Philosophy in Real Life
Welcome to the "Philosophy in Real Life" podcast with your host Carlos Santos Aguirre (a philosophy Ph.D. candidate), where we analyze difficult topics in order to discover truth.
Philosophy in Real Life
Episode 2: The 4 Stages of Moral Growth
📑 SUMMARY OF THE EPISODE 📑
In this episode, I talk about the 4 STAGES OF MORAL GROWTH: simplicity, complexity, perplexity, and harmony.
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⏰ TIMESTAMPS⏰
00:00:00 – Brief description of the episode
00:05:59 - First stage: simplicity
00:09:57 - Second stage: complexity
00:12:27 - Third stage: perplexity
00:16:02 - Fourth stage: harmony
00:25:08 - Common characteristics in all stages
00:27:20 - Connection with the next episode
00:29:00 - Social media and help
📖REFERENCES📖
Plato's "Apology" (38a5-b1).
Jesus in Matthew 6:24
Brian McLaren, Faith after Doubt
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Chapter “the maniac”)
Antonio Machado (poem) – “Caminante, no hay camino”/ “Walker, there is no path.”
Hector Lavoe – “Te quiero de gratis”/ “I love you for free.”
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As a philosophy and spiritual teacher I have always asked myself"how do the people change?""What makes people grow morally?" and "what keeps people from corrupting their souls?" you know to this question there have been different answers you know for example Socrates once said that"the unexamined life is not worth living" Socrates was able to see clearly that the pursuit of wisdom and the examination of his own life was a necessary part of the human experience for moral growth and Jesus in the gospel of Matthew takes it one step further no one can serve two masters either you will hate the one and love the other or you will be devoted to the one and the despise the other you cannot serve both God and money
so here in Matthew 6:24 what ultimately has the power to change us is what we love but obviously talking about moral progress implies that there is a starting point and then we have a desired destination our current self would be the starting point and our mature self would be the desired destination but obviously the question arises what is the map to embark on this journey towards maturity? towards moral growth? what do we need to basically go through to become a mature person of love and wisdom? well let's get ready for the ride because today we are going to talk about four things four stages of moral growth Let's go! Welcome to the Philosophy in Real Life podcast! where we strive to live in the most truthful and loving way possible while I'm asking the wrong philosophies and wrong interpretations of the world I am your host Carlos Santo Aguirre a philosophy PhD candidate in Spain Hola a todos, hola mi gente hello everybody hello my people I hope that you are having a great day today is a very exciting day we are going to discuss what we call "stage theory" maybe this is the first time you are hearing this expression of "stage theory" let me give you an example it's nothing too complicated basically there are experts or people psychologists especially who basically develop a model a working model to account for certain phenomena in reality for example Piaget was a very famous psychologist he had a stage theory he basically talked about the stages of cognitive development in our case we are going to discuss a type of working model or a stage theory for moral development moral growth now I want to preface this podcast by saying that the working model is not mine okay so I'm just using the four stages of another person that came up with this type of model even though I will apply a different meaning to these categories so Brian McLaren was is an author who wrote the book Faith After Doubt okay so I actually read this book and so in this book Brian McLaren talks about four stages of faith simplicity, complexity, perplexity, and harmony or solidarity now I want to make clear that I don't fully agree with the implications that Brian McLaren puts into each of these stages but I do like the words that he's using to put names to a lot of experiences that we go through when we are going through moments of growth moments of change moments of challenges in our lives that are basically doorways for us to become a better self if we know how to navigate those stages properly okay so I do like these four stages but again I just want to emphasize that I don't fully agree with Brian McLaren when I mentioned these books in general for me recommending a book that doesn't necessarily imply that I endorse all of the views of the author that's not the case many times I just read books that are completely opposed of what I believe because I think that they are thought-provoking and that they are stimulating for me to be able to think further and challenge so to speak the boundaries of my understanding with regard to a specific topic but yeah basically as I said before stage theory can be useful to give us words to be able to describe our experience okay but something very important before we dive into these stages in detail is to not take this stage theory of moral progress in a rigid way because it is a lot more dynamic and human experience obviously is far more complex than what this theory or any working theoretical model is able to account for you know but it is still useful okay so it is still useful to give us some words to map out our experience in our lives alright so let's start with the first stage of moral progress which is the stage of simplicity simplicity to explain this let me give you a real example when I was 11 years old I actually moved from Peru to Spain and you know my brother was already practicing boxing as a sport and he said hey you should sign up for the classes just come to the boxing class and you know I was like okay let's go I wasn't really into any sport I was really terrible at playing football or what in the US people call "soccer" and yeah so I was like okay I guess I need to find a sport and I'm not really interested in football because nobody wants to pick me to play that basically happens many times and so basically I went to boxing classes and I remember that I got really excited seeing the punching bag and people just you know hitting the punching bag really really fast and and you know I was trying just to do that and when the trainer saw me he said, "hey Carlos" come over here the first two weeks you are not going to do any complex movement or anything like that you are gonna just be in front of the mirror and you are gonna shadow box basically that meant that I have to be in front of the mirror trying to do the technique of basic boxing no punching bags no boxing partners nothing, no mitts and so that was terrible I could just you know I was just jumping the rope at the beginning of the class and then I just had to be for two weeks of training in front of the mirror trying to just learn the basics when we are introduced to something new into a new practice into a new world so to speak reality has to be simplified for us to be able to function in that environment it has a utility so simplicity basically is very authority-dependent where somebody else is bringing you into this new world and is telling you hey there is black and white you will start here and this is wrong and you don't do that so once a boxer a professional boxer masters the technique obviously then they can improvise for example if you see Muhammad Ali he doesn't really put his guard up that much which is technically incorrect when you are learning but once you master this you are able to so to speak let yourself go a bit but not before you master the basics you know because if you try to be Muhammad Ali without mastering the basics the most you will get from that is to get a lot of punches in the face and get knocked out so I would not recommend that what I'm trying to explain with this example of the boxing class is that in the simplicity stage we basically have the need to have everything super clear black and white 1 or 0 it's very dualistic it's very binary there is no much room for nuance in this stage it is basically you are learning the rituals to be able to conform to the environment so easy answers everything is knowable and for example we can see these also at a huge scale right or even some philosophical thesis about the dynamics of interpersonal relationship like everything is just power there's no love love doesn't exist so that would be a very simplistic way of looking at life this is obviously the way in which children grow and try to learn the basics and things like that the problem is that sometimes people stay stuck and they don't evolve into more and so the idea is that we can grow into maturity let's move on to the second stage complexity complexity is very important because because nowadays is virtually impossible to avoid encountering complexity because of globalism social media how the attention has been democratized the traditional mediums no longer hold all the power of attention right now if somebody wants to listen to somebody else in another platform they can do so pretty much so now people choose who they listen to and who they follow and that's for better and for worse obviously because people do get more radicalized but also people get united to do even more good in the world the complexity stage obviously happens usually when somebody steps outside of their tradition with social media we enter this stage much faster without even having to leave our community our immediate community per se because right now we are able to enter into many online communities that you know of all sorts so that's why we arrive at complexity a lot faster at the complexity stage we start to see more rival interpretations more opposing views about worldviews about the way to live our lives so we become aware that there are many many multiple options in which we are able to live our lives and we have to choose one or embody one because to live we need to live we need to interpret we need to decide we cannot just freeze time and suspend ourselves into a vacuum of no decision that doesn't happen we need to decide we need to live so this is also a stage in which you just learn to be pragmatic and choose and you just learn to do things on your own because maybe you are moving away from your parents or learning more information or many or maybe you are being exposed to more information that demands from you to just grow and be more independent in that sense typically questions about drugs come to mind also how should I conduct myself with regard to my sexual ethics should I marry? should I embrace polyamory? should I just be in between? so many issues like that come as potential viable options in our lives and so and then we need to make sense of all of that basically let's move on to the stage of perplexity now perplexity is tricky because this is usually a moment of a lot of pain a lot of confusion this is typically called now deconstruction but let me give you an example when I was at university I remember I was studying English Studies so English literature and English linguistics and I remember skipping my class of modernist poetry because I wanted to listen to philosophical anthropology and so I remember that listening to the ideas of this class and being exposed to other undergraduates that you know were discussing Karl Marx, Hegel Plato, Aristotle Albert Camus Nietzsche Derrida, Sartre and all of these people so it was like oh my goodness like I was almost like it was a lot of complexity and many things that I didn't understand and I still don't understand I'm still studying and learning but also perplexed because you know the way I relate to knowledge is not in a way that is detached and you know it's just information no no I when I read things and study this is almost like a personal quest you know of finding answers and so perplexity knocked at my door and it was like I was having questions and I didn't have clear answers and I remember that the authority figures kind of like taught me the basics the simplicity stage were not capable of providing answers that were at the level of complexity and they weren't helpful either at helping me with the perplexity stage where I was feeling a little bit disoriented because they themselves didn't necessarily face these questions or because they didn't just have the interest or the temperament to be inclined to dive more into these type of questions about life and death and meaning and values and obviously this is at a articulated level because obviously we all live through these values and meaning and things like that but many people do not articulate and do not engage in these type of conversations even though they clearly are guided by a conception of the good and so basically this is a stage in which people leave their communities they become really critical with the system with society with their families with their cultural values they become more suspicious about the true motivations behind certain power structures and I think that it can be really frustrating to experience the mismatch right that maybe you are part of a community that is a simplicity stage type of community and the gatekeepers of that community maybe are at a complexity stage but they really defend wholeheartedly many dualistic or simplistic way of looking at reality and maybe you are going through perplexity and the way they view your experiences like oh there's something wrong with you because they are not capable of helping you in that situation so that means mismatch of you going through one stage and your community that you are part of going through a different stage or not being able to actually help people in this stage of perplexity it's just very painful and a lot of people leave and this happens outside of religious communities this is all kinds of communities at a individual level but also at a community level so yeah so this this is so real okay so let's move to the last stage of moral growth which is the stage of harmony obviously we have talked now so far about about simplicity, complexity, perplexity, and harmony one of the main characteristics of this stage of harmony is is that there is an environment of non-binary thinking the other day when I was driving I called my dad and my dad asked me about how my faith was because I'm a religious person I replied to my dad and I said "better than before, dad...I think better than before." and my dad was basically expecting a binary answer you know I'm either not doing well or I am doing well so after saying, "better than before" I explain a little bit more and I say "there are times in which I feel I strongly believe""there are times in which I want to believe""there are other times in which I feel like my faith is weak" and on the worst days"I feel like I don't believe and you could even call me an atheist" and you know a lot of people could be say oh"oh you are being heretical Carlos""how can you say that!?" and I say stop that's silly because the experience of faith is a lot more dynamic than this binary model of..."Yes, you have a lot of faith""No, you don't have a lot of faith" you know and any person who have actually wrestled in the daily life with their doubts, questions, and has faced crisis they know that this feeling of having faith many times it's not there you know what I mean it's not there that doesn't mean that you don't believe in it but you just don't feel it you just don't feel it and so in this stage of harmony you are able to appreciate more the dynamism of life the movement the seasonality of life in which it's not just 0 or 1, it's 0.5 you learn to appreciate the grey areas of life so the harmony stage is also a stage in which we come to terms with our own tradition you know I had a I have a friend Dave Pocta we were talking one day on a call and he shared this which I found really fascinating he mentioned that Paul Ricoeur who is a philosopher of hermeneutics, but hemeneutics of experience okay so it's it's not about the biblical text; it's more a school of thought that came... well that is contemporary school of thought of philosophy of hermeutics of experience and Paul Ricoeur which I have read some of his books but not that one specifically Dave Pocta told me that Paul Ricoeur talked about Kierkegaard and you know he was talking about this idea of the second naivete and so basically what this means is that the first naivete is when you encounter a reality for the first time you are naive about the bad things of that group of that person of that environment and then as you go through these life experiences you become really disappointed with the way things are you know and so you start to see the flaws in your parents the flaws in the community you are part of the flaws in the system in the government and you know you can feel a lot of bitterness a lot of disenchantment with life and so that would be the first naivete the first naivete dies...dies because you are completely disappointed with life but then he talks about the second naivete which is the mark or sign of true faith which means basically that you come back to this reality that disappointed you once but this time you are coming to terms with that which formed you from a place of love from a place of peace from a place of harmony that you are able to see all the flaws and still appreciate your family and still appreciate your community you basically are able to connect with these larger unities in life with the things that formed you and not live a bitter life another aspect another trait of the Harmony Stage is that you become more comfortable with mysteries become more comfortable with mysteries and so I think that this is a huge one for me because for the longest time I think that I based a lot of my source of validation or peace and identity in intellectual certainty having the certainty about life about things and being able to you know control and have everything very well delineated and in control you know what happened that didn't go well this is very well explained by the tradition of the mystics the Catholic mystics in the Medieval Times for example they talked about this idea of the negative theology which basically means we define God by talking about what we cannot say about Him there is a quote by one of my favorite essayist or writers, he is G.K. Chesterton I did my work my undergraduate paper main paper was on Chesterton and he wrote this in his book Orthodoxy in the chapter "the maniac"
and he said the following:"To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to strech himself in.""...The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits” before the harmony stage I was trying to relate to reality and human experience and all in the otherness the other people the otherness like the logician in this text trying to put all the heavens and the complexity of reality into my mind and I realized that my mind was splitting into halves because it was too much to contain but the poet who is basically a synonym for the mystic the poet the mystic these people who see life as more transcendental than it actually looks is able to contemplate reality appreciate certain aspects of reality but the poet or the mystic is okay with not being able to contain everything into their head but that doesn't keep them from appreciating what they are able to actually get to know and understand and I think that that is kind of like the harmony stage you know you feel more liberated now as you can see this stage theory can be problematic because it can be very arrogant for somebody to think that they are already at the stage of harmony and the funny part about that is that me talking about this presupposes that I'm able to understand that I'm in a harmony stage but in my defense I will say that I don't believe that you are either in one in all aspects of your life or you are in the next one no I think that depending on what part of your life, questions, relationships, realities that you face... you might find yourself more in touch with some stages and in other aspects in your life you might feel like oh actually the simplicity stage describes more how I feel with regard to these opinions and these things in my life so it's not so much about having so many ideas or knowing or having all kinds of answers however, it does require that you have lived some you know what I mean but it doesn't mean that you have all the answers these stages are* more about the attitude that you have with respect to ideas and other people you know it's more the attitude to embody how you feel reality how you embody how you react towards certain things in your life when you encounter different things that challenge your views and the way you live your life so it's more about the attitude rather than having all the ideas because obviously none of us is able to grasp all the ideas we would need too many lives for that but another important thing is that each stage as I said before has* gatekeepers and and so by creating this community in the Philosophy in Real Life podcast what I want to foster and promote is the spirit of solidarity and harmony that this is a place where we are able to put forth difficult questions challenge ourselves in the quest for truth in love so that's kind of like the purpose because because because think about it in the end we cannot give something that we don't have there are no shortcuts to bypass or to accelerate the growth through these stages no through love and through understanding and through the practice of love we are able to navigate these stages as they come and that doesn't mean that all of us will face all the hardships in the world that doesn't mean that all of us are wired to always be asking certain type of questions that's why I was just using this stage theory or these four stages of moral progress as a tool to explain some realities of our moral lives there was a Spanish poet Antonio Machado in his poem"Caminante, no hay camino" or "Walker, there is no path" that's the title of his poem and he says basically that"you make the path by walking""al andar, se hace el camino" so I feel like these things are* like that it's like* nobody can do it for you you have to go through this you know and yes people can support you and encourage you but nobody can do it for you there is something that you need to do for yourself on your own however guided and encourage and loved by a community of people who want you to win but in the end there is a part that you need to do that nobody else can do so in short we have answered today the question about what stages a person needs to go through to become a mature human being capable of love and wisdom so with this episode now we have a map basically a map where we are able to recognize where we are at and where we are heading we are able to recognize our starting point in these stages of moral growth then we're also able to see our desired destination which is this harmony you know what I mean because by the way we could regress you know people do regress we can get bitter nihilistic cynical we can just think oh everything is about power and so the totality of reality and its beauties to just power or atrocities and darkness and you know people do regress so let's be careful it's not like these are not a static state but it's always dynamic as life itself so the next episode we are going to talk about how we can navigate through each stage of our moral development so these stages okay so now we have the map simplicity, complexity, perplexity, harmony the stages are clear I wanna grow towards maturity towards harmony towards love towards understanding but how do we do that? how do we navigate these dark waters? how do we navigate these deep complicated waters? the next episode I'm going to be speaking about the principles of navigation the principles to navigate these stages of moral growth so stay tuned for that and remember podcast is available on video on YouTube I will release clips in between the weeks remember that I'm posting every two weeks because it requires a lot of reading and effort crafting and things like that these topics are* not like are easy to think about and and also get my book if you speak Spanish"AMOR Y RESENTIMIENTO" love and resentment Nietzsche and Christianity and remember that I'm on TikTok, Twitter Instagram, Facebook all of that and also I have a Spanish channel in which I post exclusive content so if you are bilingual and you are interested in that channel subscribe watch the videos support and also if you have any questions about the show comment below please give like share it share it with your friends because this obviously helps people find out more about the podcast the videos and things like that and I really want to do this long term I want to do it even better with more support also eventually invite guest but that won't be possible without your support so if you find value in these teachings in this podcast in this community please consider supporting me that means a lot! so thank you so much for tuning in or watching for taking the time to listen and coming and supporting and I would like to say goodbye using the expression of a salsa singer named Hector Lavoe he used to say"Te quiero de gratis" which means in English"I love you for free" adios everybody until next time