Leo D.M.J. Aurini - April 03, 2015


Aurini's Insight： Men Worth Quoting

Topics
Aquinas and scientific method
Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
St. Augustine H. L. Mencken Robert Heinlein Thomas Aquinas John Locke Thomas Hobbes Tans Tafel Brandon Asimov Hippo Clark Ginny Nero
Aurini's Insight： On Prayer A Fictional Social Justice Dystopia

Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

127.54

Word count

2,047

Sentence count

144

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Brandon asks that I introduce several historical figures who are worth quoting. That I explain where they came from, what they believed, and allow that to show why it is that I like quoting from these fellows. So I ve picked six men that have not only influenced my thinking, but that have very much influenced all of Western thinking.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Thank you.
00:00:30.000 This requested video comes from Brandon, who asks that I introduce several historical figures who are worth quoting.
00:00:39.000 That I explain where they came from, what they believed, and allow that to show why it is that I like quoting from these fellows.
00:00:49.000 So I've picked six of them, men that have not only influenced my thinking, but that have very much influenced all of Western thinking.
00:00:59.000 And for the first one, we're going to go all the way back to the Roman Empire.
00:01:04.000 We're going to quote Marcus Aurelius.
00:01:08.000 Now Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor.
00:01:13.000 Nicola Machiavelli described him as the final of the five good emperors that followed the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
00:01:22.000 That's the Julius Caesar and his descendants.
00:01:26.000 There are five good emperors that followed after Nero, and Marcus Aurelius was the last of them.
00:01:34.000 Now, he was a Stoic philosopher, and the Stoics focused upon self-control and reason and maturity.
00:01:46.000 His book, Meditations, is an excellent piece of advice for any young man.
00:01:52.000 And it's no accident that the website Return of Kings frequently posts articles quoting from his work.
00:01:59.000 He's a very inspirational figure.
00:02:01.000 And the quote I've selected to best sum him up, it's actually not a direct quote from him.
00:02:08.000 Because the one downside to understanding Marcus Aurelius is that his writings were mostly in Greek, if I recall correctly.
00:02:17.000 He personally attributed his erudition to the fact that he did not go to public school, but was homeschooled, mainly with Greek tutors.
00:02:25.000 And so Meditations, I believe, was written in Greek.
00:02:29.000 And the translations are not perfect.
00:02:33.000 But the quote I'm about to give you, which perfectly summarizes his approach to reason and rationality,
00:02:42.000 and coming to understand the universe in a manly way, was actually from the film Silence of the Lambs.
00:02:51.000 And it goes as follows.
00:02:54.000 First principles, Clarice.
00:02:56.000 Simplicity.
00:02:57.000 Read Marcus Aurelius.
00:02:59.000 Of each particular thing, ask,
00:03:02.000 What is it in itself?
00:03:04.000 What is its nature?
00:03:06.000 What does he do, this man you seek?
00:03:13.000 Next up, we have St. Augustine of Hippo, the foremost theologian of Christianity.
00:03:19.000 In fact, some have even said that all Christian theology is St. Augustine.
00:03:25.000 Everything else is but a footnote.
00:03:28.000 Now, St. Augustine is a figure that I find very fascinating, very attractive, because of where he was coming from.
00:03:36.000 Augustine lived during the fall of the Roman Empire.
00:03:39.000 A time not too dissimilar from the time we find ourselves living in.
00:03:44.000 Society was crumbling, social trust was down, marriage was falling apart, children were not being had in sufficient numbers,
00:03:54.000 women were in the workplace with their own version of feminism, and there were bachelor taxes being implemented. 1.00
00:04:00.000 And so, Augustine, as a young man in this declining civilization, he was a degenerate like the rest of us.
00:04:09.000 He partied, he drank too much, he whored about with his degenerate friends when he was going to school in Carthage. 0.98
00:04:18.000 And one of his famous prayers at the time was,
00:04:21.000 Lord, grant me peace and salvation, but not just yet.
00:04:26.000 At the age of 31, that was when Augustine converted to Christianity.
00:04:32.000 And this is when he started studying.
00:04:35.000 The New Testament at the time was largely just a collection of stories.
00:04:43.000 It was a bit of advice here and there on how to live your life, but it wasn't laid out in a systemic, sensible way.
00:04:52.000 And so, Augustine is the man that did that.
00:04:56.000 His book, Confessions, is one of the most influential in Christianity that lays out the specific doctrines.
00:05:05.000 He was a Neoplatonist in his thinking, and so he took these wild and woolly statements that Jesus had made
00:05:13.000 and laid them out in a sensible and coherent manner that could be interpreted.
00:05:20.000 So, for Constantine, this is the quote that I've chosen to kind of sum up who he is.
00:05:29.000 What does love look like?
00:05:32.000 It has the hands to help others.
00:05:34.000 It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy.
00:05:37.000 It has eyes to see misery and want.
00:05:39.000 It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men.
00:05:43.000 That is what love looks like.
00:05:46.000 If St. Augustine were the father of Christian theology, Thomas Aquinas would be his biographer.
00:05:57.000 Writing centuries later, Thomas Aquinas ultimately became the author of Thomism, which is a fundamental value of the Catholic Church.
00:06:07.000 And, in fact, you can argue that it is really the antecedent, the precursor to the entire scientific method.
00:06:16.000 Now, where Augustine was a Neoplatonist, with Aquinas, we start to reintroduce Aristotelian philosophy into the Western tradition.
00:06:28.000 So, he wrote many critiques and many analyses on Aristotle.
00:06:33.000 And this eventually led him to the belief that truth is truth no matter where you find it.
00:06:41.000 It doesn't matter if it's coming from a pagan. 0.61
00:06:43.000 It does not matter if it's coming from a secularist.
00:06:46.000 Truth is truth.
00:06:48.000 And this is really a core doctrine to Christianity.
00:06:53.000 That Christianity is not a thuggish religion.
00:06:57.000 It's not a form of paganism which forces itself upon the world.
00:07:01.000 But that it's a constant quest to understand the nature of God, to understand the nature of the self, and to understand truth.
00:07:11.000 And that logic, rationality, all of these things are necessary.
00:07:16.000 Not just in a Christian context, but outside of a Christian context as well.
00:07:22.000 So, Aquinas, really, you can accredit him with leading to the foundation that would eventually lead to the scientific revolution.
00:07:32.000 And as for quotes, well, here's a couple for you.
00:07:37.000 The existence of God, and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles.
00:07:47.000 For faith presupposes natural knowledge even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected.
00:07:55.000 Nevertheless, there is nothing to prevent a man who cannot grasp a proof, accepting, as a matter of faith, something which in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated.
00:08:08.000 If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.
00:08:15.000 John Locke.
00:08:17.000 John Locke was an English doctor and political philosopher.
00:08:23.000 He is credited as being the father of classical liberalism.
00:08:29.000 The idea of equality under the law, of freedom.
00:08:35.000 Many of these values that libertarians espouse.
00:08:38.000 Now, you can't mention Locke without mentioning his equal opposite, Thomas Hobbes.
00:08:45.000 Where Locke opined that the fundamental nature of man was reasonableness and decency.
00:08:54.000 Hobbes argued the savage state of nature, where, absent of government, everybody was vicious and cruel and nobody can trust each other.
00:09:04.000 Hobbes argued that we needed a Leviathan, a state, to force us to be good.
00:09:11.000 Locke argued that the social contract would naturally arise in between people.
00:09:23.000 Now, I personally consider that both of these two philosophers are wrong in equal opposite directions.
00:09:32.000 Certainly, if you look at the state of nature, it's not as vicious as Hobbes described, but it's certainly not the paradise of the noble savage.
00:09:40.000 Nonetheless, Locke was very influential in creating our modern systems with constitutions, with the laws that are consistent with one another.
00:09:54.000 With the goal of maximizing the freedom of everybody in the society.
00:10:00.000 And so, while I don't agree with him completely, he is certainly a very important figure in the development of our modern political philosophy, and he has a lot of intelligent things to say.
00:10:12.000 And so, this is the quote I've chosen from him regarding what the purpose of law is.
00:10:19.000 The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.
00:10:28.000 For in all the states of creative beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.
00:10:34.000 Now, H. L. Mencken. If any of you folks out there haven't read H. L. Mencken, you are doing yourself a disservice.
00:10:47.000 H. L. Mencken was a brilliant writer from the beginning of the last century.
00:10:53.000 He is incredibly witty and effervescent with his prose.
00:10:57.000 He is very suspicious. No, he despises populism and takes a very dim view of democracy itself.
00:11:08.000 He is very conservative, but also very light-hearted.
00:11:13.000 He is not the stodgy tradcon by any means whatsoever. 0.97
00:11:19.000 In fact, one of his best books is titled, In Defense of Women.
00:11:24.000 Now, I've seen a few people misinterpret that title, thinking that if he's writing a book called In Defense of Women,
00:11:31.000 then he must be some sort of feminist, apologist, nothing of the sort.
00:11:36.000 The reason he titled the book, In Defense of Women,
00:11:40.000 is because that implies that women need to be defended for their many, many, many, many faults. 1.00
00:11:47.000 And so he writes the entire book justifying and defending women for having all of these incredible flaws with them. 0.59
00:11:58.000 The guy is absolutely hilarious, and the best part is, because of when he was writing most of his books you can find for free on the Gutenberg Project.
00:12:07.000 So, this is my favorite quote from Mencken, and in fact, it's my start screen on my computer, is this quote.
00:12:19.000 The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
00:12:28.000 Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.
00:12:34.000 And so, if he is a romantic, he tries to change it.
00:12:38.000 And even if he is not romantic personally, he is very apt to spread discontent amongst those who are.
00:12:45.000 And finally, we have Robert Heinlein.
00:12:49.000 Now, Robert Heinlein was one of the grandmasters of science fiction.
00:12:55.000 He is one of the big three, next to Asimov and Clark.
00:12:59.000 And he is a figure I absolutely love, and I think that most of you out there as well,
00:13:04.000 anybody in the manosphere, anyone interested in neomasculinity, will just love Heinlein's writing.
00:13:11.000 Now, it needs to be said that Heinlein honestly is not the best writer out there.
00:13:18.000 He tends to have three characters that he keeps reusing and just putting different names on them.
00:13:24.000 Him as a young man, him as an old man, and his wife Ginny.
00:13:34.000 Heinlein combines the best of the greatest generation, but also some of its worst.
00:13:41.000 You can see how this masculine spirit, this intelligent, responsible drive of a guy that was an engineer and a guy that served in the Navy,
00:13:53.000 and yet also a precursor of many of the hippie lefty ideas that have been degrading civilization.
00:13:59.000 This is the guy that one year wrote Starship Troopers, which was basically his rejection of the beatniks that were criticizing the Korean War.
00:14:11.000 He wrote that, and then he wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, which became the go-to book of the hippie movement.
00:14:18.000 He was a complex man who was very realistic, very scientific, very engineering focused.
00:14:27.000 In fact, one time for a short story of his, him and his wife spent the entire day doing mathematics to try and calculate an orbital velocity that would get you into orbit of the moon.
00:14:38.000 Just for one paragraph in his story to make sure it was scientifically accurate.
00:14:45.000 And he also had a lot of interesting ideas about how the family should be formed, how society should go, etc.
00:14:56.000 He's the guy that popularized the statement, Tans Tafel, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
00:15:02.000 But as for quoting him, I'm going to use his quote on what he thinks the nature of man is.
00:15:09.000 A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight a meal,
00:15:31.000 fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
00:15:38.000 So Brandon, thank you for your support. I hope you found this video informative. I hope all of you did.
00:15:44.000 And if there are any other great quotable figures that any of you folks can think of, please leave a comment describing them and giving one of their quotes.
00:15:54.000 Irini out.
00:16:01.000 Thank you.
00:16:02.000 Thank you.