You're listening to the partially examined life episode 226 Part 2.

We've been discussing Sir Francis Bacon's new organon from 1620.

Let's move on to the second idol, the idols of the cave that's supposed to interfere with our or the den.

Depending on your translation, things idiosyncratic to individuals which would interfere with their applying correct scientific reasoning in all circumstances.

So you might really be into some particular kind of theory, for instance.

You may discover in some area, you've gotten very excited about something and you just apply it across the board and think that this is the foundation of nature.

For instance, Nietzsche's will the power in that area, I should say, Shopenhauer's view of power there.

Seeing that in an analysis of human relations and then just sort of imposing that on, yeah, that works for nature.

Let's make that entire cosmology.

And it's unclear whether he's really doing that as a serious scientific hypothesis because Shopenhauer has a contient distinction between the world as it is in itself, which is what he's talking about with Will versus the world as it appears to us, which is what science would investigate.

But still, I can't help but see this as something that I want to apply to people quite often in the modern age.

This is the one which just sort of flows out of people's predominant pursuits and obsessions.

The individual's mind and body, but also from education, habit and accident.

So in 68, he'll give a summary of what he's just said and he'll tell us.

One of them is predominant pursuit.

The other is excess of synthesis and analysis.

Another one is party zeal for certain theories of certain ages.

And another one is narrowness of subject.

These all have to do with habit, I think, ultimately in education.

Some people, for instance, will be more inclined to the synthetic than the analytic.

But those are the four brands of this and the synthetic and the analytic will turn out to be interesting because it's one of the places where this is aphorism.

In 57, where he'll say that if you look too much at individual forms, you essentially weaken the understanding, you weaken your capacity for abstraction.

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