▶︎ 0:00 At the end of the previous lecture, we talked about conatus, and we explained that Spinoza defines it as the essence of a human being's existence, and that it is a striving to persevere in being which we can recognize both in body and in mind. The way we feel conatus in the mind is as desire. When we want something, it actually constitutes our sense of self.
▶︎ 0:30 We can find this as early as Plato when he discussed eros as the driving force of human life, which aims us towards what we lack, and through our appreciation of what we lack, we define ourselves. For example, someone who loves money is a greedy person, and someone who loves fame is an ambitious person, and someone who loves other people is a humane person, is a good person. We understand what we are through the things that we love.
▶︎ 0:58 This is, again, a guiding notion through the history of Western philosophy, and every philosopher who talked about love, and not a lot have done this very openly, have gone with this intuition.
▶︎ 1:11 But before I go on and talk about the centrality of conatus in Spinoza's thought, I do want to take a moment to go back and talk about how this shapes ethics in the context of mind-body relations, and this context was built by Plato and Aristotle. In Plato, we have this, it's a very rough picture that I'm painting here, but a dualistic picture of mind versus body. We have this mind, this immortal soul, which has the ability to understand, and it aims to overcome the desires and the needs of the body in order to attain eternal truth. And the soul goes on after the body is finished. And all of Plato's ethics is built in a way around this idea.
▶︎ 2:02 Aristotle has a very, very different approach, and it is also very important to understand Spinoza's ethics because in a way, Spinoza's ethics is very much Aristotelian. Aristotle, like Spinoza, sees human beings as an inalienable part of the natural world. We are animals like every other animal. We are just rational animals. And we are constituted of a mind and a body of which the soul or the mind is the form of the body. So we can't really conceive our minds as divorced from the body itself. The functions of a human being inform what its soul is.
▶︎ 2:50 And this creates a naturalized ethics. What does this mean? That when a living being acts, it acts in a teleological manner. That means it acts towards an end, towards a goal. And for an organism, a living thing, this goal is to be itself as much as possible. So it's a naturalized ethics.
▶︎ 3:15 For Aristotle, the ultimate ethical goal is to be as human as possible, and in order to be as human as possible, you have to understand what a human is. He says a human is a rational animal. That is, to be the best human you can be is to be the most rational human you can be. But this is always informed by the natural state of the organism.
▶︎ 3:38 This is really, really important. Why is this important especially? Because in many ways, the Platonic ethical ideal is centered on conflict. In Plato's Republic, he talks about a tripartite division of the soul into appetites, thumos, or the social aspect of the soul, and the rational soul. And he says we recognize these three parts of ourselves through their conflict. Sometimes they're in conflict, they fight, and that's how we know that they are distinct, they're different, and our goal is to have the rational part take control.
▶︎ 4:20 This is a very different picture from the Aristotelian picture. Aristotle would say that a good person, his body and his soul work in harmony towards the goal of being the best human. So if we take two different people who do the right thing for different reasons, one person has found a wallet in the street with money, and he takes the wallet as is to the police department without taking out the cash in true desire that the person who has lost it will find it. Someone does a good deed. If this person did this thing through a conflict, for example, he wanted to keep it for himself, but then he didn't do it, and he overcame his desire and went to the police station, Plato would say, "Good for you." Aristotle would say, "You're not such a good person. You have to be in harmony with it. You should joyously take the wallet to the police station. And if you're not happy about it, you're not such a good person as you think you are."
▶︎ 5:22 The conflict signals a weakness of mind. And as long as there is a weakness, you can be overcome. So that's a bad thing. This naturalized ethics which shows that a person can harmonize their inner state in order to do the right thing joyously, with joy, this is the Spinozistic ideal also. Because Spinoza sees human beings as part of a natural world, as modes of God, which are completely inalienable from the world that we live in. Which again, this is different from the Platonic picture. Good.
▶︎ 5:58 So this is understood? Excellent. Spinoza defines desire as conscious conatus. Again, conatus is the striving to persevere in being. It's this life force that we all have, and it's primary in his philosophy. Now, this movement toward things that we want, which inform our very sense of being alive, this is what it feels like to be alive, to want something, to have an urge towards something. This is what constitutes the affect of life.
▶︎ 6:37 Affect for us would be emotion. Maybe I'll write that because I'm going to say affect a lot, and it's a word that we don't use a lot. So Curley of course uses affect, and that is fantastic, and we will use affect also with Curley. But there was a previous translator of Spinoza, I think it was Elwes, who translated the Latin affectus into emotion. And one of the reasons I like emotion, first of all, it's the word that we use and it's what we feel, and the other words that Spinoza will characterize as affects, we will understand as emotions like joy, sadness, and so forth.
▶︎ 7:21 And also, I like that the word motion is in it because it's very important. Because it's the movement of the soul. Emotions are movements of the soul, and people who have no emotions are dead. As we say, we're the dead on the inside. Because they don't move. Moving things are living things, and static things are dead things. So always remember, affect means emotion, and this is very important. And obviously it makes sense that our basic drive, which is the conatus, will be what informs and constitutes our other emotions.
▶︎ 7:55 So I want to start with the third definition of part three. We can all open our text. I hope that now in lecture three, everyone has bought the text and they all have it. Obviously. I am very proud. So you go to part three on the origin and nature of the affects. Right. I'll remind you that part one was of God, and then we zoomed into the mind, so part two was on the mind, and now part three is of the affects, which is a part of the mind. It's a certain modification of the mind.
▶︎ 8:28 And now we will go to definition three. And of course, I encourage everyone to read the preface to part three, which is very short and very ingenious, in which he details what he's going to do. So definition three reads, "By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body's power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time the ideas of these affections. Therefore, if we can be the adequate cause of any of these affections, I understand by the affect an action, otherwise a passion."
▶︎ 9:03 So we have two types of affects. We have actions and passions. Now, in today's society, in today's vernacular, obviously everyone thinks that being passionate is fantastic. So the truth is that being passionate is being weak. Passion means to suffer. Pasión, the Passion of Jesus Christ is the suffering of Jesus Christ.
▶︎ 9:30 Being passionate means being passive. It means letting things overwhelm you, letting things take over you. It means that you are not active, you are not in control, and you are weak. So remember this. Next time when you congratulate yourself on being so passionate, we should all take a moment and say, "Wow, this really exemplifies the weakness of my nature." Good.
▶︎ 9:56 So when we talk about the division of affects into actions and passions, we talk about the source of the movement. But another very important distinction, and this is what I want to focus on for this moment, is that in the definition of the affects in definition three, we are talking about an increased or diminished ability to move forward in the world, to act, as it were. And this is the very important thing.
▶︎ 10:29 Emotions in this sense can be very deceiving. For Spinoza, joy, one of the primary affects, is a quintessential feeling of the power to act being aided. It's just feeling stronger. Now, a lot of times when we feel happy, when something gives us joy, we do feel empowered. And the opposite of joy, sadness, is very intuitively understood as something that diminishes our power to act.
▶︎ 10:58 When we are sad, we feel as if the candle burns less brightly. We have less power to act. But this can also be deceiving. Anger, for example, is a type of sadness, but it feels as if it energizes. But the truth is that it does not, because it energizes in a self-sabotaging way.
▶︎ 11:21 So it's not only the way that we feel insofar as it gives us power to act in any given way, because that can be a reflex. When my foot kicks, it can kick very strongly by reflex, but it doesn't mean that it was an expression of my true nature. So we want to feel certain joys, and we want to prevent ourselves from certain sadnesses that either inhibit or aid our power to act. So this is a very delicate difference.
▶︎ 11:58 So it's not if someone were to take mood-enhancing drugs and think that that would make them feel happy, but then they would make themselves dependent on these drugs, that would make them more passive. That is not the kind of act that you want to get used to. So this is different. And something that can feel like sadness, but it's actually born from a very deep love for something, and the sadness is an expression of that love, is not necessarily a sadness that diminishes the power to act.
▶︎ 12:38 So the primary affects that we have are joy, desire, and sadness. Joy is an increase in one's power of acting, and sadness is a decrease. So affectivity is experienced as a dynamic.
▶︎ 12:51 Variation in power, and this is actually our mental lives. So our mental lives are, for Spinoza, necessarily the parallel instantiation of our bodily lives. So longevity is not something to aim for in a blind matter. You don't just want to live for a longer amount of time and maintain the integrity of the body that you think is the body, which probably has changed nearly all of its cellular components.
▶︎ 13:18 I just heard that there are a few cells that exist in the body from conception to death. But even if it didn't, this idea of this body, sometimes it doesn't really represent the I, the sense of self that was supposed to be in it, and then longevity pretty much loses its meaning. So in order to understand this properly, we really need to understand what being is when you strive to persevere in being.
▶︎ 13:47 And for Spinoza, there is a very, very clear answer to this, as it pertains to the mind, which is understanding. A very strong mind is a mind capable of understanding. We hope, we believe that it can be presented in a healthy body, but this is a very delicate question. So this is a question, I think it was raised in the previous lecture. What is health? This is a huge question. I think this should be a whole se... What is health? What does it mean to have a healthy body and a healthy mind? So I don't want to go into it again too much.
▶︎ 14:28 As I said, if we put aside the idea of increase and decrease in the power to act, we can look at the distinction between kinds of affect into actions and passions. Now, actions and passions refer to whether I, as the individual, am the adequate cause of the affect or not, and to what extent I am the adequate cause. I just want to remind you very briefly about what we talked about last time regarding the three kinds of knowledge in Spinoza. We had imagination, reason, and intuitive knowledge. We can call it intuition. Right? Yes. Good.
▶︎ 15:22 For Spinoza, this is something I didn't say last time. I was a bit careful not to talk about the affective life being presented as the parallel of motion and rest as will and intellect. But actually, I was careful about this, and I did talk about the inner affective life, which is the parallel of motion and rest as being affectivity. But there is a place in Part One where Spinoza says that motion and rest are actually parallel to will and intellect. And then in another proposition, he says, "Well, actually," and this is why I was so careful last time, "the will and the intellect are one and the same."
▶︎ 16:11 This is a really interesting point. If any one of you will be interested and they want to, again, I highly recommend this to look back at Descartes. This is super interesting, because we talked about the sense of self being constituted by will. But for Spinoza, we already know that the sense of self will always be constituted by intellect or by some form of knowledge. And by saying that the will and the intellect are one and the same, he's actually collapsing knowledge, these three kinds, with affectivity.
▶︎ 16:51 So what you think, what you think are rational thoughts or thoughts that are not emotive, they are emotions. Every thought is an emotion. Every thought has an emotional register, because the will and the intellect are one and the same. But this is a very big idea here. That every idea has an affective register, because every idea is a form of intellect, which is will.
▶︎ 17:17 When we talk about actions and passions, and we talk about whether we are the adequate cause of our thoughts and emotions, thoughts and emotions being actually one and the same thing, we can look at the three kinds of knowledge and say this.
▶︎ 17:35 When I imagine something, I am, of course, only the partial cause of my idea, of my understanding, because I always relate to something different, something outside of me. The more the outside thing overwhelms me and is responsible for the nature of this idea or affect, the more passive it is, the more passionate it is. So sometimes we can be absolutely overwhelmed by an idea that comes from outside. And the more I am the author of this idea, and in the imagination, it's always like a game. It's always a game of proportions in terms of who is the origin of any given idea.
▶︎ 18:25 The more I am the origin of that idea, the more rational it is because it pertains to my nature. It reflects the structure of my own mind, and again, we discussed this, that rationality is the structure of my own mind. That is why Aristotelian syllogisms talk about structure rather than content. Truth pertains to structure. Good. Excellent. So what is the role of
▶︎ 18:51 Imagination in emotional life? This issue causes us to revisit the myth of individuality that we already discussed in the previous lectures. Why is the myth of individuality so prevalent and so harmful? We feel that by individuating ourselves or creating a false sense, I say it's false, but I'm sure that it doesn't feel false to a lot of people. By creating a feeling of independence from the world around us, we have this fantasy of strength.
▶︎ 19:33 This is precisely the opposite of reality. Since we are modes of God, which are inherently interconnected with the whole of God, which is unique and a single substance, there is no way in which we can be ever fully independent, and this should never be our goal. To be independent is to die. We are completely dependent on other things, on myriad other things, on an infinite number of other things in every single moment of our lives. The sooner we understand this, the better. The sooner we let go of the myth of individuation, the better off we are.
▶︎ 20:12 There is no stupider saying than, "Everyone comes into this world alone, and everyone dies alone." No one comes into the world alone. There is always someone there. There is a woman who gives birth to the child who comes into the world, and they are not alone, and then the woman takes care of the child or someone else. If the woman dies, and she was alone, and then the child is really alone, then he would not be there to say everyone is alone unless someone came along and took them and they were not alone anymore, so they would now come of age in order to say, "Everyone comes into this world alone and dies alone."
▶︎ 20:43 Sometimes people die alone. That is for sure the case, although they're always surrounded by something, and tragedies have. This has nothing to do with. This is only a matter of luck. This myth of individuation is the source of almost all our misconceptions about our emotional lives. Dependence on things that are the right things to be dependent on is the only thing we should be aiming for and never independence because independence is always a lie, and you can never really depend on yourself in the way that you think that you want to.
▶︎ 21:23 Now, the more people are attached to this myth of independence, the more they are actually weak and have imagination and passions rule their lives. Because they feel threatened by outside sources, they are so overwhelmed with this threat that they do not understand that the nature of the outside world is to live in harmony with them as much as possible until, of course, this is not the case, and then the end is not an end of an individuation which was in the first place imagined. Was that clear, or is that really? Good. So the more people live in this imaginative state of their understanding of individuation, the more miserable and fearful they are.
▶︎ 22:17 Now, why is this natural, and why does this happen? This makes a lot of sense. There is a sense in which our individuation does serve a certain form of survival. And this is very true. We have a sense of self that often needs to feel guarded from outside sources, especially when the outside world is ominous, is threatening, and is perceived as bad and is perceived as harmful.
▶︎ 22:59 So what is our greatest harm in life? Spinoza calls it bondage. What does it mean to be in bondage? It means to be a slave to passions. So the experience that he's talking about, the experience that we often as thinking people want to overcome is being carried away by very strong emotions. We want to try to fight this.
▶︎ 23:25 So we have these Eastern ideals of a dissipation of the sense of self. A total unification with something, with something infinite that completely defies a sense of self and therefore eliminates suffering by eliminating the self. This is not the Spinozistic way at all. So he does talk about understanding individuation differently and having a different sense of self in order to overcome suffering, but this is an understanding of a sense of self that finds itself embedded in unique substance, embedded more strongly. So it's actually fortifying a sense of self as part, as any other part of nature itself.
▶︎ 24:17 You and God are the same self. That's what you have to understand. That is your goal. If God is the unique substance and you're a part of God, you are eternal insofar as you are a part of God, and this does not dissipate your sense of self. It really fortifies it in a very strong way. It's just a different sense of self than a specific person who was born to specific parents in a specific place and time and will die.
▶︎ 24:41 Rampant individuation arises from passions because, remember when we said that definitions or a sense of understanding of concepts come from differentiation between, it's a creation of boundaries between something and something else. A lot of times when people are overwhelmed by things on the outside, what it fortifies is the boundary. So even us as living things, our skin. So we become aware of the boundaries of us and the world so that we can have sense, but oftentimes it's a sense of pain. When people feel pain as what manifests their individuation to them, they become overwhelmed with the outside world. They become very much attuned to it in order to avoid the pain, and their sense of self, together with the hatred of the world, is what becomes very strong.
▶︎ 25:40 So it's like a thought of pathological individuation, which is very much connected to passions because they are very much attuned to what is going on outside. They are always attuned to the outside, and never to the inside, and it weakens them. They're very unhappy.
▶︎ 25:56 So if we are all modes of God, and every feeling that we have, the good and the bad, the individuation, the fear, the hate, the love, everything is an expression of our modes of God, shouldn't it be positive because God is so good? First of all, your ideas of good and bad are always understood through morality, through your own perspective toward reality. So in terms of God, there is no good and bad. Everything is good because everything is created. Goodness is manifested in existence itself.
▶︎ 26:31 Now, yes, some people are born with weaker minds than others. Their ability to overcome imagination and mature into reason, and hopefully intuition, is not aided by the world that they live in, and they themselves don't have very much, very, very serious natural talents for it. This is, in a sense, bad for them. This has no special meaning for reality as a whole. Reality will also continue, as we all know, even after the last human is gone. And it has begun long before humans ever came.
▶︎ 27:09 We are not a pinnacle of existence. The ideas of good and bad that we have inherited from monotheistic religions, which have a transcendent God which has created the world in some point in time, with an eye toward the good, and teleology that is somehow, how will I say, is somehow subjected to human proclivities, it's ridiculous to Spinoza. It has no meaning. So another important issue,
▶︎ 27:42 That Spinoza approaches in a very clear way is the social dimension of the affect. He does this precisely in part four, where he talks about bondage, because one of the most difficult things for us to contend with in our emotional lives is other people. This is the number one thing. They piss us off. It's always the people who are to blame. Yes, people are the worst.
▶︎ 28:05 Spinoza understands this very, very, very deeply, and when he talks about bondage, he talks about suffering, the passions, how you're subject to the passions in part four. A lot of that has to do with other people. But then he is, in a sense, optimistic, and he has this social idea of the passions, where we can learn to live together. Maybe it will sound a bit naive, but I think it's really important to understand.
▶︎ 28:34 We will start perhaps with the definitions of part four, the part about human bondage, where he talks about the limited consequentiality of terms like good and bad or good and evil, which is precisely what Nietzsche will be doing about 150 years later, 200 years later. Nietzsche wrote that in 1860, or 1870, and Spinoza was in the 1670s. Exactly two centuries later.
▶︎ 29:01 We can open up the definitions of part four and read definition one. "By good I shall understand what we certainly know to be useful to us." Definition two, "By evil, however, I shall understand what we certainly know prevents us from being masters of some good." And definition eight is one of the most important. He says this: "By virtue and power I understand the same thing. That is, virtue, insofar as it is related to man, is the very essence or nature of man insofar as he has the power of bringing about certain things which can be understood through the laws of his nature alone."
▶︎ 29:40 This idea of power being the most important thing that defines a good person sounds very, very problematic. The thing here will be to understand what power really is. Exerting power over other people doesn't mean subjecting them to your will. It is precisely the opposite. It is a way to manifest your nature so that other people will have the incentive to manifest your power and your nature together with you.
▶︎ 30:15 A tyrant will always be toppled. Violent people will always suffer violence against them. Nonviolent people also suffer violence against them, but then maybe they will be avenged, and maybe people will come to help them, when this happens. The understanding of power as violence is completely mistaken. When we say that virtue and power are the same thing, what we have to understand is that power is necessarily what helps me persevere in my being insofar as it is my nature, and my nature is to understand. And that is what it means to be powerful.
▶︎ 30:59 A person who is being prevented from understanding, that is the most powerless person of all. If you remember, probably not because I didn't emphasize enough. It's my fault. It's my fault. I take responsibility. Reason makes sense to want to attain this. This is totally possible for everyone to be reasonable. It pertains to understanding of common properties. Common properties means something that is in the same degree in the thing and in the whole and is shared between beings.
▶︎ 31:44 Now, the thing I as a human being share the most common properties with naturally are other human beings. I share common properties with all living things, for example, especially with mammals. We can take, again, so Aristotelian, an Aristotelian picture of genus and species, in which we find a similarity in common properties. But the thing that I share the most, most common properties with ever are other people.
▶︎ 32:09 This means that they affect me the most. In a social setting, there is no running away from the fact that we have with other people emotional contagion. What they feel, I feel. I have a natural, and in some cases this is very good, this is empathy, imitation of the affects. I recognize immediately the common properties I share with other human beings, and I understand my own world, I understand my own self through this understanding of the other.
▶︎ 32:46 This is an idea, again, as old as philosophy itself. To see the self reflected in the mind of the other, and only through that to achieve, to achieve progress in philosophical understanding. We have it in Socrates and before. But in Spinoza, he has a very naturalistic explanation of why this is so, why other modes of God which share maximal common properties with me are my first reference for understanding.
▶︎ 33:18 The flip side of empathy is competition, rivalry, and a sense of threat. Because I recognize the other as similar to me, if I have experienced the world as a difficult thing which does not easily cater to my needs, I will automatically see other people as competition. Again, this is why the most important thing in the world is how a baby is treated when they are born. The way they understand their environment, the way they experience the world completely gives, so not completely, but it gives a really strong impression about how the world works, and it will affect how they see other people. It will affect their understanding of their ability to thrive and survive with other people or without other people, what they have to do in order to survive.
▶︎ 34:16 Remember we talked about imagination being a form of memory, and he talked about the body having these soft parts. There is a place where he actually says that memory is like the impression of hard things on the soft parts of the mind. We could call it, today we would say neural pathways. This is what it is. So enforced neural pathways, which are easily created in newborn children, they are very, very hard to overcome.
▶︎ 34:41 This is why I think the most admirable people on the planet are recovering drug addicts. Because they are able, through sheer force of natural intelligence, to rewire neural pathways in a sense that they express the powerfulness of their nature through overcoming unbelievably strong, passive, passionate affects to which they are, we should call it like it is, they are obviously naturally susceptible to these pleasures. And overcoming this is by far the greatest human achievement I can possibly imagine. So yeah, they are by far the most impressive human beings I think that we can know.
▶︎ 35:35 How can people live together well when we understand the precariousness and the importance of other people, as shaping the self through society? In part four, Proposition Thirty-Seven, when he has discussed enough our weaknesses and so on, he wants to go on to create a social contract that we can work with, and he says this: "The good which everyone who seeks virtue wants for himself, he also desires for other men, and this desire is greater as his knowledge of God is greater." This is a very, very interesting proposition. Let's even read it again. This is the place for it.
▶︎ 36:31 The good which everyone who seeks virtue wants for himself. Virtue, we say, is power. Every good that an irrational person wants, which would make him more powerful, he also wants for other men. Having other people powerful means having them rational. This is the only way we can thrive as human beings.
▶︎ 37:05 Then he goes on and gives this new religion view into this, and he reminds us that he started this work with his discussion of God, and he says, "This desire is greater as his knowledge of God is greater." So when prophets in the past have said that, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and again, look at the sentence. The idea is a sentence that is so clearly Spinozistic that you can see it even not as an imperative, but as descriptive. You can only ever love your neighbor as yourself. People who act badly toward other people actually hate themselves because they misunderstand what would make them powerful. They bring harm on themselves through the harm of others.
▶︎ 37:58 You can only love your neighbor as yourself. That's why essentially the Spinozistic project is not a project for loving others. It's a project of self-love, and he says, "Love yourself, you'll love others." That's the whole idea. That's why to know yourself is to know God, and to know God is to know yourself.
▶︎ 38:16 If we turn to Proposition 45 in Part Four that reads, "Hate can never be good," and we go to the scholium, you can see in Spinoza's word what I have just explained, and maybe it's a good thing to repeat.
▶︎ 38:30 My account of this matter, the view I've arrived at, is this. No deity nor anyone else, unless he is envious, takes pleasure in my lack of power and my misfortune. Job. Nor does he ascribe to virtue our tears, sighs, fear, and other things of that kind, which are signs of a weak mind. On the contrary, the greater the joy with which we are affected, the greater the perfection to which we pass. That is, the more we must participate in the divine nature. To use things, therefore, and take pleasure in them as far as possible, not of course to the point where we are disgusted with them, for there is no pleasure in that. This is the part of a wise man.
▶︎ 39:10 It is the part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation and with pleasant food and drink, with scent, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, and theater, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another. For the human body is composed of a great many parts of different natures, which constantly require new and varied nourishment, so that the whole body may be equally capable of all the things which can follow from its nature, and hence, so that the mind also may be equally capable of understanding many things at once.
▶︎ 39:41 This plan of living, then, agrees best both with our principles and with common practice. So if any other way of living is to be commended, this one is the best and to be commended in every way, nor is it necessary for me to treat this matter more clearly or more fully. And with that, he finishes the discussion.
▶︎ 40:02 In the next lecture, I would like to go onto a specific form of affect, which is love, which is very important for Spinoza also. Love runs through a thread through all of his work. We'll talk about three types of love, which correspond to the three types of knowledge. And it will tie together the things we have discussed here.
▶︎ 40:23 Another very important idea that runs through the inception of Western philosophy and reaches Spinoza in full volume is the idea to know thyself. We recognize Socrates as wanting to know himself and wanting to know himself through dialogue with other people. The project of knowing yourself naturally involves going into dialogue with other souls in order to improve oneself.
▶︎ 40:52 Now, the knowledge of the self has to essentially culminate in moral knowledge. If you remember the Apology, and then it's also prominent in the Phaedo. You can also see this in the Meno when he says, "What is virtue?" The identification of knowledge and virtue stems from the idea that the first and only commandment is knowledge of the self. If you know yourself, you're a moral person. Immoral people are people who don't know themselves. That's the point.
▶︎ 41:30 These are really simplistic sounding, but it's not. You just have to think about it a lot more. The only way I can be moral is by seeing the other as another self. Do you remember that we said in the definition of friendship, the friend is another self? The idea is to see everyone as friends. That would be the most moral person. He would act in a way that they would want to be acted to.
▶︎ 41:58 So it's all always together. And then it has these different manifestations, which is nice. I think it's nice, this clarity of continuance in the history of philosophy.