27: Adequatio

hello and welcome to classical stuff you should know it's a podcast about classical things that you should know and that's i'm not committing to any tagline that's it my name is aj handenberg i am a english and rhetoric teacher at veritas academy and i'm here with graham donaldson who also teaches english and rhetoric and uh has no tact and thomas magby joins us as well and he is a brown noser so my introduction today in light of the past two and how glorious those puns were all i can pray is that i know enough about the intro to give it its due and that i'm adequate that's an adequate that's all that i can pray is that my intro is good enough okay so magby has some stuff for us today what do you have for us so uh graham and aj leading up to this talk they keep asking hey what are you talking about they keep saying i'm talking about and then they go that doesn't mean anything it sounds like a giant squash it sounds like a harry potter spell yeah that's good um it is it i'd question what is it like darn clothing like like it's like if you want to knock a rug out all the dust out of a rug aquachio put another rug so on our last podcast that um we a few things came up that might really well with this session right now um i guess i'll kind of start it so you do about the english teachers um so you all and clearly have expansive vocabulary oh this is a latin word oh that makes me feel better that's why answering yeah answering your question what are you talking about with a latin word is not really helpful but so you will be both staying in your class with students and i would i would guess it's happening in your class but i don't know so you hand them a copy of a book and you say hey read this they come back immediately and say this book speaks my soul i love this book just nope every book every book they come across it's like the joy in their heart is just overflowing no but the dude the dudes in my class usually love all the stabbing they love the ilia they love the beowulf and they like ridiculous things and go to mesh but and there's a few girls who when they get romeo and juliet they're like finally a real man um but but then but then that's right like romeo's kind of a creep and it's like you got it yeah um but when he's saying like she doth teach the torches to burn bright there's always one that's just like oh and there's always like another girl's just like oh he's so stupid but boys are like i miss stabbing this and there's always a boy who's writing down things he's like tell girl she burns brighter than that's good you're like a giant torch i don't know if you use my phone flashlight when i'm around you whoever calls her i can just hold you up in the air and wave you around that's very beautiful can we write that down this is why i'm married so but what does it mean that so you two are older than 19 10 graders um i believe um so and you all have high esteem for the teacher class i assume so what happened there why uh aj why do you love the alien the odyssey uh hamburg why i'm sorry donaldson why do you love um parents lost and roman juliet and all the other stuff what's the difference between those two so i i like my classics for a few reasons reason number one the stabbing yeah i can't disagree with them there they're chapter five diomedes wastes like a hundred dudes and it's great that's reason number one the reason number two is and this is something my freshmen can't know their year and this is one of the reasons that they do we put this on a podcast no yeah it's not that they like shouldn't know it there's no way for them to know it like they won't trust me and it's that my books are it's like the beginning of the conversation that's been happening for 2 000 years and without it without reading these books you are lost to many other references that come later right in graham's class like they'll they'll see references to dante to achilles right achilles comes up in crime and punishment and if they don't know who achilles is they don't get it right and so by themselves yes maybe after reading them you're like why is this important but then as you jump into classicism you realize oh it's because every other author has read these and if i don't have that i cannot converse with the author it's like having a basic lingo for a video game right if you start playing csgo if you've never played csgo global offensive something uh you know you can never know what a no scope is right if you've never played that you never know i have no idea what that is well there's a gun that you can't hit there's no aiming radical unless you're looking down the scope so when you no scope somebody it means you hit him without even like it's just off the hip and with not playing that game you could never know and that comes up in a bunch of other games and so every time you hear that you miss that reference right and and that's what the reason why these books are important the last reason is because i begin to identify with the archetypal characters right these characters are in themselves pictures of even like a collection of people that you can sort of put on them like helen is the beautiful woman who is beset by her beauty the notion that beauty is a curse typically doesn't occur to high school freshmen but knowing a lot of beautiful people as i have it becomes a curse right they are hassled constantly two of which are present here wait wait wait we're beautiful people i was like am i one of those i set you up if you're beautiful you go to the bar and you can't get a moment you live in a bottle right you like guys are hassling you all the time and creepy dudes and it's just it becomes a horrible thing and she was there she got kidnapped she got abused she got stolen she was kidnapped more than once and she regrets a lot of the things that she did and her beauty to hers occurs and achilles is a young man tied to his fate you know hector is a young man laid low by war odysseus is a man that is coming to learn that the things that he dreamed of way in the distant future are not worth what he dreamed but the thing that is worth it is it's already at home he just has to go back to it right so these are archetypes and and the more that i read the more i can identify with these characters and see the things that play out in their lives play out in my own so part of it is inter interacting with the great conversation and actually getting on the ground floor and the other is just the characters sort of becoming a way a paradigm through which i see the universe for me it's thinking about so the books reveal ourselves to ourselves in many ways so i like going through it and thinking about how the books reveal what human nature is and who we are so in last podcast we just talked about how milton one of the big things in the middle ages um and paradise lost is in many ways kind of like the last book of the middle ages um is that we are creature specifically and there are contexts and places where we will thrive and there are contexts and places where we will be where we will be anxious and we will not thrive and we will feel like we're fighting the place that we're planted in um i always tell my kids like you know if you are fighting against your nature you're fighting against being a human because you don't either because of ignorance you don't know what it means to be a human or because you don't like being a human you don't like the things that you've been called to as a human being um you're gonna find you're gonna like a plant in an environment that you can't thrive and i always tell them about the plants that die on my balcony my balcony is a hot place and a dry place because it's in texas and uh and it's really high up and it's surrounded by you know our built the silver buildings metal so it kind of a lot of plants cook like they're in an oven so i decided to put succulents up there and even those succulents died to which my wife told me i was you are this horrid palace jailer who's like take this rosemary yeah so i put the succulents up there and they all died to which amanda said that i was less nurturing than a desert um which that hurts um but anyway but the idea being that when by reading these books and by going through the the sort of madness of raskolnikov in paradise lost as he's kind of trying to reject all morality or going through the despair that adam you feel or satan feels from the fall um or going through the fact that love of another person cannot save you in romeo and juliet um just thinking about all these things about what it means to be a human being um and then you're seeing dorian gray think that the things that he does can't if they don't manifest physically he's fine to do them that's right he can control what happens to his soul so reflect all of those learnings back and use them as lights in your own dark in your own interior to see where you are sinful where you are um rebellious against where god against your creatureliness against your your create the way that you've been created um so that's to me is um the books are um it's not therapy but it is medicine like i often do think that a good classical school is a hospital of the soul but but graham we moderns have science and can't we can't we learn about human nature through um just picking us apart novels basically an inefficient form of so um so um he gets this actor to pretend that he is answering question questions and then the person who's being um who's the subject of this experiment comes in and is asking questions of this person so the way it works is that whenever the person gets the question wrong um the participant in the study administer is a shock but there's not actually a shock going on that actor is just pretending that they're getting shocked the question is how many people will you know turn that dial all the way up to the top and it's the vast majority of people so i can learn about human nature that actually there's like evilness there's evil inside of people um they do wicked things people are bad i can learn from a study instead of reading a book right our meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things we murder to dissect okay would you say more oh no it's just uh there's um that's sort of a heavy-handed answer that wordsworth gives but the idea being that dissection or analytical analysis same thing um analytics um picking things apart um empirical verification that's only one subsection of knowing something um and we talked about this in the ratio intellectus podcast many many moons ago but just that is if you just want to reduce that if you want to reduce all that ontology to just empiricism um then you're going to close yourself off your universe is going to be what many people think it is which is cold and empty and material and um and consequently when you can watch that for that sort of worldview play itself out in character and see that it does not happen so we'll make anyway i was gonna say that science is only descriptive and appreciative you can tell us what qualities of happy people but not how you should like why you should do that or should we or ought we yeah and there's sometimes when you know i feel like a lot of what we're finding out in science is just rediscovery of stuff we've known for forever like i could have told you that there are people who turn that dial all the way up to ten it's we've known that we're here for a long time that's not new i didn't have to do an experience yeah and you can give a fancy name though yeah there's a lot of wisdom that comes from the ancients that we have decided to toss out like we're throwing the baby out with bathwater like learning about the tripartite soul it's a great way to think about the ordered human but how what does psychology ever do an mri like can you point to the tripartite soul and an mri so i was a psychology major et and many of my professors would say that the soul is the brain and i think it's a pretty common way i'll believe there's no like thing but that that may be true like just but pointing out that the innards of the computer exist does not mean that there isn't a good way for a computer to be ordered like just by saying yeah all that is is circuits yeah but it also means you should probably install windows and but yeah it's prescriptive rather than or sorry descriptive rather than prescriptive it's rediscovering stuff and it can't necessarily tell you what makes for a well-ordered person right it's stuff that we've known since play-doh yeah yeah i agree 100 with that of course i'm i'm going to you with all these questions um but then it's what grammy um instead of having things smaller you reference materialism but when you probably say that like most people are functionally materialists most people are functionally materialists but don't want to follow that all the way down and so they have some kind of um moralistic uh deistic therapy that they they hold to yeah i'm not sure i would say everyone's materialist i say like functionally that's probably true but they like to say that they believe there's something out there where there's a greater force or there's love even though that's kind of nebulous the term yeah the idea of um i guess used a lot in people who are talking about modern christianity in america is moralistic therapeutic deism is kind of this smuggled heresy into the church where god is he's kind of on my side and he's for me and i'm for him we love each other and he wants me to do good stuff and he makes me feel good and i screw up and when i and when i feel bad it's okay because you know jesus died for me but i don't really do anything about that because that's already done that's taken care of so the scripture in the church make no claims upon your actual daily life yeah right now here it is and um and that sort of moralistic therapeutic deism is very ubiquitous and i'll be a future podcast it's it is a it's a hard it's a weird time anyway good use of heresy too man let's talk about that we're not going to talk about that uh guys would you wish that a book had been published in the 1970s addressed all of these topics that we're talking about today i've never wished for anything but that um so the the concept we'll get to is aquatio but the um which just means adequitness which we'll get to later um you're a wizard why do household chores when you're a wizard i cannot say the makeup of this uh this podcast ever again um uh so i'm accessing this through a book uh he is getting this from um aquinas and um augustine uh far before him this book came out in 1977 uh when i brought this up with the group uh graham said oh it's a guy who wrote small beautiful which is true that's a book i've never read but it's definitely one that schumacher is better known for yeah who was schumacher what was his deal he worked with uh john mayer canes um he's a kenyan he is kenyan um uh i'm absolutely reading the back of the book so anyway um so he wrote small is beautiful that's most of what he's known for but um this book a guy for the perplexed is the one that he was most proud of um on his deathbed he gave copy to his daughter and said this is what my life has been leading to this book um it uh it's an incredible read very short is the thing i feel i need to say um it would be it'd kind of be bad if you're like small is beautiful i don't like a 700 book people may not take him seriously um right that's true no small is beautiful isn't it it's like a dieting book isn't it like i just don't like that i really don't like that title oh a dieting book a dieting book yeah i like that uh so back to the perplexed is only 140 pages um what he when he goes through those 140 pages it's very dense um but it's very worthwhile we'll be picking up a topic that's kind of after the book but there's some kind of bill left to it that we probably need to do just so if any of this makes sense um school us maybe let's let us be schooled so when you all are talking so when we talk about materialism what does materialism say what does that word mean believing that there is nothing beyond the material of our universe yeah so hard materialism is exactly that and then soft materialism would be uh maybe you don't hold that heart to your very core but acting in such a way that only you can only know what you can measure that things are only made up of matter yeah miracles miracles can exist because it means an outside force would act upon nature there are no spirits there is no god there are no like it's only the matter in the universe we are electric meat yeah so that would be the coolest band name oh yeah totally so that um uh so when it's applied to humans you'd say that's not really a good point to make but um there are things that are are material there are things that um don't have spirit right when you there are things in this world that are like that can you think of a name for this like what are things that have no spirit and are just the material substance like a rock like a rock the rock is an example um an actual rock not the rock um yeah so a kind of generous person right here he's a nice guy there's a new movie coming out with the rock and it's his family strapped in a unfinished skyscraper that's diehard but anyway um so i've seen the uh the poster for it because this is not one where people were like yeah he can make the jump yeah hopefully he does roughly very short movie so uh so grab the rocks and absolutely there's a category of things that are just the material that there's no um there's nothing else to it um and of those things like observation and empiricism makes a lot of sense to do like if you have a question about the element iron you should probably bring a microscope and do some tests on it and look at that thing to understand cause and effect. For something at that level, it makes a lot of sense to do that. So we're looking for these four levels of stuff that we can categorize. So what is one level higher?

What is one level more complex than the term he uses is mineral, but Brock has a good way thinking about it. What's one level above a mineral? Something gross, like a plant. How do you do this at the time?

I kind of think I know where you're going with this. I was going to say something that is inert, but carries information, like a book. Wouldn't that be one level higher? It isn't just simply inert.

And by studying it with a microscope, we can't necessarily, like looking at the little letter A isn't going to tell us anything about it. But that's an artifact that isn't created in nature. That's something that gets derived from I think your top category. From a human, which will be at the top of this.

Sure, sure. But nonetheless, it is an object that exists. I mean, the criteria wasn't that they had to be not. Naturally occurring.

And there are naturally occurring things that bring coded information. Like, oh, DNA? Don't say like the object itself. So the book itself, if no one reads it, it is functionally a rock.

It's a paperweight. It does nothing more than that. So the book would still be at that lower level of mineral. But Graham said it so.

Plant is that next level up. What's the difference between a mineral and a plant? They have a vegetable soul. Some people do that phrase, but I'm very confusing soul.

It means it can grow and it grows and reproduces itself. It's the presence of life is the difference between a rock and a plant. And just based on a last conversation where we found out that none of us know anything about physics, I'm sure someone will have a really good answer to say that well, there is actually technically motion inside of that rock because of the subatomic level of stuff that's happening. But I don't know.

Motion is not the only thing of life. You know, a rock left to its own design will just sit there. Motion under volition. Whoa.

But the plant character can't work to move. So volition will be the next level up. Yeah. Because the plant, you can put a seed in the ground and it'll grow up.

What's happening there is that it needs water to do that. It can't get its own water. It needs sunlight to grow. It can't get its own sunlight.

So there's a reaction. But plants do grow towards the sun. Heliotaxis. There's a word for it.

Yes. But it's different than the next level up. But it's different than a dog. Which is, can go and hunt its own food.

Animals are the next one up. So it's not just a, so they have a material substance. The animal soul. So they share, there's something common between the mineral, but there's the physicality.

There's life, which is what they share in common with the plant. Then grow. And then they also have consciousness. They also have the ability to go after a goal.

To, if I'm a dog and I need food, they can think, I need food and go get food. They can think, I need water. What would the difference be between a conscious volition and volition? Because the plant moves towards the sun.

Like it is needing a thing and it will move toward it. A rock can't do that same thing, but an animal can choose to move forward. Is there a word for volition under? Stimulus versus motive.

It's what Schumacher calls it. So at that lowest level of mineral, you can do stuff so you can kick a rock and you can find out causes with minerals. With plants you're experiencing stimulus. You can give water and it does something reaction to it.

It is life. That is happening. But it's not in the same way with an animal. So you can put rats in a maze and they will try and figure out the best way to eat a piece of cheese and they can try different paths.

The plant wouldn't do that. The plant would move toward whichever way the sun is. But isn't... Yeah, it'll move toward whichever way the sun is.

So stimulus versus motive. Or consciousness. Motive or consciousness. AJ's looking very intensive and I'm waiting for that question.

I'm probably just misunderstanding botany here, but plants will grow toward a water source even if they have no... From my understanding, even if they have no experience of that water. Like if there's a stream nearby, their roots will grow towards that. Or it may just be that they send out shoots in every direction and then the ones that are in the water, they fall off.

That's probably more likely. I have no idea. I'm only making this too complicated. There's this very complicated difference between a mineral plant, that addition of life.

When Schumacher talks about it, he turns them all into equations for no fair reason. He just calls it X. There's this X thing that exists in plant that we usually call life. But it's complicated.

I agree with that 100%. So we have minerals to plant. Plant to animal. So animals have consciousness.

And animal has material, they have life, and then they have consciousness, they can have motive, they can direct themselves towards something. What is a level above animal? Human. Human.

Rational soul. Pop star. Pop star. Pop star was the answer looking for.

I thought you were going to say pop tart twitch. You don't think they have volition. But I'm here to show you. Golf on the shelf.

I'm sorry. It doesn't move always, but it moves sometimes often enough to make me very concerned for my safety. Do animals feel sad? Um, are we derailing?

No, no, no, no. Because I'm wondering like, this is something they can feel pain. I can tell you they absolutely feel sad. So that's the thing.

Ginger, when our dog lost her eyesight, she moped in the middle of the floor for a week. She'd just sit and mope. It was the saddest. So there's just something in the bestial nature that also has emotions that maybe you can, maybe they're not as complex as human emotions, but they have it.

And perhaps that's also maybe a difference between plants. Maybe the carrot doesn't care that it's murdered for your salad. That's a good point. Or just can't communicate it.

That's terrifying. Although the mandra group screams at you when you pull it out of the ground. It's not a Harry Potter reference. That's a really dark.

Sorry. It will get better, maybe? What is the difference between an animal and a human? What does a human have that an animal is not?

Reason. Reason to get one? Maiden God's image. Maiden God's image is a great answer.

I say guilt, but I've seen guilty dogs before. That's good. So what Schumacher adds to a human that's not present in an animal is self-consciousness. So consciousness is...

So like dogs don't feel bad when they're wearing, like when they have a funny haircut? No, they do. I've seen some dogs, so when they get a funny haircut, they are self-conscious. I think it's that the dog never has a moment where he's like, I am alive.

And I want to cherish my life. So also, so consciousness is, so the dog can say, I want water, I'm going to go get water. That's conscious. They're making that choice if you don't do that.

Self-consciousness is the ability to look at that thought of, I want water. Do I really want water? What is water? What is the nature of, like, whatever.

I tend to think that the higher functions of humanity relate to philosophy in some way. And so that's where self-consciousness comes in. I know that's not shared by everyone at the table. No, the higher function is philosophy.

I still think it's the highest. And then the highest is pottery. That's the next level. You're mocking me.

You're mocking me a little bit. Okay, so animals have consciousness, but humans have self-consciousness. They're able to look at what they want and then make judgments on that, that would be self-consciousness. Another word is will.

Will is another thing that we look at and says. Okay, so that is, so there's a name for these, he calls it the chain of being, is this increase from mineral, plant, animal, human. Have you heard this one again? So it's the mineral, soil, the vegetable, soil, the animal, soul, and the human, soul.

Does Plato talk about it? I don't know if Plato talks about it, but it was a bigger, it's, we may have talked about it when we talked about the cosmos, the medieval cosmos. Yeah, there's an order. Oh, that's what it is.

Yes, it talks about it. Yeah, and so what we're getting at with materialism is to say that, so there's higher complexity with each level. A mineral is less complicated than a plant, is less complicated than an animal, is less complicated than a human. Namely through empiricism, namely through just a study group of people and see what they do, and then make a statement from there.

Yeah, but I ain't read no dog books. No dogs wrote a book. Yep, you tell them. You sure told those dogs.

So that sets up, okay, so those are the increasing level of complexity, which gets us to adequateness, or adequatio. So when students read the books in your classes, or, I don't know, think of when the last time you all went to the symphony. About two weeks ago? Eighth grade?

We got tickets, we got season tickets this year. It's good, it's really good. So when you go to the symphony, do you enjoy it? I always leave saying, I wish I loved this more.

Oh, not that I dislike it, but it's the same sort of feeling that I have in any kind of opera, or like a big epic poem I read for the first time. It's the same feeling I had when I read Paris Loss for the first time, or if I read, I've only read the Aeneid, I think, once or twice. And when I read it, I always think to myself, to really enjoy this would take a lot more work, and it would require a lot more knowledge of the thing than I currently have. So, like, when I leave, we went to the symphony, and we listened to Prokofiev, who was a Russian composer in the war, pre-World War II, post-World War II Soviet.

And I never really heard about him, and when I listened to it, I could tell that Prokofiev is very different than Brahms, very different than Beethoven, and I know they're separated by, like, three, four hundred years with these composers, but I just don't have enough frame of reference to be able to say, to be able to, like, place them in their historical categories. It's the same thing with art. I don't have enough, sort of, knowledge to be able to talk about Rembrandt versus, you know, in his era versus the Impressionists in their era. And so every time I'm listening, I always, I feel like there, it's, like, I have no taste.

Like, I feel like this is a delicious meal that I'm just like, I want to put ketchup on it, right? Like, that's how I feel. I was just thinking of funny things to put ketchup on. It wasn't important.

It's very important. You know, like, you're at a high, like, a restaurant lotto, and you're like, oh, I don't get this. You've got this restaurant where, so, like, you probably watch the restaurant on, like, Chef's Table on Netflix, and then you get this plate of, like, tiny, beautiful food, and you're just like, as you put the ketchup on it. Yeah, exactly.

They mix all the food. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think that is a perfect metaphor for what we're talking about today. So, AJ, if you went to the symphony, how would you feel going through it?

I feel like I played trombone for what you're doing in high school? Yeah, it's impressive watching people who are good at what they do. Yeah, it really is. So, how can I imagine you take an elementary school kid, a cousin or something, you go to the symphony with him, and you walk out, and you say, hey, what do you think?

They hate it. They probably slept. And why? Why would they hate that?

Because the weird thing, they both heard the same notes. You both heard the same notes. But you had a different experience more than they did. Why?

Because I know more about it, yeah. Because I have an experience of people playing their instruments poorly. I know those few years my little sister was learning violin and insisted on playing in the middle of the house versus people who can actually play violin well. And she can now, but those first few years were at trial.

And my first few years playing trombone and what people can really do. And having tried to write music, you end up knowing how difficult it is to write something good. And sometimes it especially helps if you know historically what the song is about, like the 1812 overture and that sort of thing. Yeah, and Schumacher, he talks about the music example.

He also talks about the example of the book. So, in front of me right now, there's a crimson, what color is that? It's a red dictionary that's sitting in front of me. So, at one level, what is sitting in front of me is a collection of paper that is leather bound?

I don't know what that is. Like, at some level, all that is in front of me is the material itself. And that's an accurate thing to say about that, but it's not a complete thing to say about the dictionary sitting in front of me. I can also, I can say that I didn't know about it, I can know that it has definitions inside of it, which the dictionary is actually a bad example because you can't really get so, I'm going to pull out the Odyssey, but we can all say the Odyssey.

It's sitting right in front of us at one level, it's just a collection of pages. That's an accurate thing to say about that. If I were slightly higher function, I might be able to say that's red on the cover. If I were slightly higher function, I'd say it's Homer on the cover.

The author, it says the letters, it's not a picture of Homer. Would that be funny? This is Homer. And those are all true things to say about it.

If I'm even a step above that, I can read through it and understand the plot of the story that's happening inside of the Odyssey, which is good, but even still not a complete understanding of what's happening inside of that book. There are themes inside of that book that's above that. And then, Mortimer Rattler says that this is kind of the highest way of reading is, I think he calls it synthetically, where you read across books to say what different authors say about the same thing. And I think this is where critique and synthesis comes in.

And this is one of the reasons I think people have such a hard time with even movie critics, not liking a movie that they enjoy. Well, part of it is that the critic has seen way more movies than you and has probably studied film and knows what good editing is versus bad editing versus mediocre editing. And they can say, this is a bad film because the ending was too abrupt, the beginning was too long, the cinematography was bad. And you're like, I saw a horse jump over a train.

That was cool. Character motivations don't make sense. And you're like, what is she, a space wizard Jedi? And she flies through the broken ship and my kids think it's amazing.

I think it's the stupidest thing. Or, yeah, where I have beef with some of the, like even a couple of the novels we read senior year, but it's just because there are certain things that I don't like about the writing, but it comes from experiencing knowing what makes good writing and good novels and having been widely read, right? So this is Unquatio. So this is Schumacher, chapter four.

What enables man to know anything at all about the world around him? Open quote. Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object, said Plotinus, 980-270. Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

Wait, his name was Plotinus? P-L-O-T-I-N-U-S. Oh, I was hoping it was P-L-O-T-N-E-S-S and he had to be a writer. Plotinus is good fun.

Plotinus, you'll know Plotinus. No, do not. So a part of what's happening with the student reading the book for the first time is that they're not yet fitted to the object. They do not yet have the faculty to be prepared.

Maybe you disagree with this. Do you disagree with this? In a sense, they're not ready for the book because it's their first time going through it. It's their first time being introduced to many of the ideas contained in those ways.

It makes, yeah, thinking that I want the students to have, like, read it twice to read it. Right, exactly right. Even then, it doesn't necessarily do it. Even with the Iliad and Odyssey, like I said, my kids can't know how important they are early.

And they probably won't know until they've read it and then read a bunch of other stuff and they realize it and then that's when they come back and they think, okay, knowledge is even more. It used to frustrate me when students would come back and they would say things like, I'm learning this thing now, I'm learning, whatever, whatever. Well, I've had this experience of knowledge and understanding in college. Man, I wish they taught us this back in high school.

We did. Yeah, and that's the thing. Actually, all of that was available to you. The feast was there.

You just thought it was gross. You didn't have utensils to eat it. So then I stopped sort of taking offense with that because that's just the game. That's just the growing up.

Well, there's that and there's also that they don't have to listen. You didn't talk about this and I was like, actually, we talked about it six times and in the review. We talked about it, you didn't listen. I think that's what I was getting at is that the free metaphor is so spot on because it's absolutely everything that is, I'm using the English example because you're English teachers but we're covered in math.

Bring it to our level. Everything that is being offered in these classes is a feast. It's all fine cuisine. It's all, whatever.

It's all gelato all the time. That's why I say that. But the problem is more with not having utensils. It's not, I brought this up yesterday.

I was talking to people about it and so I'll make a point eventually about this. So one way of reading is that students, it's not just students, it's me, me approaching a book. I don't have the tools for it. The other side is having the will to acquire those tools.

I guess that's the thing I wanted to ask you all. Is it a skill problem? I'm not going to read the Odyssey or is it I just don't want to read the Odyssey? So we should just teach critical thinking skills, Thomas?

Is that what we should be doing? You just created a modern high school, my friend. No, I mean, you can't learn, like the skills are byproducts that you learn by going through the thing with a guide as opposed to saying like, I'm going to teach you how to experience the experience and let you go experience it yourself. It doesn't work that way.

You need to do the thing with a person who appreciates it and you don't appreciate it and maybe at first you need to mimic the appreciation that the guide has and then eventually you will actually appreciate the thing. And that's, I mean, that's kind of been, that was definitely my experience with art. I did not appreciate or understand art. My wife did.

And we went to many museums when we lived in Amsterdam and we would drop different European cities and go to big old museums where they have all this amazing art. And I essentially like faked it until I felt it, right? And she was going through these things and she was pointing out things that I would never have thought about, brush strokes and getting really close and looking at things and talking about the history of it to the point where I had enough tools to do it myself, but I couldn't have just learned those tools without actually going and, and... realizing that i didn't appreciate it as much as i wanted to so yeah it's uh so i don't think you can do it on a skill level without going through the books yeah so in many ways like teaching you gotta learn by doing just like i hate to bring back pottery but you you can't watch somebody throw a bowl 30 times and then throw the bowl throw the bowl you have to do it you have to fail for six months at doing it i hear that japanese potters they actually when you're interning with a japanese potter they don't let you keep anything for two years um everything you make they smash until you remake because it's not good enough like you're just not there yet yeah i feel like whatever yeah we should just light their essays on fire well i'll just say when a little kid comes home and has the drawing for you and wants to go and refrigerate what you're actually going to do two years later what is this trash draw again i have a beard a question that's been bubbling in the back of my mind is how is what we're talking about not just another log in the fire that's going to make me a snob like i have taste you don't because that is you're listening it's a little bit of kerosene on an re-roaring flame so so after this point we're just talking about what this concept is and so implications of this is what will come next so again i just want to say what does aquaccio what enables man to know anything all about the world around him knowing demands the organ fitted to the object and that's what aquaccio is is developing that capacity is developing that um with that organ with the senses developing yourself to be able to know to be able to know an object so what's the implications of this one implication of this is that will be snobby or regrets you could but so so one way to look at it is say i have better taste you have worse taste that's kind of the end of it the way i read out of aquaccio is that um all of our tastes are being developed not so even taste it kind of is being developed and grown over time and so um what is unfair is to look at a freshman and say you know your taste is horrible um you know read better books because they're being developed like you know it'd be kind of weird they came in and they were reading i'm trying to look for a big book that's around here you list these by james joyce like that would be weird if they came in their freshman year reading that stuff right or they like good music yeah because they're still growing into that yeah they need to go through pop punk before they get something good we all did that they all got rough years but like even if you were to take great music and play it for them they wouldn't be ready for it and so um it's smaller steps to get them eventually to good taste music good taste books good taste whatever um so i don't know i think an implication also is patience with people as they're going into that and only that but i would say patience with certain arts like on a certain level if you hate something it might be that you just don't get it like you need to learn something more about it so if i like with uh with moby dick i read that man i hated that book i hated it so much and then talking to katherine ball who teaches the book she gave me some fantastic advice about how to approach it how to read it and then second time through i just i love the advice the advice she gave you the advice and this is like you listener trust me this is the way you gotta go with moby dick because there are a lot of chapters in there that just do not matter like there's one on the forehead of the whale there's one there's a couple on carvings of whales important and they just like to the story they don't matter much but if you look at the book less like an adventure novel and more like a whaling journey it's a lot easier because on a whaling journey it's not gonna be all fun and waves and you know getting paid and getting oil it's there's gonna be a lot of drudgery days there's gonna be days where you're just sitting on the deck nothing's happening you learn a lot about whales you're gonna learn a lot about whales you're gonna learn about random stuff in the boat that doesn't even matter like how to set up a line for a harpoon when you throw it you're gonna think about things like whale foreheads like it's just gonna be a long time and not everything is gonna be completely linear and if you go with the book like all right this is gonna be hard it's gonna take some work i'm gonna learn a lot i wasn't super stoked about learning but here we go then and it's like a little pageant of a natural whale journey so you can feel like you've been a whaler when you read this book by having been bored and learn a lot about whales yeah you can put aside your hunger for the new and enjoy stuff as it comes and pull out the worthwhile pieces of it just like on a long family road trip it's not all gonna be awesome but you can pull out those great little nuggets i read moby dick this past summer and i read pretty much all of it in two weeks when i was at a cottage with my whole family my parents my sister and brother-in-law and their kids and my days really were i would read moby dick for like three hours in the hammock and then i would go in the canoe and canoe around like up in canada i would go in the canoe and canoe around and just think about like i know there's no whales in the lake but just think about all the things he's talking about water and fish and i know it was so to me yeah it was that and there are some times when you're at college for two weeks and it's not always fun sometimes you're bored and uh yeah i mean you got to appreciate the time that the book came out when people paid a lot of money for the book they expected to get a lot of book right it was an expensive book they wanted a lot of pages because it was supposed to be past time and there he was actually one of the like he experienced whales he knew what he was talking about and so the information coming out it wasn't like he just misunderstood what was going on this was the best stuff that there was on whales at the time so yeah but i think also what you all are talking about is the difference between being an animal and being a human that it's very it's so easy to pick to open up your deck it's like this is boring and that'd be the end of it that's what an animal would do they would react to the stick they would react to what happened so in 11th grade when they come back and they look this is boring i'm going to go you animals what the difference is that no one harvests me for my oil there's that yeah that's the difference between you and your oils um but but what he said that animals don't is will is self-consciousness you can say i'm bored by this book but it's worth the reading and so the experience of boredom is okay like that boredom just it's a piece of information that you feel a certain way about a book that is not a comment on the book it's comment about you and having developed self-consciousness allows you to understand that or think about that so you should feel bored while reading a book but giving it immediately and then saying i'm sure to read spartos for the rest of the time in the you either can be developing higher faculties than yourself of like yes i'm bored but i can get through boredom or i'm given my boredom and i only entertain myself all the time one will make you a better person one will make you a worse person that's just an observation based on that um there's hope there's hope to develop to that level of happiness of the faculties um if homer was able to compile a book called the odyssey if um milton was able to put together a book paradise lost and people across times able to read it and enjoy it there's hope for our faculty to develop to that point to appreciate it at that same level uh i think great questions about like does everyone have the same capacity is an interesting question but i think you all agree the problem is rarely capacity it's more um will it's more um intention that's my yeah no i would agree with that um yeah because and i say prevalent philosophy of you know self-righteous just i don't think there's a word for it entertainmentism like there's why should i work hard i can be entertained and be fine and that again that is the animal side of the person so like so it's not to say that it's bad it's just to say that there's more to human than just that so you should be entertained like you should have fun you shouldn't just be working all the time willing yourself all the time because human is made up of all the parts of animal plus will so you should still there's and to add to that hope there's a side you gather strength as you go a couple podcasts ago we were talking about how the brain is webbed and the more that you learn the more capacity you have to learn and i've been recently enjoying the um writings of Churchill his history of the english-speaking people and as i read it i'm i just love it i'm enjoying the language and the way that he he's talking about and i know that even like five years ago i wouldn't enjoy it but now five years later i'm enjoying it because i like content but also i'm thinking of him as a writer in how i can teach my students to be writers to write something enjoyable and so there's this you know five years ago i was you know 29 or whatever and uh um and just the idea that but uh that you continue to increase the capacity and when you when you see that you can pass back and think about how far you've gone it gives you a lot of motivation to continue a 10th grader doesn't have that a 10th grader does not i mean they have a little bit and they can look back to what they liked in sixth grade and what they like now they've been forced to do that but they've been sort of yeah um whereas the motivation to do it yourself is um i kind of think it's you have less excuses not to when you're older because you can see the change um but then you also don't have like outside force doing it and making you do it yeah i've had that same experience not necessarily with reading churchill but definitely with writing i used to think after the first couple years of reading exclusively ninth grade essays all year that i was getting worse at writing just because i i've been reading as much good writing and it was just i mean that's my ninth graders but and things that haven't gone through an editor publishing process right so i didn't have a feel as much of the pros and then i worked a little more and i've been working with writing and teaching my ninth graders writing and then i went back to some of my college essays and i was like wow this is a train wreck this has two theses it's this paper trying to do two different things and not very well the paragraphs aren't cohesive and i was like wow i actually have come a little ways and then even recently having studied some things in you know the immortal strong and white and i'm reading a couple other writing manuals i don't think i ever would have by choice jumped into a writing manual college never like i figured i was good enough writing i was fine i was a good writer i look back i was not a good writer and now you know even though i don't have to i want to learn how to write an email that's compelling so that's really good and i think maybe a final like practical takeaway of what this is about is the example you just gave a while ago of um talking with you about reading through moby dick um because we um humanity is a trait across the three of us across all our students across all humans that we interact with and so to say that you read a book and you find it boring at first is okay like you can identify with that um because you probably do that at some point um but then you can also you can still encourage people to say um yeah it's not a problem for a reaction to be boredom or confusion or this is really hard you can identify and say yes it's true but um that will change so yep anyway that is aquaccio um cool yeah uh the back of the complex is a really good book uh james shaw is a he's a priest i think um yeah we got the priest he did a podcast on the art of manliness and one of his like four books of like if you think that you care about learning you should read this book and it's very good so i encourage you to pick it up all right thank you thomas so that has been our classical stuff episode does anybody have any quotes they want to give as a commonplace i wanted to say this so yes um the process of how people i guess improve or change in their taste especially um this is a quote from um of course uh one cannot i say attain supreme knowledge all at once only by gradual training a gradual action a gradual unfolding does one attain perfect knowledge in what manner a man comes moved by confidence having come he joins having joined he listens listening he receives the doctrine having received the doctrine he remembers it he examines the sense of the things remembered from examining the sense that things are proved of having proved desire is born he ponders pondering he eagerly trains himself and eagerly training himself he mentally realizes the highest truth itself and penetrating it by means of wisdom he sees in the modern vernacular he gets good yep yep this is gd good good all right thank you this is uh aj graham and bees signing off as far as classical stuff we got wrong well i screwed up the recording last podcast there's always that sorry about that guys i'm the worst and uh yeah you can check us out on classicalstuff.net you can send us emails at classicalstuff at veritasacademy.net you can tweet at us at clsscalstuff is there an at twitter that's at classicalstuff if you know how to find us just find us figure it out this is use the google machine all right and uh that's that draws to a close so thank you for listening and we will see you next time you at aquashio you're all wizard harry i feel like work in that universe would be so easy because you just use a spell like i gotta take my rugs to the darning wizard and you just line them all be like aquashio aquashio aquashio it's so easy like drag lane it's easy how does anyone make money in this world there's only one job you can have that's like selling wands or maybe selling food like those are the only two shops in the wizarding world wands and food i feel like you come up with spells like there's no spell creation it's like an app it's like a spell developer like an app developer yeah but at a certain point like i don't know it was never clear how much magic could do like can you conjure food could you conjure food i don't know if you are an expert on harry potter lore email us at classicalstuff at veritasacademy.net what if that's the thing we get most working out for oh man all right well thanks again and we'll see you later you