Ethics part 4 "he who cannot draw on 3000 years is living hand to mouth."

Goethe said "he who cannot draw on 3000 years is living hand to mouth." We explore our history and think about this quote by Goethe as we wrap our ethics series. We explore so much, including Goethe, the four ideals, prosperity, the satisfaction of desires, moral duty, spiritual perfection, Lao Tzu, "Tao te Ching," living simply and honestly, the idea of reciprocity and much more.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Fawn: Yuhoo hello? Hello? Are

[00:00:04] Matt: we ready? Oh my goodness. Yes. So here we are. We're back to talk about ethics. Oh my God. Again, um, we're gonna try to wrap it up though, which, which of course, you know, seeing is how we're literally at, uh, one CE or one common era. Ad for you folks who didn't grow up with it.

There is an awful lot going on. In point of fact, Goethe said "he who cannot draw on 3000 years is living hand to mouth."

[00:00:32] Fawn: Okay. Goethe man or woman,

[00:00:35] Matt: man. German man German. He is the man in German, literature.

[00:00:42] Fawn: I always get a little scared with anything Germans.

[00:00:46] Matt: He does. What's his background. We certainly need to touch a little bit on NCHE today.

So that's gonna be really

scary.

[00:00:51] Fawn: Oh my God. Can we make it a quick one today? We're gonna do what we can do. It's like when you're moving, you're like, okay, we have everything in boxes. And then when it really comes down to it, you're like, oh, wait a minute. There's this piece over here, this piece over there.

And you end up just cramming everything into one final box. Right? And I think that's what we're doing today.

[00:01:11] Matt: oh my goodness.

[00:01:12] Fawn: I mean, ethics is a very complicated thing or situation, isn't it?

[00:01:16] Matt: Well, yeah.

[00:01:17] Fawn: And there's, I mean, we, we should have a whole podcast on just

ethics,

[00:01:22] Matt: right. And ethics is of course that branch of philosophy that's, uh, concerned with what is morally good and bad, right.

And wrong, where they may or may not stand in opposition to each other, sometimes good and evil and right and wrong are in conflict.

[00:01:36] Fawn: Let's get started.

[00:01:37] Matt: Oh my goodness. So when we last left our heroes, as I like to say, we kinda left with the world with, Christianity starting to become ensconced in Rome.

Okay. Not fair because we can certainly go from there and go through all the Western philosophers and talk about ethics of moral right and wrong, but we're completely ignoring what happened over there to the east. So we need to talk about India. Because India gave birth to Hinduism and something that maybe people aren't that aware of, but it also gave birth to, Buddhism.

In India they had this sense that the world was set up in a correct way in a moral way. And the way things were set up was the way things were supposed to be set up. So they looked towards, four ideals and those four ideals would be, prosperity. Hey, we love that one, satisfaction of desires.

They didn't ignore that aspect of ourselves and deny it the way other people did, moral duty and spiritual perfection. And it's that last one that catches you out. So

[00:02:41] Fawn: what are the

four again?

[00:02:43] Matt: Prosperity. Woo, woo. Satisfaction desires. Awesome. Moral duty and spiritual perfection. Mm-hmm . So we start getting into this sense of the wheel of Dharma, the improvement of life

as you go on the, transitioning from perhaps one form to another form. And so all of a sudden, now that takes us out of my life, my specific life on earth and takes me to a more I need to do good things for society because in 300 years, right. I need to, you know, make sure that things are okay,

[00:03:15] Fawn: so you're not myopic, right?

[00:03:17] Matt: Again, you're not living hand to mouth. You're

[00:03:20] Fawn: not tunnel visioned. You're seeing the broader picture.

[00:03:23] Matt: Right? Right now, of course there was backlash. There is always a hedonistic cult. There is

[00:03:29] Fawn: always back backlash. Yeah.

[00:03:31] Matt: There's always people to argue. And, and when you get into Western philosophy, which I encourage everybody to do, there's a lot of back and forth.

And a lot of I refute this, but I accept that. There's a lot of that going on, but anyways, back to India, so they be...