Christian concept of freedom. And though the Stoics often talk about maintaining  social duties and being a good person to others – and they truly mean it – the meaning of such duties and goodness to others is seriously changed by that central truth of theirs.


RICHARD SANSOM

I
like what you say about stoicism -- it sounds like their take on
*life* is laid back, letting the world come to them by opening doors within the self?

GARY. C. MOORE:

Your take, I think, is exactly correct! In fact, your description clarifies for me a fundamental disdinction between Christian - I was going to say Christianity, but that is wrong and is another point that needs to be taken up - Christian asceticism and Stoicism as ways of life. The Christian ascetic rejects this world as false either as an illusion or as a temptation, both of which lead him off the road to salvation. The average Christian is worried that he does not appropriately use the gifts God gave him to the greater glory of God and risks the same fate.

The Stoic is neither worried at all about an afterlife and completely denies the value of this life, that is, as some precious object one must retain at all costs. However, they do not at all see life as drab but as a pageant one should enjoy while one can. But it is not something so valuable that one regrets it when losing it. Epictetus actually uses those words somewhere describing his attitude.

Stoicism is very sympathetic to Cynicism which advocates giving up everything whatsoever, but says they go too far.

Stoicism is very sympathetic to Cynicism which advocates giving up everything whatsoever, but says they go too far.
Such Stoic attitudes, however, are not at all simple minded and just laid back, although being simple in one's thoughts - that is, being direct and open, trying to have no unspoken prepositions and hidden values that lays guilt upon the hearer if he does not assume the same thing as in 'You should just KNOW!' - and not interfering in the world unless it is trying to force you to make an 'evil' decision - according to your knowledge. Socrates is a major moral paradigm to the Stoics, and they take seriously Socrates' statement every person 'thinks' he is doing good simply because 'evil' is just a logical error, and absolutely no one it is obvious, even murderers and thieves, want to commit what is logically erroneous because that automatically means - at least somewhere down the line and usually immediately - that one is not going to achieve the real goal one intends to achieve. There are a number of variations upon this. The goal may be clear but the method to achieve it self-defeating - or the methods are perfectly efficient for achieving a specific aim that, however, is not consistent with the real goal intended. Also, the goal can just be 'felt' and has no clear form or identity, that is, until one has done that which should achieve it and finds the end achieved does not concur with the end desired, which in part or whole is clarified all too late.

So the Stoic program of receiving each sense impression first, cutting off automatic judgments and reactions, denuding it of all prepositions, and then coolly judging it purely as the mere representation of an indifferent but extremely real external object - trying to disregard any urgency the emotions are trying to overwhelm you with - is extremely helpful and practical in daily life, a 'Stand back and let us take a look at this' instead of reacting with anger or gratitude immediately. After all, once one acts, the act is external reality and cannot be taken back in reality, merely obscured by excuses or claims of ignorance when one, in fact, did have a chance - if one is SELF-TRAINED AND DISCIPLINED - to think about it.

That is all that Stoic freedom* consists of, repeated rules to self till it becomes habitual - which, in itself is no virtue if the wrong rules are applied - but the Stoic rules are never Idealistic other worldly principles but are based purely on direct physical and existential experience and what the physical consequences, denuded of imposed interpretations, as facts are. Life is lived only in the present, so all rules are intended to making the here and now life pleasant and uncomplicated. Poverty, poverty of all kinds, is a great help in this. And the greatest and most helpful poverty is not considering your body a precious object to be highly maintained because, then, as an object, as an object considered indifferent in an indifferent world, it becomes a hostage to you held so by others you are necessarily dependent on, either supposedly benevolently by doctors and nurses and other helpful folk, or malevolently by people to say you owe them this and that.

Working oneself out of this maze and web of deceit is not at all easy.

Working oneself out of this maze and web of deceit is not at all easy. But immediate efforts, if done correctly without hiding anything from oneself, can have immediate results. It is a process of 'Letting go' that self-motivates one because as one lets one thing go, it becomes easier to let the next few things go, and then maybe let go of a big thing or two, and then the whole horizon of release begins to open for one. I say 'open'. That does not mean one understands enough to fully see and understand what that means. There are many complications. After all the Stoics are thorough realists.

They constantly advocate maintaining one's social obligations. But on the other hand, Stoicism makes you stringently reassess those social obligations to see if they really apply to you. Stoicism is very sympathetic to Cynicism which advocates giving up everything whatsoever, but says they go too far. However, Epictetus only owned a hut and a pallet to sleep on when he could have received all the money he wanted from his students. And Marcus Aurelius voluntarily chose to live the same way even though he was Emperor of Rome and did so consistently and for a long period of time despite all the temptations so readily available at just a rich and lavish court.

In detail, it even gets more complicated, but the complications are not contradictions but simply further clarifications and uncovering of one's own preconceptions. They believe in God and social values. That is easy enough to say, but they also believe in a devastating and extreme logical analysis of those notions both overall and in great detail. So the end result is in no wise recognisable to the average person. They certainly do not approve of 'the average' but rather of striving toward the exceptional and even 'perfect'. But then, here, even 'perfect' needs to be logically analyzed.

So both logics AND PHYSICS are constant companions and tools of Stoic thought, maybe not in the way we are used to them, but certainly helpful even to the most sceptical when they understand how the Stoics use them because the Stoics clearly and deliberately desire to be perfectly consistent realists and materialists through and through.

Part 2: Why Aurelius?

All the things I wrote in my letters to Richard are true. Stoicism is a relaxed view of life in the sense of detachment from meaningless worries.

What, then, distinguishes a meaningless worry from a meaningful worry? Anything external to you is out of your control. It is out of your possession regardless of whatever legal claims on paper you may have. This includes your own body.

Does this mean *spirit* as a soul-thing, a supernatural entity takes the body's place as one's most valuable object? Think again. There is, and can be, NOTHING supernatural whatsoever in Stoicism. So if the body is rejected . . . what is left? Somehow I think many of you [1, 2, many] have already put that question to yourselves and have not thrown it in my face thinking it would be impolite to show me my utter stupidity.

And, actually, I do not have a simple answer. Why? It is because our philosophical language – no, not just ours, but ALL philosophical language from the Brahmans of the Rig Veda and Zoroaster and Moses and Thales on has been thoroughly corrupted by theological thinking. Why? It is because theological thinking is how thinking as such came about through the imagination trying to comprehend a world of individual unconnected facts OF INFINITE NUMBER AND VARIETY far beyond the ability of any mind to innumerate them, much less understand them. Theological abstraction gave human beings the tools with which to form *real* classes, that is, pins and corrals into which objects could be moved in kind, cows in one place, pigs in another, and so on. That is all classes of objects are, sorting pins of the mind, and the *mind* itself is the super-class containing all classes, and that is why people completely submerged in theological thinking still call it *mind* instead of *brain* even though they may consider themselves atheists and materialists. They are still completely bound by theological thinking, and even those thinkers aware of this contradiction can EVER only PARTIALLY unbind themselves by an intentional fragmentation of their thought, destroying overall, completely explanatory metaphysics for a merely negative piece by piece process called Eliminativism that can never conclude itself as any sort of overall explanation of *reality* and discover the real *truth* of things.


     So if the body is rejected . . . The scheme of things as the Stoics see it, or rather, as Marcus Aurelius specifically sees it – as schematized by Pierre Hadot [more on him later, he is important in himself]

QUOTE-WITHIN-QUOTE "The guiding principle draws a border, as it were, between sensitive emotions and its freedom of judgment, by refusing to consent or give its consent to judgments which would attribute a positive or negative value to the pleasures or pains that occur within the body. This border does not prevent the guiding principle from perceiving everything that goes on within the body, and thereby it ensures the unity of consciousness of the entire living being, just as, within the cosmic living being, everything goes back to the single consciousness of the guiding principle of the universe [MEDITATIONS, IV, 40]. From this new perspective, Marcus continues, we cannot prevent sensations from penetrating within the guiding principle, since they are natural phenomena; nevertheless, the guiding principle must not add its own value-judgments concerning them.      On the one hand, the guiding principle ensures the unity of living beings, so that the sensations and the emotions which I perceive are mine, since I perceive them from within. On the other hand, however, the guiding principle considers these sensations and emotions as somehow alien to itself, insofar as it refuses to acquiesce and participate in the disturbances which they introduce into the body. And yet, shouldn't the sage be completely impassive, and the complete master of his body and of his soul? This is how the Stoic sage is usually conceived. In fact, however, the Stoic sage, as Seneca points out, is far from being insensitive: 'There are misfortunes which strike the sage – without incapacitating him, of course – such as physical pain, the loss of friends or children, etc. I grant that he is sensitive to these things, for we do not impute to him the hardness of a rock or of iron. THERE IS NO VIRTUE IN PUTTING UP WITH THAT WHICH ONE DOES NOT FEEL! SENECA      This initial shock of emotion is the same movement, independent of our will, of which Marcus Aurelius speaks. Seneca is quite familiar with it too: 'This is how passions are born, developed, and become excessive. First, there is an initial involuntary movement, a preparation for and threat of passion. There is a second movement accompanied by desire we can still reject, for instance, getting even for harm done oneself. There is a third movement that cannot be mastered . . . We must have revenge at all costs! The first shock cannot be avoided by reason, though habit and constant attention may attenuate them. The second movement which arises from judgment can be suppressed by judgment so that there is no unalterable third movement. SENECA QUOTE-WITHIN-QUOTE: According to the Stoics, then, even the sage himself cannot escape these first involuntary movements. As Seneca puts it, he always feels appearances or *shadows of passions. * END QUOTE WITHIN QUOTE from THE INNER CITADEL by Pierre Hadot, trans. Michael Chase, Harvard University Press, 1998, 2nd print 2001, pages 116-7. END OF QUOTE-IN-QUOTE      [Background noise: *Talk about using theological language . . .*] Yes, let us talk about using theological language. We can talk about it precisely by using Eliminativistic methods as Marcus Aurelius himself says [MEDITATIONS XI, 2]: 'A seductive melody . . . you can despise it if you divide it into each of its sounds, and if you ask yourself if you are lesser than each one of them taken separately; if you are, you would be filled with shame. The same thing will happen if you repeat this procedure in the case of the dance, by decomposing it into each movement or each figure . . . . In general, then, and with the exception of virtue and its effects, remember to head as quickly as you can for the parts of a process, in order, by dividing them, to get to the point where you have contempt for them. Transpose this method, moreover, to life in its entirety. Marcus Aurelius [trans. Handout/Chase]

          This is one of the most subtle, devious, tricky, brilliant movements of thought I have ever seen in writing at all. much less just philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche must have been in awe when he read this, and from then on, used it as a model for his philosophical irony.

      For what has Aurelius done here? His usual. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. One says something very clear and obvious. You take an everyday method, especially one that is *common* and *low brow* and totally *unrefined*, to degrade something noble and pure and spiritual by taking it apart and showing others that it is no big deal, it is just a mechanical trick like any other. In the middle of it all, you throw in the necessary exception, expected by high society, the untouchable sacredness of virtue, and then redirect distractingly the reader to what he was initially doing, taking things apart to show their unspiritual guts, and say, turning the whole universe upon its divine head, and JUST LIKE NIETZSCHE!!!! - *Transpose this method to life in its entirety!* thus re-including as a mechanical part of the divine mind sacred virtue. Divine mind? Let us get real. Aurelius has just destroyed the self and soul completely, erasing even them with the only solid ground they have by getting rid of the central importance of the body, and calling what is left simply the *guiding principle*. Now, immediately some of us are transposing this again [and getting a bit dizzy in the process] into being a theological abstraction. But it is not. All the Stoics say human being is completely material. THEY ALSO SAY ALL NATURE IS COMPLETELY MATERIAL.

     So what has Marcus Aurelius done? Actually, I have already brought this out in my discussion of Monk-on-Russell. G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, maybe just in passing, maybe with their eyes simply upon the logical problem, said human identity is a proposition. Now, is that not exactly, then, when put in full context – must that not necessarily be exactly the same thing Marcus Aurelius says the thing of central importance, the only thing of importance in human being is one's *guiding principle*? A guiding principle of what? The confrontation of the judgment implicit in the second movement of emotion that is suppressed by judgment by the denial of assent. You feel, but you do not have to give in to the judgment implicit in the feeling. That is what Stoicism is all about.

     Eliminativism is self-destructive in the same way as Marcus Aurelius shows us how to destroy a melody, then saying virtue is an exception, and then saying, Transpose this and include all life. One should very seriously consider what the insidious meaning of –ism is in words like *atheism* and *materialism* and *determinism*. Is not –ism per se abstraction? Is not –ism per se theological? It may be helpful, its tools may be necessary to retain until, or if we ever, get better ones. But is it not absolutely necessary to be honest with oneself about what one is literally doing?

Part 3: Why Aurelius, Again?

L/S: A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, THE HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHERS, volume 1, Translations of the principle sources with philosophical commentary, Cambridge University Press, 1987, reprint 2002

Annas: Julia E. Annas, HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, University of California Press, 1992, paperback 1994

Marcus Aurelius is a materialist. One must follow a logical thread from beginning with his established [acknowledged?] premises through several metaphorical allusions to an end that seems to equivocate two different conclusions. One conclusion is contradictory to his premises while the other disables the allusions.

There is no ontological division between the intelligible and the sensible as is fundamental in Platonism

     What are the basic premises of a materialist? The first 'genus' must necessarily be 'something' per se, that is, always pointing to a 'particular'. There is no ontological division between the intelligible and the sensible as is fundamental in Platonism. *The Stoics avoid the common Platonist assumption [Plato, PARMENIDES, 132b-c]that to be something is already to exist* [L/S 164]. Incorporeal objects can be said by Stoics to exist insofar as they are fictional deductions in imaginary divisions from corporeal objects as parts analyzed from the definition of a material whole the same way as Marcus Aurelius analyzes *a seductive melody*. More graphically, you can talk coherently about your arm as abstracted in the sense of being divided fictionally from your body. *Alleged incorporeals, such as virtue and knowledge, exercise an obvious causal influence on bodies. Such interaction, the Stoics suggest, is simply unintelligible except as between bodies, and hence virtue, knowledge and their like must be analyzed as corporeal* [L/S 163-4]. It makes sense to say there is such a character as *Mickey Mouse* but that fiction obviously exists only within a larger corporeal whole, that is, an animated film.

     Therefore an analysis of Marcus Aurelius' thought revolves around what is the fictional part and what is the corporeal whole. The 'confusion' of which is which is deliberate rhetorical ploy - *rhetoric* considered here as fundamental style of communication with every type of communication having a *style* of presentation – since, if all abstraction is fictional division from a corporeal whole, the only way language can function per se is to treat fictional divisions as if they were corporeal wholes in themselves. *. . . A causal effect is an incorporeal predicate – not a body, but that which comes to be true of a body . . .* [L/S 164-5]. *Incorporeal predicate* is the perfect expression of what a fictional division is as long as it is kept in mind a kind of violence is done to separate the *incorporeal predicate* from its corporeal subject. It is this lack of sense of violence, of distortion, that lets abstractions seem to take on an incorporeal life of their own as in Plato and therefore necessarily, since their anchor in corporeal reality is intellectually severed, no, ERASED without a consciously noted physical action, become spiritual, supernatural and, as I keep saying, theological. This was exactly what Plato desired and deliberately intended and succeeded so well in doing, that is, creating an intellectual world of ideas superior to physical entities, that not only very effectively explains them but, through explaining them, creates them.

     Plato then does exactly the opposite of Marcus Aurelius when he takes the parts as the originating wholes to create fictional physical objects, the products of our mind. Plato's reality is logically *dualist*, though corporeal reality is ontologically dependent upon incorporeal reality. If any proposed metaphysical system is going to be logically valid upon its own premises and effective in human action it much intend a unified reality where all things naturally belong together, that is, it must necessarily be fundamentally monist. The gradation from superior ideas to base material objects therefore would be within a proper monist scheme. But to exist as such it must necessarily be an EVALUATIVE scheme, that is, ideas are morally better than evil matter. Any evaluative monist scheme, then, must have a scale of valuation of something being ontologically better and worse.

     No one can do this with the Stoic *first genus* of *something*. Everything is a *something*, even imaginary ideas. If everything is a *something*, there is no way to evaluate one *something* over another *something* ontologically. To create a scheme of *evaluation*, one must NECESSARILY, as explained above, divide parts from wholes. Now even a partial *something* is ontologically as much a *something* as a whole something. What, then, makes a whole a whole? Indifferent independence. The finger cut off from the hand sits there on the kitchen table indifferent to your cries of pain though, intellectually, you are concentrated upon the pain and the loss, imaginative fictions coherent only in a context of words and values, all of which are derived from the holistic sensation of your whole body. Whole heavens of immortal ideas are suddenly swept into this temporal and spatial incident whose material focus and only source of IMPORTANCE is the indifferent and now independent finger that is no longer *yours*.

Now, think upon the function and *style* of the last sentence. Does it not POINT, despite its imaginary emphasis, at something IMPORTANT? All schemes of EVALUATION are evident here as fictional divisions from a physical whole. The body does not evaluate. It does not 'feel' the loss of any usefulness or togetherness with the finger, it just gives you unintellectual pain. The finger, just like the body, does not evaluate. *Of course! That is obvious because . . .* The *because*, the connection of - *A causal effect is an incorporeal predicate – not a body, but that which comes to be true of a body*.

The central problem, then, is to think consistently in a materialist *style*.

JUD EVANS:
Hi Gary!  First of all I have uploaded the [for me] most interesting section of your investigation into Stoicism in general and Marcus Aurelius in particular. You may have wondered [or even been slightly offended] that I have merely uploaded the former parts, but made no comments as to their contents? Well, apart from being a bit under pressure from the kid's holidays, I have also been thinking very deeply about what you have written and the quotations you have used to illustrate your journey of discovery. I hope what I say below is reasonable, and germane. I see my leaving comments as a privilege, not as a right. I like to think of myself as a person sincere in my beliefs rather than as a sophist who argues for the sake of argument - nor am I an ideologue, out for power, not truth, or worst of all, perhaps one of those who think they know what they don't know. All of that is not to say that my comments conflict with your conclusions, for I am referring to my criticisms of Plato and his thurifers and acolytes who carry the thuribles of theocratic unthinkingness.

Part 3: Why Aurelius, again?

L/S: A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, THE HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHERS, volume 1, Translations of the principle sources with philosophical commentary, Cambridge University Press, 1987, reprint 2002

Annas: Julia E. Annas, HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, University of California Press, 1992, paperback 1994

Marcus Aurelius is a materialist. One must follow a logical thread from beginning with his established [acknowledged?] premises through several metaphorical allusions to an end that seems to equivocate two different conclusions. One conclusion is contradictory to his premises while the other disables the allusions.

What are the basic premises of a materialist? The first 'genus' must necessarily be 'something' per se, that is, always pointing to a 'particular'. There is no ontological division between the intelligible and the sensible as is fundamental in Platonism. *The Stoics avoid the common Platonist assumption [Plato, PARMENIDES, 132b-c] that to be something is already to exist* [L/S 164].

JUD EVANS:
I find this a little ambiguous. Even as an arch-eliminativist and nominalist I too believe that to that *to be something is already to exist.*

To be a lamppost obviously presupposes that the lamppost ALREADY exists - otherwise it wouldn't be a lamppost? Does this mean that the stoics believed that the lamppost does not need to exist in order to be a lamppost?

I suppose the notorious term *something* is the Platonist *ESCAPE-HATCH word?*

It is very interesting though. Is the suggestion that *there is no ontological division between the intelligible and the sensible* identified as the hallmark of the nominalist? But wait! Why is it therefore that Marcus Aurelius is never mentioned as: *The Father of Nominalism,* a title that is often attributed to Abelard [or to a lesser extent - Ockham?] But maybe I am jumping the gun a bit and should read more first before jumping to any conclusions?

GARY. C. MOORE:
Incorporeal objects can be said by Stoics to exist insofar as they are fictional deductions in imaginary divisions from corporeal objects as parts analyzed from the definition of a material whole the same way as Marcus Aurelius analyzes *a seductive melody*.

JUD EVANS:
*Incorporeal objects exist? I really don't get it? If it doesn't exist like *the unusual amount of times Lincoln excused himself to go to the toilet during the discussion on slavery,* why even bother to call such an event it an *object?* To reify Lincoln's toiletry behaviour into an object insofar as it is a fictional deduction as an imaginary division from the corporeal object known as Lincoln analysed from the definition of a material called Lincoln? Why not simply define or describe it as a feature of Lincoln's behaviour? One could waylay Lincoln, knock him on the head and drop him down an old well - but one could not do that with *the time Lincoln excused himself to go to the toilet during the discussion on slavery.* I just cannot for the life of me understand why anybody should go to such lengths of ontological sophistry and confusion? For what? Was it all a devious plan to excuse or explain the concept of an *ontologically separated God? The must have been SOMETHING behind these nightmarish cognitive somersaults?

GARY. C. MOORE:
More graphically, you can talk coherently about your arm as abstracted in the sense of being divided fictionally from your body.


JUD EVANS:
In my opinion *humans talking coherently* has nothing to do with whether an object exists or not - but everything about the way that *talking human beings* exist.

An object either exits or it does not exist. We can imagine and talk about our arm as being separate [cut off from our body] , but it is we - our brains - which are abstracting - not the arm. We can only think about our arm as being part of our body in the first place because it exists - AS PART OF OUR BODY.

LONG AND D. N. SEDLEY:
*Alleged incorporeals, such as virtue and knowledge, exercise an obvious causal influence on bodies.

JUD EVANS:
OK. What exists is a human being thinking about *virtue* and *knowledge* - not the *Alleged incorporeals.*

LONG AND D. N. SEDLEY:
Such interaction, the Stoics suggest, is simply unintelligible except as between bodies, and hence virtue, knowledge and their like must be analyzed as corporeal*

JUD EVANS:
This is getting crazy! How can the stoics claim that *such interaction,* aka: *humans thinking about *virtue* and *knowledge*, exercising an obvious causal influence on bodies,* be *between bodies,* when it is the plainly single body of the thinking human who is thinking about *virtue* and *knowledge*, exercising an obvious causal influence on bodies* that exists and not the *virtue* and *knowledge* themselves that exist?

LONG AND D. N. SEDLEY: [163-4].
*It makes sense to say there is such a character as *Mickey Mouse* but that fiction obviously exists only within a larger corporeal whole, that is, an animated film.

JUD EVANS:
The fact that certain areas, of certain animated painted film panels, of the acetate-roll we call a *film* have varicoloured synchronised images of something that we recognise as the creature we call a mouse tricked out with certain humanoid characteristics of clothing, speech and Cinomatographic behaviour, does not mean that the fiction *Mickey Mouse* exists.

(A) It does not exist individually as *Mickey Mouse.*
(B) It does not exist within the larger corporeal whole of the roll of acetate.
(C) It does not exist anywhere in the cosmos.
(D) The concept of *Mickey Mouse* exists as a modality of the human being who is thinking about it in EXACTLY the same way as he or she exists in a modality of thinking about the fiction concerning: *the unusual amount of times Lincoln excused himself to go to the toilet during the discussion on slavery.*

If the fiction that Lincoln slipped out to have a piss every five minutes was a fiction, why should the antics of a filmic cartoon be an object. The statue of Abraham Lincoln outside the Whitehouse is a REAL STONE OBJECT - BUT IT NOT REALLY Abraham Lincoln. The object is called *The statue of Abraham Lincoln.* A film, a drawing in a children's book, a plastic toy copy of the film image on sale for $20 IS NOT *Mickey Mouse.* It is a plastic toy labelled *Mickey Mouse $20.*

GARY. C. MOORE:
Therefore an analysis of Marcus Aurelius' thought revolves around what is the fictional part and what is the corporeal whole. The 'confusion' of which is which is deliberate rhetorical ploy - *rhetoric* considered here as fundamental style of communication with every type of communication having a *style* of presentation – since, if all abstraction is fictional division from a corporeal whole, the only way language can function per se is to treat fictional divisions as if they were corporeal wholes in themselves. *. . .

QUOTES

(A) On the one hand we have the lump of rock.
(B) On the other hand we have a human existing in the mode of saying: *The rock is grey.*

JUD EVANS:
(A) On the one hand we have the lump of rock.
(B) On the other hand we have a human existing in the mode of saying: *The rock is grey.*

The categorematical term *grey* is one which ascribes its human meaning to a given 'suppositum' the *rock.* The fact that the human predicates the rock as existing in a modality of being *grey* does NOT mean that the rock ACTUALLY exists in a modality of being *grey,* nor does it mean that *greyness* exists or even that various
*modalities* exist. It simply means that a sensate being that we call *human* exists in a modality where he is attributing the word and *state* of *being grey, *which his species denotes as corresponding to the way that the light waves are being reflected off the surface of the rock and hitting his retina.

Conclusion?
(1) There exists a rock.
(2) There exists a human who says the rock is grey.
(3) There does not exist *a grey.*

LONG AND D. N. SEDLEY:[164-5].
A causal effect is an incorporeal predicate – not a body, but that which comes to be true of a body . . .* [L/S 164-5].

JUD EVANS:
BRAVO! What I think they are fumbling towards is the fact that *Causal Effects* do not exist - and that only *causal objects* as per eliminative determinism exist, in this case the human body.

GARY:
*Incorporeal predicate* is the perfect expression of what a fictional division is as long as it is kept in mind a kind of violence is done to separate the *incorporeal predicate* from its corporeal subject.

JUD EVANS:
I agree. The term * *Incorporeal predicate* is a good one. I am ontologically committed to the reality of the human as systematic unity without any smell of an *ontological difference* but I am pragmatic enough to realise that predicationally we have no option but to describe objects using fiction and reification in order to communicate the way we are existing to other human beings.

There is a price to be paid for being obsessed with systematic unity - a price which personally I am prepared to pay. The trick is not to allow the mind to close around itself. A syncategorematical term imports the order of the predicate to the subject, and although in doing so it wreaks ontological violence, it provides communicational benefit. The trick is to be CONSTANTLY AWARE THAT it is FICTION - and not to be taken in by the notion [as with Heideggerians for example] that when employed predicationally the *incorporeal predicate* is magically promoted into the world of corporeal objectivity.

GARY. C. MOORE:
It is this lack of sense of violence, of distortion, that lets abstractions seem to take on an incorporeal life of their own as in Plato and therefore necessarily, since their anchor in corporeal reality is intellectually severed, no, ERASED without a consciously noted physical action, become spiritual, supernatural and, as I keep saying, theological. This was exactly what Plato desired and deliberately intended and succeeded so well in doing, that is, creating an intellectual world of ideas superior to physical entities, that not only very effectively explains them but, through explaining them, creates them.

JUD EVANS:
Fundamentally grasped and understood! Delightfully rendered and explained! Plato was in my opinion the greatest [unwitting] enemy of rational thinking the world has ever seen. He created far more bloodshed and damage for mankind than Hitler, Ghenghis Khan or Saddam Hussein ever did, and handed it over to those who go under the name of *Christians* and [via the transfer of Greek philosophy] to *Moslems* on a plate.

GARY. C. MOORE:
Plato then does exactly the opposite of Marcus Aurelius when he takes the parts as the originating wholes to create fictional physical objects, the products of our mind.

JUD EVANS:
Bravo! YES!

GARY. C. MOORE:
Plato's reality is logically *dualist*, though corporeal reality is ontologically dependent upon incorporeal reality.

JUD EVANS:
It follows automatically if one believes in any sort of God or godlets. In order that the duality of God is to be made logically possible - the idea of an ontological duality in the world of humans has also got to be posited.

GARY. C. MOORE:
If any proposed metaphysical system is going to be logically valid upon its own premises and effective in human action it much intend a unified reality where all things naturally belong together, that is, it must necessarily be fundamentally monist. The gradation from superior ideas to base material objects therefore would be within a proper monist scheme. But to exist as such it must necessarily be an EVALUATIVE scheme, that is, ideas are morally better than evil matter. Any evaluative monist scheme, then, must have a scale of valuation of something being ontologically better and worse.

JUD EVANS:
It is indeed ironic is it not, that this Greek gradation from superior ideas to base material objects ignores the fact that humans themselves are material objects?

GARY. C. MOORE:
No one can do this with the Stoic *first genus* of *something*. Everything is a *something*, even imaginary ideas. If everything is a *something*, there is no way to evaluate one *something* over another *something* ontologically. To create a scheme of *evaluation*, one must NECESSARILY, as explained above, divide parts from wholes.

JUD EVANS:
To classify everything with such a noninquisitorial, distancing term as *something*, is in my opinion a *cop-out.* I agree that it is vital to create a scheme of *evaluation* where one must NECESSARILY, as explained above, divide parts from wholes. Unless that is one decides to go and live in a cave and be a boring, non-communicative hermit.

GARY. C. MOORE:
Now even a partial *something* is ontologically as much a *something* as a whole something. What, then, makes a whole a whole?

JUD EVANS:
I found that that reading Carl Brock Sides mereological observations concerning a definition of a *whole* to be very rewarding. if you go to this page you will find lots by  *SIDES* available there.

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/nominalism_contents.htm

Where EXACTLY for example do the boundaries of any object actually end. The quantum aspects of an object are not static - molecules break away from the macro body and float off - newcoming molecules drift in and join the assembly. AT EXACTLY WHAT point are those incoming and outgoing atoms part of the whole? When you cut you toe nail and it is hanging on bit a small - almost invisible - skein of keratin is it still part of your body? Are the scattered grains around a heap of sand part of the heap?

GARY. C. MOORE:
Indifferent independence. The finger cut off from the hand sits there on the kitchen table indifferent to your cries of pain though, intellectually, you are concentrated upon the pain and the loss, imaginative fictions coherent only in a context of words and values, all of which are derived from the holistic sensation of your whole body. Whole heavens of immortal ideas are suddenly swept into this temporal and spatial incident whose material focus and only source of IMPORTANCE is the indifferent and now independent finger that is no longer *yours*.

JUD EVANS:
Well said. On this basis why do some [old fashioned] humans still believe that there is *something* inside our skulls which is *separate* in some way from the brainmeat? I refer of course to the greatest physiological con-trick in history - the so-called human *mind.*

GARY. C. MOORE:
Now, think upon the function and *style* of the last sentence. Does it not POINT, despite its imaginary emphasis, at something IMPORTANT? All schemes of EVALUATION are evident here as fictional divisions from a physical whole.

JUD EVANS:
True Gary. What is said of the cut and discarded toenail is equally true of the finger - EXCEPT of cause that whilst the toenail grows some more - the finger didn't. Some cultures prize the finger and toenails and are careful not to let them fall into the hands of witches and necromancers.

GARY. C. MOORE:
The body does not evaluate. It does not 'feel' the loss of any usefulness or togetherness with the finger, it just gives you unintellectual pain

JUD EVANS:
The body DOES evaluate in my humble opinion - because THAT IS ALL THERE IS. The part of the body called *the brain* is part of the body as the voice-box or the eardrum - as the whole thing I don't like to use this false duality - but I will *the body and brain* are mutually dependant. I envisage the human holism as unity. It can shed some of its parts - the eyes, the legs, the arms, the ears, the lips, the nose, the hair, the teeth, the tongue - large areas of its skin, some internal organs etc. But what is left is STILL a human entity. Once that part of the human body we call the brain is removed then what is left is just an unthinking lump of meat - as opposed to it being a thinking lump of meat whilst the brain is intact.

GARY. C. MOORE:
The finger, just like the body, does not evaluate. *Of course! That is obvious because . . .* The *because*, the connection of - *A causal effect is an incorporeal predicate – not a body, but that which comes to be true of a body*.

The central problem, then, is to think consistently in a materialist *style.*

JUD EVANS:
Wonderful stuff Gary. Am I correct in thinking that this marks your final and unequivocal acceptance of materialism as the ground of your philosophical view of the world?

GARY. C. MOORE:
Dear Jud, At page 266 [348] of RED DRAGON by Thomas Harris, Doctor Hannibal Lecter tells Will Graham,

QUOTE**
We don't invent our natures, Will; they're issued to us along with our lungs and pancreas and everything else. Why fight it?'*

This essentially sums up - in parts, and you know what I have said about Marcus Aurelius and intellectual dissection, soul surgery, it applies not only here but always, in every situation. Hannibal Lecter tells Clarice in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, chapter 35, page 208-9 hardback,

START QUOTE**
Lecter:
'Incidently, did you read Crawford's stupefying speech last year to the National Police Academy? Spouting Marcus Aurelius on duty and honor and fortitude - we'll see what kind of a Stoic Crawford is when Bella bites the big one. He copys his philosophy out of Bartlett's Familiar, I think. If he understood Marcus Aurelius, he might solve his case.'

Clarice:
'Tell me how.'

Lecter:
When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can't read, Clarice. The Emperor counsels simplicity. First principles. Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its causal nature?'

[GARY. C. MOORE:Jud, remember what I have said recently about Aurelius.]

Clarice:
'That doesn't mean anything to me.'

Lecter:
'What does he do, the man you want?'

Clarice:
'He kills -'

Lecter:
'Ah --' he said sharply, averting his face for a moment from her wrongheadedness. 'That's incidental. What is the first and principle thing he does, what need does he serve by killing?'

Clarice:
Anger, social resentment, sexual frus-'

Lecter: 'No.'

Clarice:
'What, then?'

Lecter;
'He covets. In fact, he covets being the very thing you are. It's his nature to covet. How do we begin to covet,  Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort at an answer.'

Clarice: No. We just -'

Lecter:
'No. Precisely so. We begin by coveting what we see everyday. Don't you feel eyes moving over you everyday, Clarice, in chance encounters? I hardly see how you could not. And don't your eyes move over things?'

END QUOTE**

If you have been paying attention to what I have been saying about Marcus Aurelius, Jud - and I know you replied to my last letter and eagerly await reading it, but this first because Lecter/Harris is the cause of my intense interest in Marcus Aurelius -- you find the basic principles of Stoic logic, psychology, and epistemology all woven into a concrete situation for Clarice by Lecter. Harris does not read BARTLET'S FAMILIAR. He analyzes deeply the real thing, and, as I have said before, not just here.

Basically, you have the breaking down of the whole situation into parts to find its ontological reality, that is, what is rock bottom real about this human condition. Instead of Platonic heavens of abstractions like *anger* per se, *social resentment*, and *sexual frustration, you have the perpetrator sees - with his eyes - he sees everyday -some things he sees everyday he wants - he does not go to great lengths of detached abstraction to find his motives but finds them here and now.

It is a very particular stamp of Stoic physiology and psychology, as if there is a difference, that Lecter says *It's his nature to covet*. First, remember the quote above from RED DRAGON. Second, I point I still need to elaborate on but is actually obvious and should be at the edge of your mind - NATURE IS NATURE. Human nature is NOT something ontologically different from the Nature the sciences study. Especially if it is fixed in place. So what Aurelius says about the Goddess Nature, about the whole natural process in which we are undifferentiated particles of no special importance or value into which our bodies indistinguishably dissolve, of which it is FIXED in a causal chain of logic which necessarily implies a limited total number of factual possibilities for the universe and therefore - like Nietzsche's *eternal recurrence of the same* he plagiarized from the Stoics every human words and every human act is the same order will eventually recur again, is just *nature*, human, divine, rocks, trash, serial murderers, etc. All the same in *nature*.

The supposedly rude remark Lecter makes about Crawford and his wife Bella tells you Lecter has taken to heart the Stoic lesson that the only thing anyone really possesses and should value at all is his *guiding principle* [hegemonikon - *Have your guiding principle, hegemonikon, within your power, MED., IX, 7] and things one cannot control one should not place great value in. Harsh - even the Stoics have said so as I have quoted you before - but absolutely true.

AND, the quote just now, IX, 7, *Have your guiding principle within your power*. That is a difficult and tricky piece of Stoic psychology. Jame Gumb, as Lecter delineates, has his *guiding principle* but he is in its power, not it in his. How does one *get* one's *guiding principle* into *your power*? Where does the *guide* for the *guide* come from? It comes from judgment of what you desire, that is, Is it in your power? Does it last? Is it the most important thing to you? Marcus Aurelius would say only your *self* survives this examination after all is said. And what is the self? A very bare, denuded to the extreme . . . what? thing? No. Act? The mere act of judgment of judgment, the rational judgment of inherent emotional judgment, which amounts to bare assent or refusal. Nature is nature and we are no *special*, *notable* thing in nature. We have the same value as a rock or wind or water. Indifferent independence. Not only are external things such to us in our denuding, taking apart judgment, but we ourselves are such things - to others and to ourselves. That is, in the final accounting of reality as nature. Nature is nature, period.

Now, the below letter and web site describes some interesting physiological facts of the brain. I have said before it is not just, or even mainly, the cerebrum that does our thinking for us and makes our decisions. Here, the thalymus is shown choosing what to accept and what to reject - and that is suppose to be a *primitive* part of the brain? It seems to be there working on our *sophisticated* decisions just like the rest of the brain. Once again reality makes much of psychology absurd.

GARY. C. MOORE:
Dear Jud, I try to write for myself primarily. It is an effort to educate myself in what is important to myself. Finding the Marcus Aurelius is doing exactly the same thing approximately is utterly fascinating, especially when one realizes he either intended to have no audience whatsoever or an extremely limited one of just one or two people. Obviously they would have been very important and close people to him. Correspondence survives between him and his rhetoric tutor Fronto. He regards him kindly, and maintains the friendship long after the teacher-pupil relationship has dissolved because Aurelius in many different ways has become Fronto's intellectual superior, in rhetoric as well as most certainly philosophy. Fronto is not much of a Stoic at all, is a prejudiced old fool who believes Christians are incestuous cannibals and should be exterminated.

     But Marcus, for old times sake, tolerates his ranting. So I write for myself, and if I get a reply from someone like you who is not only not a fool but still teaches me important and sometimes hard lessons of philosophy is a privilege and pleasure of the highest order! If Marcus Aurelius had someone besides fools or, at best, merely competent friends to write to, he would have considered it a blessing of the Goddess Nature to have converse with someone like you. I know I strain words at times, like *Goddess Nature*, but there is a point to it, an itch I have not been able to scratch yet, but am finding some relief in discovering the literary subtlety and philosophical irony – I have just found another fresh instance – in Marcus Aurelius. Now, if I could just get someone to read Thomas Harris . . . Marcus Aurelius in Long's translation, whom many commend, is available at your web site so NO ONE has a good excuse not to read Aurelius. And Harris? If anyone gets through the first fifty pages of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and does not feel a perverted addiction one cannot refuse, a *guiding principle* that has seized control of one, and follow with HANNIBAL immediately - then – maybe – RED DRAGON - they must have no love of true adventure and real danger in their *soul*. And they will discover a real but unexpected aspect of Marcus Aurelius there.

Marcus Aurelius is a materialist. One must follow a logical thread from beginning with his established [acknowledged?] premises through several metaphorical allusions to an end that seems to equivocate two different conclusions. One conclusion is contradictory to his premises while the other disables the allusions.

What are the basic premises of a materialist? The first 'genus' must necessarily be 'something' per se, that is, always pointing to a 'particular'. There is no ontological division between the intelligible and the sensible as is fundamental in Platonism. *The Stoics avoid the common Platonist assumption [Plato, PARMENIDES, 132b-c] that to be something is already to exist* [L/S 164].

JUD EVANS:
I find this a little ambiguous. Even as an arch-eliminativist and nominalist I too believe that to that *to be something is already to exist.*

GARY. C. MOORE:
But does it *exist* in material independent indifference on its own, confronting the intellectual self almost as an affront and insult as an object all on its own, or is it merely a PART of such a *something*? Russell on Meaning made a difference between *existence* as independent object and *subsistence* as imaginary object just as your arm considered separate from your holistic body. I do not think, possibly, I touched on that very directly in my letters on Monk/Russell.

JUD EVANS:
To be a lamppost obviously presupposes that the lamppost ALREADY exists - otherwise it wouldn't be a lamppost? Does this mean that the stoics believed that the lamppost does not need to exist in order to be a lamppost?

GARY. C. MOORE:
Break it down into parts. Where do you start. The lamppost confronts you arrogantly with its independent existence. You can fuck off for all it cares. The animation becomes more relevant, of course, when one deals with an animal intelligence, but one must consider ontologically they share the same kind of indifferent independence as external objects.

But you can intellectually or in reality cut the lamppost into parts, making it, in a sense, ridiculous and insignificant because it can no longer have a function, as parts, of importance in lighting up human affairs. The same goes for animals.

JUD EVANS:
I suppose the notorious term *something* is the Platonist *ESCAPE-HATCH word?*

GARY. C. MOORE:
No. It is just the opposite of Platonist. It is Hellenistic materialist, and means anything that stands on its own in indifferent independence. You can imagine things as  *something* like Mickey Mouse, but you know Mickey Mouse only exists in a film. The lamppost, on the other hand, is going to be a lamppost and stay where it is regardless of anything else, that is, until Goddess Nature recycles it into its element in the Eternal Recurrence of the same where everything, including us, dissolves and, because of the limited number of logical, physical combinations will exist again exactly the same some day. I accept this idea, for now, merely figuratively, to make a point – which, rationally is the only way anyone, including Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Nietzsche, can accept it. It presupposes a finite universe. But how else can one conceive the universe? Any ideas?

JUD EVANS:
It is very interesting though. Is the suggestion that *there is no ontological division between the intelligible and the sensible* identified as the hallmark of the nominalist? But wait! Why is it therefore that Marcus Aurelius is never mentioned as: *The Father of Nominalism,* a title that is often attributed to Abelard [or to a lesser extent - Ockham?] But maybe I am jumping the gun a bit and should read more first before jumping to any conclusions?

GARY. C. MOORE:
Good observation. It is mainly a historical accident that the moral aspect of Stoicism was firstly introduced to Christendom. Epictetus and Seneca were considered by the Church Fathers as pagan fore-runners, like Socrates, to Christianity, pagan saints of sorts, and depending on how classically educated the Father was. The physical, materialist part of Stoicism was total anathema to them, and overall only fragments of physiology – Galen was very interested in them, also their propositional logic, re: Russell again, which survived because of his medical texts – cosmology by Cleomedes, Hierocles on Oikeiosis and self-perception, Posidonius on logic whose writing were discovered archeologically in the late 19th century at Pompeii, Chrysippus on all sorts of logical and epistemological problems, and Zeno on cosmology, logic, and politics. Most of these are only fragments, and the impression – I am very ignorrant – is they were not as good writers as Seneca, Epictetus [recorded by Arrian}, and Marcus Aurelius – who not only just barely survived at all, rescued solely by the Renaissance, but whose literary merit is highly debated, which, considering his continuous popularity since the Renaissance, competing with Thomas a Kempis IMITATION OF CHRIST, and my findings - versus the classical expectations of scholars like Matthew Arnold is very interesting in itself.

Nominalist? Nominalist as hell! But coming to be known so only late in the 20th century!

GARY.C. MOORE:
Incorporeal objects can be said by Stoics to exist insofar as they are fictional deductions in imaginary divisions from corporeal objects as parts analyzed from the definition of a material whole the same way as Marcus Aurelius analyzes *a seductive melody*.

JUD EVANS:
*Incorporeal objects exist? I really don't get it? If it doesn't exist like *the unusual amount of times Lincoln excused himself to go to the toilet during the discussion on slavery,* why even bother to call such an event it an *object?* To reify Lincoln's toiletry behaviour into an object insofar as it is a fictional deduction as an imaginary division from the corporeal object known as Lincoln analysed from the definition of a material called Lincoln? Why not simply define or describe it as a feature of Lincoln's behaviour?

GARY. C. MOORE:
Much better that that, just a *part* [see above] of the holistic body of Lincoln. They *exist* as in Russell's distinction of *subsisting* but cannot exist without being a real part of an indifferent independent object, *something*.

JUD EVANS:
One could waylay Lincoln, knock him on the head and drop him down an old well - but one could not do that with *the time Lincoln excused himself to go to the toilet during the discussion on slavery.* I just cannot for the life of me understand why anybody should go to such lengths of ontological sophistry and confusion? For what? Was it all a devious plan to excuse or explain the concept of an *ontologically separated God? The must have been SOMETHING behind these nightmarish cognitive somersaults?

GARY. C. MOORE:
*God* has to be a *subsistent* part of my holistic body, Gary Moore. I am the *existent*, God is the *subsistent*. [This is off the cuff, and I do not know if the thinking is really valid. But it is a direction I want to further proceed sometime with stringent linguistic analysis and perfect clarity. Just remember, Hume said he was, and held by it when he did not have to in the company of French atheists, that he was a *philosophical theist*. What exactly this means, I do not know, but in the context of NATURAL HISTORY OF RELIGION it seems connected necessarily to the specifically human faculty of the imagination. And, everyday, I cut down the number of qualities I consider specifically *human* as opposed to being general qualities of animal nature per se.]

GARY.C. MOORE:
More graphically, you can talk coherently about your arm as abstracted in the sense of being divided fictionally from your body.

JUD EVANS:
In my opinion *humans talking coherently* has nothing to do with whether an object exists or not - but everything about the way that *talking human beings* exist.

GARY. C. MOORE:
*Coherence* is more or less *coherent* according to how directly an indifferent independent object standing on its own, affronting the observer with its separateness, is PHYSICALLY POINTED TO in order to explain the words. The figurative language is used to exemplify the external reality of objects separate from the mind purely perceiving them AS OPPOSED TO confusing literal, denuded perception with conception, that is, is the object primarily a *lamppost* or is it that thing over there I am pointing to that gives off light?