https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EMX3ghuChB4
Okay, so I wanna kinda do the same thing that we did last time, right? So we’re gonna get into the argument this session. So the context will be a little bit different. It will be more philosophical related to the virtues, right? So I guess I wanna set a group intention in the sense of I think what we wanna do is we wanna spend time exploring, right? We wanna take it out of the book into our own understanding, our own experience. And then that will enrich in what we’re doing. Yeah, since we set intentions last time, right? Like I did it with asking a why are you here question. Instead of doing a why are you here, I wanna have like a short reflection form what the reading did with us. Like did we see something new in our daily lives, right? Like is there something that is important to us now, for example, and also a small reflection on what participating with an intention was and then setting the new intention. So I’m gonna do that for myself. I must say that fairly little changed in the way that I live my life as a consequence of last week. Although I did have some reflections upon the interactions and how people approach things because that is my intent. I’m gonna go with a similar contention which is trying to encourage the engagement of other people. So I’m trying to lift that up a little bit. Adam, you wanna go? In terms of kind of how I saw the world around me and all that, I can’t recall anything in particular. But there were insights into, I suppose, yeah. I mean, there were insights into how a kind of hierarchy between generations of men kind of helped me to frame things. We were talking about how it all started off with what was his name. The old dude at the sacrifice, basically having a barbecue and kind of, him and Socrates basically setting the stage and passing something on to the young men like Paul Amarcus. I guess that kind of highlighted that aspect of viewing things in my life, which, yeah. I was paying more attention to it, let’s say. And so far as my intention now, it’s much the same as it was last week is to kind of take part in the conversation, learn more about what’s going on in the Republic and trying to see how other people are relating to it and how I can relate to it. I can relate to it through that, but also through the way I’m, through my participation in as well. Yeah, I guess I’ll pass it on to, hey, Ethan. You’re not coming through, dude. Yeah. You can face someone else. You can face it. Okay, yeah. Danny, what about you, Danny? So, I mean, I have limited very, pretty much zero time this week, but I think where my mind has been with respect to the whole plate, Play-Doh and the Republic thing is, I’ve been thinking about where the culture is in terms of like from, kind of like the modern solution to what modern solutions are coming out of the modern problems. So a lot of these like Nietzschean ideas and Schopenhauer ideas that are kind of go back through Christianity into Platonism, gaining a better understanding of that. So basically like what’s the answer to nihilism, right? So we have, basically what are the various answers to the meeting crisis? So gaining on it because neo-Platonism is emerging like from through, in Verveki circles, in many other circles, neo-Platonism so-called is becoming more popular. So just sort of gaining a better understanding that. One intention is to sharpen my mind. Another intention is through the participation of this group, right? But kind of this week has just kind of been like, with limited time, a lot of it’s just sort of how to manage nihilism practically with respect to practical concerns. So I don’t know if that’s not a very clear answer, but that’s just kind of where my mind has been this week. So I’m seeking applications in that direction. Man, I gotta follow that. Okay, so obviously Danny’s got some big ideas in his head that I’d love to wrap my mind around more. Really for me, I just, I gained a lot of insight into just looking at the contrast of today’s society and how we tend to discuss ideas, right? Through the lens of polarization and what’s your foundation and who did you vote for as opposed to how Socrates and Thrasymachus, I think is how his name is pronounced. But the conversations they’re having, you do see some emotion come out. And so at one point, like Thrasymachus gets very animated and that’s really, that’s cool to see that they’re not perfect either, even though these are great philosophers, but then you also see this ration, they return to this rational discussion of ideas, bit by bit, piece by piece. And I just, I look at that and I go, where’s that in our society today, right? So as far as my intent, my intent is to look at and learn to reason more effectively myself. I wanna get that from this reading. And the other thing that I gained a lot from is the perspective and the machinations of the logical mind of other people and what their conclusions are. So really enjoyed this part in particular, so far as hearing what people want from this and what they’ve experienced so far. Reason? Yes, okay. Yes, so how the reading affected me this week, not so much except mainly one or two conversations I had with friends. It affected me in a way that when I discussed with them, I was reminded of Socrates’ attitude in the discussion and how he conversed his opinion. And it was just in the back of my mind how he deal with contradiction and how he tried to convince someone. So yes, that’s how this first reading affected me during this week. And for my intention, yes. For me it’s good because it makes me, I have in a way discipline to read the book. I think I like some discipline in my life, so it’s nice to be with a group, having a discipline to read each chapter, each book each week. And then yes, having different perspective, maybe I’m missing something in the book. And so having different thoughts may enrich my vision of what Plato want to say. I think this is a really good book, one because he’s arguing with an individualist, which is what we all have kind of fallen into. And he just, well, it just destroys it kind of, despite admitting that he could never win an argument with Thursimachus. Despite admitting that he could never win an argument with Thursimachus, Socrates does say that, he says, I could never beat you in an argument. I don’t think he’s being ironic when he says that. I think he’s actually being, I think he’s being honest because he’s pointing to something that’s above logic. And that’s what he’s trying to point towards or orientate towards. And arguments are, they are a form of violence. Don’t take that in the leftist kind of way. It’s a form of violence that’s like, I have the better argument, I have the more strength, the strongest person wins type of thing. And what Socrates is doing with Thursimachus is he’s, he’s playing with telos. And Thursimachus seems to think that the telos is always located within the individual. And he thinks that virtue is injustice, because the ingest person is able to manipulate the entire world to terminate inside him. And Socrates is playing with that and showing him that the ingest person actually destroys the world. Think people must be in, people must be working together in cooperation towards something higher or else the world will, the world will destroy itself. And he asked a really good question because Thursimachus proposes that, the person like the tyrant or whatever, that gets all the money, whatever, gets all the slaves is the best person. And Socrates asks him, okay, what about a band of thieves? Do they have no justice? Are they able to cooperate with each other towards a common goal? It’s kind of a trick question. It’s like, okay, so the band of thieves do exhibit some level of justice. And I remember the first time reading this, it actually, while reading is when I really clicked with me, our metaphysical things that we orientate ourselves to that bring us together, that allow us to function as not individuals. The more individualistic you act, the more destructive it is to everything, including yourself and just creation in general. So I think that’s the first question. And then the second question is, do you have any reflection on your intention as well? Do you want to say one for your participation? Reflection on my intention? Mm-hmm. From my intention from last week? From last week, yeah. It’s good, well, okay. Yeah, just giving attention to the fact that individualism is false and that to be just is to orientate, to submit yourself to something that’s not within yourself. So just catching yourself being selfish, I guess. I haven’t had a chance to do that, I just finished this yesterday, so. Okay, yeah, I think, do we want to get back to the point that we left off? Because I think we ended up going into change, right? We started going into the argument itself. And like Ethan said, the argument is coming from an individualistic perspective. Might makes right, a little bit of niches overmensch hidden in there. And I think the point that Ethan made about you cannot convince through argument is correct. I think the disagreement is not based upon argument, disagreement is based upon action. So it’s like, okay, I value this, I value this from my individualistic perspective. And if I’m gonna organize the world based upon on what I value, then certain things will pop out to me. And so the conflict isn’t really on the level of whether they follow the correct logic, it’s the framing, right? Like what is the frame in which you’re doing the analysis? And then last week I talked about that, I think Plato discerns these three levels of operating on us from the God, which is narcissistic, solipsistic perspective. And then, well, this is what I heard, I don’t know this, but like he can only lift it up one level. So he wants to make a bridge to at least a four level toward the possibility of transcending to a different means of understanding. And I think that’s what he’s trying to do in this first chapter. Oh yeah, so if we wanna connect it to current society, like I think we wanna abstract that lesson, right? Like, okay, so there is an appeal that you can make to the other person, right? So, because at a certain point he takes a step back, right? And he says, I’m gonna do a bunch of things that you’re not gonna like, right? And I’m gonna ask for your consent in doing that, right? And then the basis upon which he gets the consent, and maybe this is actually also a trick, right? But the basis upon which he gets the consent is by being your respected person, right? And so if you’re in the camp of might makes right, like the respect or the honor or whatever, right? Like that’s what honor culture is in some sense, right? Like it’s, or there’s one that’s not honor so much, it’s reputation, right? So if you have a good reputation, that’s like, I think the discernment upon which you decide how much respect to show the other person. And so, yeah, this informed consent, right? Is the willingness to participate in Socrates’ game, right? And now we’re in Socrates’ game, and now Socrates can set the rules. Because he can set the rules, he can reorient within the given frame. And like, I think we have to go over things to highlight these things a little bit more in the specific. But I think that’s a good lens to use. Does anybody wanna add something before we open the gates? Well, on the note of frames and types of characters, I think one thing I noticed is that Socrates addresses different types of people with different tactics and in different ways, right? And so obviously Thrasymachus is putting a lot of heat on Socrates saying like, okay, make a bet, right? What else? He says a bunch of things. He says, you’re taking the frame of irony, they’ll look at you, Mr. Nitpicker, right? And because he’s kind of maybe a solipsistic character, the outcome that happens is that he’s, like he’s put the shame in silenced, right? Whereas when Socrates interacts with other people, that’s not the outcome of the interaction. So, that’s just an observation. I don’t know what to do with that. But different strokes are different folks. So, yeah. I don’t know where to go with that, but that was just something I observed, I guess. Yeah, I think the shame is maybe analogous to what are you sensitive for, right? Like what is the means by which you are moved, right? Because if you try to shame me, like that doesn’t work. I’ll just say, fuck you, because I’m right, right? Like, and so I’m not sensitive to be moved by these tools. Like I’m sensitive to be moved by a good argument, but I’m not sensitive to be moved by emotional pressure or status destruction or whatever. So, yeah, like that’s, there’s two sides to that, right? Like one of it is you can see what type of person the other is, but you can also see how to approach the other person, right? Like what are the things that you should appeal to in the person? About the framing, when you hear Glokon and Trasimac, they speak in one shot. They don’t ask question and they don’t try to see where is the frame or the, if the other counterpart agree with some statement. When Socrates speak, he first ask question, do you agree on this? Yes. Do you agree on this? Yes. And then he catch off guard the counterpart. That’s interesting way of doing Socrates is he tried to see where the counterpart agree and then move on on the argument. Yeah, the style is definitely different. Trasimachus is, his method of argument is to impose his logic, whereas Socrates is not that at all. It’s more of an invitation and kind of more of a, I don’t know how else you put it, but it’s not an imposition, it’s kind of trying to cultivate something. I like that. He’s taking more of a cultivation, looking at it from that way. Trasimachus’ method of argument matches to his actual logic. The injustice is virtuous and injustice is an imposition. Whoever imposes the best, whoever exerts the most power is the best person, which is exactly where we’re at today. I mean, Trasimachus is a postmodernist. That’s what he is. It’s reminding me of this tweet a mutual friend of ours posted a couple days ago. Perennial problems mean we can ask for grant money forever from the governments to solve patterns and struggle that reoccur. Our just promised followers a way through. Anyways, people that are saying, oh, we need money, we need money because of these problems and they’re trying to take from a system that exists despite those same perennial problems. Like that ethic of, oh, we’re justified in taking money every time we experience deprivation. That is injustice. That actually is injustice because you’re destroying things. You’re not building things. You’re not maintaining things. You’re destroying, you’re parasitizing things. And injustice can never build anything. It can only destroy. And yeah, I was gonna add to what you said, Manuel. This is something that Schindler wrote. He said, the conclusion can be reached only with Trasimachus. The conclusion can be reached only with Trasimachus’ real participation because he withholds precisely this. Book one comes to an end without coming to a resolution. So yeah, he makes the same point that it can’t be won through argument. He has to sit there and participate. And experience this cultivation. He’s not going to be convinced through a mere force or imposition of logic. I think that’s a tremendous piece of thinking. And I like the relation to the modern world. And just to piggyback on that, to use maybe an unwelcome colloquialism there. Looking at Trasimachus, the way he approaches Socrates is very much, he says, I know the way you argue. I know what you’re gonna do. Because earlier on in that argument, he says, well, we know Socrates. I’m gonna ask him a question and he won’t even give me his answer. He’s gonna mend together the answers of others. And so when you’re talking about Socrates and the way he approaches things, or correction, you’re talking about Trasimachus and the way he approaches the argument is very much framed upon how his opponent, so to speak, argues. And then we talk about how very much of our solutions to our real world problems today are oriented on the framework of how we operate in the real world. So just take the banking issues of recent. You’re talking about if indeed we’re gonna engage in, let’s go ahead and veer off concept here into a modern concept, capital destruction through the bailouts of the banks, which is ultimately just creating money out of thin air. Again, can you really create in that way? Even though you sustain the system, do you indeed create in that way? So I just wanted to speak to what that kind of illuminated in my mind based on what you’d said there. It’s a great presentation. Yeah, there’s no creation. They’re just taking something up from here and plugging it over there. They’re not creating anything. They’re just moving things around and it’s just gonna make it… What is it? Entropy is inevitable. So it’s, yeah. When Socrates, Thrasymachus gets upset at him with, oh, you never make your own arguments. You just kind of use other people’s. And it goes back to the I know nothing, right? Because everybody else has knowledge and Socrates is fixated on an ideal of the good. And he doesn’t want any of the… He orientates himself towards the ideal and then he’ll allow everything to kind of emerge properly in a concordance with that ideal instead of filling something up without looking up. And then that like, if you’re doing an emergence only type of thing, you’re building and hoping that eventually that will get you to the correct disposition. But he’s fixated on the ideal first and then lets everything else kind of instruct its way up to it. I think that’s why he holds to that I know nothing because it’s dangerous to say that I know, he lets the argument emerge naturally or become cultivated again. Yeah. That bothers Thrasymachus. I got this association with the biblical knowing, right? So the biblical knowing is effectively to be intimate with. Right? And so when we’re talking about these ineffable things, like the way that we know them is by having a relationship to them, by developing a type of intimacy. And this goes back to the cultivation. So Socrates is cultivating something within the dialogue where he’s providing means for a type of intimacy. And then if you look at his arguments, like he’s circumscribing things. So he’s not talking about the thing in and of itself necessarily, but he’s more talking about how to approach. Like what is the relationship that I can have? And what is the things that I know that aren’t, I don’t know if he talks about negative theology. And I don’t like talking about what a thing is not, right? But talking about the boundaries, right? Like, okay, like I can quote on of this area and it’s at least within that area. Like how exactly it is there? I don’t know, but it’s there. And I think also what is going on is there’s a couple of ways that he’s framing things, right? So there’s this good and better, and there’s good and bad, and then there’s just and unjust, right? So there’s these, well, I don’t necessarily wanna say binaries, but these contrasts that he’s using to highlight. And so it’s important to realize how he’s doing that. And the first bit, and maybe we should start talking about that soon, is in the context of finances, right? Like, so this finances was already introduced in the beginning, and now they’re again, relating to the just through a financial framework as if it’s maybe the most relatable or the most present. Yes, my thought about KwaZi Maik is that he’s not that caricatural. When we read this book from our eyes, from our perspective, from our time, during the period, well, his point is the strong is the strongest, so it’s natural that he’s, that he rule, but I’m sure that in the past, it was a more common thought, more, I think the people from the past attach more credibility to this thinking than currently right now. Currently right now, I think it’s more the contrary, the more. When I look at politics, when I look at the, when I try to have argument with people, it’s more, the more victim you are, the more you win. And KwaZi Maik is the contrary, the strongest has, because he’s the strongest rule. And I think it was a common thought in the past. And so from our eyes, from our perspective, maybe we misunderstand how we see KwaZi Maik as someone caricatural, but he acts, he represents the common thought, he’s well spoken, and he’s emotional, but that’s okay, that’s I think some people are emotional and they speak okay, they can be emotional. So this is how I perceive the character of KwaZi Maik. And yes, he remind me of Nietzsche, I don’t know, the argument of Nietzsche, but maybe in a quick version. More prediction. He’s, it’s weird, Thrasymachus is the opposite of the people today, but he’s also the same exact thing. Because instead of whoever’s the strongest is the best, today it’s whoever’s the weakest is the best, but they’re actually the same thing, because it’s totally a having mode thing. Whoever has the most of this is the best. So whoever has the most of, of whoever has the most victimhood is the best. Whoever has Thrasymachus, whoever has the strongest is the best. And I don’t know, like we’ve lost. They’re playing a non-generative game. Yeah, it’s. They don’t wanna cultivate anything where Socrates is, they’re participating in the same thing, but the Thrasymachus is withholding any sort of real engagement. He’s kind of stuck in, I think he’s a sophist, right? So he’s kind of a rhetoric teacher for young men, young politicians. And that might be fine, but that he only is getting stuck in who wins the argument, and not about what Socrates might actually be trying to point towards. And so it’s, I think, yeah, we’re pointing to the same non-generative pattern, because it’s either you’re so strong, you’re the best, that there’s no kind of reciprocation. So there’s no, yeah, there is, in some sense, there is no cultivation. I mean, I was talking yesterday with somebody about culture, and part of what culture is is a kind of reciprocal thing of, it comes from the idea of inhabiting a place, but also there’s this kind of sexual imagery there. So there’s the kind of going too far forward of, okay, I’m winning, to the kind of opposite, the kind of so making oneself appear to be so small that there’s no consequence, that there is so inconsequential. But in either case, there is no seeming generative kind of building up towards something. Should we do the trick that Socrates, should we recite that, what he did with Thursimachus? So he says, he’ll bring up a couple examples, like a physician or a horse master, say, or a ship captain. I like that one. He says, okay, so the ship captain has a bunch of subordinates, he has a bunch of sailors. So is the ship captain’s interest his self, like is his telos located in himself, or is it located somewhere else? Is it located in navigating or running the ship? And Socrates is saying, it’s more likely, it’s more likely that his telos is located with somewhere within his subordinates, because if it wasn’t, he wouldn’t be a ship captain. His purpose is to the ship, so he’s actually serving his subject. This is one of the, I mean, Socrates obviously isn’t gonna end up here, but he’s kind of trying to pull that telos out of the individual. It’s like the doctor, is the doctor’s telos, is the medical professional’s telos himself, or is his telos the human body? Is that his subject? Is the subject of the horse master, is it himself, or is it the horse? It’s like, okay, these people are committed to things outside of themselves. With the ship captain, it’s actually, I don’t know if he actually gets there in book one, we might have to, we might get here later, but it’s actually not, the telos of the ship captain actually isn’t the, it’s not the individuals of the crew, it’s not the sailors, it’s actually the telos of the ship itself, and everybody is in cooperation submitted to the telos of the ship, and they’re actually, they cooperate together for the way that I think of it, is all of them cooperate towards something that’s higher, which would be the form, I guess you could say. There’s a loving relationship between the two. The top cooperates with the bottom, and they all can consist of the whole, whole which would be the form of the ship. So anyways, that’s the trick that he does, is like, okay, so all these professionals, they’re not committed to themselves, because if they were committed to themselves, they wouldn’t have a profession. Yeah, and so the way I would frame it is, the argument that’s being made is indirect observation. So when I do something good, that’s at a cost to me, right? It’s a sacrifice, and therefore it’s bad, right? That’s the linear relationship or whatever, right? That’s a flat world, and then you can say, well, but if I do something good, then things function, right? And now you have a level of complexity and a justification for the next layer of complexity, and I think that’s the level that gets lifted up, right? And then you can say, well, if everything functions, I benefit, right? I benefit more than I would benefit without everything functioning, right? And that’s another layer, right? So I think that’s maybe analogous to these ways of thinking, right? Like where you say, oh, right, but actually there’s a flower, and when a flower blossoms, there’s something inside, and then you have the fractal nature of that, where you can get people one step further, one step further. Hello, Mark. Hello. And I think that’s why the financial angle is maybe also really interesting, right? Because the financial angle is quantitative, right? Like it has a direct, measurable, and understandable way to relate to it, and thereby it also has a means of immediate judgment. And then the question is whether justice should follow that judgment, or whether there’s a higher standard that should be appealed. Yeah, exactly. It will never be, if you’re just only looking at the quantitative level, it can never be just. It can only be just by looking up. Yes, I think after he developed on this, and he had the concept of justice is good for itself, and then also has a utility. Because the utility is how we live in a society, and if society is just, and people inside it are just, then we benefit from everything. But as itself, also, it’s beneficial because it’s linked to your soul. I think that’s the argument. Yeah, he takes, Socrates takes it down to the person, the individual, probably shouldn’t use that word. He says, okay, so, he says this works at all levels. So if a society is unjust, they’ll actually end up fragmenting. This works on the individual. If you look, turn inwards, what about the unjust parts and the just parts of the soul? I mean, what’s going to happen to the, are the unjust parts going to outlive the just parts, or are they going to fragment off? So yeah, he says, so obviously, the person has to maintain some sort of justice, or else they will fail to exist. I think he goes on there to, he says, surely the gods are just, they’re not unjust because we know that they exist. We worship them, we give them offerings, and they bless us, whatever. Surely they’re just. It’s coming to like, justice lit is starting to look something like tied to order, and the fact that something exists, the fact that we have a culture, like that is all indications of justice, and injustice actually pulls away from that and destroys it. So he’s turning, he’s flipping it around to where justice is actually virtue, and injustice is not virtue. That’s very good to think of. Go ahead, sorry. Oh, I’ll just real quickly. So according, I don’t, obviously I don’t speak Greek, but I was reading here that Schindler was pointing out that justice, at least I think in this book, book one, other using it can be translated as virtue, I think. I think that was the word. Or no, morality. Like I’m going to go into that, like in the commentary that I had, like, cause I got a lot of, I wanted to talk about the commentary more than the book, but I’ll wait with that a little. Say that again, Manuel? There’s a commentary, and I will read from the commentary later, because I think it’s important to talk about it. And they go into the words that they’re using, because I think these translations use bad words. Well, that’s difficult. I mean, what, like, you can get the Yawet translation that was, I think that’s the first English translation was like mid 19th century. Then you can get, like the culture changed, like the English language is culture, right? And the culture of the 19th century has changed to what it is now, you know? So it’s like, what are these words that they’re using? It’s really difficult. So it really helps if you could have some understanding of the Greek, but whatever. And that is definitely a dilemma. We can get into it. You want to go there? Yeah, I think that was really interesting in terms of when you talk about, the whole conversation is about just and unjust, virtuous and not virtuous. And it’s just very, then you talk about the relationship between the collective and the individual in terms of the ship’s captain and the folks who are actually doing there. And it gets, it starts to get a little abstract for me in terms of, okay, so if you look at, if entropy is injustice and to build or to transfer energy is justice, it just makes me think of that relationship. And so I think that’s a really important thing to look at because you’re a captain of industry and because you built something big and because you are massively wealthy that you now automatically you’ve taken from people. And turning that on its ear very much is actually the concept of service, right? You’re talking about the level of service that’s rendered, the number of people who have been rendered service by say Amazon founder, right? Like, look how much service he’s rendered to people alone, just the bookstore starting off, right? So that’s just a very interesting concept for me. And it just makes me think deeply about people’s perceptions of justice versus injustice on that whole concept of just because you have doesn’t mean that you’re in just just because you built doesn’t mean that you’re unjust. And modern society very much has a strong undercurrent of going, hey, eat the whole, eat the rich concept or he who has a lot should have it taken from him because it couldn’t have been earned, right? But the reality is, and I think you pointed out well is that many people who have a lot have actually served a lot. Yeah, but I think there’s a point where Thrasynicus says is that the only reason people are just cause he says injustice is virtue. He says the only reason that just people are just is because they’re worried about being victims of the injustice people. Yeah, he gave three motivations, right? He gave the motivation of financial gain, the honor and fear, which is, yeah, I don’t know if I’m on board with that, but it’s interesting. That sort of ignores the more important point, right? Like the people who say, because you have something you must have taken it from somewhere, right? They’re not accounting for the creation of value, right? So their worldview is closed. They think things are there objectively, they’re just there. And therefore, if you created the iPhone and not me, then you stole my ability to take the iPhone from me. But that’s not true. I couldn’t have created the iPhone, right? And so they’re just missing that whole component. And because they’re missing the component of the work, ironically, that goes into the creation of the object, they think that object exists independent of the person. And that’s the only way it makes sense. It’s a closed world, right? It was already there. Therefore, if you have it, you took it from somewhere, but that’s not the way the world is, you create value. And if you create value from entropy, for example, which certainly happens, then yeah, there’s a bunch of service that goes into that. There’s a bunch of advantage that goes into that. There’s a bunch of effort that without which you don’t have those things. And so you can’t replace Jeff Bezos, whatever you may think of it, with any other person. Like it’s not to say that no other person couldn’t have done some of the things, but no other person could have been Jeff Bezos. Like it’s just same with Steve Jobs, like the same with any of these people. And that’s the problem is they’re not accounting for the full set of things. And that’s what happens when you invert things like justice by saying social justice. Justice doesn’t have a modifier. You can’t modify the concept of justice by putting a word in front of it. Justice is a virtue. So it’s higher up above everything, right? It’s, and I do like the ship captain thing, right? Means of expression, that’s what it is. Yeah, yeah. But it’s higher up above everything and the ship captain works because it points higher. Cause that’s what’s actually going on, right? There is something higher and that person is serving that higher thing, whether it be Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs or whomever, they’re actually serving something higher. They’re benefiting in their service. We all benefit in our service. We also all suffer when we’re lazy. So, you know, if you don’t get around that equation just cause you’re not successful, you’re still having consequences from your actions. So if you have positive consequences in general, there must be something positive about your actions. There are some exceptions to that, but that’s what people miss when they try to modify the concept of justice so that they can fit it, you know, within something like society. But society doesn’t work without justice and justice doesn’t exist without society. So it doesn’t make any sense that you could slam those two words together and come to an understanding of the world. You’re gonna destroy your ability to understand instead. They have the Thrasymachus’ definition of justice. Justice is just having mode. We have less, so we need to have, we need to get out there to where we’re equal. I think actually, if you ask anyone, it’s like, we need to be above you because you’ve been above us for so long. They have that having mode notion of justice, and you’re right, it’s not, that’s what Socrates is arguing here, is justice is not that, justice is a virtue. It doesn’t point to the person that has the most. That’s the thing that you say this a lot, Mark, you say, well, they don’t understand creation or they don’t believe in creation. These people, they’re immediately skeptical of anyone that has anything because they can’t see value. They think that they’re living in a dead world where everything out there that exists already exists. Everything that exists is already there. They don’t understand that things are, so, for example, Genesis 1, like the creation myth, they don’t understand, they think that that happened once, they think that that happened in the past at one point in time. They don’t understand that that’s continually happening all the time, every day. The origin of the world, in the sense that it’s how, not linearly, not like at a certain point in time, a long time ago, it’s happening all the time. That’s how things, that’s how value is created. That’s how things come into our world. They don’t understand it because it’s like pulling some ex nihilio. They don’t see, they see, there’s all of a sudden all of this value and we can’t see where it came from, so we’re immediately skeptical of you because they can’t accept the fact that something can be created. Something can be created out of nothing. Well, if we’re gonna use that language. I’m gonna make a defense a little bit because I just had an insight. So I think what happened is, and actually Plato goes into this later in the book where he says there’s three generations of people and the last generation is the democratic generation, which is actually the generation that we’re in now. But what is the quality of the democratic situation? Like they get born into a system, right? But like when a system exists, what do you wanna do? Well, you wanna fine tune it, right? So you’re saying, well, we’re putting energy here and maybe if we put more energy here, then it’s better, right? And so you’re navigating on a layer of abstraction that is in the optimization and it’s not in the generation, right? Like it’s taking for granted how things come into being and is pointing the energy of what comes into being into an expression, which is literally what politics is, right? Like the politics is the guidance of the expression of what is coming into being, right? And then if you’re not grounded into how things come into being, right? If you don’t have your feet in the ground, then you start pointing the expression in a way that it can no longer be sustained by what’s beneath and that’s what we’re getting stuck in, right? And all these people, they get educated in a way of reasoning that they’re effectively not mature enough for to participate in. I think that’s what the issue is. Like they just get lifted up too high, too fast. Yeah, it’s definitely a maturity issue, right? You can’t see above where you’re at. That’s what having mode is. You can’t see out of your three-year-old self realize your clothes get washed by your mother, right? And the food doesn’t just get cooked, right? The food comes from somewhere, a very long chain, right? And these things don’t just appear created, right? And therefore, you’re not part of that chain of what does all this take, right? That’s when we lose track of where does meat come from, the supermarket, well, kind of, right? And that’s the flattening of the world where you just see what’s in front of you. You don’t realize what’s behind all of those things. Like a supermarket is a place that exists because people need to gather to get food locally. And that food doesn’t come locally usually. Some of it might, but most of it goes through all these processes and organizations, even if it’s just bagging the food to put it on the shelf, right? But meat gets all caught up. There’s all these things involved in that. And when you flatten the world down to supermarket, you’ve lost all of the things that are going on that re-enchant the world, that show you, oh, no, no, this is a complicated process. This isn’t just me, my three-year-old self going, I am hungry and getting a candy bar or whatever, right? Because that’s how we start and we all start that way. As we grow, our understanding is supposed to expand and part of that hasn’t happened. That’s when you get this flattening of justice. And then it gets in, and it can happen to adults too, right? And you can lose understanding. You can know one day and then forget, right? You focus in on something silly like technology or TikTok, and then you forget all the stuff that happens in the world that enables you to exist and the implications of that, the virtues that go into that, the values that must be carried out in order to do that, right? I mean, there’s somebody somewhere right now working in a field, right? So that you’re able to eat and they know that and you don’t. It’s like, whoa, right? And look, it’s gonna take them all year. So for example, farmers typically get paid once or twice a year. They make all their money in one or two days. That’s it. They don’t get a paycheck every week or every month. That’s not the way it happens for them. And then they have to manage their money differently. We have no appreciation of this normally. You have to have experience with that. Otherwise you get into that problem of, well, justice must just be some, you have, I don’t, balance, therefore unjust when it can’t possibly be that simple. Yeah, I wanted to share, can I, you mind if I, I wanted to share a tool that’s been really useful throughout most of my life. This was from when I was a teenager. So it was called like, when you’re in an apologetic frame or an ironic frame like Socrates, where you don’t make any assertions, like literally the first thing he says when Thrasymachus says, justice is in the interest of the stronger, he says, what Thrasymachus is the meaning of this? Weissom already is aware of these things, but these are called the Colombo tactics. Two questions that I’ve been, you can win any argument without knowing a thing about the topic by asking these two questions. And that, and this is useful for us is if you’re stuck in middle out thinking or if you’re propositionally trapped or if you’re in flat land, we, as we, as we acknowledge the disagreement is over axioms. So if we can back people up, these two questions are really good at backing people up. One is, what do you mean by that? The second question is, how did you come to that conclusion? So like, if somebody comes on your door, knock, knock, knock, excuse me, sir, do you have a moment to discuss, whatever, right? And you know nothing of the subject. You can just ask those two questions over and over again. And that oftentimes will back people up towards their axioms, whereby you can get to kind of have a more productive conversation. And then hopefully you can maybe jump out of that propositional entrapment or something like that. But those two tools have been very useful for much of my life. I see we some smiling there because we did much of this in Houston. So. You recite those questions again. What do you mean by that and how did you come to that conclusion? Hey, Paul, Paul, this is the perfect timing. I swear, I haven’t asked these questions in years. Paul is another coworker of mine from Houston. He happened to join up. He gives me a hard time because in sarcastic, he asked me that every time I have something in a group chat, he says, what did you mean by that? How did you come to that conclusion? He uses that ironically. And I swear, anyway, he just happened to come in at the right time. I wasn’t. Just to be clear, I often think back about these questions and they’re super good questions. As he was saying, they’re just shifting the burden of proof on the other person. What a logical sledgehammer that is. Well, I think just to take it back to where you get into that sort of, as you were describing it, Manuel, the kind of, you’re brought up into a kind of, it was a frame that you basically don’t have maturity to actually engage with properly to give a little bit of the historical context here. But it’s proper that this happens in this conversation because this conversation is happening around the time of the Peloponnesian War. So Athens is a very, let’s say, very, very mature civilization. Right? They have colonies all across the kind of Aegean and they’ve recently come into war with Sparta. And to put it in a generational context, because it’s like, well, you come with generation where that, you get people who are running around, engaging with stuff that they don’t have maturity to do. That they don’t have maturity to engage with. About 80 years prior to this, you have Thermopylae, you have men like Leonidas and not just the Spartans but Thebans and all of that, who willingly stood against 100,000, a million Persians at the head of Greece, 300 men sacrificing their lives to buy time for Athens, for instance, right? For Athens to be evacuated so that people could retreat so that they wouldn’t, you know, you wouldn’t have this kind of loss of life. And so it’s interesting to put it into context where they’re kind of, we’re wondering about justice now at this time period, whereas the men of that time period, let’s say of that, and the probably two generations back, probably would have had a much more mature engagement for that sort of thing so that they could just, they would embody that without much kind of propositional playing with it. Because they kind of had to, the situation was such that it kind of made it more immediate. I think we actually say the same thing. So in conclusion, Sokouad say, we need to act with justice as a virtue and we need a state ruled by just men. And currently we say, we want justice. We want a state, just state. We are saying the same thing, but I think the definition are different. Maybe because Sokouad, click justice to the virtue and to the soul. And right now we are not making this link at all. And it’s a different perspective on justice that make that’s big of a change, I think. And if we go back to definition, if we take the argument of Hazimak. Hazimak say the state must be ruled by the strong. Of course it must be ruled by the strong because they are strong by definition, they must be strong. So it’s kind of irrefutable argument. But in a way Sokouad say a irrefutable argument. He say the state must be ruled by the just because they are just and so they will act accordingly. Human are layered and they are not always perfectly just. It’s difficult to make such an absolute argument. So I think what I found liking in this argument is the irrefutability of it in a way. It’s just based on definition and it’s not practical in a way. So the modern conception that you pointed out though is the idea that you can encapsulate justice or you can have it or it’s a property. That’s that having mode thing as opposed to being mode. You can’t have justice. You can be just, but you can’t have justice. That’s not a thing. Justice is an implementation in the world of a virtue. And so that interact, that’s the fundamental thought shift. I know John Verveke talks about this a lot, the having mode versus the being mode. And I would argue there’s a third mode. But when we approach things as objects, as stuff that we have, we’ll say control over that are smaller than us, like justice, I can’t have justice because justice is so much bigger than I am. Justice is bigger than all of us. Like justice is way big. It’s not, when we try to make it smaller, we try to flatten it, try to take things above us and bring them down. That’s when we run into all kinds of problems because we’re trying to define things in terms of ourselves instead of defining ourselves in terms of those things that are bigger than us. And that’s the being mode stuff. Am I being just in my actions? Am I being just when? Is justice being done to me when? It’s not a subtle language shift. It’s a huge shift. We just think of it as subtle, probably because we’re not paying attention. But it’s a huge difference. Where’s the object? Where’s the center of the discussion? Because if it’s me having justice or getting some justice, that’s wrong. That’s centered around me. Justice is so much bigger than I am. You can’t really do that. And I mean, we all slip up, but it’s good to get back into this. And that’s what I was talking about earlier with the attitude about, is justice something that can be manipulated? Like, can I have social justice? Can I have modifier justice? No, you can’t modify justice. Virtues are those things that you cannot modify at all because they are bigger than you. You can’t modify them. Maybe society changes how justice is in that society. But the society doesn’t exist without the justice, and the justice makes no sense without the society, because they’re both bigger than individuals in them. They have to be. They have to be containers for something else. I think it’s important to realize that one of the trends that we’ve had is we wanna have reliable treatment of people. So we consider it unjust if someone falls through the mazes of the net. So we wanna capture that person, and we wanna have something that that person can rely upon. The means that we do that is we create rules. So we remove things from the individual judgment or the individual discernment to a rule-based system. And in some sense, that’s necessary and important because we don’t wanna live in a corrupt society where people just randomly do what they think is right. But if you go too far in that, like you remove the agency of the individual implementing, and now they’re gonna be robots. Now all that you can do is you have to have a system that can account for everything. That’s the only way that you can resolve that problem, but obviously we can’t make systems that can account for everything. So we start making errors on the other side. So instead of having errors because incompetence or corrupt people, we start making errors because the systems can relate to the situation on the ground. And now the question is, well, what do you privilege? Do you privilege the consistency? Like do you privilege the consistent reaction, or are you privileging results? And are you trusting that the individuals that are participating in providing the solution are gonna provide the best result possible? Can’t hear them. No, we’re just, we’re talking about, we’re trying to understand what you were saying, Manuel. That’s all we were talking about. We were processing it. You can ask questions. Yeah, I didn’t quite get it. You said there was a rule set of, or you were mapping on like a set of rules onto, yeah, I didn’t- Well, that’s laws, right? We tried to codify everything in law, right? So what’s happening is, okay, we’re making this legal system, right? And then two, three years later, it’s like there’s this big thing in the news. It’s like, oh my God, the legal system isn’t working, right? And then now they do the patch, right? Oh, these people are not accounted for in the system, so we need to make an extra rule to account for them, right? You keep making extra rules for the people that are not accounted for, because there’s always people that are not gonna be accounted for, right? And at a certain point, you’re making rules against the rules that you made before, right? Because you’re correcting the second order of facts of the rules that you made. And now you’re just in a battle with yourself, right? Like you’re no longer trying to optimize something in reality, you’re trying to optimize the system in order to maintain the system. That’s the corruption, right? That’s the parasitic nature that happens over time by instantiating something, right? The minute you bring something into being, and say, it can be anything, right? It can be the cell phone. It’s like, well, what’s wrong with the cell phone? Do you wanna list? Because there’s all kinds of things wrong with the hardware, the cell phone. It’s like, okay, well, now we need to fix it. But what about going back to the one that worked? And then it’s like, well, but that doesn’t work either, because the world has moved on. And so it’s this perpetual cycle of renewal, right? Because you eventually corrupt because you’re holding on to the system too long. But the system isn’t the virtue. The virtue is in the platonic realm, right? It’s in the realm of form. So the virtue can’t be, there’s no perfect triangle here. We don’t have perfect triangles. And so that’s what Manuel’s pointing to. The minute you instantiate it, the clock is ticking on the corruption, and you don’t know what that clock looks like. You don’t know how fast it runs. But eventually, the so-called justice system, the system of laws becomes corrupt, and then you patch in the second order effects all of a sudden. And now you’ve moved away from justice, and you’ve moved into fixing the implementation of justice. And that’s where things start to crumble, right? Because they’re parasitic on themselves. That’s when things are dangerous. Yeah, so you have the ideal, right? The first principle. Then you’re going to have a dispersion of the effects of the ideal. That’s the triangle, right? It’s gonna go down this end like this. And if you look down, you look to the side, and you look at the effects, and then you start identifying against those effects, you’re just second order, third order. You have to keep your sight towards the ideal, not towards the extremities of the effects of the ideal. Or else then you’ll become unjust, because you end up destroying things. The problem is we want a completely controlled world. We don’t understand the concept that there’s going to be a dispersion. There’s always going to be margins, always. It will always be there. You said something about this yesterday to your exceptions that proved the rules of talk. I don’t remember, but yeah. You can’t always have to identify in the ideal, the first principle. You have to remember the first principle, identifying the first principle, not the second effects or the second order effects. Because those will always be there. What it reminded me is something Jesus said, he said, the poor will always be with you. And he’s making that point. He said, you have to stay focused on the ideal. The poor will always be there. Yeah, and what you want to do is you want to have a different means to account for the people that fall out. You don’t want to account for it within the system. You want to have like a bucket on the side and say, well, okay, we’ll just catch you. And then we do something different instead of having it all in the same thing. And also like there’s sacrifice. Like there’s just people that have to do things like that sucks, right? Like, because if they don’t get done, they don’t get done and things don’t work. Like there’s no way around that. It’s the importance of Sabbath, right? If you read Pagel’s book, seven, the remainder, and the not tilling the corners of the fields, there’s always going to be an extremity. And you cannot contain that extremity. You can’t account for it in the system. You can’t write an algorithm for that. So you have to acknowledge that that’s, you have to accept that that will always be there. And you have to, like, that’s where things like charities and stuff like that kind of, they kind of, they take it theoretically, they take in the corners, and they deal with them on a case by case basis because you can’t come up with a law that will control for everything. Cause it’s completely, it’s the chaos on the edges that can’t fit into the structure. Anyways. So what’s, this might be kind of introducing a common theme that maybe I just haven’t looked into much, but that the Platonists might reduce, like the idea of the true cause of the problem reduce, like the idea of the true pilot. It does matter why they’re on the voyage then, right? Because that’s the T loss of the ship, you know? So, but there’s also the art of navigation. And so like, so the art of what the Platonists would say is that there’s some, like everything reduces into some mathematical pattern, which is represented in like music, right? And they would roll things back and say like, oh, well, music, that seems way too reductive, right? And so there’s some kind of aspect of excellence or art that seems to be like transferable, but only like- Why do you say that, Andy? Why do you think they would, Platonists don’t reduce anything. They’re actually expanding the world. The idea of forms is a revolution in terms of previous thought. Like previous thought couldn’t integrate the difference between the instantiation and the ideal. And Plato gives you a way to do that by introducing forms. And he also explains the decay of, we’ll call it the non-ethereal world, right? He says, this is why this is like this. Like, again, it’s the triangle. That we cannot have a perfect triangle that is not available to us, which is not to say there isn’t a perfect triangle. There is, it’s just in the Platonic realm. It’s in the realm of forms. So he doesn’t reduce. He actually expands everything. You have to look at it historically. Like before this, that concept, while it may have been teased at, was not really there. And you gotta remember too, and the more I look into this, the worse the story it gets, all of these people were worshiping. Some God or other, maybe seven or 10 or five or two, who knows, right? They all were. That was already a thing. So everything in philosophy comes out of that, what we would now call religious tradition. They didn’t have that term. They didn’t think that way about it, right? That’s 1530 is when we started to use that word incorrectly. So basically, they already had a way to worship. They already had a way to look at virtues. Like they had all the practices that we would identify or map onto a modern religion in terms of they had tradition, right? They had some way when they were in trouble of trying to work out something outside of themselves, they had mediation, right? They’d go to the gods for mediation in some cases. But when Plato comes along, he takes that oversimplified system as well. Wait, there’s the forms. There’s some mystical way of forms. You were born into them or you were born knowing them or something, which is the trick he plays, right? And then he proceeds from there. And so he’s not reducing anything. He’s actually kind of expanding the world that everybody else is in from before his time. And I think that’s really important to realize. From their perspective, it’s not a reduction. Okay, so yeah, it’s an expansion. Like you could zoom out more and say pre-axial, like we’re on the step versus axial age where we have all these new. So basically now, the problem that I see in terms of the solution to nihilism that we’re seeing now is going back to, the Nietzschean principle ideas of stimulating vitality, passion, getting out of your head. Like basically, so the thing about the axial age is basically like abstraction, right? So like if we introduce the idea of like navigation as an art, like I don’t know anything about the forms. So intuitively, we have the sense that like, you say your axiom is being as good. It’s not life as good because a flesh blob and a petri dish is, we have an intuitive sense that there’s hierarchies of life. And they’ve like, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, they get into this stuff, right? About how there’s higher and lower orders of life. And, but I mean, it seems like that intuitively seems like most people would kind of like nod their head when they hear like, but I don’t know. I don’t, it seems like, what was I bringing all this up? It seems like, what was I bringing all this up from the starting point was, what’s the question? So how, okay, yeah, how do you not, how do you not, okay, whether you’re irreducibly, what’s the opposite of expansion? Reducing, how do you prevent that same process from expanding it? Like, where are the boundaries on Platonism? You see what I’m trying to get at? So, what do you mean the boundaries on Platonism? Are you- I think you need to reframe it, right? So, cause it’s like Ethan said, it’s a triangle, right? So there’s an ammunition, which is a point and you can call that a reduction, right? But it’s not. It is a thing that can unfold itself into every expression, right? So the complexity is there as a seed. Like, it’s not there as an actuality. And I think that’s the step that you have to make. What is like, okay, there’s a way to relate to things where they haven’t found their expressions yet. But relating to the thing pre-expression allows you navigation, right? Like better navigation, cause now you can relate to the essence, right? And find universal relationships of all the expressions that follow below the ammunition. Like, so you don’t have to analyze every specific instance anymore because you can relate to the class of instances instead. So that’s what I was getting at, is that how do you respond to the purse? Cause I get this argument all the time and it’s very common in the modern world, is that there’s a math, like, because I see mathematical patterns in Beethoven, that’s a more pure, like whatever, it’s more good or it’s more whatever. But so what you just, what I heard from you just say is that you have, in order to make it say something like that, you have to recognize some form of emanation. Otherwise, how do you have to recognize some form of emanation as well as, what was the second thing? I lost the second part of what you said. But basically, what I was asking along the lines of, in terms of, I’m trying to understand Platonism and a lot of the modern arguments I get are these like mathy pattern things, right? And I don’t know how to respond to that. Like, oh, well, there’s these mathematical patterns in the universe. Mathy pattern things is a flattening, right? Like it’s a materialist interpretation of Platonism. Well, like- You’re telling them they’re wrong. That’s how you say you’re wrong. Like, like- But how, I don’t know how. How do you respond to Nietzsche? Nietzsche was wrong. Okay, can we move on now? Right, how do you respond? Literally, any modern philosopher, yeah, they’re just wrong. Throw them out, go back to Plato, problem solved. I guarantee you this is true. It’s true, you don’t need any of that other stuff. You can reject bad frames and people get up. You can’t do that. No, I can, I did, I will, I’ll continue. It’s not that hard. Like you don’t have to take everybody into account just because somebody says they’re smart or 20,000 people listen to them once. You can just throw out their stuff. Like it’s not, and it is a reduction, right? When you say a pure form of something because math, right? So, well, Beethoven can be, or Mozart’s a better example, right? Mozart can be reduced to these mathematical patterns and their fights. Like, okay, well, why don’t you express the math using whatever methods, because there’s more than one way to express math. Why don’t you express that math and tell me if it’s as beautiful as Beethoven, right? Because it’s not, or Mozart, it’s not. Well, now what? So you’ve over-reduced, that’s how you know, right? You know because the true, the good, and the beautiful is not there. Well, the true, the good, and the beautiful is not there. Why am I doing this? That’s the boundary. The math, we’ll see later that the mathematics is just one point on the line and that it comes from the first principle. It’s just one point. Bach has actually, he said, there’s a quote from Bach, he says, he attributed his art to two things, God in science, mathematics in God, primarily God. Something ineffable, the first principle, and then mathematics, which are, or science, or the understanding, that’s what he meant as like music theory and stuff that helped him understand and implement this higher first principle. Yeah, I wanna go back to where we started, right? And we started with this idea that Socrates was cultivating a relationship, right? So some things we can all, what was it, know, oh yeah, like it’s the biblical knowing, right? Like there’s this intimacy, right? And the intimacy comes from establishing a relationship, and what is that relationship? Well, it’s the ability to grasp, right? It’s the ability to get grip on something, right? And math is a really powerful tool to get a specific type of grip, right? Like, you know, you’re in a relationship, you’re in a specific type of grip, right? Like usually math is in relation to manipulation, right? So it’s like I reduce the complexity of something to a certain set of variables, right? And then I can manipulate the variables, and then I can get some expression out of the thing that I’m trying to manipulate, right? Which is effectively the project of science, right? So it’s really powerful, a powerful way to grasp something, right? But it’s a specific type of grasping, and I guess I wanna introduce the commentary that was on the text, because they’re talking about this, right? So the way that they were defining goodness, right? Like I think this is just the common Greek understanding of goodness is excellence or virtue of a workman that lies in its efficiency, right? So the workman, right, like is a person who has a talus, right, so he’s relating to a purpose, a emanation, right? And then the efficiency is the capacity to give expression to that emanation, right? And if I am capable of making good shoes so that people can use shoes, then I’m a virtuous shoemaker, right? Now that is a really, really, really materialistic expression of virtue, right? Like I think it’s highly problematic, right? Because now we need to say what is a good shoe, right? And then you get into this argument, well, a good shoe is again, the thing that fulfills shoe-iness, right? But like what is shoe-iness? Because like not everybody, like some people want beautiful shoes to walk on the catwalk. Some people want like sturdy shoes so that they don’t cut off their toes when they work in the field. And some people like solid shoes that they can do long walks, right? So this shoe-iness is like there’s always this ineffability that’s there and it’s like you can never collapse, right? Like there’s always this mystery in the definition and so I don’t like it, right? Because efficiency implies a tangible understand, right? Now you can also have a different quality, right? Which is fulfillment, right? So I can have a shoe that fulfills its role as a shoe, right? And so now I am sufficient, right? Like, and now we don’t have to go into qualitative or quantitative arguments. No, it’s like there is a requirement that is being met and my capacity to meet the requirement allows me to have a proper fulfillment of the identity. So yeah, I’ll stop there. I got more, but I’ll stop there. Yeah, that sort of points to the fact that the identity exists in the, what would you call it? The weaving together of the emergence and the emanation, right, and that’s why Plato re-enchants the world or enchants the world in this case, right? He’s because he adds in that emanation and adds it back into thinking and says, yeah, these quote definitions are all about, say the dead matter, but actually they’re in service to this other thing that can’t be defined. I mean, this is really the problem, right? And this is where Socrates is a use, right? And everywhere else, maybe he’s not, right? You are operating on a definition. Oops, that might be an error when you’re trying to talk about a virtue because virtues can’t be defined in the way that a chair can be defined, right? And that’s what we don’t recognize. We don’t recognize the class of things that are virtues and values that do not have definition. What we can define is part of their implementation, but only a part and only the implementation and not the form nature of it. Like again, I can talk about a perfect triangle that exists as an abstraction in the realm of forms. There’s no question about that. It has to, because I have to be trying to instantiate something when I draw a triangle. You know what I can’t have? A perfect triangle, like still true. Yeah. Yeah. I have mixed feelings about this. You can have a different kind of fulfillment. And well, if you don’t have definition on your argument, then the argument is pointless in a way, because you can make any kind of statement and it will be true. Oh no, no, that’s not true. That’s not true. You see what Socrates is doing, right? He’s asking for consent of his interlocutor. Right. Yes, yes, but I think Socrates defined enough so that… Arguments aren’t the only way to interface with the world. They might be the best way to communicate to the most types of people, but, and that’s limited in and of itself, but the fact of justice can happen in an action without an argument, without a definition, without a discussion, without a word. In modern times, we overemphasize the language and the ability to communicate using language without realizing, this came up last night in my live stream, without realizing most of our communication is nonverbal. And so actually most of it, right? And so the idea that arguments are primary and therefore definitions are important is wrong. It’s just not correct. And again, as Manuel pointed out, although there’s also other examples, we can have a discussion about something that we don’t really wanna argue, right? We’d have a discussion about something without definitions and that might be okay if we share enough in common about the context of what we’re talking about. And the reason why that works is because the context constrains things such that the definitions aren’t as important, aren’t as needed to be emphasized. And the thing that Socrates does do is that he destroys definitions. That’s his whole trick. I’m gonna destroy your axiomatic definition of something, some concept, some set of words, some argument you’ve made, I’m gonna take it, I’m gonna smash it with a hammer and make you start over again, right? And that’s basically what Danny was pointing to earlier with the two questions. That’s what you’re doing. You’re saying, okay, here’s where you’re starting or here’s where you’re standing in the moment, I’m gonna smash that or force you to justify it. And if you can’t justify it, then we’re in a whole new league. And so the argument doesn’t rely on the definitions. The definitions can forward the argument and if they’re agreed upon, but you can get agreement to discuss something that you don’t understand. Actually, I think that’s one of the more useful pieces of John Verbecky’s work is he says, yeah, if you’re gonna do this D’Alogo’s practice, you should talk about virtues and values. Why? Because you can’t have a debate about virtues and values. You may say, well, of course we can debate it. No, not really, because in a debate, there’s a winner. You can’t win defining a virtue. It’s not possible because any definition you come up with is incomplete. So you can’t win that. It’s not an argument. It can’t be won. It can’t be a debate because there can’t be a winner. And so that’s more generative than say, is this phone a good phone or not? We could have a winner in that argument. You can argue whether or not there’s a way to make a winning argument, right? But you can try with a virtue. You kind of go into it with this, oh, wait a minute. This is bigger than me. We can’t debate a virtue. We can’t get into a fight about a virtue. We can only enhance each other’s understanding because whatever somebody brings to the table is very likely, not perfectly likely, but very likely to be relevant to the virtue in a way that I wasn’t thinking about in the moment. A good example of that is actually the Socratic dialogue, Euthyphro. It’s talking about Socrates is asking a dude who’s suing his own father, what does piety mean? Piety being kind of, yeah. What does it mean? The whole thing is, it may get me a definition on it. And it’s like, there was none that was satisfactory, but it wasn’t that Socrates was trying to, aha, you can’t, you know, I won the argument. It was more like, well, I want to figure out what this is because it’s important. And there are points in that. And there are points in this as well, but it’s like, it’s the engagement. It’s the participation in it, which is actually the kind of primary, one of the primary kind of ways of doing it or ways of going forward. It’s not the mere propositional aspect. I mean, in this, they reference stuff back in the conversation, but that’s, we’re reading that now and we think, oh, it’s on the piece of paper, it’s a proposition, but that was a conversation like we’re having now, right? So it’s more to kind of frame it almost in the sense that we’re having it now. So think about, you know, what were we talking about 30 minutes ago? You know, it’s like, well, oh, you know, do you remember something, you know, Manuel talking about the three generations, right? That’s kind of more what it’s like, rather than a kind of series of bullet points that we’re all kind of looking back to and seeing whether they’re congruent or not. Yeah. Yeah, just, of course you can debate and without setting a definition, but you will not get the truth. I think Socrates is trying to get to the truth, not only fulfillment. If you are fulfilled and debating and it’s fulfilled you, then that’s good. You progress in some way, but you are not getting to the truth. Getting to the truth, you need to look at the reality or concept, the attribute, the relationship. There is some kind of, some way of logical mechanism to understand, to understand the truth. If you are not, if you are not explorating and investigating things, you will not get the truth. If you are not defining precisely thing and the relationship, I’m not sure you will get something. Maybe you will get something else, but not the truth. Can you define the quality of the truth that you need in order to accept something as true? Well, there is different perception of truth, but if you take the scientific methods, I mean, you will have a certain confidence of it because you are doing- Yeah, so that’s just, that’s fulfillment. Because that’s, at this point I’m satisfied. Like that’s- I see what you point. It’s fulfillment, but you also have a probability of truthness. You can scientifically- But a probability is actually not a truth. Like it’s literally not a truth. And also like science can’t deal with most of the world. So you can’t apply the scientific method or science or anything we even call science to most of the world. And people don’t, they don’t take that into account and then they expect science to do the heavy lifting. And science has nothing to say about justice. Set up a scientific justice experiment. I’ll wait here. Like good luck with that. So you’re not gonna resolve any of these issues using that methodology. I’m not saying using this methodology, but if you are not setting definition and if you are only on symbolism and I don’t know, not giving something factual concrete in a way, logical application of what you are saying, then it is pointless. No, I would argue that’s just materialist. It’s totally unnecessary to be materialistic about it and to reduce it to material. Well, materialism is when it’s linked to reality, you can have thought about concepts, logical thought about concept. It’s not materialistic. But if I cut up a piece of meat, right? And I say, this is your portion and this is my portion. Is that just? So I think, look, I think it sounds like Wiesem is saying it has to be ground out in fitness, but fitness is not the same kind of hardness. Like if you’re sailing on a ship, yeah, of course you need to know, there’s a fitness to how you sail, right? But it’s fundamentally like they talk about this, like hunger or it’s these desires that are the fundamental drivers of ultimately value, right? So, I mean, yeah, there’s some, I mean, there’s gotta be some kind of relationship between fitness and passion and desires, right? I mean, it sounds like that’s what you’re getting at Wiesem. Is that somewhat close? Yes. What do you mean by this? Well, when you say, it sounds like you’re defining, what I’m hearing you define is the concept of fitness. That’s what, right? When you say there has to be a logical mechanism to arrive at the truth, right? Well, we can’t prove it out scientifically. Yes. That’s limited, right? But we have this concept of fitness. I’m not saying, scientifically it’s a word that, it’s a case that we put, but I mean, we say logic, true logic. If you’re not getting a thing through logic, then you will not necessarily getting to the truth. I mean, if you’re making an argument to another person, the other person have to meet you in a way. And the only way to meet you, it’s true logic, I think. No, logic doesn’t work. Like that’s the problem. I can use it. Logic is in your soul. No, hold on, hold on. Logic, reason and rationality can justify anything. Actually, I’ve done it many, many times. It’s a trick that you can use, right? It’s literally the trick that people use is they can give you a logical argument for something and you mistake that for the truth. I can justify anything logically. It’s not hard. The problem is that logic, reason and rationality all rely very heavily on your starting points, on your axioms. And that’s why your starting axioms are important. And that’s why Socrates goes after your starting axioms, because he knows full well, logically, you can lead anybody anywhere. You can actually lead people to kill other people logically. It’s not that hard. People do it all the time, right? Logic avoids the reason for capital punishment. Oh, well, this guy killed seven people. And if we don’t kill him, he’ll kill seven more. It’s logical to kill that guy, okay? Is that true? It might be, it might not be. The logic, oh, you could say, well, logically, he’s got his whole life ahead of him and he could have a revelation, right? Or he could change, or he could be rehabilitated with effort, right? And because being is good, that effort is worthwhile, no matter what it costs society, right? That’s also a logical argument for not killing him. Those are both logical arguments. There’s nothing wrong with either argument, right? They’re starting from different core principles, axioms, right? And they have different goals. Because if being is good, then your goals change too. Because your starting point constrains your ending points. And that’s what constrains logic and reason rationality. And that’s why it matters. And that’s why logic can’t tell you anything about the truth ever. Because logic alone is completely insufficient to the task. It takes us back to the questions, what’s your axioms or what’s your starting point? I mean, you’re exactly right. It can be used to, Thrasymachus’ starting point is something like the comfort of the individual. His starting point is the individual. And that’s what Socrates is trying to do in Book I, is trying to show that not only is that wrong, it can’t be right. It’s utterly false. It has to be located. He’s not saying where. He’s just saying it has to be located outside of the individual, somewhere. That’s what Book I is opening the door to. And ironically, Mark, you weren’t here for this. But Schindler says this. The conclusion can be reached only with Thrasymachus’ real participation. It can’t be done through logic. Because he withholds precisely this, his participation, Book I comes to an end without coming to a resolution. And then ironically, after Socrates kind of provides an argument or logic that Thrasymachus kind of submits to, he’s like, OK, whatever you say, Socrates, I’ll just agree with whatever you say. And Socrates builds up this logical argument. And the reader’s reading is like, oh, yeah, that makes total sense. And then due to the lack of participation from Thrasymachus, all Socrates has is a structure of logic. And then we get to the end of Book I, and he does exactly this, what he does to other people. He’s like, well, that was fun. And then just throws it off the table. And then it’s almost like he’s like, let’s start over. But it’s not let’s start over. It’s let’s start fresh. And that’s what the whole republic is, is it’s pulling you through this participation. That’s actually what the participation is, is we’re building, we’re doing this, like up, down, up, down, up, down. He’s trying to get you to look up, look at this ideal. When he speaks with the character, he says that the action that you set is leading to something bad, something false. Then he tried to set up a better action, and through this action, he creates something through a logical argument. I don’t think he, he rebooked the concept, the world concept of the others. And then he creates his own world concept. That’s how I perceive it. Right. But the problem is, you’re talking about worldviews effectively. It’s like, how do you construct the way that you see the world? And the problem is you cannot convince someone out of their worldview. Because now you need to appeal to something inside their worldview to get them outside. And that’s a paradox. But the Platon worldview is more inclusive. It takes account of more things. It is more, more strong. Why is that better? Like, I want to have my fish in the other one with the golden throne. Like, I don’t care about more inclusive. I think he tried to, because he not only rebooking, he also creates something. Yeah, but you can create anything. The point is that what is created needs to be accepted. Right. And like I pointed out this earlier, right. Like the way that Socrates gets that acceptance is by asking the other person to consent. Right. And the way that he is asking for the other person to consent is by doing an emotional appeal. Right. That’s not a rational argument. He’s making an emotional appeal. He’s appealing to something that they value in order to gain a grounding within their understanding that he can make a logical argument upon. But like he first has to have the place to stand. Yes. So he’s making a logical argument and he’s trying to be inclusive. And I’m not sure that… He’s first creating a place to stand. And like that has to happen first. Like you can’t have a logical argument without the thing to build the argument upon. Exactly. So he’s setting his worldview and to his worldview, I think he’s… Well, when he… No, no. He’s not doing that. Like that’s not what’s happening. He’s setting a place within the other person’s worldview. And then he’s building upon that into his… Well, not even his worldview, into something bigger than the worldview of the other person. Yeah. That’s what he’s doing. Socrates says earlier that you’ll… Okay. He says, you’ll beat me in an argument, Thursimachus. I mean, there is… I think Socrates actually can beat Thursimachus in an argument. But I think the point that he’s trying to make there when he says that is that arguments are not the way. Like that’s not how you’re going to prove truth. And Socrates actually ends up… He plays Thursimachus’ game. He says, okay, all right, let’s argue. And he argues and he actually out argues him. He’s playing, he’s trying to convince him via argument that… He’s trying to point him up to this higher ideal by his own means. And I think that’s why he destroys it at the end. Because that’s actually not how it works. Well, that’s the Socratic trick is I’ll play your game by your rules and I’ll beat you. Because it’s an unwinnable game. The argument game is… You can prove this actually mathematically. This is the irony, right? Like nobody bothered to map this to math, did they? You prove it mathematically. Arguments are a pointless endeavor if that’s what you’re relying upon. And that’s why participation is important because participation involves your ability to break out of logic, reason, rationality, and find a connection with the person where you can participate with them correctly, right? Otherwise, it’s just a battle and that devolves into war. And like we were talking about this last night in the live stream, right? That’s why when you take away something from society, like the ability to duel, right? With swords, in particular with swords, which I thought was an interesting, interesting tweak on the argument. The fact that you can duel means you have fewer duels. When you take away dueling as a way, you get more fights, you get more death because you don’t have a mechanism to signal. Because what happens when you have the mechanism signaling duels? You don’t want to do that, right? And you can think about it in a very simple video game way. I use this analogy last night. Let’s suppose I’m going to get into a duel with Danny, which would never happen, right? And Danny goes, Danny’s got a power level of eight and I have a power level of four. Maybe I’m being generous to myself here. But Danny knows he’s going to win. The problem with the duel, the problem with the duel is Danny may go, you know, you can defend your point if you’d like, right? And I make it a point of honor and I say, I challenge you to a duel. He has two choices. Choice number one is to say, boy, he’s pretty serious about his argument, you know, because that’s the signal. Like, I’m willing to die. I’m willing to go down from four power points to zero to prove to you that I’m serious. Right. And so he can just say, Well, I don’t want to lose potentially four or six hit points here. So I’ll just, you know, give up and say, all right, I’ll keep your honor intact or we can fight it out. But without that option, there’s no signaling. And that’s part of what Socrates is trying to do is trying to signal to you, here’s your method of of of understanding the world. And I’m going to show you in the moment that your conclusions are wrong using your own method. And then I’m going to crush it. Just to show you the pointlessness of the effort that you’re engaged in. Right. And it’s a signal to point up again. Right. As Ethan keeps saying, it’s pointing up in the same way the duel is a signal. There’s a material cost to continuing to impugn my honor. And therefore, if you want to do that, I will bet that balance. And most people didn’t duel. Like, you could challenge people to duels. Most people wouldn’t do it. Why? Because it’s still a cost. Winning is not free. Winning is still costly. And so you have to decide is winning this important enough. Right. Something I would add to that, the. So the difference here, like postmoderns will do this is what the postmodernists will do is they will they’ll do the same trick that Socrates does. The difference is, is they don’t smash it and throw it off the tables. They they keep it there. So postmoderns, they they play this trick on the moderns. Because the moderns are committed to this objective logic, worshiping logic, reason and rationality. The postmoderns come along and they use logic, reason and rationality to convince to seduce these moderns into doing their own will. The postmoderns, they not they may they’re submitted to their they’re submitted to their individual telos. And they use this concept of logic and reason to bring the the the moderns along with them. Where Socrates differs from that is he plays a trick and then shows them that what they’re committed to, their axioms of objective logic and reason don’t work. I’m not super de-confessed, but I do agree that he played Aikido. With the argument of the counterparts. He he just find the issue in it and he demonstrated masterfully. Afterwards, he creates something. He he start with an example and then he say, do you agree with this example? Do you agree with this? So he includes the counterpart into his worldview. Then. Then he creates his worldview that include him, so he must be he must be convinced by it. He must be must agree with it. But I think he goes through some kind of logical argument to demonstrate this. Not sure that he he go outside of it. But but but like he does a bunch of things that I have problems with. Because like I can I can look at Socrates argument. So one of the things that he does is he makes an analogy. Right. So he starts talking about I don’t know what it was exactly. And then he says, well, just as it’s just like that. And I’m like. Well, no, he starts talking about the professions. Right. And then he’s basically at some point he’s talking about money being abstracted. Right. So so there’s an artistry of money. Where you’re giving people that just pay. Right. And then he’s making another abstraction to. Well, justice is just as the artistry of money. And I’m like, I don’t I don’t think those are logical moves at all. Like, those are invalid moves, according to logic in my book. Like, I don’t think you’re allowed to do that at all. Like, that’s that’s that’s claiming truth by analogy. Like, you can’t do that. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I see what I see your point. And it’s true that he do this a lot metaphor and analogy. And I think he jumps faster than that. But yes, I like it. Like you say, I think the intent of it is logical. The intent of it is logical. But yes, necessarily not everything is logical. Well, I think I think it’s definitely intentional. So I agree with you there. But but but I don’t I don’t I don’t think it’s logical. And and and now I lost the word that you used, but you used you used a word that that implied that that it is it is a persuasion. Why? Like it’s it’s it’s it’s a leap. Right. Like it’s it’s you used the word jump. That’s that’s what I think. Right. And jumping means that there’s a gap. Right. Like jump jump means that you’re losing contact and landing at a different ground. And and that’s swapping frames. Right. Like that’s transcending a a perspective or maybe a worldview in into another one. Like I’m not saying that circuit is wrong because like like even if he’s wrong, he’s not wrong enough to care about. But I don’t think that’s valid. Like, I don’t I don’t think you’re allowed to do that. Like like you’re not allowed to do that according to logic. You’re you’re allowed to do that to consent. And he’s asking for consent. And like I think it’s valid if you do it with concern. Does he do more persuasion or more convincing in your opinion? Well, OK, so so the way that I see what he does is he’s like a guide. Right. So he’s taking you on a journey. Right. And he says, well, this is this is the best land ever. And then you’re like, yeah, but like I’ve I’ve been to like what Disney World and then like like nothing is better than Disney World. It’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like this is the best land ever. We just just come to work with me. Right. And then he and this goes back to the participation. Like during the work, he he lets you interact. Right. He develops the intimacy with the land. Right. And like, is there an objective better land? No. Right. Like, why is Disney World good? Because because it’s high contrast. Right. Like there’s there’s a way, a natural way of participation that allows you to have a depth of experience that that is really accessible. Right. But right, like when you go with the farmer and the farmer tells about like, oh, this is how I plant the seed and here you can see how they grow. And then I like it like like when when the vineyard is like five years old, then I start getting the grapes and then I I make wine. And here it says the wine. Right. And so now the wine is enchanted. Right. Like there’s there’s this whole story behind it that gives meaning. Right. And now you get this intimacy again. Right. You get this intimacy with the wine, with the land. Right. And that intimacy is a different quality of connection than Disneyland. Right. And so that’s what Socrates is doing. Right. Like he’s he’s using the quality or the connectedness that you’re having with the land to say this is better. So you should you should you should move like you should. You should no longer go to Disneyland. This is the actual land. I agree with this. Yes. And that’s not logic. Like that’s just not logic. I don’t agree with this. OK. OK. OK, I want to work. We’re kind of at approaching two hours. So we said it’s a good question. They kind of get into this idea of I hate to use it with term perception versus reality in Chapter two, but they kind of get in on this theme. Also in Chapter two of when they say like, well, if you teach your kids to be just, then, you know, what’s it what’s it what’s it mean for if they’re about keeping up appearances, is it better to keep up appearances and appear to be just? Right. That’s what I mean by perception versus reality. Like I’m it’s better to be really be unjust behind closed doors, but keep up but appear to be just. And they kind of get into this similar theme in the next chapter. So that’s coming. Go ahead. I want to finish the couple of words. So so goodness is defined as the capacity to do work, which which is like an affordability. Which which is like an affordance, right? Like, but that that’s a moral, right? Like the capacity to do work has no moral valence. It’s just a potential. Right. And so and that’s already. That’s the Greek word that they’re using. And then Sophia, which which had a meaning right before philosophy. Like so. And Sophia means the skill to do art, right? Which is which is like the affordance to be a shoemaker, for example. Right. So that that’s that’s the knowledge. That’s the intimacy. So the Sophia is is is pointing at an intimate connection with your craft. Right. And and and it’s it’s it’s the capacity to to navigate in the being shoemaker, right? Like there’s there’s there’s so and that this goes into the the the model that I am Mark made because I think we are effectively using something similar. And efficiency is good at living and that’s virtue. Right. And I’ll skip over this. And then the thing that I like is justice leads to harmony. Right. So so so so the justice isn’t isn’t necessarily right relationship, but it’s it is integrated relationship. So this this goes into what we were talking about before. Right. Like so so when when things are in harmony, this goes back to to the cutting the piece of meat. Right. Like how I cut the piece of meat is depending whether it is causing conflict between you and me. Right. So as long as as we’re in acceptance. Right. And the best way to do that is that I pick what I perceive as the bigger piece and always give the bigger piece to you. Right. That that’s the best way to do that. But but as long as you’re like, well, I’m I’m getting my fair share, then that’s just right. So there’s and this is this is back to the fulfillment. Right. Like like, yeah, maybe you only need 10 percent of the mama to feed your family. And like, you don’t care whether you get you get 80 percent or 10 percent, because you can only use the 10 percent. And so the justice lays there as well somewhere. Right. Yeah. And then this this last thing is there’s three things that he was explaining that the unjust is superior to the to the just in character. Inverted intelligence. That’s that’s one of the clauses that he’s he’s dealing with and refuting. And then in just is a source of strength. Right. Like, so he’s refuting that statement and injustice brings happiness. Right. So that’s the three arguments that are being put forward and that are being refuted. So that’s what I had. Hey, so we got a hard stop here. He’s got a hard stop. So we’ll go to go. But glad you came. Thanks for coming over. Yeah. So guys, definitely been like grabbing onto a moving freight train. That’s awesome. And they say, you know, you’re in the right room when you’re not the smartest guy. So that’s I’m definitely in the right room. So I appreciate all of the great things have been spoken here today and look forward to to next week for sure. Cool. Thanks. OK, so I’ll look out. Yeah, so then we can conclude with a reflection on. So try and present to yourself the things that were salient during the conversation, like what triggered you, what motivated you. And then try to connect that. Like, what does that mean in my life? How does that connect to micro reality? So close your eyes. Yeah, I think we can do Book 2 next week.