Speaker 1Hello everybody. How you doing? I hope all is well. Welcome to another lecture. Today we're going to be moving on a little bit from on relationships and love, and we're going to be talking about cultivating confidence. So the chapter title we're going to be looking at is on fear and confidence, because as I hope we're going to learn in today's lectures, confidence is sort of about having healthy relationships to fear. So confidence, and I want to establish this early on, is by no means necessarily the absence of fear. I want to establish that right away, because a lot of what we'll be discussing in the next couple questions will be our fears, right? So as always, we're going to start off this lecture with our philosophical meditation. I have some questions for us and some prompts. I'll do a little bit of reading for some bibliotherapy, hopefully some good elaborations. Then we're going to get into some Aristotle, which is featured in our bibliotherapy book. And then I also think we're going to have a lecture from Logic-Based Therapy that I hope is useful from Dr. Eliot Cohen, who is a huge fan of Aristotle. One of his books, What Would Aristotle Do?, clearly references Aristotle a lot. It's sort of the basis for his action-oriented approach to using philosophy as a form of therapy, specifically using logical arguments to get us to behave in different ways, to live in different ways. Of course, Aristotle himself was an action-oriented philosopher, you know, famously. And Nicomachean ethics saying, you know, we think so we can act and live better. So thinking is not necessarily the end that we're searching for in and of itself. We're using these thoughts, this discourse, these questions to ultimately lead the best lives we can. And I think confidence is really an essential part of life, or let's say it's an essential aspect of leading a flourishing life that doesn't really get talked about that much. So I'm hoping this lecture is useful for us. So on that note, let's jump into our philosophical meditation. So here are a few questions. Again, if you can get a pen and paper in front of you, that's great. If not, hopefully giving them some thought will still be useful. So first question, what scares you and why? So for this one, I would say, try to list your most common fears. And we could think about small fears, quote, unquote, we could think about larger fears. I think it's interesting to kind of locate, again, as we've talked a lot about, right, the fears that we feel the most frequently, even if they're not all that intense. Then, of course, we could also think about the fears that we might fear intensely that don't occur to us all that often either, right? So there's a spectrum here. Spend a few minutes with that question. I think it might be useful. And really try to get down to the why. So how might we do that, right? You might want to think about memories, events in the past that might cause you to see this particular thing as scary. You might want to think about our imagining of the future. We're going to talk a little bit more about anxiety in this chapter. And we'll have probably a lecture on that next week, right? But of course, anxiety is a negative, fearful vision of the future, right? And we talked a little bit about that already. But again, try to unpack the why of that anxiety. What about this thing that you have the image of is scary to you? And maybe even, right, as we can connect it to you for a second, right? What part of yourself might be encouraging you to see this thing as scary when it might not be, right? Which then leads into the next prompt, which I would suggest drawing like a T-chart maybe or in your mind creating one. What are your rational fears? And what are your irrational fears? And even categorizing fears as such, I think might be a very useful exercise. Because some fears, it's tough to say if it's rational or irrational. And we can keep in mind, right, if you fear, let's say you have a fear of fear, you have a rational fear. For example, a rational fear for me, this is ironic, is that I don't get my doctorate done in a timely way, right? Which is to say there are delays that prevent me from getting it done next semester. I just have one today that might potentially delay it. One of my advisors had to delay a meeting, right? So it's rational to fear that a little bit. It's rational to be anxious about that. The key there is to be anxious and fear it to a certain extent, right? The fear itself might be rational, but we can fear that rational fear in a way that is irrational, in a way that is excessive, right? So maybe we could say that's a rational fear, but it could become an irrational fear if my relationship to it is not balanced, if my relationship to it is not moderate. And these are themes that are going to come up a lot in my elaborations and reading from Aristotle, right? So really work with that T chart, get down to the why and make a list. Even maybe, you know what, list the three fears that are the most frequent and then maybe list the three fears that are most intense. Break down why and get down to the rationality or irrationality behind these fears. Apply your reason, apply your gaze, apply some attention to it and see how it goes. All right. So next one, how would you define confidence? So maybe the prompt of this would be confidence is fill in the blank. And also in that context too, we can think about confidence is not right. And then fill in that blank as well. Now let's locate for ourselves when and where and how are you most confident in what context, maybe even, you know, what times of the day, what times of the year. Let's locate where we're confident. What tasks are you confident performing? And once again, break down why. What might be encouraging that confidence? So of course the other side of that, right? When, where, and how could you be more confident? Where could you develop a greater sense of confidence? And I think a good prompt to help us think about this would be to fill in the following, right? If I was more confident, I would then try to think of a verb. I would say this thing, I would do this thing. I would try this thing. I would stop doing this thing. And then of course, to follow up on that, let's give ourselves, and this is very much in line with what Dr. Cohen would suggest from logic-based therapy, give yourself an action plan, right? I could cultivate confidence today by, and then break it down. And make it, replace today maybe with this week, but pick a time that's immediate. Now let's get a little more specific here with that definition of confidence, right? For you, what are the differences between arrogance and confidence? Now, let's think a little bit about what might contribute to developing confidence in a more kind of, let's say, um, theoretical way, right? How might knowledge and confidence work together? How might confidence and passion work together? How might confidence and experience work together? All right, so let's now get a few quotes that I hope will be helpful. So the first few we're going to talk about are coming from Seneca, from Seneca six pack, right? First one, we do not put to the test those things which cause our fear. We do not examine into them. I think this is a very valid point and that's hopefully, um, well, you know, we're, we're doing the opposite of that with this meditation, right? Hopefully we are examining. We are putting those things into our fears. We are putting those things to the test that we fear, and I think this is, again, a really interesting prompt, perhaps, or a question, right? When's the last time you tested a fear, right? One of the things we get from magic based therapy that I think I have talked about in some lectures is this idea of testing doxa, right? So doxa is a Greek word, it means poorly supported or even, you know, let's say provably false beliefs. We could be living our lives on fear based doxa, because even if something is poorly supported, and let's even say for argument's sake, we don't get certainty in this life, which I think is a valid point, well, we have to be able to make decisions after we gather evidence, and we have, you know, we want to make those decisions rationally and confidently, right? So we might be having situations in which our fears are doxa, or they're based in doxa, once again, poorly supported beliefs, poorly supported opinions. Right? And if we never examine them, we're living these fears, we're moving according to these fears, these fears are controlling us, when really they're poorly supported, they're not based on truthful, rational evidence. So we have to look into these things. Again, that's why I ask why, right? Because that why might lead us to the discovery that, okay, these fears don't make sense. There isn't enough evidence to support me living this way. Right? There's an analogy I encountered recently that was pretty useful in terms of why, you know, why bother with philosophy as a form of therapy? Why bother with? Philosophy as the art of living? Well, let's say we all have a few barking dogs in our minds, right? Of course, sorry, I dropped something. Of course, the barking dog is a metaphor for doxa, right? Because it's not just enough to say, okay, we have these false beliefs we have. these false fears because that would almost be, let's say, that would be unfair because that's not the only thing that is happening. Their existence isn't necessarily the problem. The problem is that they bark at us. They influence us. They encourage us to think, feel, and act in certain ways that aren't truthful, aren't just to ourselves and others, that aren't courageous, that aren't good. So it's not just that the dog exists, which is to say the dog exists. It's that it barks at us and we allow that to impact us. So I literally imagine myself, and I think this has been kind of a useful exercise of visualization recently for me. It's like, if you're walking down the street and there's a dog behind a fence barking at you, you could be startled by it. You could not be startled by it. You could be so afraid of it that you walk a different route. You could be so afraid of it that you're sweating when you're blocks away the second you start to hear the dog. Or you could get calm. You could just walk by the dog. You could acknowledge there's a fence, right? Maybe that fence is, in this analogy, that's philosophy. Our ability to separate ourselves from our doxa, from our fears, by acknowledging, you know what? There's a fence between me and this fear. I don't need to listen to it. I don't need to walk another way. I can hear this barking dog and walk right by it. And maybe philosophy even helps us to hear the dog softer or ignore the dog. I don't need to listen to it. I don't need to walk another way. I can hear this barking dog or maybe sometimes the dog isn't there because we've adopted new practices or we've understood the dog in a new way. I was like, you know what? You don't even need to bark anymore. I'm not sure if this analogy is working and I don't have anyone to, you know, I'm just here talking to myself. So I don't know if this is working, but I do think this is potentially useful, right? There are some dogs that are going to bark. They might always be there, but philosophy, some daily practices we've discussed, maybe this conversation where we get to know our fears a little bit better. We confront them, right? At the very least, when we confront our fears, they're not controlling us anymore, right? Because we're not running from them. Right. So by examining into our fears, right, we're putting them to the test. I can walk by this barking dog and nothing will actually happen to me. It's just a barking dog. There is no bite unless I allow there to be a bite and I start living in a way that is responsive to this irrational fear. So what might we do, right? Well, this is a great word. It's going to come up again later too, I think. Seneca tells us in another quote, temper your fear with hope. So maybe a part of confidence is the capacity to hope, right? Because hope, belief, confidence, these are all, I think, similar ideas. So when you're fearful, especially I think this works well with anxiety, right? How do you change the object of your consciousness? So this is right from logic-based therapy too, right? When you're anxious about the future, you're essentially telling yourself a story, right? You're putting this potential event, as the object that you're looking at in your mind. What if you got good at changing the channel, right? So that fear narrative doesn't have to be what we focus on. We can have a hopeful narrative. That hope could be the new object of our consciousness. That's tempering the fear. You have a fearful narrative. Well, hold on. Let me confront it with something else. Let me shift my focus. The confident person might be hopeful. Now, that doesn't mean they're blindly hopeful or they're naively hopeful, but their life might be slightly more theorized by an optimistic kind of hope for the future. So how do we cultivate hope narratives? Great idea for a self-writing exercise. Next quote. We let ourselves drift with every breeze. We are frightened at uncertainties just as if they were certain. Once again, back to anxiety as a common type of fear, right? We've talked about this, I think, with, I did a lot of, we're doing a lot of zoological references today, but with the pandemic, we're doing a lot of zoological references today, but with the pandemic, we're doing a lot of zoological references today, but with the pandemic, we're doing a lot of zoological references today, but with the pandemic, we're doing a lot of zoological references today, right? We give assent to doxa. We make it true in that sense of the word. Then also we can talk about assent as in going up, right? So it goes up from, oh, this is possible to then this is probable to then, oh, this is, I'm living like this has already happened. We can grieve for things that haven't even happened yet, or at least we can feel like that. And that's always a possibility because we have powerful imaginations. So how do we not let ourselves? Well, that goes back to one of the virtues we talked about in the book, which is the power of imagination. And that's about in the practices, right? That vigilance over the self. So we don't allow ourselves to whenever we're reminded of a fear, that's a breeze. Then we start making this jump from uncertain to certain. Then we're really thinking and feeling in ways that aren't really positive. And then that might, once again, cause us to act in ways that aren't positive, that aren't confident, that aren't noble, let's say to use a word from the Bible, but think about it, right? This back to some modern psychology words. And this is again, thousands of years ago, we're reading from Seneca. This is long before modern psychology, but that breeze could just, you know, it could be an external, it could be a trigger of some kind. So maybe those triggers will be there. Maybe some of them are unavoidable to a large extent. Well, how do we not let ourselves become so frightened that the uncertainty, the possibility, the probability becomes a certainty. And the next quote, I think really works really well with this as well, right? We suffer more often than we think. We suffer more often than we think. We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. And I think fearing is a part of that suffering. So this is great. This is actually one of my favorite quotes that we have in this whole book, because I, I, I personally go through this quite often, right? I think things will happen. I make them feel like they're happening. They're bad. And then I'm suffering and then nothing even happens anyway, right? The thing, the thing literally does not happen. So for Seneca, it's like you either suffer once for no reason, or you suffer twice for no reason, right? You suffer once when you imagine it and you suffer. And then when, you know, if it does happen, you suffer again. So you're doubling your suffering or you're creating unnecessary suffering. All right. So maybe we can get good at seeing, okay, these, these things might potentially go wrong, but instead of sitting in that sense of dread, we work to once again, add that hope narrative, but I'll be okay. Might be a different way to, and this is an oversimplification, but it might be a way to grapple with this idea that we have a natural human tendency. To suffer more in imagination than reality. And how would a confident person's imagination differ from someone who really lacked a lot of confidence? Someone who lacks confidence, maybe not only imagines the future going poorly or imagines the present, or let's say interprets the present is a better way to put it, um, in a negative way, not as, uh, you know, an opportunity, but as instead only as an obligation or, you know, an obligation that feels burdensome. Um, that interpretation of imagination, you know, those are skills. We can cultivate them and develop them. One of the lectures we're going to, we're going to have that will likely be for next week is a coming from the school of life once again. And the opening sentiment is like confidence isn't just something you get. It's not like divinely granted to people. It's something that we can really work on. Um, which isn't of course to say that luck isn't involved, right? Cause ultimately a large part of how they conceive of confidence is that, you know, our early caregivers, once again, those interactions are really powerful in terms of how we establish confidence. That being said, those are starting points. Those aren't where we necessarily have to end up. So we can cultivate confidence like it's a skill. It's a great point. So this is some ideas from Seneca. Now we're going to go quickly to a few other short quotes from various thinkers. So this one is coming from Dr. Martha King, Jr. Um, a gift of love sermons from strength to love and other preachings. He tells us first, we must unflinchingly face our fears and honestly ask ourselves why we are afraid this confrontation will to some measure grant us power. So this quote was the inspiration for some of the questions in the meditation, right? To unflinchingly face our fears might mean to, at the very least, I think, give them the attention that a 20, minute self-writing exercise would grant them at the very least. Right. And I love, um, what Dr. Martha King, Jr. is sharing here in regards to granting us power. And that's a really cool word, right? Again, we're talking about power, courage, confidence. These are all, I think, really similar ideas. Confidence is a form of power because the confident person, or let's say the truly and correctly and rationally confident person is a powerful person. They have power over some of the things that, or let's say a greater degree of power over some of the things that Seneca just mentioned, right? That power leads to self-mastery in a very meaningful way, but we have to face our fears honestly, unflinchingly. Okay. And that question of why, once again, clear motivation for my first question coming from this quote, it's not just enough to acknowledge the fear. We have to grapple with the source. There's power to be found there. There's power to be cultivated in that exercise. Right. And we could even ask too, right? How do you flinch when you face fears? How can we work to even not necessarily get rid of the flinching, but how do we maybe make the flinching healthier, more rational? Because that's normal too, to a large extent, we all have fears. Next quote is from John Stuart Mill. Both in feeling and in conduct, habit is the only thing which imparts certainty. So I include this quote in the confidence because I think we could sort of replace certainty with confidence. As I said earlier, right, we don't really get absolute certainty, but we can get degrees of certainty, right? So I love the idea of connecting habit to the development of confidence. Aristotle will challenge that, I think, to an extent, but I think from a more practical standpoint, right, if we are to, just for example, too, if we are to change our habitual actions, if we are to change our habits around fear, again, back to Dr. Martin King Jr. for a moment, right, if we change the way we habitually flinch or do not flinch around certain fears, we can see that, I think, as a pathway to developing courage, right? So I think Aristotle challenges the idea that simply because you've done something habitually and you don't fear it, that doesn't necessarily mean you're confident or courageous for doing it, right? That being said, in a slightly different way of interpreting the Mill quote, I think we can work to establish new habits and in so doing become more confident people. So I think Aristotle would agree that what we do habitually has a profound impact on who we become and who we are, right? So we have to examine our habits around our fears. We have to maybe start confronting our fears on a more habitual basis. We have to change the habits within that confrontation to become more confident people. Now, this is a great quote. We'll finish, I should hear this brief meditation lecture. Does anyone fear change? Why? What can happen without change? What is nearer and dearer to the universal nature? And that's from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, right? So becoming more confident is going to be a scary process. We have to, again, change the way we think, change the way we feel, and change the way we act in many cases, right? So we have to come to terms with the notion that change is the real kind of philosophical underpinning that's going to drive this process. So we have to be comfortable with that. Or at least, again, maybe comfortable to a greater extent. We can fear becoming less fearful because even, you know, this is an interesting conversation too, I think, right? We become married to our fears. We become married to our suffering. We become married to our worries. It's almost, to oversimplify it, it's like, well, if I'm not worrying about this, then what am I going to do? And there's fear there because at the heart of that, there's change. At the heart of that, there's uncertainty. So I think at times, right, this is a quote from Nietzsche. I'm kind of paraphrasing here, right? But he tells us sometimes in order to conquer one emotion, you need another emotion or other emotions to conquer it. So maybe we habitually can, work to cultivate hope narratives, and that will kind of just drown out the fear narratives. Right? So find an emotion that maybe can conquer the fear. Changing the way we work to focus on objects of consciousness. So if I'm not going to be anxious anymore, what am I going to do? Start reading. I'm not going to be anxious anymore. What am I going to do? Plan your day. I'm not going to be anxious anymore. What am I going to do? Go for a walk. These might be kind of, let's say, unique modes of grappling with fear that almost surprisingly have us in a state of calm that then we can cultivate the confidence more easily within that state. All right. So this is our guided meditation. Our next section will be a lecture on logic-based therapy and Aristotle. All right. So this brief part of the lecture will be a little bit on Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, and then a little excerpt from Dr. Elia Cohen's The New Rational Therapy, all of which we'll be discussing courage and fear. So we're keeping in mind one of the earlier remarks on the philosophical meditations section of the lecture that ultimately, and to a large extent, fear is about, I'm sorry, confidence is about cultivating a sense of confidence. And so a healthy and rational relationship to fear. So what Aristotle is going to help us establish, I think, is a clear understanding of what confidence is, what it is not, and how we can work to basically aim for it, right? So he begins book seven of Nicomachean ethics with the following. What is terrible is not the same for everyone, right? So what's important here is I think, one, we're getting the acknowledgement that things are terrible. There are terrible things. And this is something he continues to, return to throughout this section, right? Things are terrible. Things in life will provoke fear. Other things in life will encourage confidence, right? So what should we focus on then? Okay, we're talking about Aristotle too, who in Nicomachean ethics is speaking to his son saying, like, look, chance is real. Fortune, misfortune, these are real aspects of life that everyone's going to deal with. So we want to arm ourselves with some philosophy to make sure that we're pursuing the noble things in life, the virtues, right? Confidence for Aristotle, or let's say courage, is a virtue, right? So if there are terrible things, we're all capable of feeling afraid, and we're all capable of feeling courageous and being courageous and being afraid in our states of character, right? He wants us to know that it is possible to fear things, these terrible things, more or less, and again, to fear things that are not terrible as if they were. Of the faults that are committed, one consists in fearing what one should not, another in fearing as we should not, another in fearing when we should not, and so on. And so too, with respect to the things that inspire confidence. So even like stopping for a moment, right? And Aristotle is big on the idea that we have to examine our actions. He's big on the idea that we have to start with what is known to us. And of course, as I said, he's, you know, an action-oriented philosopher. He wants us to think so we live better, right? Take a second here, and some of these will sound familiar from the meditation, but I like how he's raising these points, right? What do you fear that might make sense, but you fear it too intensely? What might you fear that makes sense, but you shouldn't be worrying about it now? And what are maybe patterns in those ways of thinking and feeling and acting, right? Are you constantly worried about five years from now today, for example? Are you fearing that too intensely, right? Instead of letting that fear kind of inspire some good action, do you kind of pursue it in a negative sense? Right? Where you're damaging your way of thinking, feeling, and acting in the moment? All these things will contribute to whether or not you'll be confident, according to Aristotle, or be courageous, let's say. Okay. So he says, the person then who faces and who fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way, and from the right time, and who feels confidence under the corresponding conditions is brave. So again, it's about cultivating a relationship to the things that will provoke fear and confidence, that will encourage fear, and confidence. To fear them in the right way, with the right intensity, with the right frequency. Right? Knowing what is to be feared, what is not to be feared to a greater extent, right? That's how we'll become more courageous. Because, and this is from Aristotle, because the brave person feels and acts according to the merits of the case, and in whatever way the rule directs. Two important things here. Merits of the case. We have to know what the case is. We have to be able to analyze with a higher degree, perhaps, of clarity and truthfulness what the situation is. We have to, once again, confront our fears, get into the details. We have to be good at asking questions, examining, perceiving, right? These are all skills we have to practice. Once again, self-writing, I think, comes in really handy here. And then the rule, right? Well, that's the virtue of courage, and it'll define the virtue of courage in a very, of course, Aristotelian sense in a moment. But for Aristotle, it's like courage as a noble thing we should strive for is like an imperative. It's a directive, right? It almost commands that we act in a certain way. Right? And as he says, and he punctuates this paragraph for the following, right? Therefore, it is for a noble end that the brave person endures and acts as courage directs. So again, action-oriented, of course, and the idea of enduring, that's a really powerful verb here too. Because I think sometimes we might imagine a confident person striking out and taking action, which is important. But we also have to imagine a person is good at enduring, maybe not, or seemingly not taking action. That's still an action. Right? And now we define from Aristotle's perspective, the kind of virtue, or we define courage as a virtue, right? So let's just briefly, you know, for this, think of a line with two lines at the end, punctuating it or stopping it, and then one line in the middle. On one end of this is excess. That's to the right, let's say. To the left, that's deficient, or deficient efficiency, right? So one is too much, one is too little. We want to aim in the middle. That's the golden mean for Aristotle. That's where all virtue lives for him. It's profoundly connected to the notion of balance, right? So of those who go to excess, right? Those who exceed in fearlessness, right? They kind of seem like almost as if they're insensible to fear, as if they fear nothing. And he lists earthquakes and waves, like things we should fear, right? that is the person for Aristotle who is rash. That's an extreme. Okay. This is someone who, again, does not acknowledge what they should acknowledge in regards to fear. They do not fear what should be feared. And there's a couple of reasons for this or how someone might be this way. We'll elaborate on it in a moment. But ultimately, we have to be able to characterize the one extreme for our style. This is the rash person, right? They also might act boastfully, right? And he characterizes them as a pretender to courage. So this is not authentic courage. So insensitivity is not what we're striving for here at all. As I said, it's about cultivating a sensitive relationship to fear that's characterized by rationality, by reason, by examination. So this rash person is not in that category, right? On the other side of the spectrum for Aristotle is the person who exceeds in fear, who he would describe as a coward, right? Because this person fears both what they should not fear and what they should fear. So they're adding fears to their lives, basically. And they fear things too intensely. And again, they fear things too frequently. Because this person, of course, is lacking in confidence. They're also, you know, their disposition is typically one of despair for Aristotle. So they're not hopeful at all. Right? And for Aristotle, hopefulness is a mark of a confident disposition. So we have, on one end, the coward, deficient in confidence. On the other end, the rash person, excessive in confidence, such that it's not even confidence anymore, it's arrogance. Right? In the middle, we have the brave person. And all three of these people for Aristotle can be concerned with the same objects. But they are differently disposed towards them, which is to say, of course, their relationships to these same objects are all different. The first two, as we've been saying, exceed and fall short. They miss the golden mean. They miss the aim. They miss the boom in the middle. So how do we get to the extremes? And how do we make sure we don't confuse these things, let's say, as being synonymous with the thing we want, which is the middle ground, the bravery in the middle, the courage in the middle, between cowardliness and excessive confidence? Let's say arrogance. Right? So one is ignorance. So ignorance cannot be a pathway or cannot be synonymous, let's say, to arrogance. To confidence. Acting when you don't know you're in danger, of course you're not confident. Confidence requires awareness of the potential dangers. And acting towards nobility, towards virtue, towards balance, towards the good thing in the face of that knowledge. So let's not confuse not knowing and then taking action for courage or for a courageous action. Right? Even passion, Aristotle questions. Right? Because ultimately, if you're acting under excessive. Emotion, you're not applying your rational thinking skills. That can't be said to really also be synonymous with courage. Now, I'm kind of questioning Aristotle. Might these things help a little bit? Right? And we're never going to know everything anyway. Right? And it might help to be a little bit passionate to get us to confront the fear with, you know, to sort of use, I think I already mentioned in the past, maybe this idea from Nietzsche. Right? That sometimes you need one emotion. That you can use to conquer another emotion or a couple of emotions to conquer an unjust or untruthful or unuseful emotion. Right? So maybe passion can be helpful, but that doesn't mean it is courageous. Or it doesn't mean it is courage. Right? So we want to be careful of these things. Right? We also want to be careful of the idea that experience inherently means we're courageous. And one thing I thought of here, I think I've already referenced this a million times, but public speaking being such a prominent fear, right? I. I maybe get nervous the first day of class, but ultimately the second day I've been doing this for a few years now, I'm never really nervous. So I can't convince myself that I'm this courageous person as a result of doing that. I need to set out and do new things. Because also an interesting point of this reading from Aristotle is that these virtues that revolve around balance, knowing yourself, you know, we have to be sure that we understand the relativity of these things. Right? So someone who's never spoken in front of a group before would be courageous for doing what I do if they were obviously going to deliver, you know, a lecture or engage in a dialogue that was truthful and just and meaningful. Right? They would be courageous. I'm not, though I've been doing this, right? So the experienced person, you know, has to acknowledge that one to like, we can't just kind of rest on that. If we're going to continue to cultivate the virtue, we have to move into new things. Right? And secondly, and this is more in line with what Aristotle is offering in this section. Just because your experience is something that, again, might be typically characterized as courageous, doesn't mean that in a new set of circumstances, you will act courageously. As we had with those two important elements, right, you have to take each circumstance for what it is. And we talked about prosuche, the idea of vigilance when we did our On Practices chapter, right? You have to kind of renew the pursuit of these virtues in light of your experiences. You can't, again, kind of rely on them to say, I'm a courageous person because I've acted courageously. In the past, well, if you're challenged in the moment, you have to kind of step up and move into that nobility in order to maintain that state of character. So we, again, we cannot rely on experience. Also, we can't rely on, let's say, past. It's kind of in line with this, right? We cannot rely on past successes either. And again, an experienced individual, a passionate individual. Someone who's experienced. Someone who's had success in the past. They may seem confident. But our style of saying, we have to look a little closer at this. We cannot make these things synonymous with courage. Which, again, revolves around interacting with this set of circumstances. Whatever the present is presenting. We can, I think, again, I'm sort of adding maybe layers here. We can use these things, and we should, to help us act in the moment. Maybe tune into a little experience. The notion, okay, I've done this before. I can do this again. But it has to be driven towards doing the good thing again, or doing the new thing. That, once again, if we're called by courage to try the new thing, we have to maybe use our experience in the past. Are your successes in other fields or other modes? Part of the meditation was, how are you already confident? Well, that's about thinking about the past to fuel the development of this virtue in the now. Okay, maybe a little bit of passion is helpful. A little bit of passionate thinking is helpful. But it has to lead to action. And again, the person who's ignorant of the danger or who's overly passionate might not even be cultivating enough awareness about what is to be feared to say that they're confident or truly courageous. It's about the knowledge and the acting as a result of that knowledge towards the noble aim of being virtuous. In this case, the virtue we're pursuing, of course, is confidence. That middle ground. So on that note, I want to wrap this up with a brief definition from Dr. Elliot Cohen that I think will definitely feel Aristotle here. I think he phrases it nicely. And once again, so this is the guiding virtue for some of the fallacies we're going to reference in a little bit from logic-based therapy that revolve around fear. So we want to cultivate courage, right? Which for Cohen, quote, means confronting adversity without fear. Confessing adversity without under or overestimating the danger. So once again, it's about a rational application of questioning, gathering of evidence. You're not ignorant to the fear. That's underestimating it. And you're also not so paralyzed by the fear you can't do what you have to do, which would be overestimating the danger. It means fearing things to the extent that it is reasonable to fear them. And in the face of danger, acting according to the merits of the situation. Again, very Aristotelian here, right? Okay. And a couple other things he adds I think are nice, right? Such a person who abides by this, right, tends to learn from and derive positive value from things going wrong. And is also willing to take reasonable risks in order to live well. And I think that final note is actually a nice way to punctuate this section of the lecture and think about risks you've taken recently. Were they courageous risks? What aim did they have? What ends? Or I guess like what was the end of their execution, right? What was the result? Was it good? Was it true? Was it just? Was it helpful? How might a courageous person take risks? How might you, through cultivating courage, take different risks? How might that impact you? How might that impact others? Okay. Thank you very much. One idea from logic-based therapy that I think is really interesting revolves around what Cohen offers in his book, The New Rational Therapy. And he refers to fallacies in explaining, right? He calls them explanatory rules. So basically when things happen, how do we explain them? How do we describe them? And at the heart of one of the fallacies or incorrect ways of explaining the way things happen, for him, of course, is fear, right? So he calls this the feared explanation. And he says, to the extent that you fear one explanation more than another, that explanation is the more probable. So you are falsely increasing the probability of this explanation being correct because you fear it more or you fear it the most. So you're explaining the world. You're explaining why things happen around you, why things happen to you with this lens where you're searching for the fear. Then you're using that to justify basically, again, right? You're giving of assent to the doxa. You are making this thing seem more true. You're choosing this as the reason, as the explanation, only because it's more feared. Right? And he explains this, I think, really nicely. He says, quote, the explanation we often favor is the one we fear the most. Fear of rejection, fear of losing someone or something we covet, or fear of betrayal, for examples. This attests to the tendency of human beings to be insecure. Motivated by self-protection, we often overlook the obvious, upset ourselves unnecessarily, and waste valuable time ruminating over unlikely possibilities only because we fear them more. So this is an example for me of how we are driven by fear. Right? And what he wants us to understand is that the logic of explanation is one of probability. Probability, not of fear. Probability is a function of evidence and is not improved or diminished by what you might fear. Right? So we could ask ourselves, what are your favorite explanatory rules? What are your favorite feared explanations? So again, if there are two potential ways of explaining something, you're going to choose the one that you fear the most. So for me, I think I'm always going to choose the one that I fear the most. I'm always concerned and afraid of being unprepared for, let's say, teaching or for school, for example. So what that leads me to do is I assume that when something goes wrong, it's my fault as a result of a lack of preparedness or a lack of organization. I assume that there's some type of flaw in the way I dealt with this issue. And that's my first reaction. That's my first explanation. And studying this actually really helped me kind of bring that to light because I recently had a situation where I was going with that feared explanation and someone had to point it out to me like, you're missing, again, to use Cohen's idea, you're missing the obvious fact here. Right? I basically was frustrated with myself for not asking a question when the person, you know, at least according to my friend, I think this is good advice or a good interpretation. My friend was like, they should have just told you. Why is it that you have to think of every potential question? Right? But my fear is that I'm unprepared. My fear is that I'm disorganized and that gets in the way of me moving forward with things in life. So whenever it's even possible, that's the case. I have the tendency to blame myself. And I initially interpreted that as, oh, I'm just being responsible. Well, no, that's not the only thing that's happening there. Because I'm afraid of being unprepared, I assume that that's the issue. And I explained that instance, but I do this with other things as well. I have a real habit and pattern of explaining things with that fear. The fear that I'm wrong, because I'm also afraid of being wrong or doing the wrong thing. So for me, those fears largely impact the way I tend to explain things happening, especially things that are external to me. Right? So when we learn this, again, it opens us up to gathering evidence in more accurate ways. Right? So in that scenario, instead of saying, well, it's my fault. I was unprepared. I didn't have my questions ready or I didn't think of that. Right? And I was wrong. I was wrong for not thinking of it. I missed the obvious point that this person knew the information. They could have just told me, oh, I need this paper three weeks in advance, not a week and a half, not two weeks. Again, this is a small example, but I think it's emblematic or representative of the point. I immediately started blaming myself. And I misinterpret that as me being responsible when, in fact, it's just because I'm afraid. And I choose the explanation of, oh, I messed up. Because I'm afraid of messing up. And just because we're talking about explanations and other, this is a slightly different idea than fear and confidence. But I just think it's a nice idea from logic-based therapy. He also says that we have a tendency to commit the fallacy of using what he calls pet explanations. So this means to the extent that you prefer one explanation to another, that explanation is more probable. Right? So one is because you fear it more. And this is because you prefer it. You like it more than the other. So this pet explanation is not, I wouldn't say the exact opposite of the feared explanation. Because even with me, right, me saying that it's responsible, I like the feeling of being responsible. So I think we can mix the feared explanation and the pet explanation. So by that, I mean one explanation could be both. But I also think this is compelling, right, to explain things in a way or such that we like them more. So just because we like them more. If we like it, that's what we're going to go with. Not because, once again, it's based in actual evidence. Fear, right, when we apply philosophy to fear, we're going to be shining a light on some of the ways in which we're not only diminishing our own confidence. We're going to shine a light on the ways in which we are perpetuating fear. And we're also going to hopefully get better at gathering and interpreting and understanding the evidence. Right? So there really is. There really isn't a lot of evidence in support or for me to see myself as unprepared and disorganized. At least not in recent years. But there's enough of that in my childhood, right, like these early moments of fumbling in school or what have you, right, or losing stuff frequently, right, that I've largely, I think, moved beyond. But I haven't really sat with the evidence of me moving beyond those things yet. Right? Again, that's a great kind. That's a great kind of point of philosophical inquiry, too, as we've said, right, to really think. That's a big word. We're using our memories. We're using our imaginations. We're interpreting, right? So think about this idea of the feared explanation and the pet explanation as well, right? But more so for this chapter, maybe. Do you have certain things that you fear that then get into the way you explain occurrences? And how might that impact the way you live? How might that impact the way you think? How might that impact the way you think, feel and behave?
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