73 Minutes
 Some Strong Language
 Jeremy Cubas is the host of the Contra Gentiles podcast and a former professor in the Humanities Department at the University of Alaska.
 Jeremy joins Pete to give a quick overview of Aristotle's thought. Jeremy then explains how its abandonment in the 16th century has led to many, if not all, of the societal problems we face today.
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I want to welcome everyone back to the Piconone Show.

How much trouble you been getting in lately?

I did some some work and then it pissed off some liberals again, but they didn't publish it on the newspaper this time.

I was like, wow, you guys are just, they're kind of obsessed over here.

I don't know what's the problem, but yeah.

Unfortunately, Alaska is probably 1 of the more pathetic political states in the whole country, just the way that they kind of are.

We just have no, I don't know, very strange people.

Alaska, for as much as I love it, the fact that it is my hometown, it's a very strange atmosphere.

So they're kind of pussified in some ways and not pussified in other ways.

But yeah, I think the more people are coming out of state, the more it's becoming more and more blue.

I mean, you also have to question, I mean, if somebody goes there because their company sent them there, the military sent them there, work sends them there, that's 1 thing.

But if somebody goes there on their own, like, they're looking to escape something or, you know, yeah, so, Yeah, I've always had the thought in my mind that, you know, Alaska would be like this weird place because you'd have a whole bunch of people like a bunch of military a bunch of people who were like escaping probably like, you know, Wanted by the law and in the lower yeah, and And then just a bunch of liberals because they have to go everywhere and fuck everything up for everyone.

The amount of sex offenders, registered sex offenders we have here is kind of insane.

But it's just, but you're right, That's, I think I've said that many times just growing up here.

There's, there's a, there's just a handful of reason why most people come here.

I've met probably 4 in my entire life where the story is different, but everybody comes here either because they're running away from something.

And it's like, you either get transferred up here because of the military the oil or you just something happened Maybe it was a divorce.

Maybe it was whatever but people don't just come up here for no reason It's far removed.

I think the The significant like cultural shift from the lower 48 to here is pretty significant.

I mean, I've lived all over Yeah, I could really tell you that that there is something different about Alaska for better or for worse You know, I I think the best way that most people say it is that it's pretty much the most libertarian area that you can live with in a country.

You have cities like Kenai that has a cat mayor because they truly don't believe in politics so much that they don't even elect a human mayor.

But also, along with libertarianism comes a lot of the bullshit of liberalism.

And so it's like, It's coded with this very strange atmosphere that we're not really a red state.

I think a lot of people think of Alaska as a red state, but we're pretty much like our own quasi-libertarian liberal kind of a state.

I don't think I've ever seen in any other place.

Do you guys still get the profit sharing from oil?

The PFT is the it's been reduced significantly because of the previous governor, because he basically kept a lot of the money and nobody has the balls enough to change it.

And so, but yeah, it's still pretty good sometimes.

So I heard you talking on your show about, you were talking about philosophy because of course that's what you do.

And you were talking about philosophers and you were like, well, well, screw that guy.

If you're going to study that person, just study Aristotle.

So it's like, okay, well, I mean, I've talked about a lot of philosophers on the podcast, but I've never, never had someone else talk about Aristotle.

I think for starters, historically, Aristotle was the groundwork for every other philosophical idea that came about until, yeah, you could even say some of Descartes ideas were influenced by Aristotle.

So I would say until probably like the 1700s, 1600s, where it was a complete abolition of Aristotelianism.

Aristotle was the foundational groundwork for most basic understanding of reality.

And so it's like once they rejected it, what we ended up doing now is we fall into the same pre-Socratic issues that kind of plagued philosophy until Aristotle, until Plato, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, I guess that kind of framework.

But for example, this is what my doctoral thesis was actually about.

And so It was the issue of quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of relativity.

And so there is this issue where we cannot marry these 2 ideas because there is a issue with multiplicity, there's an issue with change, There's an issue with, I guess, constants within reality.

Because, you know, the theory of relativity necessitates something to be constant, whether it's the universe, whether it's, you know, particles or whatever you want to place it.

There has to be something constant for the equation to work.

And when it comes to quantum mechanics, there really isn't anything constant.

It goes back to chaos where you just have the multiplicity of electrons being placed as if it comes from nowhere.

So when they did the double-slit theory, there couldn't be detected any kind of causal link of where and why the electrons were placed where they are.

And so when you read the pre-Socratics, this is the same issue that you find with Parmenides and Heraclitus, where you have an issue, a problem of change or multiplicity or whatever, where either Heraclitus is right, where he says everything is just constant change and flux, where there is nothing that's univocal, there is nothing that is constant, or you go back to Parmenidesian point of view, where it says everything that is change and flux is an illusion.

And so all there is, is a constant state of being.

And so when I was reading, when I was in grad school and I was reading some of the research being done by many physicists, there was like 1 physicist, I forgot her name, but people could look it up, where she theorized that everything is pretty much a hologram where, you know, there is such a multiplicity.

There's an infinite amount of possible universes where the universe at which we are experiencing right now isn't real per se.

It's hologramic of a deeper quantum existence.

And so that is very similar to what Parmenides says where you have, everything is changing, flux is just an illusion, but there's only 1 thing that is constant.

And for them, for primaries, a state of being for many quantum physicists, it would be some kind of chaotic placement of electrons where it's not dictated by anything.

And so a lot of the issues that we have today, whether it's something like physics or whether it is in immoral issues, whether it's just basic perception and Ontology of what what can be seen We fall back to the issue.

We don't know what's real anymore and and this is what happened from pre Socrates pre pre Aristotle and then this happens after the destruction of Aristotle.

And there's a reason for that because Aristotle offered a very elegant and rational solution to this problem of multiplicity and change and constant and whatnot.

So could you say that Parmenides was probably at that point the closest to a Christian framework where there's a permanent being and there's just change within it?

I wouldn't say necessarily because he says that change doesn't really even exist at all.

And then I would say Heraclitus is the opposite.

And so yeah, I mean the Christian framework, I would say a lot of it is influenced by Aristotelian framework.

And so the synthesis that Aristotle really presented was that the issue that we're having is that we're understanding multiplicity.

We're understanding movement incorrectly.

And that's really what was the first step for Aristotle to solve the problem.

Because prior to that, as Parmenides kind of said, he says, the reason why change is an illusion or multiplicity is an illusion, because it always brings about the concept of not.

And so for example, if you have this glass and it moves from point A to point B, the only way that it moves to point B if it's no longer point A.

And so just out of necessity, in order for it to exist in point B, it is not in point A.

And this is true about any kind of change or multiplicity.

If you have 2 glasses, the only reason why you have 2 glasses is because this is here and that is there.

And so even if everything else is identical between the 2 objects, the fact that they occupy 2 different spaces encompasses this idea of not being, is that it is only in existence because it is not the other thing.

And so when he says, well, can we define not, can we define nothing?

Can we conceptualize a state of nothingness?

Well, obviously we can't, because the only way we understand nothingness is by understanding something.

And nothing is simply the privation of something.

And so there is no affirmative definition of nothing.

Nothing is contingent on the concept of something.

And so because of that, Parmenides says, well, then this concept is incomprehensible.

We can't really comprehend of nothingness.

And so nothingness is simply an illusion.

And if nothingness is an illusion, then multiplicity is an illusion.

And if multiplicity is an illusion, because of nothingness, so is change, motion, and so on and so forth.

All these things, particular realities are illusory.

And this was kind of the framework that for the most part Heraclitus and many other philosophers were trying to tackle because we'll say, well, it does make sense.

It makes sense that we can't conceptualize nothing and yet we use it all the time.

And so with Heraclitus, it was the reverse.

It was like, well, the only thing that I do know is that things are always changing and that there are many things because that is what I see, right?

To tell me that what I see is an illusion, It seems insane.

It's like, no, that's what I experienced.

And so if that's what I experienced, then that must be the only thing that is real.

When you conceptualize this, a state of being that is unmoving and unchanging, that's just fantasy because I've never experienced that.

So then the only thing is change and change in flux.

And, and again, we could kind of see this in the contemporary world, right?

You, you have empiricists who kind of say, well, the only thing that is real are the things that I see, I have to see to believe in and so on and so forth.

And so a lot of the modern problems are just ancient problems, manifest because of the destruction of Aristotle.

And so Aristotle's solution was simply saying that, well, change and multiplicity, all these ideas, is not necessitated by a state of nothingness.

Rather, it is always in a state of being, but it is the actualization of a potential that exists within the nature of the object.

And so, for example, when we look at something changing, when I look at this glass, I understand that it cannot just change into anything.

It cannot be a frog or a dog or a chicken.

It can become other objects that it is not embedded in its nature.

And so it is true that there's this concept of nothing and not being and there's being, but change only happens in a state of being, in a state of actual reality.

And so Just to diverge a little bit, this is where a lot of like the Newtonian physics actually is based on when they say like Energy is neither created nor destroyed.

It normally moves from from from 1 state of being to the other That there is no basically that there is potential energy and then there's kinetic energy where potential energy exists in the object and within its nature and then is put into motion by something else that's in kinetic energy and so on and so forth.

And so again, the reason why Aristotle's solution is so important is because it is what gave rise to many of these fundamental ideas that we come to later.

But anyways, and so, since all things exist in the state of actuality, if it is an existing state of actuality, change is only a process of an actualization of a potential of something that's already in a state of actuality.

That there is no just motion from being to non-being.

It isn't as if this glass moving from point A to point B means that it's no longer there.

It just means that the potential was actualized to be in this state of being.

But it can still be over here again because that already exists within this nature.

It exists within the nature of every object that we kind of see in the world.

And so understanding change and multiplicity in that way led to a more fundamental, I guess, solution to kind of these intellectual problems that we have to today, because everything is kind of wrested from that primary understanding.

From that, for us, you could kind of determine, well, then how do we discover the nature of an object?

He says, well, you just ask 4 basic questions.

You say, what is the stuff that makes it?

What are its predications or what are its forms?

Where did it come from and what is it for?

And if you answer those 4 things, You know what that object is.

And so like the example I normally give it is of the human heart So if you look at a human heart, you could ask the first question.

What are its predications where it says cone shaped?

It's it's left center of the chest cavity, there's certain arteries that stick out of it and so on and so forth.

These are all its predications, how it exists.

And then you could ask, well, where did it come from?

Well, you could either go to, just like the development in utero, right, where you have the splitting of the endoderm, ectoderm, and mendoderm, and that this is part of the circulatory system that gets developed.

And you could go all through the empirical scientific information for that, but for the sake of this argument, just understand that you could tell its material actualizations within reality.

And so once you understand those basic things, you understand its nature.

And if you don't, you don't know, you don't know what the thing is.

And we kind of function this way still, even though we reject ericitarianism, we function this way.

If you have a cardiac arrest and you call a doctor and he's looking up your asshole for your heart, you'll be like, well, this guy doesn't know what a heart is, right?

Or if he says, is a heart made of metal or is it wood?

It's like, well, then you don't know what a heart is, right?

And when, or if you go there, it's like, what is it for?

And it's like, well, you don't know what it is.

And so we still functionally base things on Erisoterian philosophy because it's just very common sense.

And then that's kind of what I wear They're I present just he's a master of common sense And so when we when we understood the sandals things we understand his nature if we understand the nature We could understand a good version of it in a bad version of it if you have heart arrhythmia That's a bad function badly functioning heart, right?

If you're really tall for example, and you've been your heart beats too quickly for your height, well, you know that's a badly functioning heart.

It has to beat a little slower because it's pumping blood through a larger body, and vice versa.

There's all these mechanics that we could figure out once we understand the nature of the object and Then we could determine good and bad in general from that And so that that very primary metaphysical understanding of reality is basically the framework that built a very sane civilization of the West.

Without that framework, you go back to chaos.

You go back to, I don't know what things are for.

If you talk to many people on the left and you say, well, no, you know, what is, you know, the famous question, what is a woman or what is a dude?

Common sense would be like, well, dudes have dicks, you know, it goes back to kindergarten and cop, you know, boys have penises and girls have vaginas.

And then the left person will be like, well, how do you know that determines what it means to be a man?

And it's like, well, because it does, right?

Like it shouldn't need further explanation.

You could observe every animal in the world and you could determine there's a chick and there's a dude.

I'm going to, you know, if you're breeding dogs, I want this dog to fuck this 1 so it could produce children.

And then they ask, well, what do you think sex is for?

It's like, obviously it gives you pleasure and it produces kids.

But then it was like, how do you know that's the real function of it?

And so we fall back into chaos and not understanding reality.

When you reject just basic Aristotelian metaphysics, which I think gives you just a solid groundwork for understanding what is real, what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful.

I want to hold off on what, in your opinion, what destroyed Aristotle, what made Aristotle go away.

But so I heard Michael Jones say that Aristotle, the great thing about Aristotle was he wrote on everything except economics because economics isn't a serious discipline.

So yeah, so it's actually based still upon these fundamental principles.

Because when you, once you understand the nature of something, you can understand goodness in general.

Like I said, a good functioning heart, or a bad functioning heart, a good functioning arm, bad functioning arm, a good functioning human, and a bad functioning human.

And so that's where this kind of bleeds into morals, right?

Because there is a concept of goodness in general.

This is ontological goodness and ontological evil.

And then there's moral goodness, which only pertains to human behavior.

And so once you begin to analyze a human person, you begin to analyze, well, what is it that makes man, man?

And so there's certain natures that we have.

1 of them is that we are rational animals, right?

And there is no other animal that does, right?

There is no other animal that does, right?

There is no other animal that takes basic, I guess, arbitrary sounds and symbols and constructs a word that has meaning because of a reference.

There is no real other animal that does that we are the only ones that do that There's other animals to communicate.

But as well as we all understand, you know language while these hopefully most people understand language is not solely communication language is is Expression that That's fundamentally what it is.

And so you could communicate with yourself.

And anybody that has kids kind of understands this, right?

Because Whenever we see a child babbling, normally it's not towards a parent.

They're playing with blocks, they're playing with toys.

You know, I have 9 kids and each 1 of them does the same things.

Like when they first started babbling, they're like, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, and they start banging things.

And it's like, they're using this babbling to signify whatever interaction they're having.

And then when they want boobs, you know, they start like doing something to signalize once they go beyond just a crying phase.

They, they, they, they figure other ways to kind of express the things that they want.

And so, so fundamentally language is using, you know, arbitrary sounds and symbols to express something about reality, whether it's like an internal, I'm hungry, or I am sad, or I am happy, or whether it's to point at something like there's a table, there's a block, there's a wall, or whatever.

We're using these arbitrary sounds to refer to some state of reality.

And so we understand that that's an aspect of human beings, that that's a unique aspect that makes us human.

And so it goes into deeper understanding.

But just to cut to the point, because we don't want to talk like for 2 days with it, cut to the point, we understand that there is a state of man that there's a reality of virtue.

And this is where his like Nick McKean virtue ethics come from.

Virtue is normally when you have an act that 1 can do and it is I guess unified or coherent within its nature, and it's normally the mean between the 2 extremes, whatever that action may be.

So when you take an action like bravery, for example, Bravery, you could have the 2 extremes of being a coward or going to war with a butter knife in pajamas, right?

It's like to be a coward is dumb and to go to war with a butter knife is dumb.

But bravery is actually going against some kind of threat and facing that threat properly, with the ability to actually win, with the ability to conquer.

And so you could kind of understand actions between the 2 extremes, but also in accordance to whatever the nature of that action is.

And so every action that we have, let's take eating for example, it has a certain nature, right?

We could ask the 4 questions again, okay?

You have, What is the material reality of eating?

You know, you have teeth, you have mouth, you have tongue mastication, and so on and so forth.

What's the formal reality, the way that it is shaped, what kind of teeth it has, what foods it could break down, and so on and so forth.

You could say where'd it come from, comes from the skeletal system.

Well, it is to both satiate the hunger pains as well as to put nutrients in your body.

And so now we understand the nature of eating, we could talk about the good version of eating and the bad version of eating.

If you eat and then you vomit, you put your finger in your mouth, it's like, well, that's perverting the act of eating, because you're privating the body of nutrition.

You're just doing this solely for the purpose of pleasure.

And then if you eat too much, you're like, well, then you're gluttonous, because you actually deteriorate your body by eating too much.

You're not putting nutrition to your body actually killing yourself quicker and so then we could say a moderate for a version of eating a proper form of eating is Is the virtuous form of eating?

You know, you could do that with sex you could do it with With I guess laziness, you know Why laziness is a vice not a virtue You could do it with human activity.

You could do that with every kind of human action.

And so understanding the natural law, understanding the way things are, you could begin to determine, just in very common sense reason, what is the good version of that and what is the bad version of that and the more information we get the better it is For determining that right now Because obviously you could be wrong.

You're like, oh fuck, I thought that might've been good, but now that I know that that actually deteriorates your body, it could be actually bad for you.

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Episode 950: The Consequences of Abandoning Aristotelian Philosophy w/ Jeremy Cubas of Contra Gentiles