Female Speaker: Dr. Rush we are back at our session 2, and if it's alright with you I would like to start at a very elementary level again. So we don't miss anything and we talk somewhat about human nature last time and a whole thing with temperaments, it's fascinating, and I can see that will be very illuminating for people, I am finding it so. And I am wondering if you could just define what is it to be human?
Dr. Vincent E. Rush: To be a carpenter is to do what carpenters do well. And to be human is to do what humans do well. So we have to be human. In order to be human we have to use both our intellect and our will. These are the two faculties that separate us from everything else on the planet. There is nothing else that has the possibilities that we have with intellect and will. And the intellect is able to range over and look at a variety of options and that gives the will a choice to make this or that selection. And choice and freedom are bond up with the intellect and the will.
So the intellect is really the critical thing. In fact in middle ages, will, free will was called free judgment. Meaning that the judgment was free to range over and that allowed you freedom. You can't choose something you don't know. You can't choose a cereal you don't know about it, even if it's very healthy for you. So you have to range over and you have to look at what these possibilities are.
Now the intellect has some obvious limits. But the intellect doesn't take things in its fullness. The intellect is the word -- the technical word is it abstracts. So if you look at a tree, you get an idea of what a tree is? And that same idea of tree applies to what you are looking at an oak, or an ash, or a maple or whatever. It's tree, that's a tree, that's a tree, that's a tree. So you have that variety of things with only one idea. And that's one of the economies of the mind. There are more things than ideas and more ideas than words, and that's why we have these multiple meanings of words and we have to clarify them with adjectives.
But the intellect also has -- since it has that limit. It can't go out to the thing as it is. It's restricted and it takes in only parts so to speak. And there is an old Latin - that an abstraction is not a lie. It rhymes better in Latin. But that's what the intellect does. It abstracts what it can know because when you know a tree, you don't have a tree up here. You just have the idea of a tree. So then the will comes along and the will is a totally different faculty. The will is remarkable because you can love things more than you can know them. You can find something good and go out to it. The intellect takes the thing into you and is limited by what it can take in, but the will takes you out to the thing and so it can embrace something bigger. And once again I only know a Latin for it. I am sorry there is no English word. But it's called cooptatsio and the will kind of forms itself to what it loves. It becomes what it loves. So I can say to you very, very clearly, tell me what you love and I will tell you what you are. In fact this is so true that you watch people who have been married for 30-40 years and they start to look like each other.
Female Speaker: They do.
Dr. Vincent E. Rush: Yeah.
Female Speaker: So their will is forming itself to their partner.
Dr. Vincent E. Rush: Yes.
Female Speaker: And their biology is following somehow.
Dr. Vincent E. Rush: Exactly, it's amazing, it's amazing. But it's that way. But see that gives you this enormous power and that gives you -- since the intellect is able to range over what you will cooptatsio about, it makes you free because you don't, you are not constraint to one thing or another, at least ideally, there are things that interfere with freedom. But we will get to that. But right now the thing to see is that the will is free, it goes out, it becomes other, and it can - and the marvelous thing about it is you can fell in love with something that isn't a thing.
Female Speaker: Wow! An idea.
Dr. Vincent E. Rush: It can fell in love with an idea or an ideal. If a lion is out in the forest and the lion is hungry. The lion is in the bushes and it looks around for an antelope. And along come one species of antelope, let's say, that's very near extinction and the lion doesn't say, oh well, that species of antelope is near extinction. I better wait. Lion says, oh there is a weak one on the back, and off it goes. And the lion can only go after its prey because it's hungry and it doesn't have a choice. But we have a choice, we know we cannot go after something but we can choose an ideal for which we sacrifice our life. We can choose the common good. And a common good is really call that because we all share in that good. The good we share in this country, thank God is freedom, and people have died for freedom. They have gone out and given their lives for it, all kinds of people and we are sitting here at their beneficiaries.
Female Speaker: So it's not even a concrete thing.
Dr. Vincent E. Rush: No.
Female Speaker: It is just an idea and because they are humans it is the reason they can go after that.
Dr. Vincent E. Rush: They can do that, yeah. The lion will never say, gee, I think it's been a bad year and there is a lot of real need for fertilizer in the forest, I think I will go out and just let myself starve to death and become good fertilizer for the forest. They can't do that.
Female Speaker: So none of the other species are free.
Dr. Vincent E. Rush: No, no they don't have options. And you can impose rationality on an animal. You can teach the dog when it wants to do its thing to go outside and all, that kind of thing. But that doesn't mean the dog is sitting there, making decisions, you've trained it, and we are not necessarily trained, at least in our ideal state. Now as a little child you have trained little children to be rational, because rationale isn't in the ascendancy in them. As I always used to say to my students, if you don't give a lot of good rules to three year olds about the swimming pool, you don't have any four year olds. So you give them rules and you impose rationality on their behavior for their own sake. But then as you emerge in as a person, you takeover and you start to become a really loving person.
Female Speaker: So in freedom you can love more than you can know.
Dr. Vincent E. Rush: You can love more than you can know.
Female Speaker: So if somebody like for instance if you love the sky at night, you love the stars, you can actually really love them even not understanding what they are.
Dr. Vincent E. Rush: That's right, that's right. You can reach out to things that you don't fully understand. I hate to say this, but I think most people who get married don't fully understand the person they are marrying. But they do fall completely in love with them, hopefully!
Female Speaker: Yeah, oh, that's truly beautiful.
Dr. Vincent E. Rush: And so then as you get to know them more then you love more and you want more to know about them. One of the middle aged philosophers said, as you love something, you seek more knowledge about it. So it's a reciprocal thing.
Female Speaker: Sure, sure you can see that in contemporary society, the way people go after their role models and their football heroes etcetera.
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