m8JESL51UW4.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          It seems to me that the way that you fortify your faith in being and in life and your own existence isn't to try to convince yourself of the existence of a transcendent power that you could believe in the same way that you believe in a set of empirical facts. I don't. I don't think that's the right approach. I think it's a weak approach. Actually. I don't. I don't think that the cognitive technology that I don't think that's the right cognitive technology for that set of problems. You know, that's more a technology that you use if you were trying to solve a scientific problem. It's more like it's more something that needs to be embedded in action rather than in stateable belief and the way that you fortify your faith in life is to assume the best, something like that, and then to act courageously in relationship to that and, and that's, that's tantamount to expressing your faith in the highest possible good.

Speaker 1:          00:51          It's tantamount to expressing your faith in God and it's not a matter of stating, well, I believe in the existence of a transcendent that daddy, because in some sense, who cares? Who cares what you believe. I mean you might and all that, but, but that's not the issue. That's not the issue. The issue it seems to me is how you act, and I was thinking about this intensely when I was thinking about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky because of course you know that nature was the philosopher who announced the death of God, right? And who is a great, great critic of Christianity at vicious critic of Institutional Christianity in the best sense, you know, and he announced the death of God and he said that we'd never find enough water to wash away the blood. It wasn't a triumphant proclamation even though it's often read that way and don't need shoes.

Speaker 1:          01:36          Conclusion from that, from the death of God, the fact that our ethical systems, we're going to collapse. When the foundation was pulled out from underneath him, he believed that human beings would have to find their own values to create their own values. And there's a problem with that because it doesn't seem that this is something Carl young was very thorough and investigating, it doesn't really look like people are capable of creating their own values because you're not really capable of molding yourself just any old way. You want to be like you have a nature that you have to contend with and so it isn't a matter of creating our own values because we don't have that capacity. It might be a matter of rediscovering those values, which is what young was attempting to do now. And, and, and so I think nature was actually profoundly wrong in that, in that recommendation.

Speaker 1:          02:21          I think he was psychologically wrong. Now you know, there was the Husky wrote in many ways in parallel to Nisha and was a great influence on nature. Their, their lives parallel each other. To a degree that's somewhat miraculous in some senses. It's quite uncanny. Dostoevsky was obviously a literary figure, whether whereas nature was a philosopher, a literary philosopher, but still have last for Dostoevsky, wrestled with exactly the same problems that, that nature wrestled with. And, but he did it in a different way. He didn't literary manner and he has this great book, the brothers Karamazov and in that book there's a hero of the book is really Lee Osha Who's a monastic novitiate, a very good guy, kinda not an intellect, not an intellect, but a person of great character, but he has a brother. I have an older brother who's a great intellect and and a very handsome soldier and a brave man and like Dostoyevsky's villains.

Speaker 1:          03:16          Ivan isn't exactly a villain, but that's close enough. Ivan or Dostoevsky makes his villains extraordinarily powerful. So if Dostoevsky's trying to work out an argument, he, he clothes the argument in the, in the flesh of one of his characters and if it's an argument he doesn't agree with, then he makes that character as strong as he possibly can, as strong and as attractive and intelligent as he possibly can. And then he let some just have outer. And so Ivan is constantly attacking Lee Osha and from every direction trying to knock him off his perch of faith, let's say. And they'll Osha, Ellie, Osha can't address a single one of Ivan's criticisms and, and he doesn't have the intellect for it. And, and, and Ivan has a devastating intellect. It's devastating to him himself as well. What happens in the brothers Karamazov essentially is the lel. Osha continues to act out his commitment to the good, let's say. And in that manner, he is triumphant. It doesn't matter that he loses the arguments because the arguments aren't exactly the point. The arguments in some sense are aside issue because the issue is, and this is the existential issue, the issue is not what you believe as if it's a set of facts, but how you conduct yourself in the world.