Episode 150 - Aztec Philosophy with Sebastian Purcell

Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:16] Ellie: The Podcast where two professors relate philosophy to everyday life and current issues.

[00:00:21] David: I am Dr. David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:23] Ellie: And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

What does life look like without the possibility of redemption? That's one of the things that Sebastian Purcell asks in his book, the Outward Path, the Wisdom of the Aztecs, which we're gonna be talking about today. And it has really stuck with me, David, since I read the text. In general, the Aztecs are a very overlooked people when it comes to philosophical thinking, and so we'll get into why it's bad that they've been overlooked in some of our discussions today, but.

Purcell thinks that they offer an important antidote to our usual ways of thinking, and one of those usual ways of thinking is that happiness is important in this life, and redemption is important at the end of it, and perhaps even for a future life. Purcell says The Aztecs don't care about redemption.

They don't think it's possible, and they also don't think happiness is a particularly important goal. Also, one that's not possible and one that we'll talk to Sebastian about once we speak with him a little bit later in the episode. But the answer to the question, what does life look like without the possibility of redemption, is that basically, it's still fine.

Like don't worry too much. He says, you will be fine. That's their answer to this.

[00:01:49] David: Well, but that does have some unpalatable consequences, like in his discussion about death, right? Most of us want to think that if there's an afterlife, whatever part of the afterlife we get or whatever station we land in, it should be because we deserved it, right? If you end up in a good place like in heaven, it's because you were a good person in the here and now, and if you end up in a dark place, it's because you were a shitty person in the here and now.

And he points out that for the Aztecs, there's just no correlation. It's not your moral fiber or character or history in this life that determines where you end up in the afterlife. It's actually just the manner of your death. Like if you die in a particular way, like drowning, you end up in one place. If you die in another way, you end up in another place.

But there is no reason why certain people end up having a really good time once they exit this world, and it has to do just with the emphasis on luck and randomness that is so central to not only Aztec cosmology, but also Aztec ethics and moral theory.

[00:03:00] Ellie: Yeah. And I think when people hear that, they might be thinking, well then is everything permitted? And you just need to like party your way through life. And this isn't an anti partying philosophy by any means, but it's also not that kind of view that, well there is no just afterlife and so everything is permitted.

Instead, the Aztec way of life is very much rooted in a concern for the good life in a life well lived in ethical principles. It's just that those are conceived of not as gearing up for some reward at the end of your life or even really in this life because so much of the view is that very little is actually within our control.

Some would say, okay, well if that's true, then what we should work to do is just control the few things we can control. That's not quite the picture that we get here. Instead, it's a philosophy that's very much rooted in relationships with other people in our daily activities and so on and so forth. And so I think for that reason, it is presenting an unfamiliar relation between metaphysics and ethics, let's say relative to ones we might be accustomed to from European or so-called Western philosophy.

And part of that is because it is not a nihilistic philosophy, there is still a good life to be had, even if there's no redemption.

[00:04:25] David: Yeah. And he uses a lot, the metaphor of slipping that humans are slippery creatures in the sense that we tend to fall, we tend to make mistakes. We make bad judgmental. Even when we don't want to.

[00:04:36] Ellie: You're successful now, not for long sucker.

[00:04:40] David: and it seems like one way of describing the good life according to the Aztecs is that the good life is one where you slip a little bit less than you would if you had been thoughtless, which is not to say that you won't slip or slip a lot or slip all the way until you die, but that you just slipped a little bit less and showed some level of restraint and self-control.

And that allowed you to anchor yourself in your mind and in your community in a way that justifies your life. But it's a very weak form of justification.

[00:05:12] Ellie: Yeah, and it's unusual for us to have an episode that focuses on a particular school of thought. We're often pretty topics-based, so it's not unheard of for us to have an episode that focuses on a school. But yeah, a little bit less common. We were super excited when we saw that a new book on Aztec philosophy had come out because it's a very neglected area of philosophy.

And so David, because it is like a bit unusual for us to focus on a particular school, I know you wanted to tell us a bit about who the Aztecs were, just in case some people don't know much more than the city named Tenochtitlan.

[00:05:47] David: Yeah. Well, Ellie, are you only asking me because I'm Mexican?

[00:05:52] Ellie: You really, you really set me up for that one. You tell me before the recording, I will say some historical things about the Aztecs.

[00:05:59] David: Well, no, and, and it is because I'm Mexican in so far as I grew up, with this mythos and this history and a sense of identity that traces my roots back to the Aztecs, even though there are no like pure blood Aztecs anymore because of the conquest and because of the intermingling that led to a lot of mestizajes. We did a whole episode about that.

But in terms of who the Aztecs were, first things first. The people that we call the Aztecs, were in fact a group, a cultural ethnic group called, not the Aztecs originally, but the Meshika and the Meshika are a group who moved into the central Valley of Mexico in the 11th century, 11th, 12th century.

So in the 11 hundreds, so 12th century actually. And they came from their original homeland, which is a place called Aslan. Now one of the biggest mysteries in Mexican archeology is whether Aslan, the place where these people came from, which is north of the Central Valley of Mexico, is a real place or a purely mythological place.

So there are those two ways of interpreting it. And those who say no, it really is a place disagree about where that place is located. Some people say it's somewhere in the north of Mexico. A very common interpretation of the place where Aslan existed back in the day is that it's actually the southwestern United States like Arizona, California, which make the meshika, i.e. the Aztecs, originally a Native American tribe that just migrated downward because of their nomadic lifestyle.

Anyways, as this group is going down, moving into the Central Valley, they start interacting with other tribes, sometimes by war, sometimes by exchange, sometimes by marriage. And by the time they get to the Central Valley of Mexico, it's because they're following this prophecy from their God Huitzilopochtli who told them, you will find a new home once you find a specific sign.

And that sign is an eagle devouring a serpent on top of a cactus. And so they're moving down looking for this sign, and eventually they find it on an island in the center of a lake called Lake Texcoco in what is nowadays Mexico City. So they get to this island in the middle of this lake, they see the sign and they settle themselves there and create a temple to their God Huitzilopochtli.

Now, many people have heard that Mexico City sinks a few centimeters every year, and that's because it was built literally on top of this lake. That's why the Mexican flag also, if you think about the insignia at the center, it is an eagle devouring a serpent on top of a cactus.

So all of this is connected to the essence of Mexican identity, which is why we call ourselves Mexicans and Mexico because of the Meshika. Now when they land in this island, you know, they're very savvy politically. They start dominating the area and they start creating an empire in the span of 150 years in a very short historical time period.

They go from being a minoritarian tribe to being the center of a really impressive empire that shocked a lot of visitors with its splendor, with its city like metropolitan almost feel.

[00:09:26] Ellie: Like intense canal network, extremely sophisticated hygiene practices and like interior design even.

[00:09:36] David: Oh yeah, there's a lot of interior design. They were very good at constructing very heavy structures on what was very marshy land. Right? They're talking about a lake. And So they would drive these sticks into the mud and then create on raised platforms. And so the whole city was considered the Venice of the Americas because of the, water connection

[00:09:57] Ellie: we got interior design, we got exterior design,

[00:09:59] David: We have also, they were a deeply artistic people. They cared a lot for poetry. There were poetry competitions. I've talked about how I did poetry competitions.

[00:10:12] Ellie: You're obsessed with talking about your poetry competitions

[00:10:13] David: well, and it's because it's a practice.

[00:10:15] Ellie: You're linking it to lineage I love it.

[00:10:17] David: I am a modern day Aztec poet. Everybody, you need to know that nobody there is a clear connection. The reason that we do competitive poetry in Mexico is because it's a way of preserving this cultural heritage.

Anyways, they create this empire. They start funding the arts, they start funding a lot of architecture, public buildings, so on and so forth. And by the 15 hundreds, of course there is the famous contact between the Aztecs and the Spaniards that leads to the devastation and the collapse of the Aztec Empire in a very short period of time.

But we did preserve a lot of Aztec thought, Aztec culture and Aztec traditions, and they have survived in modern day Mexico. And they have become the basis for the formation of a national identity that traces itself not only to the Aztecs, because there were other ancient civilizations like the Toltecas and also the Mayans.

But the thing about the Aztecs is that they were a very recent empire, right? We're talking about the 14 hundreds, so it's an empire that w ent extinct only half a millennium ago.

Sebastian Purcell is associate professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Cortland. He specializes in moral, political, and Latin American philosophy and is the author of numerous articles and the book that we are going to be discussing today, which is The Outward Path, the Wisdom of The Aztecs. Hi Sebastian, welcome to the show.

[00:11:57] Ellie: Welcome.

[00:11:57] Sebastian: Glad to be here. Thank you.

[00:11:59] Ellie: We're so excited to talk to you about your book, and I wanna start by thinking about one of your core points here, which is that the Aztecs are often considered pessimists from a philosophical perspective, what makes them pessimists? Is that a fair characterization? If so, why? And where does their pessimism come from?

[00:12:22] Sebastian: Yeah. So I think it is a completely fair characterization.

[00:12:26] Ellie: Yeah, if you read the book, I mean, you kind do say that in chapter one. So.

[00:12:29] Sebastian: yeah. I think it's totally fair. And I mean, the most obvious source of that comes from one of the most famous myths in Aztec cosmology called The Legend of the Suns. And in this myth you have the idea that we live under the fifth sun, there were four previous suns, and a sun is sort of a metaphorical constellation of kind of the cosmic order. So humans under different suns are said to eat different kinds of food and act differently. The texts are fragmented, but it looks like each one of them had a different sort of existential character, if you can put it that way. So we live in the fifth one.

All of these suns are inherently unstable and they come to an end. Ours is said to come to an end. It's a movement sun, it's a specific kind of like undulating movement. So ours will come to an end with an earthquake. That is the idea in the Codex Chimalpopoca, that's what it says a couple of times. So there is that view, and that makes them a lot like Norse mythology with Ragnarok or something like that, that it's all gonna come to an end, and that means that our human existence is somehow justified in the struggle, not in the results.

They have two other characteristics that I detect. Two other reasons to be pessimistic in a certain way. Now, pessimism here, of course, doesn't mean it's like, oh, it's all bad and it will all end the chaos or something. 'cause you can still live good lives. You can live a good life in struggling well, right?

It's just means that you're not necessarily going to be happy in the sense of always smiling. So we have these passages from a father talking to his daughter, for example, and he says, well, you're of age now. Look around good, bad people. They both become unhappy, it rains on the good and the bad alike.

And happiness itself is a feeling that comes and goes a little bit like any other feeling. So you have happiness and then fatigue or happiness, and then you stub your toe when you feel some pain, right? That's what happens. And so their approach to happiness is to deflate the philosopher's approach. They would probably have looked at Aristotle's kind of use of eudaimonia and said like, well, fine, but that's no longer what ordinary people mean by the term.

You were just arguing about a different conception of the good life. At that point, you're not really talking about happiness, like ordinary people use it. Most of us mean happiness, like smile on your face, that sort of stuff. Elevated emotional states and that stuff clearly comes and goes, and nobody really controls it.

So in that sense, you're not, you can't aim for happiness as a goal, and that means you should probably be looking for something else, right? So that's a second sort of argument, is an analysis about typical goals. A third argument here is that we're all kind of really complicated beings, and it goes to the title that I gave the book, which distinguishes the Aztecs from say, stoicism or Buddhism, to my fellow Stoic and Buddhist philosophers. I don't want to say that there's a fundamental disagreement. I want to say that there's a difference of inflection.

So for the Aztecs, you have. A really chaotic mind. So the idea that you can start out by working on breathing exercises through meditation or something, still your mind master that and after 10 years, you know, in the Himalayas or something, you, you then go out to the world and you're better.

That's just not the Aztec approach. The Aztec approach is to say your mind is chaos. You have like 13 centers of mind, roughly. It's not even clear that they have the same concept of mind that we have, but 13 centers of thought ish. They all compete with each other. It's not clear that there is one key center.

Maybe there are three. It's what philosophers would call a massively modular conception of mind. And that chaos is not easy to organize. So it's better to start with your friends and family, like have them help you organize your stuff, learn to lean on them, start on the outward path, go outside in. And that's why the example that I gave in the book was of my wife after we moved into this neighborhood that I'm in right now.

So the first time we were in like a traditional kind of neighborhood where mothers will walk their children in strollers or people walk their dogs by each other, they sit on the porch. It's a very kind of communal place, like the 1950s or something. So we get a lot of trick or treaters. And we were told our first year here to get a lot of candy, which we did.

We erred on the side of having too much rather than too little candy. Afterwards we put the excess and this platter in our room, like our living room, and there's no way to get by our first floor without just constantly crossing that. And so for the next, like so many weeks, I was just eating the candy every time I passed.

And it broke my diet. And I was Catholic background here, so I feel guilty, you know, transcription and guilt, this whole thing. And ultimately I came back one day and the platter was empty and my wife came back from her. She's also a professor. So she came back after me. I said, well, what, what happened?

And she's like, oh yeah, I just took it to my department and gave it to the philosophy kids there, So she gave it to them, our college students, and it was gone. And she solved this whole process of guilt and transgression that I'd been struggling with, and I did virtually nothing.

Right. And that's a good example of the outward path where you learn to lean on good people in your life and they help you live a better life. I have no better ability to resist. I didn't, I don't have more willpower, more temperance, more anything I like in the classical, like Aristotelian sense, I didn't become a better person.

[00:18:17] Ellie: I love story. In fact, when somebody was asking me what the book is about, that was the story I told them as a lens into what the Aztecs are all about.

[00:18:26] Sebastian: Right? Yeah. And see that's their view and partly that's the result of their pessimism. To go back to the key question there, your mind is chaos. You're going to slip up all on your own. There's no way to control it. So one of your better approaches is to go from the outside in rather than to start with stilling your mind and breathing exercises.

They had things like teomania, which translates as meditation, and they did have breathing exercises, and they did have a lot of the things that the stoics and the Buddhists will recommend. It's just that they didn't necessarily, I don't know, say you should start there,

[00:19:02] David: And I like this contrast that you're drawing between philosophical traditions that presuppose a rational ordered and stable mind that maybe can find its place in a rational ordered and stable universe. And on the other hand, this view of the Aztecs in which the world is chaos. I mean, even the cosmos will come to an end with an earthquake, and so is the mind.

So in this world, what exactly are we looking for? And it seems like we can't really be looking for happiness as the highest goal In the book, you talk about how that's because the Aztecs had a very different ethical, highest value, and that was not a happiness, that's what you call rootedness being rooted or feeling like you have roots in a place and in a time.

And so I want you to talk to us a little bit about this notion of rootedness because I find it very compelling. And I also find it very beautiful. The image, of course is of a plant throwing roots down into the ground. So what are the ethics of rootedness?

[00:20:09] Sebastian: Yeah. So lemme take a step back here in two steps. Okay. One for the scholars. I'm working from a tradition that began maybe the late 1880s in Mexico for interpreting these texts. Just a note about the texts themselves, they're fragmented. They come from the post-colonial era. I tend to stop at about 1640 because there are linguistic differences there.

And so I have grounds for saying the text before then are roughly one kind of thing. And after them are another. So that's what I'm working with. They're fragmented and they're gonna be contested. So there are multiple traditions of interpretation. And the one that I follow comes out of, you know, Mexico City, the UNAM, which is the leading research institution in Mexico City.

That tradition is a living tradition. So they work not only to interpret the texts, but to update the texts relative to our best epistemic cannons. Just like a contemporary. Aristotelian doesn't say like, oh, I must go by exactly what Aristotle said. They try to update it. So in my retrieval here, just as a note, I'm retrieving it consciously as part of a tradition, and that goes to the term rootedness because that's sort of a term of art. The Aztecs tended to prefer lots of terms. It's our culture that likes one word for a thing, and the Aztecs thought that that was ugly. They preferred two terms, four terms, eight terms to describe especially very important concepts.

And a lot of those metaphors look alike. They turn on this idea of not falling down, growing roots being like trees, very large trees. The Montezuma Cyprus for example, or the Ceiba, they're trees with very deep roots and the model human being is supposed to be like them. That's where I got that from.

There may be a linguistic connection there. There may not be. I think we probably don't have enough evidence to settle that, but I think metaphorically the constellation makes sense. And there's a story that backs this one up. They had a saying that goes, the earth is slippery, slick. And there's a couple of examples of this and one of those examples strangely turns on moral luck and it just sounds like a passage outta Bernard Williams basically. Now their idea about slipping up was that you will make mistakes even in the things that matter to you. The story I give there is of Trent Resner, who I'm dating myself by age here, but when I was a teen, he was super important.

He was on the cover of Spin Magazine back in 1999. He was an international rock star, and he would wake up every morning and basically decide whether or not he should shoot himself, and he decided, he kind of just procrastinated, but the editor from Spin Magazine asked him why, and he said, well, what if you got everything you ever wanted and it still sucked?

Which is to say he was experiencing disillusionment, which is a weird way to fail. He failed. By way of success, and that's an Aztec point there. Disillusionment means you got the thing that you wanted and you failed because of it. And that's their point. You can mess up all of the time about all these things. The best approach that you have is to try to grow deep roots with other people, and they liked fours in the book. I try to reorganize them in terms of threes, but they said things like, you want to take root in your psyche, in your family. So psyche like, you know face and heart is a metaphor they had. But for your character and your psyche, your mind in your family, your community, and then the natural environment.

So there's kind of four levels that the Aztecs would prefer. All of that gives you the best chance to avoid slipping up in a terrible way. Now it's impossible to avoid that altogether, but that's the sort of best approach that we have. And at least any conception of the good life should be informed by an awareness that you are going to mess up at all of these levels and you should try to respond to that intelligently because this is ethics for humans, after all.

Not, not ethics for Angels or somebody else who doesn't make mistakes.

[00:24:32] Ellie: Yeah. And I can see how that notion of rootedness also relates back to the story you told before. It's because you were rooted in virtue of your relation. Well, first off, you were rooted in your neighborhood, which is why you bought the candy. You were rooted in your relationship and your wife knows you well enough and saw your behavior, you know, so that then she responded to it.

And I think that idea of other people kind of picking you up and your environment supporting you in a deeply pessimistic world is very appealing. And I think especially perhaps nowadays when so many of us feel, there's so much uncertainty around us and so little control over the situations in which we find ourselves.

[00:25:20] Sebastian: And their idea is ultimately a little bit like the stoics there. You're like, you're not gonna be able to control any, everything, but it's also an illusion to think that you can control yourself in a way, right? Like that's, nah, that's a lot harder than people tend to expect. It's better to, you know, good enough in a lot of areas, work with other people and sometimes they surprise you and they did give you techniques that you can use to get better at these things too, that you can practice.

And in that sense that they're a little bit like the stoics, right? So you do have techniques, but it's an arch.

[00:25:54] Ellie: Wanna tell us about maybe one or two of those techniques And I'll just say as you gear up for that, I think one thing that is really interesting about your book too is that you're sort of responding to the popularity of stoicism in recent, not amongst scholars but, but more among the general public.

There's just been this huge, and I would say to me as a philosopher, kind of shocking rise in the popularity of stoicism. And one way of understanding your book is as an alternative to stoicism saying, if you like this idea of philosophy as being practical, applicable to everyday life, stoicism isn't your only choice.

You know, you also have this very different kind of choice and it's a choice as you mentioned, that I think is like more outward looking. I get frustrated sometimes when people strawman stoicism as just being about your inner self, but you're not doing that in the book and, and your answer, you know, you just mentioned as well, the stoics are very interested in how we can fulfill our social roles appropriately, but you are drawing on a very substantial distinction between the two different views. So yeah, tell us a little bit about one or two of these practices.

[00:27:01] Sebastian: Sure. So for the Stoics, right, you're trying to control your mind for the Aztecs. You do have a few of those practices, but you can almost start outward and, and work your way in. So some of the most inner practices are liminal. That's how I describe them. The right at the level of consciousness that like breathing, that Buddhism does that and it's kind of under your control, kind of not.

You can focus on those liminal practices, but you can also focus on practices that would increase your willpower, you know, moderation or something like that. And what they did, for example, with the students, 'cause they had schools for their kids and they tried to send them, they tried to like cultivate virtue in a way.

And so they would have them wake up early, which sounds, well we do that actually, frankly, it's one of the only.

[00:27:51] David: Some of us do it. I know all of us do.

[00:27:53] Sebastian: We force our children to do that though, right. And I teach a nine o'clock class. Usually it's logic. They're all asleep. That's what administration has decided. That is the right time to teach them, you know, mathy things.

The only real justification I can find for this is at least it's helping them practice moderation, like willpower. They had all of these sleep practices, waking up early, getting up in the middle of the night to do stuff or whatever else. Also cleaning your room. Like effectively they had sweeping practices and carrying heavy logs from place to place because again, moving heavy things is kind of an intense activity.

So that goes to the fact that they broke willpower down into three separate components, more or less. I call them different things in the book because my editor didn't like Will Too and Will not too. She said it sounded too niche and she was right. She's always right about these decisions.

But I, think of it as like, okay, at base you're either willing to do something like get up early or willing not to do something, not eat the candy, right? But on the willing to do something, there's a difference between the intense thing waking up or what I did one time is that in our neighborhood.

The sewage backed up and it started coming out of our basements, like the sink in our basement, and it started flowing into everything, the whole area, because people are using those wipes, which you're not supposed to use, right? And they're flushing them, and it caused a backup.

[00:29:24] Ellie: Talk about slipping.

[00:29:26] David: I was,

gonna say it's the end of the fifth sun.

[00:29:29] Sebastian: It was oh, terrible. But I had to run into the basement then multiple times into the poo water to salvage whatever I could before it rose too high. Right. Deeply disagreeable activity. Just highly intensely. That's high intensity though, right? So willpower to do that, it lasted, you know, roughly an hour. Okay.

That's very different from another thing that I don't like doing, which is squats. I hate doing squats as a workout. You're supposed to do them workout, whatever else, but like how often? Well, like three days a week forever. Because it's good for your health. That's a different kind of thing, right?

Willpower over time is very different from short term willpower. It's like a low intensity consistency sort of thing. And so the Aztecs organized different practices for different kinds of willpower. I'm bad at resist ing sweets. My wife helped me with that. But you know, I'm able to grind through lots of studying, which is why I ended up with a PhD.

Right. The, those are different things and they're different willpower activities. So they focused on different spiritual exercises to use the word from pure high dose translation of the, of askesis in Greek, that's the Greek term for exercise practice. Right. And they had a bunch of these that they gave their kids.

So those are just like a couple of 'em. That's an external one that you did with other people. By the way singing helps you do onerous activities. It turns out a lot of students realize that they like listening to music to help them get through stuff. Like we all kind of recognize that. But if you're listening to music to do something super boring, that's an Aztec practice that's outward, right?

You're not really controlling your mind, you're using your circumstances to control your mind.

[00:31:10] David: And you know, a lot of these practices have a clear moral orientation in so far as they are meant to give us this handle over our own will, over our own desire. But some of them are also targeting an area that I find really intriguing from a philosophical perspective, which is the area between ethics and etiquette.

So a lot of these practices were meant to lead to the cultivation. Of a certain mode of being in the world. One of the earliest books that I read about the Aztecs years ago was, Jacques Soustelle's The Daily lives of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest. And there he says that the Aztecs were completely obsessed with etiquette.

You know, how to sit at the table. There were all these manuals for not getting food on yourself or anybody else. And in your book you also talk about some norms of conduct, let's say, that are discussed and that have been preserved in Aztec writings, especially writings in the wake of the Spanish conquest.

You mentioned the Florentine Codex, for example, and you point out that one of the ingredients of the good life for the Aztecs was what they called right speech. A good Aztec. Knows how to speak properly. And it reminded me of this notion of regalness of, you know, like exuding regalness as the norm of good Aztec society.

And so I wanna hear what good or what right speech meant to the Aztecs and what it looked like at the time.

[00:32:42] Sebastian: Yeah. So, and there's actually two features of that I wanna pull on. One of them is about kind of how right action evaluation works for the Aztecs. And at least this is my contemporary reconstruction in such a way that it solves a lot of philosophical problems in a nice way. So if it worked this way, it would make sense.

Okay, so you have virtues of character that you perform with other people. Those virtues help you achieve a good life. Okay, fine. We're all on board with that. That's structurally a little different from Aristotle because they include shared agency. So friendship is a legitimate virtue for the Aztecs, whereas Aristotle has to say things like, it's not really a virtue, but it's like a virtue because it's not based on an individual character.

So Aristotle has like a kind of like a logical problem there. The Aztecs don't, okay, great. Those virtues though, ultimately help you fulfill your social roles and your social roles. It's from those social roles that you derive obligations. And that's how we tend to criticize people. And a lot of the Aztec culture turns on discussing things in terms of honor.

So they wouldn't say like, you failed to recognize your social role obligation because who says that? They would say that is a dishonorable action, by which they mean you failed to fulfill your social role obligation. So if your action is going to be right, it includes performing the right action in your social role for certain circumstances and a lot of stuff about right speech.

Concerns like your station life, different people in different stations. So children have different obligations about speaking than adults and for obvious reasons. With that in mind, there's also the flip side of that, which is that speech is liminal, like breathing. It's partly under your control and partly not.

Most of the time we don't focus on it, but you can, most of the time you don't know what you're gonna say when you begin a sentence until you end it. So it's quasi, it's right there at the threshold of volitional consciousness and, yeah.

[00:34:39] David: Another example of something in between.

[00:34:41] Sebastian: Yeah, and that allows you to like pull on it as an area by which you can practice controlling those non-conscious features of your psyche and right speech.

So performed means that you have a more organized mind. There's an example that I give in the book about SMS Health. Robert Cialdini is a relatively well known psychologist who focuses on non-conscious influences on the human mind. I say non-conscious rather than unconscious, because I don't want to confuse this with like Freud or something like that.

Let's just be neutral. It's stuff in your awareness or stuff that kind of just goes under your awareness most of the time. Like that's what I mean by non-conscious. You could pay attention to it, but most of the time you don't. Okay. So he was invited to give a talk to this health organization that's been wildly successful.

And they said, great. Don't say the following things. And they gave him like this list of bullet points. Like don't say actually he, one of those is don't say bullet points. They said say talking points. Right? Because they're a health organization. They wanted to provoke non non-violence. So don't say targets, say goals, don't say, beat the competition, say outdistance, the competition.

And he initially, his reaction was like, fine, you're paying me $15,000 for a talk. I'll show up and do it. But after a period, he realized that it sort of set the tone for everything that they do. At the organization. 'cause if words lead to actions, the wrong words lead to the wrong actions, and hence you affect the wrong goals.

The turn of phrase that I gave to this, it's a sort of an Aztec turn of phrase, is that what crosses your lips pre-frames your mind. So you need to pay attention to what's coming out of your mouth because you're subtly influencing that whole wealth of minds, the 13 centers of minds, right? In a way that you don't understand.

So right speech becomes a mechanism by which you can sort of outwardly get some control over the inner chaos.

[00:36:56] Ellie: And it strikes me that this is simultaneously giving less power to speech than I think the history of what we usually call Western philosophy does. And at the same time, maybe giving more power to it than our everyday discourse tends to conceive of it. And so what I'm thinking about is the fact that the history of Western philosophy is defined by what Derrida, for instance, calls logo centrism.

The idea that speech is more important than writing and that it is associated with reason. And so the reason I say I think there's a different approach here is because I think the notion that speech is more liminal is really different from the history of Western philosophy. And I think the emphasis on speech that you see in a more logo centric approach is maybe like an overemphasis.

But then on the other hand, in our culture, in contemporary US, at least people are like, I should be able to say whatever I want and it doesn't matter. And, and there are so many concerns about policing speech, what we used to in the nineties called political correctness and the various, you know, ways that that kind of discourse has flourished since.

And so I think that also reveals a kind of lack of care for our speech in at least contemporary US society, that we could really learn from that, that we could learn from the Aztecs on. Speaking of speech.

[00:38:25] Sebastian: Yeah. No, I see what you're saying there. And you know, I think the difference turns on the way in which the Aztecs don't look at speech in a, doxastic way. It isn't principally about right. Speech isn't principally about enunciating the right doctrines or avoiding swear words because the goal is to organize speech such that your thoughts don't go the wrong direction.

And get you in the wrong goal at the end of the day. 'cause we all slip up and that's the real concern is avoiding slipping up. Not so much enunciating the right doctrine.

[00:39:07] David: And a lot of this, of course, is an insight from Aztec Wisdom or Aztec philosophy, but I was taken aback by one of the observations that you make in the book, which is that although we ought to think about the Aztecs as philosophers, the Aztecs didn't really have philosophers in the sense in which we think about it, there was no social function of the philosopher.

So I want to ask you about this because then how should we think about the relationship between the two? Is it that they recognized certain voices as philosophical, but there was no such thing as somebody that was widely recognized as smarter than everybody else? What did philosophy as maybe now we understand it mean to the Aztecs, if

[00:39:59] Sebastian: Yeah, it is a sort of cultural or like a scholarly term of art. I think we need to be conscious of the fact that even in the West, as traditionally conceived, the people at the start of that Thales, for example, didn't match up. Right. They held to positions that didn't cleanly distinguish what can be known a priori from what can be known not a priori, assenting to beliefs that could in principle not be verified through scientific methods.

Like that whole discussion clearly is much, much later. I don't think that Sally's or Parities or Heric colitis would make it as philosophers if those were your criteria. Probably not Plato either. Right. So I just wanna be really careful about that. The division between what we call like religion and philosophy is quite blurry.

[00:40:50] 150. david stem: Well, we're continental philosophers, so it's all welcome for us.

[00:40:54] Sebastian: Yeah, exactly. And you know, I think that that's consistent actually with philosophical practice longer term, right. Is to say that it's, it's sort of an ambiguous notion. There's a relationship with another portion of that that emerges a little later. So social role specificity, like did Socrates conceive of himself as a philosopher?

And the answer is actually no. Not in like the, I endorse the view that I, you will never find a Socratic dialogue where he thinks of himself, uses the term to designate himself as a philosophers. Right. It was typically people who engaged in certain kinds of questioning activity, but also did other things.

I mean, Thales was a commodities trader, let's be honest. He made a lot of money trading olives.

[00:41:41] Ellie: Wait, what? I thought he just fell into a well and never out. I had no idea.

[00:41:45] Sebastian: According to Aristotle, like Aristotle points out that he was very intelligent and he looked at the seasons and he bought a lot of olives early on. 'cause he expected a shortage later on and made a ton of money as a commodities trader, so.

[00:42:00] Ellie: Wait. I love this.

[00:42:01] Sebastian: Right. So, I mean, it just goes to show

[00:42:03] Ellie: or I love learning this. I am agnostic aboutthe ethical practice of the Thales business trade.

[00:42:09] Sebastian: Yes, so what I find that very interesting though, is to say that the same person did many things. And so the people that the Aztecs called tlamitini scholars say, well, I don't know. The wise ones fine, but I also think it's important that we are aware that philosophies come to be an honorific term.

Cultures that are deemed philosophical are deemed to be for better and worse, more advanced than cultures that are not deemed philosophical. And so there is a precautionary principle. I think that's at work we ought to be as inclusive as possible given, so this is a sort of decolonial epistemology behind this, but we should be more inclusive rather than exclusive with this term because being exclusive has often historically led to denigrating various people's and they shouldn't have been.

So if they did something that looks roughly like philosophy, let's just err on the side of caution and call them philosophers. And that's pretty much why I call it the tlamitini philosophers. I think that's the right translation given my decolonial approach to that problem. But you know, to be frank, if we look at the term philosophy, even in the West, it's gonna be amorphous and change all the time.

And, you know, I don't know if you have a really narrow definition of philosopher, then maybe none of those emerged prior to the 19 hundreds. Like, I don't know. Right. So it depends on where you, where you put that designation. So I think that to be really clear, the Aztecs had a view of some people as wise, who engaged in questions about things above the heavens and below the earth who were concerned with living better lives, who thought about talking to other people and helping them lead better lives through conversation.

Some of those things resemble things that Socrates did. That seems close enough to me. Let's call that philosophy.

[00:43:56] Ellie: I'm very much with you on that. Our student assistant a couple of years back, did a YouTube series on decolonial philosophy, which is amazing. And we got some, you know, some of those just weird comments being like, but is it technically philosophy? And the answer. You just gave that's all we need to direct them to.

Next time we get a weird comment about that. I also wanna go back to the idea of what the outward path means, especially in terms of activity. You talk about habit and activity quite a bit in the book, and as you mentioned earlier in talking about how happiness is not the ultimate goal for the Aztecs.

One thing that I took away from your discussion is that Aztec wisdom involves activity more than feeling. And you talk quite a bit about practical wisdom as well. And so I'd love to hear you talk more about the role of activity, whether you think it's fair to say that for the Aztecs activity is more important than feeling and what this says about the good life of the outward path and how we might attempt to live it in the times we find ourselves in today.

[00:45:05] Sebastian: So feeling is a weird word. It doesn't really translate directly in, they don't have like a thinking, feeling distinction in the way they weren't post Cartesian, so

[00:45:15] Ellie: Yeah.

[00:45:16] Sebastian: right.

[00:45:16] Ellie: Yeah. It was so interesting when you, said the face and the heart are what they thought of in terms of character or self.

[00:45:22] Sebastian: And so heart has desires. Your face, sometimes translated eye, but you know, whatever face has is your seat of judgment. We have passages where father's holding his infant son, and he basically says, you have a lot of, you have a heart, but you have yet to assume a face by which he means, yeah, you hold an infant, they cry a lot.

There's no judgments there, right? They want many things, but they have no judgment, and that evolves over time. But heart like desires versus judgment is not the same thing as desires versus reason, right? That's a kind of different thing, and that's why the feeling, reason, discussion translates very awkwardly into their world.

Ultimately, they might call what we call feelings, fast thoughts. Something happens, you have a quick emotional response, like a gut reaction to it, and then you have to process that. Yeah. You have 13 minds, like your 13 minds are competing for different stuff, and then you gotta kind of organize your response later, right?

So, okay. Feelings are fast thoughts. Reason is slow thoughts, eh? It's rough metaphor, but that might be the right way to go at that. What matters is not how fast your thoughts happen. By the way, they would all be thoughts then, but whether or not they're sound, they're not have good judgment. And a lot of that becomes embodied in practices.

So the way that you're supposed to be virtuous, remember is through cooperation with other people. The social roles actually are the source of your obligations, but they also help you like organize. Your relationships with other people too. So they had rituals to help you do the right thing. It turns out that, you know, if we have like Robert's rules to help us have discussions, that's sort of an Aztec idea in a way, is like you're gonna deliberate and you wanna make sure that everyone gets a fair shot at giving their piece, then you need to organize how the discussion happens in a way that makes sense, Robert, rules of order that sort of helps with that.

That's the Aztec idea. So the rituals here, and I don't wanna say they also didn't have religious components, I just want to add that in addition to what a lot of anthropologists and historians highlight, they had these functional components that helped you organize how you interacted with other people.

And that was partly the role of ritual. So when you look at like loving someone, it's not really the feelings that you have in our sense 'cause again, feelings doesn't make, it's a different notion for them. It's how you interact with them over time and they had rituals that helped you sustain the appropriate interaction with people over time.

So they had, you know, some rituals around what I call, I don't really know any other word for this in English, but like intimacy, not like sexual intimacy, but just like intimacy as in like getting to know a person. Because sometimes a couple when they were married did know each other. Sometimes they didn't know each other that well.

Their culture sometimes had what we would call arranged quasi arranged marriages, sometimes. Teenagers got to know each other. In the cuicacalli, which is a school where they sang, they would hold hands. They had all these little cute rituals that kind of resemble like our prom or something like that. They had those right?

And then you would go and get married after that. You have to remember that people got married and had children at a much younger age in historical cultures because, you know, you tend to get disease and die pretty quickly. They would have these rituals though, where they would sequester the couple for, you know, two, four days, sort of depended and they would just get to know each other in an uninterrupted way.

And that becomes, that's a ritual practice to promote intimacy. Like knowing the, the secret things that you don't want people outside of your company to know about you. Right? That's what you do there. So you have a little ritual to support that. Or you know, they had like regular sweeping rituals, which are part of like your ordinary stuff because most of your stuff in a relationship is mundane, let's be honest. Consists of things like me making sure that I fill up the cars with gasoline for my wife and that she makes sure that before I run out of the door with our daughter, Lonnie, that she has food and drink so that she won't get upset when I drive her to childcare.

Like there's just like a whole lot of coordination that happens here that is a lot of a relationship, like the overwhelming amount of it. And they had really like ritual practices that helped you enact that. So to put it provocatively in the book as like love isn't what you feel, it's what you do over those periods.

And that's kind of what I had in mind is the enactment of these activities. Now that's where the activity goes. 'cause activity can be two kinds of things. Making a pot, you do something and then you like you're a potter. And then the pot exists afterwards, which Aristotle would call a product and performance like dancing.

There's nothing left over after that. So the goal is internal to the activity, and ultimately your life for the Aztecs is a linked sequence of performances. The goal of life is not to leave a cadaver. That would be the productive view of the human life, right? The goal of life is to have danced well on the world stage and the virtues in your social relationships and all of your rituals are the things that help you do that.

[00:50:31] David: I like that image of dancing until the zone goes up, or in this case goes down. and anyone comes up.

[00:50:38] Ellie: Dancing until the earthquake comes.

[00:50:40] David: Yeah. Sebastian, Thank you very much for your time and for your insights. We recommend your book to all of our listeners and viewers, the Outward Path. Check it out by Sebastian Purcell, thank you very much.

[00:50:54] Ellie: Thank you so much.

David, this book was such a joy to read, and I am left wondering, are you an Well, I was gonna say, are you an Aztec now? Because that's what people would say if they ask, are you stoic or are you a Buddhist now? But it's, but like to say, are you an Aztec now doesn't really make sense.

[00:51:19] David: Are you, Chinese philosopher now or an Indian philosopher?

[00:51:23] Ellie: I know, I guess it's like better for me to ask you than for you to ask me since you, so gallantly decided to align yourself with the Aztec worldview earlier by mentioning your Mexican heritage.

I don't know why I said gallantly. I don't think gallantly's the right word there. Anyway, cut me

[00:51:41] David: No Regal, very regal.

[00:51:43] Ellie: Regal. Okay. Yeah.

[00:51:45] 150: Regalness is an Aztec value at

[00:51:47] David: least according to this other book that I mentioned, the

Daily Life of the Aztecs.

[00:51:50] Ellie: So are you in Aztec now?

[00:51:52] David: So I really like. Aztec philosophy, Aztec thought, Aztec wisdom. And it's not just because I grew up surrounded to some extent by it, but also because it speaks to my sensibilities. The interaction between tragedy, pessimism, and moral luck is largely how I see the world, especially the world of human action.

And so is it that I like it because it's something personal? Or is it because I was primed to think in this way, having grown up in a world where maybe this way of thinking is already somewhat common? Because Octavio Paz has made the argument that a lot of Mexican culture still is suffused with some this Aztec tragedy, and we have not let it go.

And it continues to define the Mexican character.

[00:52:44] Ellie: Interesting, interesting. Okay, so your answer is basically, I don't need to become Aztec because I'm already low-key Aztec. Not David reconnecting with his heritage from reading, this book. And it's not just heritage, I mean also like straight up nationality.

Okay. So, I will say I think there are many aspects of this worldview that I really appreciate and maybe in some sense already embrace, but after reading the book, especially do so. The first is idea of our fundamental relationality and rootedness. This idea that our self cultivation is not a matter of just an introspective path, but something that we engage in with others and in large part thanks to our environment.

Second thing, I really like about this is the idea that love is a matter of doing not of feeling, which is something that Sebastian touched on a bit in the interview. I think that's right and I think we do a lot of damage to ourselves and others when we think of love as just like a sheer passion. Then again, as he mentioned, the question of feeling is a bit complicated for the Aztecs because they didn't have a specific category of feeling.

They're these fast thoughts, but you know, let's say it's not feeling in the sense that we tend to think about it. And the third thing that I think is quite compelling about this is that life is more a series of performances than it is a matter of finding some core true self. So I love that idea and I am really looking forward to integrating the particular Aztec way of thinking about that a bit more into my understanding of performativity.

I do think though my sensibilities as longtime listeners will know, and my personal practices skew quite Buddhist and I've been practicing Buddhist meditation and the theravada tradition for a very long time.

And I don't necessarily think though, that's as at odds with the Aztec path as Purcell suggests. And so one quick thing I'll note there is that I think he depicts Buddhist thought as primarily about an inward path of taming the mind. And although taming or stilling the mind is a very important aspect of Buddhism, it's also a very ethical path too.

And I think sometimes we can misunderstand Buddhism in its variegated forms over thousands of years of history when we think about it as a series of practices for stilling the mind. And so I would just say, I think maybe the Buddhist approach is a bit more compatible with the outward path than Purcell suggests.

[00:55:31] David: Well, I still do like the idea though, that if we want to get inspiration for life from ancient sources, that the Aztecs offer a different path than the Buddhists. the Hindus, than the stoics or the epicureans, whatever the case might be. And so I wonder what would happen if we started tapping into some of the practices, those like spiritual practices that were specific to Aztec culture as a way of strengthening the mind and the body in the present.

And that, you know, that might include certain things like practices or cultivating right speech, but also even some of the cleanliness practices among the Aztecs. 'cause they were an immaculate people. Right. we've talked about how they actually thought the Spaniards were very gross because they didn't shower as frequently as they did.

And in fact, there is,

[00:56:24] Ellie: Or bathe. They

[00:56:25] David: Yeah. They didn't

[00:56:25] Ellie: Aztecs didn't shower. They bathed.

[00:56:26] David: Yeah.

They didn't, bathe. But actually the, the anthropologist, Camilla Towson has made the argument that we often have this idea that when the Spaniards arrived, the Aztecs were so enamored and so impressed by them because they were so different that they experienced them as Gods.

This is a very common myth. And she says no, they thought they were kind of gross and disgusting, just powerful and weaponized. And it, that also doesn't explain the fact that they literally went to war against them. If you had thought that you were encountering a God, you, you know, the last thing you would do is actually battle them out.

[00:57:01] Ellie: Well, although they did initially invite them in.

[00:57:04] David: Oh yeah, no, Yeah.

no. Initially they, they invited them in, gave them a tour. Hernan Cortez got a tour through tenochtitlan, very famously got to the top of a pyramid where he was able to see the landscape knowledge that he then used for military strategy. And so it was a case of a Trojan horse making it into the city.

But one thing I'll say that I also find very appealing about the philosophy of the Aztecs is its emphasis on a certain kind of finitude. This is very different than the finitude of death. It's actually the finitude of the collapse of a universe or the end of worlds because of the cosmology of the five suns.

And I like to think about this actually in the wake of climate change. How do we think the possible end of our species, right, the setting of our sun or the end of a planetary system as we know it? And I think given that the Aztec way of life and way of thinking is already encased by this idea that the world will end no matter how you live your life, maybe we can use that philosophy for thinking about the ecological predicament of the present.

[00:58:14] Ellie: A pessimistic philosophy for a pessimistic world. We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

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[00:58:53] David: And to our listeners, thank you so much for overthinking with us.