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and along the way we challenge the pseudo-historical distortions and confront the disinformation that all too often surrounds these very topics.
2:10
SPEAKER_02: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
2:13
SPEAKER_03: And Ruben Ariano Tlakatecat.
2:15
SPEAKER_03: How are you today, Dr.
2:16
SPEAKER_03: Tlakatecat?
2:18
SPEAKER_03: Today today's a good day.
2:20
SPEAKER_03: Today's been a nice uh week, a nice weekend.
2:24
SPEAKER_03: Uh carrying over to today for this week.
2:28
SPEAKER_03: Um just enjoying life to the fullest.
2:33
SPEAKER_02: Very good.
2:34
SPEAKER_02: Very good.
2:34
SPEAKER_02: I've I've completely recovered from the birthday party on Saturday.
2:38
SPEAKER_02: So I'm sorry I listed.
2:41
SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry I listed.
2:42
SPEAKER_02: I know, man.
2:43
SPEAKER_02: Wish you could have been there.
2:44
SPEAKER_02: There'll be another one, I hope.
2:46
SPEAKER_02: Fingers crossed.
2:49
SPEAKER_02: And I'm very excited today because we are joined by Dr.
2:54
SPEAKER_02: Sebastian Purcell.
2:57
SPEAKER_02: Sebastian Purcell is an award-winning associate professor of philosophy at SUNY Cortland in New York, where he researches ethics, Aztec philosophy, and mathematical logic.
3:11
SPEAKER_02: He is also the author of these two books right here that I've got in my grubby little mitts.
3:17
SPEAKER_02: Discourses of the Elders, the Aztec Wewetlachtoli, a first English translation, which is awesome.
3:26
SPEAKER_02: And also of, and equally as awesome, the outward path, the wisdom of the Aztecs.
3:33
SPEAKER_02: So thank you for joining us today, Dr.
3:35
SPEAKER_02: Purcell.
3:36
SPEAKER_02: Hey, really happy to be on here with both of you.
3:39
SPEAKER_02: Pleasure.
3:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's been a long time coming.
3:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
3:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
3:43
SPEAKER_02: I remember when uh I first saw that uh there was going to be an English translation of the Wewatlahtoli, I was very excited because so long overdue.
3:55
SPEAKER_02: Long overdue.
3:56
SPEAKER_02: I think the closest we had up to that point was the uh book six of the Florentine, right?
4:04
SPEAKER_02: Of the Florentine, right.
4:07
SPEAKER_02: But to have the actual the book, uh the way with Lachtoli, which I have one of the editions right here.
4:14
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
4:14
SPEAKER_02: Uh in Nahuatl and then corresponding Spanish, but to have it in English is is a great, great help.
4:21
unknown: Yeah.
4:22
SPEAKER_05: So thank you for doing that.
4:23
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that was in fact I you know I almost didn't want to.
4:27
SPEAKER_05: I was hoping somebody else would do it, and then I just found myself in the sort of unenviable position of fine.
4:35
SPEAKER_05: I'll be the one.
4:35
SPEAKER_05: I'll be I'll be the guy.
4:37
SPEAKER_05: I'll be the guy who does it, and then you have to make a whole bunch of really weird choices up front because the never been translated.
4:45
SPEAKER_05: And like you know, because that book itself has various versions and parts.
4:52
SPEAKER_05: And do I produce a critical edition where I integrate everything together?
4:56
SPEAKER_05: Or do I just treat the one piece on its own as like worth treating on its own?
5:03
SPEAKER_05: Yes, I and that's what I did.
5:04
SPEAKER_05: Because that's what we do in philosophy for like ancient Greek philosophers.
5:08
SPEAKER_05: There's a difference, right?
5:09
SPEAKER_05: So you could take like Aristotle's Nicomachian ethics and his Eudemian ethics, and there's a lot of overlap.
5:15
SPEAKER_05: Um, but they just translate those two books separately and let them go down their path, um, even though they share stuff.
5:21
SPEAKER_05: And you could conceivably, and scholars do, correct various passages between them.
5:25
SPEAKER_05: But my goal was just to say, like, translate each piece as its own artifact and leave it as that.
5:31
SPEAKER_05: And it's worth doing, right?
5:33
SPEAKER_05: Because even on its own, it shows something interesting and syncretic about the environment.
5:40
SPEAKER_05: And if I erode that by trying to I'm not saying there's something wrong about producing like critical edition, it's just a different choice.
5:48
SPEAKER_05: So then I just put my blinders on and paid attention to this is the text that I have in front of me.
5:53
SPEAKER_05: How do I make decisions about this text right here in front of me?
5:58
SPEAKER_05: Nothing else.
5:59
SPEAKER_05: And um, and then I just threw in at the end because I wanted it to be useful for teaching philosophy students some of the descriptions of uh social roles that are from um volume 10 of the Flourteen Codex, because I thought those could be helpful for students and professors and whatever else teaching it.
6:21
SPEAKER_05: Uh that kind of just as complimentary there, that was because I could, because I could.
6:26
SPEAKER_05: And I thought that would be helpful for so that people could read about, you know, here's the description of the Clamatini and what it what it says and so forth.
6:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, book 10 is great.
6:38
SPEAKER_02: It's one of my favorite books.
6:39
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, totally full of super useful stuff.
6:42
SPEAKER_05: And since a lot of, as far as I understand it, Nahwa ethical philosophy, the role okay, how do you talk about like ethical duties?
6:51
SPEAKER_05: For them, as far as I can tell, it it's most of those turn on the roles that you inhabit in life.
6:58
SPEAKER_05: So as a father or a professor or whatever, I have specific obligations that follow from that role.
7:04
SPEAKER_05: But if I wasn't if I weren't a father, I wouldn't have the same obligations.
7:08
SPEAKER_05: Or if I weren't a professor to specific students, I don't have the same obligations.
7:12
SPEAKER_05: So um that kind of comes down the line a little bit.
7:15
SPEAKER_05: And I thought it was necessary.
7:17
SPEAKER_05: You almost didn't get a complete view of the ethics if you only had that the way with Platonic.
7:23
SPEAKER_05: Right?
7:23
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
7:24
SPEAKER_05: Um and that's why I kind of wanted to put them together so that, you know, a a professor could say, like, here's one book, and not the Dibble in Anderson with the, you know.
7:33
SPEAKER_05: I mean, you can assign that, but you know, with the Nahuatl and then like a translation on the side.
7:38
SPEAKER_05: Side by side, yeah.
7:39
SPEAKER_05: Side by side, yeah.
7:40
SPEAKER_05: I was like, well, I'll just let that stand.
7:43
SPEAKER_05: So it's good it's good enough for the thing.
7:46
SPEAKER_03: What I'm gathering is that you have to kind of establish a baseline so that before you can get to the critical component of any text, you have to basically start off at the baseline and figure out what it is that the text is actually saying first.
8:00
SPEAKER_03: And and then I like the way that you did um your translations and you offered various interpretations and you even included what others have interpreted and and you tried to explain how uh you differ from them, not that you're saying that they were wrong, but you're saying this is why I've translated this specific phrase or or term a specific way as opposed to the way that someone else might have done it, right?
8:21
SPEAKER_03: Because you're kind of trying to get that baseline going.
8:24
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean, and you know, that's why the subtitle is a first English translation.
8:29
SPEAKER_05: It's very much intended to be that, like a I sort of uh because it's the field is emerging, I was like, look, there's gonna be a number of us who have the linguistic abilities and we can argue with each other about it.
8:40
SPEAKER_05: And there will be a better version of this, I hope, at some point, right?
8:44
SPEAKER_05: And then we can do that later.
8:46
SPEAKER_05: But we got to kind of just, yeah, baseline set, here's how it goes.
8:48
SPEAKER_05: This was actually the first intentionally philosophical translation of anything from that sort of stage two era into English, all right?
8:59
SPEAKER_05: Um and because historians and anthropologists don't have the same interests in mind.
9:05
SPEAKER_05: It's not nothing, not a knock against their discipline.
9:08
SPEAKER_05: They're just not doing the same thing, and that is okay.
9:11
SPEAKER_05: Uh so I I literally had a sort of rosetta stone of when I was making that.
9:18
SPEAKER_05: Here is all the the terms in Nahuatl, right?
9:21
SPEAKER_05: Here are all the terms in Spanish, how they're typically used.
9:24
SPEAKER_05: Here are all and then I went through Latin, Greek, German, English, so that I could kind of get a sense of what the differences were, where I stood among all of those terms as they were trying to coordinate, you know, how how much stretching am I doing?
9:40
SPEAKER_05: Right.
9:41
SPEAKER_05: After a certain point, you're kind of stretching when you're moving something so foreign into English and how much is tolerable.
9:46
SPEAKER_05: And that's why there are copious footnotes.
9:48
SPEAKER_05: Right.
9:49
SPEAKER_05: Whenever Yeah, and that's one of the things I really appreciate about it, too.
9:52
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
9:52
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's just to have like footnotes.
9:53
SPEAKER_05: So you're either like, I don't know.
9:55
SPEAKER_05: Like you if you don't like a phrase, you can almost always go down to the bottom of the page and be like, oh, okay, that's that that's what it is in Nahuatl and whatever.
10:02
SPEAKER_05: Or if you don't care, you can just read it.
10:05
SPEAKER_05: Do both things.
10:06
SPEAKER_02: Well, I was wondering if you could start us out at the beginning.
10:12
SPEAKER_02: Just a little bit of background information about yourself, where you're where you're from, and what really you know got you going in philosophy?
10:21
SPEAKER_02: Did you like were you interested in philosophy and then you discovered Aztec philosophy, or did you discover Aztec philosophy and then that opened up like the broader world of philosophy to you?
10:34
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
10:34
SPEAKER_05: So my mother wanted me to be a software engineer, uh and I have been coding since I was five.
10:42
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
10:43
SPEAKER_05: That is why I still teach mathematical logic, right?
10:46
SPEAKER_05: And have spent a bunch of my university career effectively as a mathematics professor.
10:51
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
10:52
SPEAKER_05: Uh that's where that came from.
10:53
SPEAKER_05: Uh at the age of 17, I was taking a course, like a sophomore level computer organization course.
11:00
SPEAKER_05: Um, so 12 years by that point, doing this one thing, and I had my own little mini existential crisis.
11:07
SPEAKER_05: Like, is this gonna be it?
11:09
SPEAKER_05: Is this all I do?
11:11
SPEAKER_05: Um and I asked the professor that day, because we were writing code about memory registers, like whether or not computers actually remember.
11:20
SPEAKER_05: And he said, you know, this is the wrong class for that.
11:27
SPEAKER_05: And it's the wrong department, the wrong building, and the wrong area of campus.
11:34
SPEAKER_05: It's like you're getting too deep.
11:36
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
11:37
SPEAKER_05: You need to go over to this other area where they have people called philosophers and talk to them.
11:44
SPEAKER_05: We don't do that here.
11:46
SPEAKER_05: Go back to coding.
11:48
SPEAKER_05: And I was like, all right, go find these people.
11:51
SPEAKER_05: And uh yeah, so philosophy was way more interesting for me at that point, and I learned I took a class in Aristotle and Plato and whatever else, and became far more interested in that.
12:01
SPEAKER_05: I decided I uh this this is what I was going to do.
12:03
SPEAKER_05: So I totally changed career paths and went into philosophy instead because I found it actually interesting, and I always figured I could come back and code if I wanted to, that would be around.
12:14
SPEAKER_05: Now, that that turns out to have been right for a long period of my life with AI now threatening that maybe it maybe it was the better decision.
12:21
SPEAKER_03: But um we don't know, because AI could be philosophizing for us in the future.
12:27
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
12:28
SPEAKER_05: Who knows?
12:29
SPEAKER_05: But it broke my mother's heart at the time, but you know, then I went on and became a philosopher.
12:32
SPEAKER_05: Uh and it wasn't until I was done with all my coursework, had written my dissertation, and was basically waiting around to defend it that I had a visiting assistant professorship the next fall at a local university in Boston.
12:50
SPEAKER_05: And I was going to teach a class on Latin American philosophy.
12:54
SPEAKER_05: So I got kind of free reign to do what I wanted to do, and I thought I'll break this up into three chunks.
13:00
SPEAKER_05: One of that Mesoamerican era, one of that um kind of the colonial era, and then something early 20th century.
13:07
SPEAKER_05: Like that was going to be the idea of it.
13:09
SPEAKER_05: Um and I didn't know about Miguel Leon Pertia, but I just happened to stumble upon La Philosophia Nahuatl on the library, and I was lost for a week.
13:20
SPEAKER_05: It's like, holy crap, this is I didn't know there was Aztec philosophy.
13:23
SPEAKER_05: I was gonna like just, I don't know, look at practices that we're people were doing and try to like interpret dances, right?
13:29
SPEAKER_05: I was like, I don't know how I'll start this, but that's what I was thinking.
13:32
SPEAKER_05: And I realized there was a whole written tradition and nobody was paying attention to it.
13:37
SPEAKER_05: Um and at that point, after that, I put in my mind, like, okay, I'm gonna learn the language because I'd already learned Greek and Latin.
13:45
SPEAKER_05: I was like, I'll just treat it like a dead language, learn one of those, I'll put it on the books, um go forward with my defend, go forward with my job, get tenure, and then I will return to this.
13:57
SPEAKER_05: Right.
13:58
SPEAKER_05: But in the meantime, and that gave me like seven years to work on my language skills, which was more than enough.
14:03
SPEAKER_05: I think NAPLAP is hard for those people who want to learn, uh, especially as a dead language, but it's not really harder than Latin if you just dedicate yourself to it.
14:11
SPEAKER_05: It is weird in a way, but after you get into it, it starts to become pretty intuitive, right?
14:16
SPEAKER_02: Um when you say quote unquote like dead language, you're using it to refer to like classic what what is called classical.
14:23
SPEAKER_05: Classical stage two era before so the only borrowed words at that point would have been nouns, really, mostly nominal terms.
14:33
SPEAKER_05: Dios shows up in a text, for example, or whatever, right?
14:37
SPEAKER_05: But they would be very nominal and sometimes they're incorporated, like um so uh animame, right?
14:45
SPEAKER_05: So like a plural of soul sometimes comes in and things like that.
14:50
SPEAKER_05: But the they're very nominalized.
14:52
SPEAKER_05: None of the grammatical structure structure changes until like 1640 forward.
14:56
SPEAKER_05: And that matters for philosophers because there's a sort of implication about the way the language says something about reality, right?
15:05
SPEAKER_05: And I think stage three forward, which my grandmother spoke to me and everyone in the family ignored, but um you know, like stage three Nahuatl, which is the contemporary form, has actual pronouns and other help or auxiliaries.
15:20
SPEAKER_05: The stage two is still properly omnipredicative.
15:24
SPEAKER_05: Everything's a predicate, everything could be, or in um Andrew's terminology, everything is kind of a nuclear clause, and could be a s except for a few you know, like e probably not that, but the uh you know main terms could be self-standing sentences, right?
15:39
SPEAKER_05: And that is all intact there.
15:42
SPEAKER_05: So it has no need for um a term like being.
15:46
SPEAKER_05: And and that gives it gives us a completely different metaphysical backdrop, at least embodied in the language.
15:52
SPEAKER_05: So yeah, that's the one that I studied, and I studied it like I just learned Latin.
15:56
SPEAKER_05: That was it.
15:57
SPEAKER_05: Good Catholic boy, went through a lot of years of education, learned Latin, and hence learned this, reconnect with my roots, and learned that my grandmother wasn't crazy after all.
16:04
SPEAKER_05: That's kind of what happened, right?
16:06
SPEAKER_05: Um, it was a kind of self-exploration realization.
16:10
SPEAKER_05: Um, but yes, my first entry point was through Miguel Portia, and then and yeah, I had correspondence with him too, up until he passed, right?
16:19
SPEAKER_05: Right.
16:20
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I'm I'm gonna ask about that later.
16:22
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, he was really good on email too.
16:24
SPEAKER_05: I was surprised.
16:25
SPEAKER_05: I was like, I don't know what like 24-hour back replies, going through detailed passages with me on things.
16:31
SPEAKER_05: It's called dedication.
16:33
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, he I mean he clearly had in mind like the next generation of scholars coming after him.
16:38
SPEAKER_05: Right.
16:38
SPEAKER_05: So um so that's kind of the short of the story, which was stumbled into it after I was already in philosophy, didn't even get tenure writing on this stuff because I was not going to risk it, right?
16:52
SPEAKER_05: Um I was gonna get tenure writing on Aristotle and ethics and logic, just like every other philosopher out there, and then afterwards use tenure as a backstop to do something innovative.
17:07
SPEAKER_05: Uh that was the whole approach.
17:08
SPEAKER_05: And hey, you know what?
17:10
SPEAKER_05: The system works in a way.
17:11
SPEAKER_05: You can still do that.
17:12
SPEAKER_03: Uh so to just to get tenure in your field, did you have to publish a book first?
17:17
SPEAKER_05: No, no powerful.
17:18
SPEAKER_05: No philosophy doesn't typically require a book.
17:21
SPEAKER_05: It did publish a couple of dozen articles.
17:23
SPEAKER_05: Articles, right.
17:24
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
17:24
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
17:25
SPEAKER_05: Quite quite a few articles.
17:26
SPEAKER_05: Um everything from ethics to transfinite mathematics, you know, blah did that.
17:33
SPEAKER_05: But I found the Aztecs to be interesting, uh, the Nahuas, since um and this is my focus on them, they just came at the whole discussion of what we in the West call ethics really differently in a more socially centered way.
17:49
SPEAKER_05: It felt intuitive to me, and then a lot of it was just like articulating kind of what's in the background here.
17:55
SPEAKER_05: Um and fortunately I did get to teach classes to students during that period of time.
18:00
SPEAKER_05: So I could use them as my workshop to see whether or not these ideas made sense.
18:04
SPEAKER_05: Because then it was a matter of conceptual translation.
18:07
SPEAKER_05: Because these are hard texts.
18:09
SPEAKER_05: Right.
18:09
SPEAKER_05: And I'm just getting, you know, kids in upstate New York who are pretty much from Long Island, it's mostly where they're from.
18:15
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
18:16
SPEAKER_05: Right.
18:16
SPEAKER_05: You know, like Italian, you know, Irish kids that are coming in there, and it's like, okay, so how do I make this alive to them or make sense to them?
18:24
SPEAKER_05: Uh so a lot of stories.
18:26
SPEAKER_05: That that's it.
18:27
SPEAKER_05: And we try to try to hang each idea on something they know and then something new.
18:34
SPEAKER_05: And the the book, you know, uh the outward path is exactly that approach.
18:39
SPEAKER_03: Before we get too deep in I'm sorry to cut you off, but before we get too deep into it, you you mentioned ethics.
18:45
SPEAKER_03: And sometimes when I try to explain to because I'm a historian and I teach history, and we discuss very heady topics that deal with the the more the morals and the ethics of that specific time and place, uh, it's often a little confusing for students.
18:59
SPEAKER_03: So it just like in an elevator um pitch, like can you give us the basic definition of the difference between what's something uh something that's moral and what's something that is ethical?
19:09
SPEAKER_03: Like what what distinguishes between between those two things?
19:12
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
19:13
SPEAKER_05: So um and both of those surface in Nahua philosophy in an interesting way.
19:19
SPEAKER_05: So the I guess you could run it this way.
19:22
SPEAKER_05: Typically, if philosophers are going to distinguish between the moral and the ethical, the the moral will attach to obligations and the ethical will attach to things like something prior to that or conceptions of the good.
19:35
SPEAKER_05: Right.
19:35
SPEAKER_05: So for the Aztecs, courage is an ethical concept, but courage helps you maintain your social relations, right?
19:44
SPEAKER_05: Which then or your social role obligations, right?
19:48
SPEAKER_05: Which are your actual duties, your moral duties.
19:50
SPEAKER_05: So as a parent, um uh for example, I took my daughter recently to her little, she's three, almost four, but she's three, and she was at her little dance rehearsal thing.
20:04
SPEAKER_05: Um I go in there.
20:06
SPEAKER_05: My wife couldn't go, typically she goes, I go in there, like all new people.
20:09
SPEAKER_05: I'm the one dude in this whole place.
20:13
SPEAKER_05: So it's a little bit like not my space.
20:15
SPEAKER_05: I realize this going in.
20:17
SPEAKER_05: And so it's like, okay, well, all right, navigate it.
20:20
SPEAKER_05: Like you got to take care of your kids, so you just go in there, start meeting all the new people, and learn that here's the dance instructor, here's the thing, we gotta organize it, blah, blah, blah.
20:28
SPEAKER_05: And it's like that's where the courage helps you support the social role obligation, right?
20:33
SPEAKER_05: So the virtue is the ethical concept, but the obligation is the like the moral thing that follows in the uh in the Aztec view from the fact that I'm a dad, right?
20:42
SPEAKER_05: So that means I have to I have to do stuff to help my kid do well in the world, right?
20:47
SPEAKER_05: And the the have to is the moral obligation part.
20:52
SPEAKER_05: So they support each other, but they're a little different.
20:54
SPEAKER_05: Notice how they're related, but different.
20:55
SPEAKER_05: Aaron Ross Powell So do the ethics guide the morals or they reinforce the morals?
21:00
SPEAKER_05: Trevor Burrus Support the actualization of the morals, right?
21:04
SPEAKER_05: You can be moral because you have the ethical basis for it.
21:09
SPEAKER_03: See, I've been looking at this from the opposite view.
21:11
SPEAKER_03: To me, the morals is like the theory behind what is just and good versus what's improper and the opposite of good or bad.
21:20
SPEAKER_03: So that's the moral part of it.
21:22
SPEAKER_03: And the ethical part is your action that you take based on the morality that you know based on your culture.
21:28
SPEAKER_05: So is that looking at it from the opposite of the Trevor Burrus, I mean, I might be looking at it in a in a different point of view too.
21:33
SPEAKER_05: So yeah, because there's a further question of what is the right act.
21:37
SPEAKER_05: Right.
21:37
SPEAKER_05: Right.
21:37
SPEAKER_03: And that's in that culture itself is what dictates the act itself at that precise moment in time.
21:44
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
21:44
SPEAKER_05: And so for the and I'm just kinda like and what I'm doing, by the way, is I'm just kind of articulating this as I I see the Nahua philosophy working kind of these two registers.
21:53
SPEAKER_05: Right.
21:53
SPEAKER_05: Um and so the right action becomes its own sphere.
21:57
SPEAKER_05: Uh that's kind of how I treat it.
22:00
SPEAKER_05: Uh and for the the Nachwas specifically, acting well means acting with other people, like in the ideal case.
22:07
SPEAKER_05: So for Aristotle, he happens to say things like, Oh, well, if you were just smart enough, you wouldn't have to talk to anyone else.
22:14
SPEAKER_05: You would know the right answer and you could just act.
22:17
SPEAKER_05: And the Nawas are like bullshit.
22:20
SPEAKER_05: Nobody's that smart.
22:21
SPEAKER_05: Nobody's ever that smart.
22:23
SPEAKER_05: That's not even the ideal for human beings, right?
22:26
SPEAKER_05: The ideal for human beings is that you are working in a good group of people.
22:30
SPEAKER_05: Yes, if you're in a bad group of people, it goes poorly really fast.
22:35
SPEAKER_05: But if you're in in the ideal, the ideal case is you're in a good group of people, you deliberate over something with them, and you get a good answer as a result.
22:45
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
22:46
SPEAKER_05: So acting acting well is inherently a social activity, not an individual activity.
22:53
SPEAKER_05: Right.
22:53
SPEAKER_05: And that's by the way, that's very different from the Confucian conception.
22:58
SPEAKER_05: So Confucius is said to be kind of more social in some ways, but that's because they have social rituals that you're supposed to practice.
23:06
SPEAKER_05: But those rituals are aimed at you as a person, as an individual.
23:10
SPEAKER_05: You're not actually doing the thing with other people, right?
23:14
SPEAKER_05: Whereas for the for the Nawas, you just like read through their texts.
23:17
SPEAKER_05: The rituals are there to help the group function.
23:20
SPEAKER_05: I actually have this in a passage about merchants that are deliberating.
23:25
SPEAKER_05: They sit in a ha like a semicircle and they put the kids at the end, which is fascinating.
23:30
SPEAKER_05: And the like elders or most knowledgeable people are at the center and they all deliberate.
23:35
SPEAKER_05: And so that means the thing that they're doing, like they're going to go travel to another city, and it's kind of perilous, right?
23:41
SPEAKER_05: Back in the day, you didn't know if you're going to make it to the other city.
23:44
SPEAKER_05: There could be like natural disasters or you could be robbed or you could just fall sick or God knows, right?
23:49
SPEAKER_05: So actually traveling is hard.
23:50
SPEAKER_05: And so they would deliberate about what's happening and how to get there.
23:54
SPEAKER_05: Like who last went there?
23:55
SPEAKER_05: What was it like?
23:56
SPEAKER_05: You know, that sort of stuff.
23:57
SPEAKER_05: And they have a ritual in it, but the ritual is what organizes the effective communication of the group.
24:04
SPEAKER_05: Yes, there are like religious components to the ritual, but there's also the like the just the practical component of enabling people to speak well and work with each other well.
24:13
SPEAKER_05: So the ritual helps the activity function in a social register, right?
24:19
SPEAKER_05: It's not just like a training practice.
24:21
SPEAKER_05: In Confucius, it's like training the individual, okay?
24:23
SPEAKER_05: But for the Aztecs, it's like it is how the group works.
24:29
SPEAKER_05: And interestingly, um, Barbara Rogoff and her team, contemporary sociologists, did work on Mexican-American children and uh sort of Mesoamericans, so Guatemalan heritage children, and had them collaborate in groups and like see them work in activities, and they exhibit what's called fluid synchrony, um, where they just kind of work together without even telling each other what they're doing.
24:54
SPEAKER_05: And their European counterparts don't do that nearly as often.
24:58
SPEAKER_05: Uh so the Mexican heritage children do it at twice the rate.
25:02
SPEAKER_05: They collaborate more and they collaborate in fluid synchrony more often.
25:06
SPEAKER_05: So they're more effective working in groups, and that's just because they're raised that way.
25:10
SPEAKER_05: Um like all of us here probably have this and we didn't even know it.
25:14
SPEAKER_05: Uh all of us, like on this podcast, could have been raised in this without knowing it.
25:19
SPEAKER_05: Um and I just look at that evidence and I think, okay, yeah, I'm not just reading something into the text that the Nachlass were more collaborative.
25:28
SPEAKER_05: We have contemporary sociological evidence that shows they have pace graphs, minute-by-minute graphs to show how this works.
25:35
SPEAKER_03: So it's not just I can give you uh an example of this.
25:39
SPEAKER_03: Like growing up, like one of the things that was really enforced, or not enforced, but like really um uh expected, right, uh of us was to what what um my mom and dad used to call uh to be helpful, right?
25:57
SPEAKER_03: They would say acomidate, to be accommodating.
26:00
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
26:01
SPEAKER_03: Wherever you go, wherever you go, make yourself useful.
26:04
SPEAKER_03: You don't have to be asked to do a thing.
26:05
SPEAKER_03: If you know that there's something that needs to be done, you go ahead and do it.
26:09
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
26:10
SPEAKER_03: And that's part of the culture.
26:12
SPEAKER_05: That is part of the culture.
26:12
SPEAKER_05: That's actually one of the things they tested, is they would have a Mexican heritage child sit down on one end and like a group facilitator sit on another.
26:20
SPEAKER_05: And then a little table, the facilitator would casually knock over a cup that had pencils in it while they're talking about something else.
26:28
SPEAKER_05: And the European heritage children would just sit there and keep on listening to the directions.
26:31
SPEAKER_05: But the Mexican heritage children would be like, oh, they'd help they'd help them start putting the pencils back in the cup.
26:37
SPEAKER_05: Nobody asked them.
26:38
SPEAKER_05: That's acomina.
26:40
SPEAKER_05: That's exactly it.
26:41
SPEAKER_05: Right.
26:42
SPEAKER_05: Um and that just shows you the neat way I think this is different.
26:48
SPEAKER_05: It's real, and um it's in the text, it's been around for 500 years, it's still around.
26:55
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
26:55
SPEAKER_05: And that's a different approach to ethics, which as a philosopher, I'm like, well, this is cool.
27:00
SPEAKER_05: Um, hey, maybe it's a good way to live.
27:03
SPEAKER_05: Right.
27:04
SPEAKER_05: But it is.
27:05
SPEAKER_05: And that was part of what I was trying to do in The Outward Path was sort of articulate like this is actually, yes, it it's an interesting theoretical exercise, but it'll probably help you live better, too, which is really the goal of ethics, which is to help you live better.
27:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
27:21
SPEAKER_02: Well, let's talk the outward path.
27:23
SPEAKER_02: So great title.
27:25
SPEAKER_02: Um, and the the cover image is from is this plate 32 of the Borgia?
27:32
SPEAKER_02: I forget which plate it is, but it's one of my favorite plates from the Borgia.
27:36
SPEAKER_02: Um because you you only use the center image, but on the actual plate, there's the four uh tlaloques, there's four tlalocks on each of the outer ends, and they're piercing uh using a bone all, they're piercing like the day signs into existence, which I thought was I always thought that was such a cool thing.
27:58
SPEAKER_02: But the title, the outward path.
28:01
SPEAKER_02: Um, how did you come to that title and and what does it mean in terms of Aztec philosophy?
29:56
SPEAKER_05: Well, so yeah.
29:57
SPEAKER_05: Um I was trying to So there is a whole group of um, I don't know, philosophers, public philosophers, as a result of Ryan Holiday, the Stoics have come back, right?
30:12
SPEAKER_05: And I think that in the United States, Buddhism in this whatever Americanized form has been around since the 60s.
30:19
SPEAKER_05: And I wanted to intersect with that discussion because I realized that Stoicism and Buddhism, for all of their differences, uh follow the inward path.
30:28
SPEAKER_05: They tell you if you want to live better, do something like meditate.
30:33
SPEAKER_05: Sit down, still your mind according to a series of practices, then go out into the world.
30:39
SPEAKER_05: Very kind of individualistic in a way, right?
30:42
SPEAKER_05: Um and the Nahuas would say, like, it's not that you can't do that.
30:48
SPEAKER_05: It's just that your mind is chaos.
30:49
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
30:50
SPEAKER_05: You're going to get more effective, I don't know, results by just collaborating with the people around you in your life effectively and go outward, then use that to come in.
31:03
SPEAKER_05: So it's a difference of emphasis.
31:05
SPEAKER_05: Uh the example I give in the book is a case that I had with my wife when we moved into our current neighborhood.
31:12
SPEAKER_05: Um we were told this is a strange neighborhood.
31:16
SPEAKER_05: It's like 1950s.
31:17
SPEAKER_05: People sit on their front porches, they walk their strollers and dogs by and say hello to each other.
31:23
SPEAKER_05: And I don't know how this little time capsule continues to exist.
31:26
SPEAKER_05: But strange for New York?
31:28
SPEAKER_05: I thought that was just commonplace.
31:30
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
31:30
SPEAKER_05: Upstate New York.
31:31
SPEAKER_05: I don't yeah, I know.
31:33
SPEAKER_05: So um yeah.
31:35
SPEAKER_05: So we we asked them, like, what do we do for Halloween?
31:37
SPEAKER_05: And they said you're gonna get a ton of kids.
31:39
SPEAKER_05: Okay, great.
31:40
SPEAKER_05: Bought a whole bunch of candy.
31:41
SPEAKER_05: Um, give it out, and we have some leftover.
31:43
SPEAKER_05: Uh, just poured it into this platter in the center of our living room.
31:47
SPEAKER_05: Now, to go anywhere in my house, you have to pass that.
31:50
SPEAKER_05: I have a sweet tooth.
31:52
SPEAKER_05: And uh so I was just eating it every time I passed.
31:55
SPEAKER_05: I'd pick up something.
31:56
SPEAKER_05: And I hated myself for it.
31:58
SPEAKER_05: I let my wife know.
31:59
SPEAKER_05: And I came back one day after teaching classes and it was empty.
32:05
SPEAKER_05: It's like, well, what happened to it?
32:06
SPEAKER_05: And she's like, Oh, I just took it to my department.
32:08
SPEAKER_05: She's also a philosopher.
32:09
SPEAKER_05: I took it to my department and gave it to the philosophy kiddos, and they liked it.
32:13
SPEAKER_05: Oh, well, well, thanks.
32:15
SPEAKER_05: Like, so like she heard me.
32:17
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
32:17
SPEAKER_05: Problem solved.
32:18
SPEAKER_05: Right.
32:19
SPEAKER_05: And like the problem was solved.
32:21
SPEAKER_05: Like this whole cycle of like guilt and transgression that I had going on, she just like solved it for me.
32:27
SPEAKER_05: And I don't have, I didn't gain like more moderation.
32:31
SPEAKER_05: I didn't do it in Aristotle's way of becoming a better person and getting more willpower or something.
32:36
SPEAKER_05: No, I just had somebody else in my life who's was attentive enough to realize there was a problem fixed it for me.
32:42
SPEAKER_05: And I had a better life.
32:44
SPEAKER_05: That's in a metaphor, what really the Aztecs are about is you've got to get the right people around you who do the stuff mutually to fix each other's problems, and you will live a better life.
32:54
SPEAKER_05: Go outward first, then come in.
32:57
SPEAKER_05: And that's very different from sit down and meditate, right?
33:01
SPEAKER_05: It's not that you can't like the the Nahuas cle famously had their own meditative practices.
33:06
SPEAKER_05: It's just that that stuff isn't this like the emphasis is different, right?
33:12
SPEAKER_05: So sociality first, individuality second.
33:16
SPEAKER_05: And hence hence the outward path.
33:18
SPEAKER_05: Very different from those other approaches, and everything else that follows is different.
33:23
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
33:23
SPEAKER_03: What has been the response from other philosophers that are used to the Western European approach to this kind of philosophy?
33:33
SPEAKER_03: And then when you introduce them to this idea, like what it what has been some of the responses that you've gotten from your colleagues?
33:40
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
33:40
SPEAKER_05: Um, so tend to be split.
33:43
SPEAKER_05: Uh there's a sizable minority that just think it's so much hogwash and we should ignore it.
33:52
SPEAKER_05: Um just like, why?
33:54
SPEAKER_05: This is just people making up philosophy where it's not really philosophy and we should just ignore this.
33:59
SPEAKER_05: Uh right.
34:00
SPEAKER_05: So there's just that contingent, and I don't talk to them very much, obviously.
34:04
SPEAKER_05: There's not much to say.
34:05
SPEAKER_03: I mean, because you could say the same thing about all philosophy.
34:07
SPEAKER_03: It's all BS if you really don't do it.
34:10
SPEAKER_05: I mean, but not according to them.
34:12
SPEAKER_03: Their favorite theory is clearly the best, and this is just hogwatch.
34:15
SPEAKER_03: Theirs is real.
34:16
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
34:17
SPEAKER_03: What's what's the fallacy there?
34:18
SPEAKER_03: It's uh there's a fallacy at play here, right?
34:21
SPEAKER_03: Um I forget what it is.
34:24
SPEAKER_03: But it's it's it's a fallacy that that they're working with, you know, like their preferred way of doing things is is the right way of doing it, and yours is not, because they're right and you're wrong, and they can't tell you why.
34:35
SPEAKER_03: They just know it is.
34:36
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
34:37
SPEAKER_05: Well, they won't even they won't even deign to consider it philosophical.
34:42
SPEAKER_05: So weird.
34:43
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
34:44
SPEAKER_05: So for them, uh th this is why the small arguing over small words tends to matter.
34:48
SPEAKER_05: Do we call the Tlamatini mech philosophers?
34:51
SPEAKER_05: For them, they're going to say, no, no, no, those are sages or wise men and women, the wise ones.
34:58
SPEAKER_05: They are not philosophers because philosophy is a Western conception and it comes out of the Greeks, and this had no contact with it.
35:05
SPEAKER_05: Therefore, this is not philosophy.
35:06
SPEAKER_05: It is something else, and they kind of shove it away.
35:09
SPEAKER_05: And there's it's sort of cultural imperialism by steps.
35:13
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Do they say the same thing about the Indian philosophers that would come out in recent years advocating for Indian philosophy as well?
35:20
SPEAKER_05: Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, they say that yeah, they they they do.
35:23
SPEAKER_05: They say that that is also not philosophy, that is something else.
35:27
SPEAKER_05: Aaron Ross Powell So they're equal opportunity haters.
35:29
SPEAKER_05: So at least they're consistent.
35:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they're consistent in their dislike.
35:34
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
35:35
SPEAKER_05: Um, and then you point to them like various texts.
35:38
SPEAKER_05: It doesn't hold up very well, but they don't want to have those arguments.
35:42
SPEAKER_05: So the next uh group of them are a group of people who um basically get confused pretty quickly.
35:53
SPEAKER_05: They're open to the idea, but they have they lack the conceptual framework to make sense of it, and they very quickly think they know what I'm what I mean and try to pigeonhole it into the wrong framework.
36:06
SPEAKER_05: And it's obviously the result is my claims are absurd and they dismiss it or disagree.
36:15
SPEAKER_05: Uh, for example, when I tried to claim that the Aztecs were more socially centered in a way that we just went over, they have tried some of them confuse this and think that I'm arguing about something like Hegel's objective spirit, or what Charles Taylor calls social reality.
37:51
SPEAKER_05: So um, you know, stop signs.
37:54
SPEAKER_05: We all understand what a stop sign is.
37:56
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
37:57
SPEAKER_05: And the only way that works is because, or traffic laws in general work is because enough of us share a map of social reality that we can expect other people to act a certain way, and we coordinate, right?
38:11
SPEAKER_05: That's how social coordination happens.
38:13
SPEAKER_05: Okay, so this isn't these aren't just laws on the books.
38:17
SPEAKER_05: These are it's sufficient penetration in people's minds.
38:20
SPEAKER_05: So we have an overlap of social reality to make that work.
38:24
SPEAKER_05: That is an interesting feature about the world.
38:26
SPEAKER_05: Social reality is it's a thing, it's real.
38:28
SPEAKER_05: It's not physical reality, but it has to be there for complex coordination to happen.
38:34
SPEAKER_05: That is not the kind of sociality I'm talking about, though, when a group sits down to deliberate over whether or not you can travel to the next town over because there are bandits, right?
38:42
SPEAKER_05: Like, or whether or not, you know, the the sort of fluid synchrony we were we were discussing before, right?
38:48
SPEAKER_05: It has very different things.
38:51
SPEAKER_05: Like I in class, I'll demonstrate two students picking up the podium and moving it across the stage, right?
38:58
SPEAKER_05: So they have to do that together and they have to cooperate.
39:01
SPEAKER_05: That is a very simple as shared agency.
39:04
SPEAKER_05: That's one kind of sociality.
39:06
SPEAKER_05: This other concept of sociality that comes out of the kind of European tradition is cool.
39:11
SPEAKER_05: It's there.
39:12
SPEAKER_05: It is just a different concept.
39:13
SPEAKER_05: And that's what I mean.
39:15
SPEAKER_05: So they try to pigeonhole it back into that.
39:18
SPEAKER_05: Um that's where people will sometimes bring up Hegel or Heidegger or somebody like that.
39:22
SPEAKER_05: And and it's not, it's it's it's a mistake, and it makes the Nahua view less plausible, right?
39:28
SPEAKER_03: Because it seems to me like they're misunderstanding the point that you're trying to make is that yes, there are there's a stop sign there, and we have been uh conditioned, right, in this society as drivers to stop at a stop sign, and most people will stop.
39:43
SPEAKER_03: But that's not the same thing as someone uh noticing that you're not gonna come to a stop and like running out and trying to stop you from doing that, because most people won't do that because you're gonna get run over or get hit, crashed, right?
39:56
SPEAKER_03: So that's the difference, right?
39:57
SPEAKER_03: Like what what your wife did, like you you voiced a concern that you had for yourself, and she took it upon herself said comedio, right?
40:03
SPEAKER_03: Your wife said comedio to do you that favor of taking away the thing that was causing concern for you.
40:10
SPEAKER_03: That's different, right?
40:12
SPEAKER_03: They're very different.
40:13
SPEAKER_03: That's that's the part that they're misunderstanding, I guess, is what you're trying to say.
40:16
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, exactly.
40:16
SPEAKER_05: That and that is a beautiful contrast there.
40:18
SPEAKER_05: So this is it's a good they they try to work with me, but we have this weird, awkward dance, right?
40:24
SPEAKER_05: Um and okay, fine.
40:27
SPEAKER_05: I'm still they're useful.
40:29
SPEAKER_05: I think that's a maybe I'll get through to that group.
40:31
SPEAKER_05: Then there's the hey, this is super cool group and they love it.
40:34
SPEAKER_05: And there's a group of those people that love it.
40:36
SPEAKER_05: The the problem with them is they might be committed to the idea before they fully understand it, also, right?
40:43
SPEAKER_05: They're they're not opposed, but they don't exactly know what they're supporting.
40:47
SPEAKER_05: And the result of that is is again conflation.
40:50
SPEAKER_05: Uh when I say things like the Aztecs were virtue ethicists, people think they were like Aristotle.
40:55
SPEAKER_05: And my whole point is no, they were structurally fundamentally not like Aristotle at all.
40:59
SPEAKER_05: Virtue, like Aristotle was a virtue ethicist, and Machiavelli was a virtue ethicist.
41:04
SPEAKER_05: Virtue is a weird term with a lot of latitude.
41:08
SPEAKER_05: Um so, yes, they had a concept that maps it roughly, but they were my whole point is they're not like Aristotle and not like Confucius in really important ways.
41:19
SPEAKER_05: And so um I've had people, I think, erroneously agree with me uh because they thought they were something else.
41:29
SPEAKER_02: Right.
41:30
SPEAKER_02: Um, well, in your book, you you touch on the concept of uh in isti in yolot, right?
41:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
41:37
SPEAKER_02: The uh the face and the and the heart.
41:39
SPEAKER_02: And just you know, for listeners who don't know, it's it's uh it's a difrasismo, right?
41:45
SPEAKER_02: This coupling of words that are used to express a larger concept.
41:50
SPEAKER_02: And so for our listeners, they they might be most familiar with um In Schochit in Quikat, the the flower, the song, which means like poetry or beautiful speech.
42:03
SPEAKER_02: Um so what can you tell us about in Istli nyolot?
42:06
SPEAKER_05: Aaron Ross Powell Yeah.
42:07
SPEAKER_05: So first caveat for this for the scholars, I don't I step away from that discussion between Leon Partia and Lopez Austin about whether or not Istli is first translated as eye or face.
42:18
SPEAKER_05: I don't really matter for the Difrasismo, right?
42:22
SPEAKER_05: Uh my view of it is that it's a metaphorical expression of character, all right, in a certain way, like who you the essence of who you are, your character.
42:30
SPEAKER_05: And that's really what we're trying to get at there, which is something that you build up over time with your actions and so forth, right?
42:37
SPEAKER_05: And they they have a wonderful phrase about putting a word, a tlatoli, in the chambers of your heart.
42:43
SPEAKER_05: And that's how how you habituate something and build up a good character, good face and heart.
42:49
SPEAKER_05: And so that is it's still a symmetrical balancing of things, right?
42:53
SPEAKER_05: But the you know okay, so one step back, the big view, as far as I see it in Nahua, the Nahua worldview, and this is supported by James Lockhart, so this is just standard uh agreement with the Anglophone historians, right?
43:08
SPEAKER_05: So there's no disagreement on this, is that they were kind of interested in ordering and arranging.
43:14
SPEAKER_05: And they always found pairs or quadruples or whatever eightfold versions of things, and they would organize life around those doublings.
43:27
SPEAKER_05: Um they would do this with the words and phrases like uh Shochikwikat, right, the difrasismos, that's in language.
43:34
SPEAKER_05: Uh, if you look at the stanzas of how the poetry, the Shochikuikat poetry are actually laid out, there's a specific format of linking doubles together into eight line or eight stanzas.
43:46
SPEAKER_05: Um they did this with their cities.
43:48
SPEAKER_05: It's how the cities actually emerged, right?
43:51
SPEAKER_05: And how the organized cities around kind of cellular mitosis, you would have like one group of buildings and a plot of land, and then when it grew large enough, it grew into two, and then that would double into four and eight.
44:05
SPEAKER_05: And the thing that sustained the organization was the obligations, because they would rotate the obligations of what each of those Calpoli was were supposed to, like neighborhoods were supposed to uh build and make.
44:18
SPEAKER_05: So one would be charged with featherwork, another with, you know, um maybe agriculture, whatever.
44:24
SPEAKER_05: They would do that, right?
44:25
SPEAKER_05: And so the rotating obligations maintained the symmetry.
44:29
SPEAKER_05: So the idea is you got these doublings with a core idea that lint linked those doublings together at some level.
44:37
SPEAKER_05: The interesting thing is for your Ishli Yoyot um face heart, the thing that links them is ethics.
44:46
SPEAKER_05: Right?
44:47
SPEAKER_05: It's the living a good life.
44:49
SPEAKER_05: That's how you keep that in harmony.
44:51
SPEAKER_05: So if you're going to do that, there are conditions that you need to fulfill in order to do that thing.
44:58
SPEAKER_05: Right.
44:58
SPEAKER_05: So for them, ethics isn't some like ten tablets that come come down from the sky.
45:03
SPEAKER_05: Right.
45:03
SPEAKER_05: Right.
45:04
SPEAKER_05: Right.
45:04
SPEAKER_05: It's like, no, no, no.
45:05
SPEAKER_05: There are just like logical conditions.
45:07
SPEAKER_05: If you want to do this thing, then you have to do this other stuff.
45:13
SPEAKER_05: Right.
45:13
SPEAKER_05: You need to be what we would call courageous and prudent and just or fair.
45:19
SPEAKER_05: Like you need to have a certain amount of temperance, um, humility.
45:24
SPEAKER_05: Virtuous life.
45:25
SPEAKER_05: Right, right.
45:26
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
45:26
SPEAKER_05: Right.
45:27
SPEAKER_05: And those things just you're going to need those things in your character, and they're have to be habituated.
45:31
SPEAKER_05: Otherwise, you will not achieve that balance.
45:35
SPEAKER_05: Um, so that's that's the the link.
45:38
SPEAKER_05: Because you can the doubles have to be linked by some idea, right?
45:42
SPEAKER_05: And in this case, it's the ethics that does the linking for you.
45:46
SPEAKER_05: Um so I think that that's also pretty well attested.
45:49
SPEAKER_05: Again, I don't there's one there's we've spoken a little bit about how some disagreements with Anglophone scholars, but this is, I think, broad agreement uh right there.
45:59
SPEAKER_05: There's no real challenge.
46:01
SPEAKER_02: Well, you you use one of the diffracismos in um in both of your books, uh in quali in yetli, right?
46:09
SPEAKER_02: The the good, the right, right.
46:12
SPEAKER_02: And you translate that as virtue, right?
46:16
SPEAKER_02: Right.
46:16
SPEAKER_02: Being being virtuous.
46:18
SPEAKER_02: And it makes sense to me, because first of all, in the way with Latoli, because you got some pushback, uh, I don't know how recently that paper came out, but somebody reviewed the book and they were just harping on your use of the word virtue, and I was like, what the hell are they talking about?
46:36
SPEAKER_02: And so I went in and I was reading it, and they were like, it should actually be translated this way.
46:41
SPEAKER_02: And then they give their translation, and I was like, You're you just made the same point.
46:46
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't it it seemed overly pedantic to me.
46:50
SPEAKER_02: Pedantic, yeah.
46:51
SPEAKER_02: Like really nitpicky.
46:54
SPEAKER_02: And especially where for the Wewetla Koli, you were saying, look, this is not a literal translation, this is a philosophical translation.
47:02
SPEAKER_02: And this is what I'm trying to do with this work.
47:07
SPEAKER_02: And then you give the case and I I just happen to agree with the case that, you know, in in Quali and Yakli, yeah, the the good, the right.
47:16
SPEAKER_02: You live a life that is good and right.
47:17
SPEAKER_02: You carry that which is with you in your life, that which is good and right.
47:23
SPEAKER_02: And that to me, that makes sense.
47:25
SPEAKER_02: You're you're living a virtuous life.
47:26
SPEAKER_02: A virtuous life, right.
47:27
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's again, and I think this is um that's one of some of the set of the disciplinary confusion that goes on.
47:35
SPEAKER_05: Uh the historians, when they there's a certain group of historians, when they try to approach things, will first of all say, like, look, where is it in the historical text?
47:44
SPEAKER_05: So did Molina have that in his dictionary?
47:47
SPEAKER_05: If no, then you can't translate it that way.
47:50
SPEAKER_05: My reply as uh as a philosopher is to say, well, but that's what I'm trying to question.
47:55
SPEAKER_05: Molina wasn't a philosopher.
47:57
SPEAKER_05: He wouldn't have noticed, right?
47:59
SPEAKER_05: Or I've gotten pushed back on some other things like, well, that isn't in Karkocci's grammar.
48:03
SPEAKER_05: I'm like, was Carcocci a logician?
48:05
SPEAKER_05: My whole point is to put that historical text into question.
48:10
SPEAKER_05: Maybe it's wrong.
48:12
SPEAKER_05: You can't use it as an immutable source of truth.
48:15
SPEAKER_05: The the truth is, I'm sorry, interpretation is going to be holistic, right?
48:20
SPEAKER_05: They're to they're trying to treat it as if it's not holistic.
48:23
SPEAKER_05: But it is.
48:24
SPEAKER_05: It's inevitably holistic.
48:26
SPEAKER_05: And, you know, because if for them that is the ultimate source of truth and it's unquestionable, then they have an anchor in reality, and that is just the way it is.
48:34
SPEAKER_05: Um but, you know, those were people.
48:37
SPEAKER_05: They they were fallible.
48:39
SPEAKER_05: They only knew certain things.
48:40
SPEAKER_05: So maybe a Karkochi missed a logical component because he was not a logician.
48:46
SPEAKER_05: Or maybe Molina missed something philosophical because he wasn't actually a philosopher.
48:52
SPEAKER_05: Uh so like you you can't use that against me.
48:57
SPEAKER_05: I'm trying to question whether or not they're right.
48:59
SPEAKER_05: And then the answer is, well, okay, so what else can we use?
49:03
SPEAKER_05: And then I kind of just go through and here's the texts, and I have a forthcoming paper, which I originally titled Wirtus among the Nawas.
49:13
SPEAKER_05: But um just because virtue is such a weird word, it was a weird translation in Latin of the Greek arete.
49:20
SPEAKER_05: It was almost a mistranslation.
49:23
SPEAKER_05: And uh because it didn't make sense, and actually there was excellentia, which right there, it's right there in Latin.
49:29
SPEAKER_05: They could have used it, but they didn't.
49:31
SPEAKER_05: Um so it the instead they stretched it word for manliness.
49:35
SPEAKER_05: Weir means man in Latin, right?
49:36
SPEAKER_05: This stretched it into manliness, it's called the semantic calc to fit the Greek term for a variety of reasons.
49:43
SPEAKER_05: Anyways, it was a weird idea, and my point is it's always been a weird term.
49:48
SPEAKER_05: Right.
49:49
SPEAKER_05: Right.
49:49
SPEAKER_05: You know, so like uh there's a philosophical justification for continuing to use the weird term.
49:57
SPEAKER_05: And I'm just saying, why the double standard?
50:01
SPEAKER_05: Why is it okay to for this double like us to use this weird term when we're talking about Greek philosophers or Roman philosophers or something like that?
50:10
SPEAKER_05: But we can't use it for talking about Mesoamerican philosophers.
50:14
SPEAKER_05: And that's kind of the thing in the back of my mind here.
50:16
SPEAKER_05: I'm always like, this is kind of like a decolonial epistemology, which is like, why, what justifies it in one case and not in the other?
50:26
SPEAKER_02: Right.
50:27
SPEAKER_02: Well, even beyond that, it's it seemed kind of hypocritical to me because the individual who wrote that critique that it was a review, right?
50:37
SPEAKER_02: A review in a in a philosophy journal.
50:40
SPEAKER_02: They have a a book out um How to Be Grateful, an Aztec guide to the art of gratitude, which I also picked up.
50:50
SPEAKER_02: And it's it's fine, but I was actually a little disappointed with it because it's not actually a guide to the Aztec art of gratitude.
50:59
SPEAKER_02: Like there's these translations, but they never engage with the text to like really tell you, like, okay, so here's what they're saying, and here's how this can be interpreted as a guide.
51:11
SPEAKER_02: Like it's it's not actually a guide.
51:12
SPEAKER_02: Like, why why did you give it that title?
51:15
SPEAKER_03: So it's just a translation of of Nahuatl text?
51:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, basically, I I Yeah, yeah.
51:21
SPEAKER_02: And it's it has a preface, it has an intro, and the intro is pretty good.
51:25
SPEAKER_02: But what's interesting is in the introduction they talk about the concept of uh Ipal nemwani.
51:32
SPEAKER_02: Right.
51:33
SPEAKER_02: No, no, no, not not Ipal nemwani, in tloken nawake.
51:37
SPEAKER_02: So tloken nawake, they uh the the near and the close, right?
51:44
SPEAKER_02: And they translate that as the all pervasive.
51:50
SPEAKER_02: And I was like, well, okay, but am I gonna argue with you now that like, well, the Aztecs didn't have a concept of pervasiveness?
51:58
SPEAKER_02: Like, well like it I I think it's a fine translation.
52:03
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
52:03
SPEAKER_02: Twoke nawake, the all-pervasive.
52:05
SPEAKER_02: They could have uh omnipresent, they could have said that.
52:10
SPEAKER_02: But to to really nitpick and be overly uh prescriptive, I I think, uh, with your work, and then allow themselves uh some leeway, uh I thought was a little hypocritical.
52:26
SPEAKER_03: See, this is an another example of the fallacy, and I just remembered what it was.
52:29
SPEAKER_03: It's the special pleading fallacy, right?
52:32
SPEAKER_03: They're pleading for their own interpretation as being the absolute correct one, and yours, well, it's not like mine, so therefore there it's deficient and there's something wrong with it.
52:43
SPEAKER_03: Right.
52:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
52:44
SPEAKER_03: So that's that's the operating fallacy with that I'm seeing here with all these folks that are criticizing your work.
52:50
SPEAKER_05: Right.
52:50
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's it's just or that's sort of the way it's going to be.
52:54
SPEAKER_05: I was hoping that because the field is small enough that we would be more cohesive, but of course that's not the case.
53:01
SPEAKER_05: It's good in a way.
53:02
SPEAKER_05: Um, you know, because I think scholars should have healthy debates, and I'm all all for good, strong, healthy debates.
53:08
SPEAKER_05: They should just be, you know, respectful and at least give the other person the benefit of the doubt.
53:14
SPEAKER_05: Like you know what they're doing.
53:16
SPEAKER_05: There's some basics right there, right?
53:18
SPEAKER_05: Uh and hence, yeah, if you're gonna expand a term rather than the near and the nigh as uh Dibble and Anderson translate that, um, to the all pervasive, which Dibble and Anderson never would have translated, um, you know, you have to come, you have to have a justification for that.
53:37
SPEAKER_05: Uh I will say post-Lackhart in the field, um, there has been a tendency to use deflationary translations.
53:46
SPEAKER_05: And that's because Lockhart was looking at everyday Nahuatl texts that happen to survive, like testimonials, like last will and testament sort of stuff.
53:54
SPEAKER_05: Okay, so your regular Massewaltin is not going to have an extremely articulate understanding of things.
54:02
SPEAKER_05: They're not like academic philosophers or something like that.
54:05
SPEAKER_05: And so I think the deflationary impulse makes sense in that case.
54:10
SPEAKER_05: But when you're doing philosophy, it's exactly the opposite.
54:13
SPEAKER_05: Philosophers just screw up language all the time.
54:17
SPEAKER_05: Right.
54:17
SPEAKER_05: Like so Hila in uh the Odyssey, when Odysseus is kind of like trying to come back from the island of Calypso, he gets some wood from the uh the nearby forest to make a raft, but the Greek term is called Hila.
54:31
SPEAKER_05: Aristotle transforms that into Prote-Heli, calls it prime matter, and it's one of the most abstract metaphysical ideas out there, right?
54:40
SPEAKER_05: And I think that that's you know, common basically stuff.
54:43
SPEAKER_05: The word meet meant stuff in Homer, okay.
54:46
SPEAKER_05: Becomes like this technical term in Aristotle, prime stuff.
54:50
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
54:51
SPEAKER_05: So you think he's just talking about the wood, right?
54:53
SPEAKER_05: Right.
54:54
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
54:54
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
54:54
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
54:55
SPEAKER_05: He's just talking right.
54:56
SPEAKER_05: And so it becomes um it's a weird idea.
55:00
SPEAKER_05: Uh, but that's what philosophers do.
55:02
SPEAKER_05: So common language in a philosopher's hand equals weird.
55:06
SPEAKER_05: And that's where I think the deflationary tendency is the wrong tendency.
55:10
SPEAKER_05: Like you have to be willing to do the more maximalist interpretation because it is philosophical.
55:15
SPEAKER_03: For the lean man, can you explain what deflationary means?
55:18
SPEAKER_05: What happens?
55:19
SPEAKER_05: Aaron Powell Yeah, yeah, yeah.
55:20
SPEAKER_05: So like interpreting it like as benignly or as literally or as commonly as possible, right?
55:28
SPEAKER_05: Rather than as something technical.
55:31
SPEAKER_05: Um so when you see Gila, you you translate that as stuff or wood.
55:37
SPEAKER_05: That would be the deflationary tendency.
55:39
SPEAKER_05: But if you translate it that in Aristotle, this he's talking about prime wood.
55:43
SPEAKER_05: You could that would make no sense, right?
55:46
SPEAKER_05: What he's in fact talking about is this concept that like he's trying to talk about like what things are.
55:54
SPEAKER_05: What makes it a door?
55:56
SPEAKER_05: Ultimately, it's the function of the door, the thing, the the way that the it doesn't have to be a door doesn't have to be made out of wood, right?
56:02
SPEAKER_05: It's it's the purpose that it serves that makes it a door.
56:05
SPEAKER_05: The woodedness, the matter of it, is just circumstantial.
56:10
SPEAKER_05: So you generalize it could be wooden, it could be marble, it could be any of those things.
56:15
SPEAKER_05: That kind of like general idea that it does have to have some kind of matter.
56:19
SPEAKER_05: Um that's the prime matter.
56:22
unknown: Right?
56:22
SPEAKER_05: Right.
56:23
SPEAKER_05: It's a really kind of abstract idea there.
56:25
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Well, speaking of the Odyssey, one of my favorite parts is you talk about um the island of Calypso and you were using it as an example in one of your interviews, and I think in in the book too, right?
56:38
SPEAKER_02: Of um how it relates to happiness and you don't actually want what you think of as happiness, and how that's actually a very Nawa, like Mesoamerican way of looking at the world.
56:54
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
56:54
SPEAKER_05: And I think that there's probably two key ideas there that really matter, two stories.
56:59
SPEAKER_05: Um one of them is, yeah, because Odysseus only leaves the island of Calypso, right?
57:04
SPEAKER_05: So he's it's weird.
57:05
SPEAKER_05: He's given a choice.
57:07
SPEAKER_05: He's given the choice to um stay with her and live forever and be eternally young and never work, uh to live in the romantic company of a goddess, which, you know, pretty good.
57:22
SPEAKER_05: Um and um Yeah, so that's a possibility for him, and he turns it down to venture back on a wooden raft.
57:35
SPEAKER_05: The interesting point there is it's sort of the opposite of Genesis, right?
57:40
SPEAKER_05: Odysseus chooses to leave paradise.
57:42
SPEAKER_05: But on the other hand, I mean, the way I do this with my students is I have them, I I ask them, like, well, okay, so imagine you rubbed a lamp and a genie jumps out of it and says, I'll give you immortality and agelessness, and you get a billion dollars in a bank account, and you'll get to find somebody that you're really attractive to and you know the love of your life, and they'll also live along with you.
58:03
SPEAKER_05: And uh, you know, um the one drawback here is that I'm gonna have to move you to a different city and you'll never see your friends and family again.
58:11
SPEAKER_05: You'll just be a missing person to them.
58:13
SPEAKER_05: You don't even get to take your dog.
58:15
SPEAKER_05: Right.
58:16
SPEAKER_05: Uh would you take the genie up on that offer?
58:19
SPEAKER_05: And it's usually only students who are like, no, I hate my family.
58:22
SPEAKER_05: Uh I will definitely take up the genie on that offering.
58:24
SPEAKER_05: Right.
58:25
SPEAKER_05: Everyone else is like, no, I would rather the things that make life worth living, right, are are my friends and family.
58:31
SPEAKER_05: Like you're asking me to give up the good stuff.
58:34
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, the things that make me happy.
58:36
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, the things that make it worthwhile.
58:38
SPEAKER_05: So but those things also, very interestingly, um, don't necessarily bring you more elevated emotional states.
58:46
SPEAKER_05: You know, deep relationships with your family members are talking through their problems, like the real problems with them, right?
58:52
SPEAKER_05: And those are also emotionally heavy for you.
58:55
SPEAKER_05: But that's the good stuff of the relationship, right?
58:59
SPEAKER_05: Which just shows that we're not really after like a jejun or superficial sense of happiness.
59:04
SPEAKER_05: We're after like a deeper, richer sense.
59:07
SPEAKER_05: Um I don't know.
59:09
SPEAKER_05: Speak for yourself.
59:10
SPEAKER_05: I'm after the trillion dollars.
59:11
SPEAKER_05: That's how you're after the trillion dollars of Elon Musk.
59:16
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
59:17
SPEAKER_05: Um, I mean, and there's the There's no way that guy's happy.
59:22
SPEAKER_02: That guy's face just looks like pure misery and stupidity.
59:28
SPEAKER_03: And you know, well, uh you know, interesting say about someone like Elon Musk.
59:32
SPEAKER_03: That's the big question.
59:34
SPEAKER_05: Well, yeah.
59:34
SPEAKER_05: I I think they would say it's an example of um you know the slippery earth.
59:40
SPEAKER_05: And one of the inter We all slip up, but one of the interesting ways that you can slip up is by succeeding at the wrong things.
59:49
SPEAKER_05: Uh right.
59:50
SPEAKER_05: So the example they give in the book is of Trent Reznor, right?
59:54
SPEAKER_05: Because he was a rock star in 1999 or whatever it was, 2001.
59:58
SPEAKER_05: He was on the cover of Spin Magazine, um, multi-millionaire selling tons of albums, blah, blah, blah.
1:00:06
SPEAKER_05: The I don't know, most influential artist of the year, he gives his interview back when people cared about things like music magazines, right?
1:00:13
SPEAKER_05: And um, the interviewer Yeah, I know.
1:00:17
SPEAKER_05: Like, oh, it feels makes me feel so old.
1:00:19
SPEAKER_05: Anyways, um the interviewer asks him, like, because he was, you know, he would wake up every morning and basically contemplate suicide, like whether or not he's going to use his cult 38, and he just was procrastinating.
1:00:31
SPEAKER_05: He'd be like, Yeah, not today, I'll do it tomorrow.
1:00:34
SPEAKER_05: Um and he did that for a while.
1:00:35
SPEAKER_05: And the interviewer asked him, like, why?
1:00:37
SPEAKER_05: You seem to have all the stuff that people want.
1:00:40
SPEAKER_05: And his answer is, well, what if you got everything you ever wanted and it still sucked?
1:00:45
SPEAKER_05: Um disillusionment is a way of fail.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_05: You fail by way of success.
1:00:53
SPEAKER_05: You get your goals, and then you still fail because of because of those goals.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_05: Um, and I think that that's kind of what you know, the worry there would be with Musk is he seems sort of unhappy a lot of the time.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_05: It's like, well, yeah, you got a lot of your goals, but they were the wrong ones.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_05: This is part of the slippery earth.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_05: It's hard.
1:01:12
SPEAKER_05: Um, all right.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_05: And so so yeah, you're not really after happiness, you're after a rich, uh, meaningful life with your friends and family around you.
1:01:22
SPEAKER_05: I think the metaphorical constellation of Nahuat terms suggests that rootedness is one way to translate that in English, right?
1:01:31
SPEAKER_05: Um there might be other terms.
1:01:32
SPEAKER_05: Again, they like many metaphors, so if you don't like that metaphor, pick another one.
1:01:36
SPEAKER_05: But I think rootedness expresses it well.
1:01:39
SPEAKER_05: They literally used many metaphors, so like go pick another one if you want, like try to identify the constellation there.
1:01:45
SPEAKER_02: I like uh tlanepantlakayot, which is like centeredness.
1:01:49
SPEAKER_02: Centeredness.
1:01:50
SPEAKER_02: Where the woman is telling her daughter, you know, you're walking along a ridge, basically.
1:01:57
SPEAKER_02: I'm paraphrasing, but you're walking and to the left of you is an abyss, and to the right of you is an abyss, and if you veer too far this way, you're gonna fall, and if you veer far too far this way, you're gonna fall.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_02: So nepantlakayot, like centeredness.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_02: Centeredness, middle middleness, I guess.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_02: You know, stay stay centered as you walk because the earth is slippery.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_02: And the earth is slippery.
1:02:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you can't.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_02: And we all slip up.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_03: Walk in balance of Mother Earth, right?
1:02:24
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
1:02:25
SPEAKER_02: Walk in balance.
1:02:26
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
1:02:27
SPEAKER_05: And so so yeah, I mean, that's why I think being uh that's one of the first lessons from the Nahuas is that especially uh Americans think they're after happiness.
1:02:38
SPEAKER_05: You're not, not not not in the bare sense.
1:02:41
SPEAKER_05: You're after a rich life, which has obligations and things that will have costs.
1:02:46
SPEAKER_05: I mean, you know, I'm a child, I my wife and I, we adopted.
1:02:49
SPEAKER_05: That was a very deliberate choice.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_05: Have a kid, you know, those first nights, like the first year, you don't sleep much.
1:02:55
SPEAKER_05: You're just kind of like sleepwalking through life, right?
1:02:58
SPEAKER_05: With them.
1:02:59
SPEAKER_05: Um but you don't do that because you want to be happy in like the dumb sense of the term.
1:03:06
SPEAKER_05: You do it because it's worth having raised a kid.
1:03:09
SPEAKER_05: And if you're a parent, that's it it's a thing you'd never not want to have in your life.
1:03:15
SPEAKER_05: Um, you know, you it's not like have a child snort some cocaine.
1:03:18
SPEAKER_05: Those aren't on the same level.
1:03:21
SPEAKER_05: All right.
1:03:23
unknown: Woof.
1:03:26
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, maybe.
1:03:28
SPEAKER_03: There's both, yes.
1:03:30
SPEAKER_03: Well, so one of one of the things that that I um liked about your book, the Discourses of the Elders, um, was that even though it's not meant to be sort of like a Bible of sorts, it kind of reads that way in in a sense, right?
1:03:46
SPEAKER_03: And so even I was thinking like in like, you know, for those of us that that do ceremony and uh we we're accustomed to doing ceremony a certain way, and sometimes during the ceremony, you know, people are allowed to, you know, express themselves.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_03: And I was I was wondering, I wonder if I can adapt some of these um some of these verses to and strip away the post-uh colonial uh energy.
1:04:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because a lot of it's very overtly and obviously Christian influence.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_03: Christian influence and strip away some of the Christian influence, some of the colonial influence, and and and just get back to the bare bones of it and maybe you know use it and and start adapting it to sort of a uh you know uh a ceremonial Bible of sorts, right?
1:04:37
SPEAKER_03: And so what is what is your take on that?
1:04:40
SPEAKER_03: Like when you were um looking at the Weatlatole and you were you know interpreting it like is this something that crossed your mind, or what were you thinking as you were going through the process?
1:04:51
SPEAKER_05: I think that's that's yeah, that's totally right.
1:04:53
SPEAKER_05: And especially at the end, as I was translating it, again, I I set out to translate that piece um just on its own, like as its own artifact, right?
1:05:02
SPEAKER_05: But the end of it felt like catechism class to me.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_05: Um that's what it feels like.
1:05:08
SPEAKER_05: Uh it just happens to be written in Nawat, but you know, it's catechism, it's Catholic catechism.
1:05:12
SPEAKER_05: So at the beginning, though, it feels much more like something else, right?
1:05:18
SPEAKER_05: And um some passages are clear, some passages are not.
1:05:23
SPEAKER_05: Uh I think what I'm trying to do at this point in order to avoid as a scholar is just make claims like I'm gonna treat each thing on its own.
1:05:33
SPEAKER_05: At a personal level, and maybe later in my life, I'll work at separating things out more explicitly.
1:05:40
SPEAKER_05: Um here's my guiding line if I had to like because I I compare some passages to like peeling a banana very easy versus peeling a raspberry very hard.
1:05:50
SPEAKER_05: Um with the level of interpolation, a Christian interpolation.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_05: Um But so which what how would I peel a raspberry?
1:06:00
SPEAKER_05: Like what would my guiding line be?
1:06:02
SPEAKER_05: My guiding line is that for the Nahuas, like their view, like read the passage, and when they suggest you should do something, if that should is intrinsic or internal, then it's probably more Nahua, that's my guess.
1:06:20
SPEAKER_05: And if it's extrinsic, it's probably more colonial.
1:06:24
SPEAKER_05: So do this, otherwise God will punish you is a more colonial Christian idea versus do this because this is how you have a successful life, that's more a Nahua type view.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_05: Right?
1:06:37
SPEAKER_05: So you want to treat your family well and enjoy a meal with them, that becomes your way of being rooted or centered with them.
1:06:48
SPEAKER_05: It's not like I'm having the meal in order to enjoy my family.
1:06:52
SPEAKER_05: It is the way by which I enjoy my time with my family.
1:06:55
SPEAKER_05: It is the mean, it's a constitutive means rather than extrinsic means.
1:07:00
SPEAKER_05: And that's that would be my razor by which I would go through those passages for the most part, is that if it's intrinsic, that seems to be me to be more uh Nahua based.
1:07:12
SPEAKER_05: And that's why I think a lot of the latter stuff really says, like, do this or God will come down and burn you.
1:07:18
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_05: Right.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_05: Right.
1:07:20
SPEAKER_05: Like that just sounds a fire and brimstone speech as we're we're used to that uh in in the Christian context.
1:07:26
SPEAKER_05: And I think if you have that in mind, you can pretty clearly, you're like, yes, no, yes, almost line by line go through like what's good, what's happening here and why.
1:07:36
SPEAKER_03: Because I was really interested in the ones where it's like the father talking to the son and and like instructing them on how to be a good person in society, what their duties are, how to be a virtuous person.
1:07:46
SPEAKER_03: Like that's the thing that I could, I mean, like you were saying, that you can tease out of the text and you can discern, okay, this is definitely something that is pre-invasion, and then all this other goofy God stuff is kind of interjected post-invasion to uh appease the the the the Christian the censors who were the censors, right?
1:08:06
SPEAKER_03: Whoever, whoever's uh looking at the stuff that's being written down um for the purposes of colonization and Christianization.
1:08:14
SPEAKER_03: And so I'd be interested, I don't know if you're interested in in doing this at some point, but I'd be interested in, you know, I don't know how long it would take me, but you know, you know, going uh verse by verse and kind of just stripping away the the Christian colonial component of it and just leaving the core indigenous aspect of it intact.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_05: And maybe publishing that, I don't know.
1:08:36
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, no, that would be in that and in that one I would reference the other piece that we have, because we have another piece from a grammar in there that would help us, especially for that first uh We Wat Latoli.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_05: Um yeah, so I would do that work too.
1:08:49
SPEAKER_05: I and I think it could be reasonably done.
1:08:52
SPEAKER_05: It wasn't my my venture in this piece.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_05: I think it could be done.
1:08:56
SPEAKER_05: Um and yeah, because the father admonishes the son says, like, don't go down this path, because otherwise it will be as if you put on hooves and you become a beast, like a deer and a rabbit, you know, like that's the path.
1:09:12
SPEAKER_05: So again, notice how intrinsic that is.
1:09:14
SPEAKER_05: In order to be a human, you can't act this way.
1:09:18
SPEAKER_05: Right.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_05: Right.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_05: That's not because somebody's punishing you.
1:09:22
SPEAKER_05: Right.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_05: You can't act this way because this is just what it means to be a human.
1:09:27
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
1:09:28
SPEAKER_05: Constitutive.
1:09:29
SPEAKER_02: One of my favorite, and I I forget, I don't know if it's from the Florentine or the Romances or or the Way Watlahtoli, but one of my favorite ones uh sayings ever is the um do not throw yourself at women like a dog on its food.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_02: Right.
1:09:47
SPEAKER_02: Damn.
1:09:48
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:09:49
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
1:09:50
SPEAKER_02: It's like just have some self-control.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_02: Control.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_02: You know, have some self-respect, have some self-control, respect these other people, and comport yourself in a certain manner.
1:10:02
SPEAKER_02: Like that, that one's always stuck in my head.
1:10:04
SPEAKER_02: Like, damn, that's cool.
1:10:05
SPEAKER_02: Or any of the ones that I've noticed that when they're referencing people who are foolish or stupid or annoying, they always uh identify them as being loud and that they're noisy and they're just making they're just talking to talk and they're not saying anything of value.
1:10:28
SPEAKER_02: And in one of your interviews, and I couldn't find it uh before we recorded, I was trying to find it, but you you you talk about one specific idea of like how how words are formed and how they're put out into into the world and and and what that means.
1:10:45
SPEAKER_02: Do you know which which which one I'm talking about?
1:10:47
SPEAKER_05: Well, yeah.
1:10:48
SPEAKER_05: So I I there's there's uh uh quite a number of passages around speech and right speech, and this gets into one of their practices, which is um I just call it right speech.
1:11:01
SPEAKER_05: I don't know any other way to put it, right?
1:11:03
SPEAKER_05: Uh maybe tekpilatoli is something like but that's really more like noble speech.
1:11:07
SPEAKER_05: They don't really have a good um specific idea here, but uh the sense is that what passes your lips pre-frames your mind.
1:11:17
SPEAKER_05: They were aware of this, because again, for the Nahuas, your your inner life is chaos.
1:11:23
SPEAKER_05: That's why it's better to start outside and move in, right?
1:11:27
SPEAKER_05: But you do have these quasi-inward things, and learning to control your speech is a way to control your inner thoughts.
1:11:38
SPEAKER_05: Uh the example that I always try to back these things up with a text and a can something from contemporary social science, right?
1:11:47
SPEAKER_05: Because I don't want to just lean on the authority and say, like, oh, these were ancient peoples, therefore they're right.
1:11:52
SPEAKER_05: I want to say, here's some things that they said, here's contemporary science that also supports what they said, so they weren't just ancient peoples, right?
1:12:00
SPEAKER_05: And the example I draw from is um a psychologist, Cialdini, who was asked to speech as to speak at uh SMS Health, and they told him to basically censor his own speech with various words.
1:12:15
SPEAKER_05: They say, don't say bullet point, say talking point, don't say target, say goal, don't say beat the competition, say outdistance the competition.
1:12:29
SPEAKER_05: And the reason is that they were health, a health organization, and they thought violent language was inimical to their goal.
1:12:37
SPEAKER_05: Like you can't pursue health and have a whole bunch of violence kind of subconsciously everywhere.
1:12:44
SPEAKER_05: And so what they so he went through, and at first he thought it was silly, but he conformed.
1:12:49
SPEAKER_05: They were paying him a big speaker fee, so he did it.
1:12:54
SPEAKER_05: But afterwards, he realized it did change subtly the whole culture of the organization.
1:13:00
SPEAKER_05: Because when you focus on getting rid of violence and everyday speech, you have more peaceful thoughts, right?
1:13:09
SPEAKER_05: And it pre-frames everything.
1:13:10
SPEAKER_05: So he actually wrote a whole book about pre-framing, right, and what that does for you.
1:13:16
SPEAKER_05: Uh the Aztecs had this as one of their components of living well.
1:13:21
SPEAKER_05: If you want to change how, like, how do you change as a person?
1:13:24
SPEAKER_05: We all have bad habits.
1:13:25
SPEAKER_05: Like, how do you actually change?
1:13:27
SPEAKER_05: Well, one of the practices is to change your language, strangely enough.
1:13:31
SPEAKER_05: Uh if you want to have a less fraught life, start looking at violent words that you use casually.
1:13:39
SPEAKER_03: Uh it's it's it's it's kind of counter counterintuitive to what we would think, right?
1:13:44
SPEAKER_03: Because we we're thinking that whatever's in our mind is what's going to come out from our mouth, right?
1:13:51
SPEAKER_03: We're talking is it's gonna reflect what's in our in our already in our minds.
1:13:55
SPEAKER_03: But you're saying that the way that the Aztecs looked at it was like if you can fix the way that you speak, especially in public, that's going to kind of rewire the circuits in your mind in a certain way, that's going to be beneficial if you're doing it in a virtuous way.
1:14:11
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
1:14:12
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:14:12
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:14:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:14:13
SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm reminded of uh when somebody told me uh you need to stop saying you're bad at math.
1:14:18
SPEAKER_02: Um, because it's just making you bad at math.
1:14:21
SPEAKER_02: You know, you're not inherently bad at math.
1:14:24
SPEAKER_02: You know, stop saying that.
1:14:25
SPEAKER_02: And I was like, all right, all right.
1:14:26
SPEAKER_02: Then I took a math class and I was like, holy shit, I'm bad at math.
1:14:35
SPEAKER_02: There could be limits.
1:14:36
SPEAKER_03: Wait, wait a minute.
1:14:37
SPEAKER_03: So that's an example?
1:14:38
SPEAKER_03: Wait a minute.
1:14:41
SPEAKER_02: That's a bad example.
1:14:43
SPEAKER_02: That's uh that that's my uh my yeah, that's my example of of of the opposite in in effect.
1:14:49
SPEAKER_02: Turns out you actually have to study the math.
1:14:52
SPEAKER_02: You can't just be like, I'm great at math.
1:14:56
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
1:14:56
SPEAKER_05: It's not yeah.
1:14:57
SPEAKER_05: And that's actually a really good contrast because the the Aztec one is different from the affirmations.
1:15:02
SPEAKER_05: Like people have say like daily affirmations or whatever.
1:15:04
SPEAKER_05: That's really caught on as a trend.
1:15:06
SPEAKER_05: The Aztecs are close.
1:15:08
SPEAKER_05: The Nachmas are close, but they're not.
1:15:11
SPEAKER_05: And I think the difference matters.
1:15:13
SPEAKER_05: It isn't just saying things.
1:15:15
SPEAKER_05: The point is saying things pre-frames your mind so that you're more disposed to do the things.
1:15:23
SPEAKER_05: Right.
1:15:25
SPEAKER_05: If you want to learn some math, you probably have to study, right?
1:15:28
SPEAKER_05: Uh so that it helps you do the things, but it's not sufficient on its own.
1:15:33
SPEAKER_03: They would we've could we uh describe it as manifesting virtuosity or virtuousness.
1:15:41
SPEAKER_03: Virtuousness, right.
1:15:42
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
1:15:43
SPEAKER_05: Sort of manifesting.
1:15:44
SPEAKER_05: It's kind of that, but it's not like, oh, I thought about being virtuous, and that's good enough.
1:15:49
SPEAKER_05: Right?
1:15:49
SPEAKER_05: Like it's more like you're trying to pre-frame things so that you don't end up you know, it's like my wife's thing of taking away the candy.
1:15:58
SPEAKER_05: That that's a pretty good example.
1:15:59
SPEAKER_05: I didn't then go out to the nearest store and buy some more candy.
1:16:08
SPEAKER_02: Well, before you had spoken about um being in contact with Miguel León Portilla, and I wanted to get back to that because you had said that he was really, and I'm not surprised that he would be really willing to engage with people.
1:16:25
SPEAKER_02: Um I wish I had thought of reaching out to him because I had questions.
1:16:30
SPEAKER_02: And so I don't know if you had a chance to listen to any of our earlier episodes, um, but we like I'm not gonna speak for Ruben.
1:16:41
SPEAKER_02: I uh I myself do not see any uh pre-Qwaltemoc pre-colonial evidence for this idea of ometeot, which was something that Miguel León Portilla was very, very big on.
1:17:00
SPEAKER_02: Um did you did the two of you ever discuss that?
1:17:03
SPEAKER_02: I did.
1:17:04
SPEAKER_02: Really?
1:17:04
SPEAKER_03: Well, in fact, isn't he the one that came up with the idea or at least you didn't hear him regardible?
1:17:16
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:17:16
SPEAKER_03: So but Portilla's the one that made it popular.
1:17:19
SPEAKER_03: Right.
1:17:19
SPEAKER_03: With his book uh uh The Philosophia Nahuatl, Nahuatl.
1:17:23
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
1:17:23
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
1:17:23
SPEAKER_05: And so I asked him about that.
1:17:25
SPEAKER_05: Uh I specifically asked him because I said you cited this in an earlier version of the edition of La Philosophia Nahuatl, but it doesn't it's a little weird.
1:17:33
SPEAKER_05: And he came back and he said, uh this is of course the whole discussion in Spanish in Espanol, but uh right, the uh he came back and he was like, okay, well look, here he gave me some new passages that he was looking at that supported the idea of the dual God, right?
1:17:48
SPEAKER_05: Um and uh uh, you know, I think this comes back to the following.
1:17:55
SPEAKER_05: There are some passages that could be interpreted as supporting the view.
1:18:01
SPEAKER_05: And if you wanted to take the opposing view, you probably could also.
1:18:07
SPEAKER_05: Uh so I it's going to be holistic.
1:18:09
SPEAKER_05: I think that there's not going to be some smoking gun.
1:18:12
SPEAKER_05: I that's effectively what it's going to come down to.
1:18:15
SPEAKER_03: But see, this is where I'm going to have to push back a little bit on that because we have names for Tescatlipoka, Ketzalkwa, Tlaloc, um, and all these other deities, right?
1:18:25
SPEAKER_03: Uh.
1:18:26
SPEAKER_03: And so why is the one dual.
1:18:30
SPEAKER_02: Supposed to be the most important.
1:18:31
SPEAKER_03: Right.
1:18:31
SPEAKER_03: The most important, the most central of all, not specifically mentioned like thoroughly throughout all the texts where you have various deities named.
1:18:43
SPEAKER_03: Right.
1:18:43
SPEAKER_03: That's the part that that that that I find uh uh concerning when people are adamant about this notion that Ometeot was an actual entity that existed at that time.
1:18:53
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:18:54
SPEAKER_05: So the way I see it is I think that teot is kind of like as a general idea, sort of how Mafi has it, makes sense to me.
1:19:02
SPEAKER_05: Um and my view is the ro there's a relationship, something like being and existence between teatl and ometeat.
1:19:10
SPEAKER_05: And the reason why you don't find ometeot passages surfaced very often is because most passages don't require the subtlety of that discussion.
1:19:18
SPEAKER_05: So I kind of disagree with Leon Portia on that myself.
1:19:21
SPEAKER_05: Um so teat is kind of like all possible manifestations of things versus reality is like the specific stuff around us, right?
1:19:31
SPEAKER_05: And concrete reality gets doubled.
1:19:34
SPEAKER_05: That's how it functions is through doublings, uh, various inamikwan, which do seem to be pretty well attested, right?
1:19:41
SPEAKER_05: So when you go from possibility to actuality, you go from teat to some form of ometeat.
1:19:47
SPEAKER_05: And that's how I view it.
1:19:49
SPEAKER_05: And there's enough textual evidence to be like, ah, good enough, you know.
1:19:53
SPEAKER_05: And my metaphysical view on this is that in fact the Nachwas had um sort of a view of reality as further levels of specification.
1:20:04
SPEAKER_05: Um in an earlier version of the book, which my Norton editor killed, I had a whole chapter on this.
1:20:10
SPEAKER_05: She was just like, nope, nope, you cannot explain metaphysics in a popular book.
1:20:15
SPEAKER_05: Damn.
1:20:16
SPEAKER_05: But the view was look, you have a concept color, a more specific or determinate view of that is red, a more determinate view of that is scarlet, right?
1:20:26
SPEAKER_05: And um they had a view of reality's increasing levels of determination.
1:20:33
SPEAKER_05: Uh so you get teat, ometeat, and so on down to our specific reality.
1:20:37
SPEAKER_05: That kind of explains the layers of the cosmos as they understood it.
1:20:41
SPEAKER_05: So I think that um porte was on to something.
1:20:46
SPEAKER_05: I don't think it was a base concept like he does.
1:20:48
SPEAKER_05: I think that's probably wrong.
1:20:50
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
1:20:51
SPEAKER_02: Me either.
1:20:52
SPEAKER_02: But uh you do have a heart out pretty soon.
1:20:56
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
1:20:56
SPEAKER_02: So I would just want to thank you for coming on the show.
1:21:00
SPEAKER_02: Uh the two books, The Outward Path and Discourses of the Elders, are both available.
1:21:06
SPEAKER_02: Uh where can listeners find you online if they were so inclined?
1:21:10
SPEAKER_05: Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, if they are so inclined, I am um actually going to be relaunching a podcast called the Expert Bookshelf where I talk to people about books that they liked reading who are experts in various things.
1:21:21
SPEAKER_05: So they'll be finding me on that.
1:21:22
SPEAKER_05: Um otherwise I'm on Twitter at LSPurcell.
1:21:26
SPEAKER_05: Um and oh, they call it X now.
1:21:29
SPEAKER_05: Whatever.
1:21:29
SPEAKER_05: I still call it Twitter.
1:21:32
SPEAKER_05: I don't call it shit anymore.
1:21:34
SPEAKER_05: I just got off of it.
1:21:35
SPEAKER_05: I was like, all right, I'm done.
1:21:37
SPEAKER_05: And until next time, remember the truth is like medicine.
1:21:40
SPEAKER_05: It doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.