Latest / Philosopheasy Podcast / Socrates: wrongdoing as a mistake in sums, and why it rarely feels like one

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Socrates: wrongdoing as a mistake in sums, and why it rarely feels like one · Philosopheasy Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Eighteenth-century London.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: The man who wrote the dictionary of the English language is lying in bed at midday again.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Samuel Johnson kept diaries and prayers,
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: and in them, year after year, he resolves to get up earlier.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: He writes the resolution down.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: He means it.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Then morning arrives, and so does the pillow.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Johnson wasn't confused.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody had lied to him.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: The right answer was sitting in his own diary.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: So why didn't he act on it?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates, about 2,000 years before Johnson had a ready reply.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody does wrong willingly, he said.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you truly knew the better thing, you would do it.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Failing to do it only proves you didn't really know.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's tidy, and I don't believe it.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Tonight you'll say the walk beats the couch, and you'll mean it.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: But do you know it, or can you just say it?
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle looked at people like Johnson and decided Socrates had left something out.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle's answer in the seventh book of the Nicomachean Ethics is that knowing comes in kinds.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle's examples,
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: a man asleep who mutters a line of poetry,
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: a drunk reciting a proof, a first-day student parroting the teacher.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: They know it, sort of.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: They can't use it.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Having knowledge and using it are two different things.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: So when you stand in the hallway at 6 in the evening, what happens?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: The knowing is on the shelf.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Appetite is standing in the hallway with you,
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: saying this sofa, this biscuit now, and for a minute it's louder.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Stupidity?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle says no.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: He called it akrasia.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Lacking command over yourself or weakness of will.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Your grip slips.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Your knowledge is fine.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle split this into two kinds of failure, and from the inside they feel nothing alike.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Some people are impetuous.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: They don't stop to think at all.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: The text is already sent, the card already out.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: The plan never got a look in.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Others are weak.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: They think it through.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: They reach the right conclusion.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: They even feel it,
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: and they cave anyway, like a committee member whose vote was fine and got ignored.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Johnson in bed is the weak kind.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: He deliberated and resolved, and then he stayed put.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Most evenings, which are you?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the one who agrees with himself and sits down anyway.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: The cures differ.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: The impetuous person needs a pause.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Weak person needs the knowing to still be on its feet.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: When the wanting turns up, Aristotle's hint is that shouting at yourself doesn't work.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody gets brave by lecturing themselves about courage.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: You do the thing and the wanting trails along later.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: So here's a small practice for tonight.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Pick the good thing you keep failing at.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Shrink it until appetite barely notices.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Not a five-kilometer run.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Shoes on, front door open, two minutes.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Then the same tomorrow, you aren't trying to win tonight.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: You're getting the hallway version of you some practice.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to find out which of the two you are impetuous
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: or weak-willed Wednesday's episode,
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: closing the akratia gap starts with exactly that question,
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: and the first seven days are free.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates may well be right that we all want the good.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle just notes that wanting it doesn't get you off the sofa.