Plato's The Republic, Book 10 Discussion, part 2⧸2 (o1jrM-qPYI0)

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I can’t wait to hear your notes. I’m excited. I loved the end of this book. I thought it was amazing. I don’t know about you guys. Mark laughs. There’s an end to the book? Really? That’s a fact. I’m looking forward to hearing what you think the end of the book was. That’s part of why I love it. All the problems are solved. No more questions to ask. That’s what he says. I don’t know about that. There’s no solutions in this book. I have a bunch of questions. I have tons of questions. I have plenty of questions. Let’s open this stuff. We’re all like, uh, okay. I recognized during my note taking that I was taking really few notes. I wasn’t even sure what to take notes of. That definitely threw me off. And it became worse and worse. Let’s reflect on last week. Danny wanted to maximize vitality. Mark wanted to figure out what Plato’s after. I wanted to regard it as a play. Definitely not going to happen now. That wasn’t a play. That was next level fantasy writing. I’m also like, oh, here’s Dante. Here’s this Bible stuff. It’s all there. Why is this all there? This is actually scary how much is there. What were we at last time? The greater and the lesser. I know we referenced things beyond 603, but in my reading this morning I thought it was appropriate to begin around 603, which is sort of at the tail end of when they’re talking about the imitative art of the inferior. It produces inferior offspring. That kind of flows into this contrast of good against evil and it gets into discernment. I don’t know about this framing. Let me set my intention. My intention is to be open-minded and try to find the angles I cannot see. And that’s it. Mark, you want to go next? Sure. My intention is to ponder what the heck Plato just did. I’m looking forward to seeing what you guys saw because I was just completely caught off guard about the end of the book here. This is unbelievable to me. It took a turn. I certainly wasn’t expecting. I’m going to continue to look for what Plato was after. What do you think, Danny? I’m going to keep mine the same of maximizing vitality. My interpretation of this is that it’s very heroic. There’s a picture of a hero and a vision for the pursuit of virtue and what some of those implications are. I’m going to keep my eyes fixed in that direction. We’ll see what we get. The last sentence I think I read is, poetry also does harm the good. And then we got into this whole fire eating. Do you have a source for that? Yeah, just in the text. Do you have a number? I got it open at 608 here. I don’t know what. But I’m not following the text. Let me just go through some of my notes and just catch up to that point. In 603, I think it’s potentially foreshadowing for this good versus evil dichotomy that’s going to come up in the future. The imitative arts in an inferior one, which marries, it has inferior offspring, they examine it further whether the faculty has the poetical imitation is concerned. So they’re trying to determine whether poetical imitation is good or bad. They end up calling this poetical imitation sister, I think like sister imitation later. So they kind of personify it, which I think is important. In 604B, there is this guy who, his son dies, and they ask him like, is he just going to cry or is he going to moderate his crying around others? Of course he’s going to moderate his crying around others. And therefore there are these two distinct principles that are pulling at this guy. So that’s kind of the setting the frame for this good-bad dichotomy that they’re sort of constructing. I don’t know if I saw it that way, though. Because the external social pressure is not a principle that’s pulling at it. They’re setting up this dichotomy, but what they’re basically saying at that point is that the external, the manifestation of the external, the communion, is making you treat the signals that you relate to differently. And events come to you from, it’s what chance brings. It’s like, oh, okay. And so it’s a very specific context of, I would call it a stoic context, of things that are happening to you. So I don’t know that they introduced an idea of internal and external, because where they end up going later is, remember, they’re making a case for immortality when they say like, they have a food. Suppose a food is bad, and then you eat the food, and the body actually becomes diseased. We don’t say that the badness is in the food, and then it gives the type of badness that we would call bad, like say that’s bad food. It’s like the transjective property. They introduced the concept of the transjective effectively, when they say that you have, but so in 604b they say, when a man is drawn in two opposite directions, to and from the same object, this, as we affirm, necessarily implies two distinct principles in him. So they’re putting, remember in the myth they get to the spindle of necessity, they’re putting this idea of necessity, like basically they’re painting this whole picture with rationality, and behind the rationality is basically is immortality or the eternal. And so the whole point is that there’s no divorcing rationality from getting away from the gods. And so in the way that they use reason, behind that, like the arguments that they make with the reason, so in other words the nature of the necessity, like they say, like okay we’re setting up this polarity of this man who’s torn in two. On the one hand he wants to cry because his son’s died, on the other hand he wants to be strong. When they say ask yourself, if you were that guy, you wouldn’t just fall apart and just start crying in front of everybody. You would do your duty and you’d be strong. That’s kind of what they’re saying. And so they kind of set this polarity up in order to explain that behavior. That’s my understanding of what they’re doing. And then they say certainly one of them is more ready to follow the guidance of the law. And they advance this. But the problem is, even though it’s true that they’re being pulled apart, only one principle rules. Right. But a lot of what’s set up here. The principle is abiding by the law, whether they abide by the law. That’s another principle. Yeah, but no, it’s not all about that at all. Like my text doesn’t even contain a lot of these words. Like, right? Isn’t one ready to be persuaded in whatever direction the law leads? So the law is leading. Right. The idea behind this is to say, despite what chance brings. So one way to understand this, you’ll see why I’m using this frame in a second, is to put chance in the realm of the material or the natural realm. Materiality is what I would call it. The material realm, you stand apart from that. You don’t have to, right? But you can. And the reason why he’s doing that again is to place justice firmly in that non-material realm. Which is also to lower your expectations for justice in the material. Because he does that later. He says basically, yeah, you’re not going to get justice effectively in the material realm. Right? And he shifts the importance of justice entirely out of the material realm. Right. I think that’s where he’s going. I 100% agree with you. Maybe we got there through different sets of reasoning. But yeah, he basically says later explicitly, justice is only for the gods to know. And he builds the case for the fact that we need this eternal space. And then we have to, in order to take the next step, we have to move into the internal. We need to have a lens that your soul lives and therefore there are things that you do that matter beyond your corporeal, beyond the corporeal realm. And this is that setup again that we talked about with the so-called platonic cave idea, which is not a cave, it’s a den. Where you start with the example of the layer of analysis of the individual. This is starting with the example of the layer of analysis of the individual. Which is very late in the book to do that. Which is kind of mysterious. In fact, maybe if I wanted to reread this and boy, I don’t want to actually do this. I could go in and find this pattern where you start with the individual, you go to the group, and then you go to the city. And it’s always those three frames, it’s always what he’s using is three frames. Always using those frames in some sort of ordering or whatever else. And so he’s starting that pretty late here, but he ends it pretty spectacularly at the end, as we’ve been alluding to. But what this is talking about is prudent, quiet character, which is always nearly equal to itself, is neither easily imitated nor when imitated easily understood. So he’s denigrating understanding as such. Especially by a festive assembly where all sorts of human beings are gathered in a theater. In other words, where people are looking at you. Where you’re on display. For the imitation is of a condition that is surely alien to them. So that’s 604C. And so, I’m sorry, 604E. And so what he’s basically saying there is that if you don’t have eyes to see, you can’t imitate. If you want to put it in a more recent Christian-y frame, that’s what he’s talking about. See, he’s not talking about the individual instance that he’s talking about at the beginning of this. He’s actually talking about the fact that even if you exhibit good character, that’s not going to be enough for other people to exemplify and follow you. Right. Which is not, that’s why you’re stoic. You do it anyway. You don’t do it for the sake of the signal. So he says, and where he ends up going, and people only talk about the tragic arts and the poets, but he also says comedy is the same. Same could be said of lust, same of anger, and all the other affectations of desire and pain and pleasure. So where he ends up going, like we already beat the horse to death, the fact that poetry moves people, okay. Now, he does say explicitly there’s no knowing whether such things are, this is back to 6 of 4, I’m rewinding a little bit. He said there’s no knowing whether such things are good or evil, but nothing is gained by impatience. So he’s sort of hinting at the way to sort of get at towards justice, and to move higher is through modes of being or ways of knowing or something like that. Later he gives an example of, he said the just man is like a runner who runs a race and at the end gets a crown, and the unjust man is like the guy who sets out on the race, and he runs the race and completes the race, but he doesn’t win. Like maybe he leaves, it’s ambiguous, maybe he got distracted, right, etc. But it’s the way in which he runs the race that matters. What I got there is mindfulness, or I think I had a different word for it, but effectively taking the crown, oh that’s meaning, that’s the word that I found, right? Because if you win, and you celebrate your prize, like he’s also talking about a physical prize, or you appreciate your prize, that’s the word, you imbue your activity with meaning. If you win for the sake of winning, where’s your meaning? I think that’s literally the dichotomy that he makes there, and that’s just nihilism versus the enchanted world. And he’s very explicit about this, so in the prelude, this is back towards 6 or 4, 5ish, something like that, it says, no human thing is of serious importance, or in other words, no temporal thing, how I interpreted that, and grief stands in the way of that, which at the moment is most required. So this is talking about this guy who lost his son, is he going to cry in front of everybody? He’s saying, what the guy needs to do to be virtuous is do what’s required. Well, what’s required? They talk about what’s not required, when fate strikes, like a tragedy or whatever, like what we don’t want to do is we don’t want to be like children, keeping hold of the part struck, so in other words, eternally damaged, like, oh, I’m changed forever, you’ve got to recover. Wasting time in setting up a house, so that’s complaining about all my problems being a victim. But always, customing the soul forthwith, do apply a remedy, so there you go, fix your problems, raising up that which is sickly and following, banishing the city of sorrow by the healing heart. So you’ve got to get past your pain and you’ve got to heal yourself. That’s what the virtuous man would do. And that’s a treaty against fatalism, right? Like, you can’t let the thing drive you, you’ve got to take the wheel. And I think the argument behind the stuff of like the temporal, he’s pointing up towards what’s more important, towards the immortality or the things that are bigger than us. I think that’s really what he’s trying to drive his rationality towards. Okay, but at that point he’s just pointing at functionality, right? Like he’s setting a precondition to point up. Because like doing things while you’re grieving is not necessarily good, right? Like it still has to be imbued by the good through something else, right? Like a telos. And so I think the way that he makes his argument is like by basically painting a picture of an anti-hero, which I think he calls the rebellious principle, the rebellious principle, which I think is the one that was bothering you last week, which inclines us to recollect our troubles and to lamentation, which we can never have enough of, we call irrational, useless, and cowardly. So he’s sort of like, I think he’s basically saying like, let’s move in terms of like imitation, let’s try to like distance ourselves from the rebellious principle. And I think where that moves you towards is towards immortality, I think. No, no, no, no, like this is Sam Harris’s escape from hell argument. No, like you can’t get to the good by escaping hell. Like the rebellious principle is hell. You don’t get to heaven by fleeing the rebellious principle, but you still have to flee the rebellious principle. I would say I’m running away from that, but he does say that’s a signal that you’re on the wrong path. He does say that that’s a signal that you’re on the path to hell. Where is that? Where is it? So part of my problem is the point of 604 and 605 is about imitation. 604E. Right, but imitation is a stand-in for the affections. It’s a stand-in for the affections that are like out of place. Because he says that. Okay, so here’s my problem. I read 604E. It contains none of what you’re talking about. I actually read it earlier. It doesn’t contain any of that. Again, it’s talking about imitation. All of this is talking about imitation. Like the focus of this is imitation. Right, because you’re still talking about the poets and the actual men who do the thing and what the difference is and the importance of moving people and imitation. So the word imitation is all peppered throughout this whole thing. Yeah, so I can tell you what I wrote down. The rebellious principle is ripe for imitation and the good principle is hidden because it’s not creating contrast and drowned out by strong signals. That’s my way of translating. So basically he’s saying there’s something that’s salient because it’s playing upon the emotions. And so you easily get drawn in by that which emotes you. Because that’s what emotions are. They’re the things that move you. And the things that are right, they’re going to be in the background because they’re not going to manifest fireworks effectively. They’re going to be patience and kindness, more feminine qualities in some sense. And they’ll be hidden. They’ll be hidden in the confusion of all the other signals. And this is where the asymmetry comes in. So he basically says you can do good and bad in the same play, but people are going to see the bad and they’re going to relate to the bad. Yeah, I don’t know that I would say drowned out by strong signals because that sounds like cognitive overload. I would say it’s more like seduced by imitation. Because the imagery is easy saying like what he ends up doing with this imagery is he’s saying like we’re going to put sister imitation on trial, which later I’m kind of jumping ahead a little bit. What we’re going to do is we’re going to elect two people. One of them likes poetry, one of them doesn’t. Sister imitations, we’re going to banish this. By the way, this is just what makes the text so rich to read in like two sentences. Plato can make these really rich images that make you say huh. And they introduce a whole bunch of questioning. So he says we’re going to have this island in like two sentences. We’re going to banish sister imitation there. This is six or seven. We elect a guy who likes poetry and a guy who doesn’t like to talk to her. Then they come back and represent her to us and we’ll determine whether sister imitation is useful and not just delightful. And then they’re talking about how like if the defense fails, then her desires oppose our interests, which are rational. And so we must also in a way, we must give her up like a dead lover not without a struggle though, because she’s attractive, poetry’s attractive, but not true. So the whole issue that they have with poetry is that it violates their concept of truth. And so then if her defense succeeds, we’ll keep it to ourselves, but we’re not going to fall into this childish love which many of her captains, which captivates the many. So they’re being tyrants still in their design of, in this hypothetical you know, they’re designing in this picture that they’re painting. And the irony is thick here. Like there’s no way that you’re strong enough to resist sister imitation. Like sister imitation is just too powerful. Like the solution in Odysseus is to bind yourself to something like the post when he goes by the sirens for example. But they keep saying over and over again, we can’t let sister imitation in because we cannot betray the truth. They said that at least twice. And then they also sort of hinted, they said, yeah, we’re sort of, yeah, we jumped past the Homer stuff. That’s important though. You’re jumping all over. I’ll just go through my thing. I just want to say that in relation to what you were saying, like they singled out poetry from all the arts, right? And they’re basically saying, well, everything is crap, except maybe poetry isn’t. So that’s important, right? Like that’s, yeah. Well then how do you interpret 606D? When they talk about, they said comedy, it’s the same situation. The lover of comedy can turn into a… Yeah, but that’s earlier, right? What do you mean? And they said the same maybe set of Lost Anger and all the other fictations of desire and a pleasure. Yeah, but that’s before they start talking about poetry. So, okay, what they are doing, it’s like when they do start talking about poetry, it’s like blasphemous on the order of South Park. It’s like, I think he’s like, I think Plato is like trolling and he’s using comedy to say, when somebody tells you that you should, this is 607, when somebody tells you that you should take Homer up again and again, which means like to study it and be devotional to it, and get to know him and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honor those who say these things. We can pat them on the head. Like, thank you very much. They are excellent people as far as their lights extend. So he’s saying like, they’re actually not that bright. If by just being devotional to Homer, he’s placing that in a lower realm, I think, by saying because it’s lacking the eternal qualities of the soul, which I think he’s moves towards, I think that’s what he’s doing in that. And we’re ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of all poets and the first of tragic writers, but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which may be admitted to our state. So they’re saying like, okay, we’re going to give credence to Homer, great tragic, great comic, great tragic guy, but because of the nature of passions to move people, we can’t have any more of it. So we’re going to acknowledge like the existing poetry that’s around us by fitting it in. And in doing so, he’s basically like saying that it doesn’t have all the answers. We have to allow poetry. Okay, so this is a translation different. What Bloom says in here, like, things you’re talking about are just not in my text. But what Bloom says here is that you just have to be careful how many poets or artists or whatever you admit into the city. That’s it. Because only so much of poetry as is hymns to the gods or celebration of the good men should be admitted into the city. Yes, that’s the conclusion. Right, so he’s limiting the amount of poetry. He’s saying, in other words, we can’t be nothing but poetic. That doesn’t work. But the reason for that is at the end of the paragraph when he says, we came to this conclusion through brute rationality, and the law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have been deemed the best. So basically, the way that we arrived at this conclusion was through the flaw of democracy. That’s what, that’s, that’s, that’s the problem with democracy is relativism. That’s how, we have a total translation breakdown here. Let me, it’s an interpretation, it’s an interpretation breakdown. Let me, let me, no, no, it’s an interpret, it’s not interpretation, it’s a translation problem. Bloom is pretty clear about this. And if you admit the sweet music, or the sweet muse in lyrics or epics, pleasure and pain will jointly be kings in your city instead of law, and that argument, which in each instance is best, in the opinion of the community. And so he’s saying, you’ve got law, and you’ve got poetry, and they can both move you, right? We’ve already established people move towards law, or can move towards law, but they can be more easily moved by poetry, and that’s why we must limit it. I’m still in violent agreement, and so he’s not against poetry at all. I don’t know where people get that. Apparently they have low reading comprehension. That’s not what this says. It just doesn’t say that. I don’t even know what else, it’s not there, it’s not in this text, it might be in some other text. It’s not in this text. But all he’s saying is that we have to balance these two things. And I think that’s correct, like, yes. Right. And there’s other reasons too. Like, if you squeeze out all the heroes, the poets can’t write new poetry. Obviously there’s a reciprocal relationship there. Well, he’s effectively stating, there shall be no gods before me, right? And he’s basically banning out all the other gods, because you’re not allowed to worship your feelings, right? So the only god that can be there is the god that establishes the law. Right? And I think the argument is not more than that. Like, in order to have the law be the law, it needs to rule, and therefore everything needs to submit to the law. So, yeah, we can’t allow the mythical space to creep, because then we’re no longer in control of the rational frame that we’re encapsulating everything with. What he’s saying is that poetry, then the reason why they have to lock it in place is because poetry is outside of the space of common consent. So they got to this point through common consent, and because they’re playing the role of tyrants. No, poetry isn’t outside the space, poetry with the wrong tell-us is. Like, it’s all about the tell-us. No, no, no, no, no. Poetry, like law, creates common space. In order to implement justice, you have to be careful what the common space is that you create. Justice is bound to law, or law is bound to justice. It doesn’t matter which way you go on that one. And therefore, you have to be careful with competitors to the law in terms of moving people. And so in order to be careful with competitors to the law in terms of moving people, you have to engage carefully with the poetry versus the law, which means you can’t have too many poets. All it says, it’s not a treaty against Homer or poetry or art, that’s not here. Yeah, well I agree that it’s not there. But the reason why you have to be careful in engaging with poetry is because popular culture is not high culture. And he’s saying that if you’re in the realm… The reason why I think this is like blasphemous on the order of South Park is because he’s saying that Homer, he’s equivocating, I think, Homer with popular culture. I think that’s what he’s pointing to with bringing up these… By bringing up this concept of the common consent. And then when he says… Where are you grounding those flames? 607-ish, but let me find… I gotta flip back to Bloom. So at the end of 607, they make a gesture by which… If you could be on this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, so we’re rooting our position in law and reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, and so therefore pleasure and pain will be the rulers of the state. And as we’ve been through in these previous constructions, that pleasure and pain is an inadequate spectrum to move towards justice. We’re still in the realm of the lower. And I think… I think he’s still trying to move to point to this idea that there’s a soul and there’s intrinsic motivations and aspects to being… He already made an argument previously, I think in Book 9, for moral absolutes. You can’t kill your child. You wouldn’t sell your child for any reason. So he’s saying… He’s pointing to problems with relativism, which is the problem of democracy effectively, which is the whims of the day. It’s reasonable and rational for Nazi to kill the Jews. Still evil, but he does it with reason. And I think he’s just setting up this whole argument to point to the reason why in order to get towards something like justice, you have to look through an eternal lens. You have to look at your life… And the reasoning for that is because you’re connected to others, which we’ll get to in the future. Can we chill out? I’m just gonna read my shit and then we’re gonna have a more structured thing. Because when we’re jumping and we’re dragging pieces from all over, I don’t think that’s productive. I think we’ll make like Fermicelli ladders or something at that point. This is where I left off. When looking at art, compassion is hypocritical. We don’t value being possessed by emotions. This is what we were talking about. And this is something a framing that we’re missing, Mark, actually, I think. I think emotions create a desire. So there’s the thing that emotes and the emotion then manifests something that you can grab onto, which is the desire. There’s a force and it grasps onto something to make it a goal. It makes it an aim. Maybe it doesn’t have to, but if it doesn’t have to, then you have restlessness in your life. But this thing that there’s a desire and then there’s something relatable. Now you can orient yourself in the world according to the emotion. And this translationary step, like people equate the emotion with the desire of it. From the evil of other men, something is communicated towards oneself. If you’re in the presence of people that are evil, you can’t get out and escape. You’re being harmed in some way. If we cultivate our sorrow by watching others, it becomes stronger in ourselves. So this is also the same thing. If we expose ourselves to something, if we go through the motions of something, then it will gather a stronger hold upon us. Comedy has the same dynamic. I think all these things that you were saying, by the way, are descriptions, not prescriptions. He’s not saying that by being exposed to evil, you cannot escape. He’s saying that that’s a description of a character. And in the same way, by watching the tragic poems, by watching sorrows, it’s not necessarily going to have the memetic effects on you. It can have a corrupting effect. No, but it’s not inevitable. Danny, this is a hard no. If you need to resist something that’s coming at you, that means that you have to conform to it in a way. Now you can say, well, the way that I’m conforming is not necessarily negative, but it’s still having a negative effect, because that energy that you’re using to conform is not pointed towards the good. It’s pointed towards the evil. It has an effect of you in that sense, but it’s basically… No, it has a negative effect. It’s draining resources. Right. It does cause resources. The interpretation as to is that going to take you straight to hell is your interpretation of the end of the myth, which is ambiguous. I’m not saying it’s going to take you straight to hell. I’m saying that that is an imposition upon you that will negatively affect you. And you have to take that seriously. If you don’t take that seriously, it’s like, oh, I can just walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Yeah, you should do that. Or I can engage with a text that is fundamentally evil. No, but you said when you’re around evil, you can’t escape. You made an absolute claim. Same thing with watching sorrows. It’s not… It’s going to have an influence on your course. No, no, no. Danny, you don’t know what your mind does and pretending that you do know is an act of hubris and it’s going to lead you to hell. Like, sorry. I know, but the argument that he makes is that there’s ways of being and there’s modes of engagement that you ought to be most concerned with. I think when he establishes this concept of the soul and says the immortal aspects of the soul are the things that you should be concerned with, I think that’s where he’s saying, like, your responsibility is to basically just… There’s a thousand different dimensions that you could splice these things into in terms of this conversation about, is my… The question is, is my behavior good or evil? Okay, that’s the question. And we could slice this into… It’s a whole bucket of muppets at the end of the myth. You’ve got all kinds of people from all different ways of life. Big ones, tall ones, fat ones, poor ones, rich ones, prideful ones, strong ones, weak ones, widowed ones, women, men. All kinds of different dimensions he gets into in the end of this myth. And what he’s where he ends up going is saying, when it comes time for you to make your decision to be reincarnated, what were the things that went into composing your character? And in order to make that argument, he has to point towards these immortal aspects. And I think that’s the point of what he’s saying here about watching the sorrows. He literally said that what went into composing the character is not the immortal aspect. Like, nobody did that. He said that you made the choice. You make the choice. That’s what goes in. In other words, what you choose to expose yourself to is the thing that’s making the choice, not you. It seems as though if you choose pleasure, it softens you such that you end up choosing poorly and then you end up a tyrant or you end up an elf. No, he says that what the people that choose base their choice upon is their previous life. Yeah, so there’s definitely this inertia. He definitely paints this picture of inertia. That’s for sure. But I think it’s because they’re not philosophers. Right. So that much we can agree on. So if you hang out with evil people, you’re not a philosopher. Like, sorry. So yeah, he does say there’s an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry and they say there’s four quotations. I think this is at 607. These are things that people still in the modern day say, why would you do philosophy? Here’s four reasons why they would criticize people back then. The yelping and the howling at her lord. I don’t know what that means. But the type of people who do philosophy, their talk is mighty in the vein talk of it. It sounds mighty, but it’s really vain. So this is this is this is and then the mob of the people who type of people who do philosophy are like the mob of sages circumventing Zeus. This is like the religion that’s not a religion. And this is and then there are also the type of people who do philosophy. They’re subtle thinkers who are beggars after all. So they can’t pay the bills. So part of part of what he’s doing is he’s constructing the need for philosophical principles for like for cultivating wisdom, education, whatever, whatever you want it, whatever you want to call it. He’s saying we can’t we can’t we can’t get at justice statically. We need we need philosophy in order to in order to have wisdom and wisdom and we need we need an eternal space. These are sort of parts of the pieces of the hold on, Danny, like you need to stop making that move. Like you’re you’re tying too many things in like the whole book is very synthetical, though. I mean, there’s it does leave a lot of it is things, but you can still tie too much stuff together. The point of 607 C, right, is to say we should be delighted to receive them back from exile. So the argument that Plato doesn’t like poetry is that he exiles them earlier. I agree he does, but if you read it, he says we should delighted to receive them back from exile. Right. And then and then he comes up with an objection to that. But isn’t it a whole he betray what seems to be the truth. Aren’t you too, my friend charmed by it, especially when you contemplate it through the medium of Homer. Very much so. So in other words, because we have philosophy, we need poetry. And even though poetry moves us more and it even moves me, we still have to have it back. And so again, it’s just the opposite of what everyone’s telling you. The book says the book says you need it. The book actually says you need it. It’s not optional. It doesn’t say it’s evil. We got to get rid of it. The evil thing is existent in philosophy just as much as it is in poetry. And that’s actually what’s up because he’s just saying he’s saying philosophy is not an easy way out of this problem. You still need the poet. That’s actually what 607 C says. So I don’t know if people are getting this from. Again, low reading comprehension. Maybe I don’t get it. Like maybe they’re not tracking. They took bad notes. I don’t know. But it’s pretty clear that the problem of poetry exists in the problem of philosophy. That’s actually what 607 B says. So I don’t. And C is the redemption, if you will, of poetry. I don’t even get this other stuff. And in D it says that poetry should be under the guise of philosophy. So yeah, I agree that that’s what he’s saying. I don’t think that we’re saying, speaking, the implications is that he’s saying we need both poetry and philosophy. The argument that they’re walking down is forced. He keeps reiterating like when they’re talking about putting a sister imitation on trial, sending her off to this island, he’d ask a question and be like, well, reason forces us to take this next step, so let’s proceed via reason. And I think the whole point that he’s pointing at is that reason is subservient to the gods. You can’t separate reason from the gods. I mean, that’s why he ends up telling a myth at the end. But reason is in response to good manifesting or something. Like he goes into that. That’s why you can’t separate it from the gods. It’s like, what do you mean? Hold on. The reason is not a telos. It provides a telos. No, it captures the telos after it manifests. No, it captures it. You did something and then you find the reason you did it. That’s how it works. Reason is justification, right? And that’s the recent confusion, right? The age of gnosis, the age we’re living in now. The confusion is in the one confusion, one equivocation, as John Brevecky calls it, is on the word reason. So we switch how we use the word reason and the two primary ways we use the word reason as telos, like, oh, my final cause was this or should be this, whatever. But most often when people use reason, they use it as a justification for their actions, but not a result. So they’ll say something like, oh, the reason why I did that was I thought that this thing would happen. Which is different from saying, oh, I want to make somebody happy so I’m going to give them a gift. Like that’s okay, good. It’s in the future. It’s telotic, right? It’s talking about a final cause and end state of happiness, right? Now if I say I gave somebody a gift, right? So they shouldn’t have been made unhappy, but maybe they were made unhappy by the gift. You’re misusing reason, or you’re using reason fine and not talking about telos, which is which means reason captured something. It captured the telos from you, basically. Or it took away the telos or took away your need to talk about your final cause. The way I see it is that you teleport yourself in the future and from the point in the future you look back at your current action. You don’t get to do that. And then what you’re talking about in that current action is that action and not the end result or the desired end result. That’s the difference between telos and reason. So you can say what’s the reason you did that? That’s usually a justification argument. It’s not an argument for I was intending to make this happen. I was trying to manifest this final cause. It’s a very subtle difference and it’s really hard to understand. I’m totally fine with the language that reason captures telos. I think regardless, he’s insistent that when they say we can’t let sister imitation in the city because we cannot betray the truth, it’s obvious that he’s not a reason first guy. What truth are you even talking about? He’s a poetical way of knowing first, which is connected to the gods necessarily. And then he’s using, he’s trying to say can you get that? Can you not see that in order to use reason, you have to have your poetical ways of knowing attached to the gods. He’s trying to point you to that point. He keeps saying it over and over again like we’re forced by the hand of reason. We can’t betray truth. And then we have these absurd steps and these absurd arguments. Totally agreed. As we move towards this myth. But let me build the thing because I still feel like my notes are missing in the conversation all the time. So amusement supersedes disgust, right? So that’s a way to deal with negative signal that doesn’t make you face it effectively, right? Because disgust is in your face. And you have to resolve it while amusement can put it aside in some sense. You’ve restrained the ridiculous and let it back out with watching comedy. So that’s, well that’s the capturing of the thing. Lust, anger, other affections, desire, pain and pleasure. Those are the things that you were talking about, Danny, that drive us or drive us through the poetic side. Good poets are excellent people within their domain. I don’t know if that’s me or from the text. But the only appropriate art is hymns. So it’s actually talking about hymns in my translation and not poems. So that’s like a subset of poems. Anyway, to the gods and praises to famous men. So now we’re putting it in into the hierarchy, right? Like we’re making a hierarchical reverence or honoring. If we go beyond that, pleasure and pain will be the rules of the state. That’s what we talked about. Ancient quarrel between philosophers and poetry. And then poetry can only return to the state if she can make a defense for herself. And there needs to be a care made for poetry in prose. So basically he’s trying to capture the defense in a propositional frame so it doesn’t hold in the motions. And then the passions distract from pursuing honor and virtue. And then we get to the crazy part. So that was what I have to say about that. Yeah, I mean, I think those points totally describe where the text is going. I think one thing that’s important is that the imagery, when they’re banishing sister imitation to an island, they’re using this like, the reason is because she’s seductive. There’s this seductive quality to her. Like they described her as charming. And that’s why they elected these two representatives to mediate or intercede between to determine, again, and the whole, it’s not just trial. Trial for what? Trial for use, utility. Useful. Is she useful to the state? That’s fundamentally what they’re going to evaluate her on. And again, so it’s, what do we mean by useful? That’s, I think that’s important. Well, use means that it’s part, right? Like, if you’re not useful. It means you’re subservient to our interest. They say it explicitly. If her defense fails, her desires oppose our interest. Where is it? 6-0-7-ish. What did my note say at least? Yeah, that’s right. If her defense fails, then, my dear friend, like other persons who are enamored of something, put a restraint upon themselves when they think their desires are opposed to their interests, so too must we struggle after the manners of lovers give her up, to not without struggle. We too are inspired by that love of poetry which the education of noble states has implanted in us. And therefore, we would have her appear at her best and truest. But so long as she’s unable to make good her defense, this argument of ours, so charmas, which we will repeat to ourselves when we listen to her strains, that we may not fall away to the childish love of her which captivates the many. At all events, we are well aware that poetry being such as we have described, is not regarded seriously as attaining to the truth. He who listens to her, fearing for the safety of the city, which is within him, should be on this guard against her seductions and make our words his law. So if her defense fails, the reason is because her desires oppose our interests. Poetry is attractive, but not true. There’s no defense in my text whatsoever. At all. Let me see. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve got a defense on it. They’ve brought poetry back from exile. And then they’re talking about the protectors of poetry. There’s no sister in here, there’s no woman, there’s no personification in the Bloom. Whoa, this Bloom is so different. It’s 608. It’s way different, dude. And again, they’ve already brought her back from exile. Poetry is back in the city. Period. End of statement. We need it. We already established that. So this trial thing is how much and what kind. I agree. Hold on. Like she’s back on exile on a condition, right? And I have to clarify the condition. There’s no trial in the Bloom. At all. It says, shall I propose then that she be allowed to return from exile, but upon this condition only, that she make a defense of herself in lyrical or in some other matter. Don’t have any of that. That’s in D. 607D? Yeah. Nope. Isn’t it just for it to come back in this way when it is made an apology in lyrics, saying all you need to do is apologize. Yeah, yeah, but an apology means that you justify yourself, right? Yeah, and then they give the protectors a melism benevolently, right? Not only to the pleasant, but also the beneficial. So they’re accounting for pleasantry and beneficiality or efficiency. And then we would, he said, undeniably gain. Well, they do, but the exile is still here in 607C. All the same, let it be said that if poetry directed to pleasure and imitation have any argument to give showing something that they should be in a city with good laws, basically can you fit into a city with good laws, we should be delighted to receive them back from exile, since we are aware that we ourselves are charmed by them, etc. The language is quite different, but the language is different, but also chosen back in the city. Yeah, one thing that’s more clear in Bloom, before they get to that point, they say let’s not quarrel over either philosophy or poetry. That’s explicitly clear in Bloom. It was implicit in Gillette, but I think they still made the same points, which I think that’s really ultimately what’s important here, is like we need them both. Like they both perform a function, and I, anyway, I have my opinions about why, but I’ll point it. Right, but again, we’re not just bringing poetry back and saying you can do what you were doing before, and I think that’s where your confusion is. We’re saying you have to pay really close attention to how poetry is moving you and what it’s saying. And I agree, like yes, that is true. Just in the same way you have to pay attention to philosophy, and this is the point that’s made earlier, the difference between sophistry and philosophy, right, where there’s true philosophers and then there’s sophists, and all the non- it’s a no true Scotsman argument, actually, in the text, which I just find hysterical, right. All the true philosophers are not sophists, and all the not true philosophers are sophists. Fair! Because at some point you just hit a wall, and Plato’s like, yeah, there’s the wall right there, we’re just going to ignore the wall and say, and draw that line, and never explain it. And this is the same thing. The thing you have to pay attention to is the line we’re not drawing. Right, that’s where the magic is. I totally a billion percent agree. You have to be careful with which philosophy you engage in, you have to be careful which poetry you engage in. Right, and that is your duty as a person, right, and they don’t actually put that on the city. No, but like children, but yeah, I’m just going to bring in children. The whole point of this is to say, look, because this is dangerous, the city has to exile it, and then they reverse that and say, actually it’s not up to the city, the city can’t reverse that because it’s beneficial, and so we can’t just exclude it, right, but the city also can’t regulate it. Each person has to regulate their engagement with it, which is correct. And so if you want to put it in a frame of individualism, which is totally wrong, evil and bad, don’t do that. You could say it’s up to the individual to maintain the sanctity of the poetry and the philosophy within the city to create a better city. It’s a fair way to think about it. But also, it’s not a condemnation of poetry or philosophy, it’s just noting, yeah, there’s problems here. There are actually a keen problem. We have to keep in mind that he’s talking about the perfect city, not about a city. What I think that he’s saying here is that we can’t exclude Homer or the poetics or the poetical because truth is truth and poetry can’t be contained and rationality is driven by the gods. I think he’s really reiterating this idea by insisting that we’re forced by reason to take our next step and we just can’t get away from the gods. He’s kind of saying, well, we’re kind of stuck with something like Homer. But the point about the gods I think is later. Okay, so Guru talked about this, and I didn’t want to bring this up right now, but you listen to that too, Danny, right? That there’s three heroes, right? And he goes into Odysseus later actually in this book, which I didn’t realize that would happen. But basically, what’s coming out is that Odysseus is completely insufficient, right? And he will choose something better than his life, right? Which is a rejection of himself. And so it’s important to… That says something about Homer as well, right? Because Homer wrote that thing. And basically he says like, no, your story is not sufficient. Even though it’s amazing, it’s not sufficient. So I mean, I agree with the observation you made. I didn’t quite see the broad point that you were trying to make there. Odysseus paints a picture of a hero who does something that’s greater than him. There’s a hero in Odysseus, he has a heroic ethic, and the heroes are chasing after things that are bigger than them. I mean, that’s what happens, yes. So what are you trying to say though? We’re talking about this as the people who should live by the book that Homer wrote, right? Like this is how we talk about the poetry, right? Like effectively religion, right? Like, okay, I’m going to use that book as my Bible. This is the argument that we’re talking to, right? Because they’re inspired by the book, right? And then these people have good qualities, right? Because the book allows for the cultivation of good qualities. But he’s literally implying, right? Not saying, but he’s implying that the qualities of Odysseus are deemed insufficient by Odysseus himself, because he would choose a different life. Well, so if you imitate yourself after Odysseus, then you’re not going to be a godly man. Like, that’s the implication there. Yes, yeah. It’s blasphemous, and that’s what I think he’s saying. Right, so then Homer has not written a divine text. Right. Okay. He’s saying, yeah, exactly. That’s why it’s so blasphemous, is because what he’s saying is he’s saying those myths are in this lower realm. And what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to build this idea for his soul and his immortal properties by trying to make arguments for intrinsic values. He’s saying, like, you can’t get that from Homer because Homer’s down here in the temporal. Even though it’s a divine, even though it’s a story. What’s more important is how you relate to Homer. That’s maybe another way to say it. Which is… I don’t think he’s making a claim about where Homer is. I think Homer has imitated something, and he didn’t relate to the form of the good, like a true philosopher would. The blasphemous poke that he makes is by saying that the law, the way the law was established and the reason of mankind is basically was formed by common consent. And so you can’t, just because he’s saying, again, it’s a problem with democracy and relativism, he’s just saying you can’t just reference popular culture. Just because the law is this way doesn’t mean it’s not evil. So he’s trying to set up, if we’re gonna Hitler’s gonna kill Jews by passing a law or Russia, now that this special operation, if you call it a war, they can send you to jail for 15 years. Just because we can pass laws… That doesn’t mean that it’s evil either, right? All right. Yeah. Anyway, I’m gonna keep going. So an ancient quarrel, poetry can only return if she can make a defense. She needs a case made in prose, passions distract from… Okay. So now we get to the soul of man is immortal. Right. That’s a huge jump, man. That’s why I was sorry. I know I’ve been going crazy, but the reason is about the setup is important to me is because when they made that jump, when they said the soul is immortal, I’m like, man, this is the biggest jump that they’ve ever made in this text. Now, part of me, I don’t care, because it’s just completely sci-fi and just totally ridiculous. It’s not like I want to understand the mechanisms for the advancements. But what is clear, this is why I thought about this a while this morning, is like they force that jump under the guise of reason. And then behind reason is all the implications they get to in the myth story, which we’ll get to, namely the gods. But this jump, I mean, what did you guys think about this jump in 6.080? When they transition to this concept of the soul and they said this there’s this immortal, the immortal being should look to the good of the whole. Did that go well with you guys? I mean, he already did that move earlier in this book. He already pointed at it earlier. That was like, yeah, totally prepared for it. He’s making a weird move, but he already talked about the soul bunch. He’s talking about the soul death of human, which is outside of time, effectively. Yeah, I’m not sure about this argument. I’m sure that it’s referencing like 15 different debates that were going on at that time about the nature of the soul. I don’t know if I’m convinced because there’s a bunch of presuppositions that aren’t gotten into. But within his framing, I’ll accept it. Within his framing, I don’t see why not. Right, and so the framing is just done by brute force, which is fine, or by reason. No, no, no, no, no, it’s not. The soul is that which relate to that which is outside of time. The only claim that I’m question about is how do you know that it exists separate from the body? Because that’s where a bunch of assumptions are drawn into. Well, the body decays. So he just, again, his actual argument is that there is a realm of eternality, right, where things don’t decay. And again, he’s placing justice in that realm. I would call that the ethereal realm. Christians might call it the spiritual realm, right? Everyone, doesn’t matter. But he’s contrasting that with the material realm. And again, he’s going to make the case that justice can’t happen in the material realm because imperfection or something, roughly speaking. Right, but the argument is not supposed to be strong rationally. I mean, I listen to some YouTube video where this professor’s like, I find this argument really weak. And if you read the text, they literally admit to that in 609c when they say, are there things that destroy the soul? And the response is yes, unrighteousness, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance. There are a lot of things. They set up this dichotomy of the vice and the evil, right? When they say everything has a good and an evil. Danny, super important. In Bloom, it’s not destroy the soul. It makes it bad. Really? I think it’s corrupt. And the corruption eventually destroys. Like, that’s the problem, right? And they’re actually literally going about it, saying, no, that which corrupts the soul does not kill the soul. Because there’s still stages in between and stuff. They have this whole thing that they’re going around. I got a hard time holding it in my head. This last half of Booktale Bear, it’s hard to follow. Yeah. Right, so they say, does any of these dissolve or destroy her? Question mark. So yeah, bottom line is there’s these incorruptibility. We can probably be loose with the precision. It probably doesn’t really matter. I think the fact that there are these attributes that reach. What they do is they say, we’re going to ascribe the property of bad to a piece of food. And then if you ask, again, I would just call this a transjective property. And they say, is the food bad? I don’t like how you’re using the transjective, Danny. Yeah, I don’t have a reiki using the transjective. It’s bad, but not to the bread. It’s bad to my human physical flesh. What I understood of it, right, because a whole is a body. You just have to think in terms of body. So the body can only lose its bodiness by stop being a body. Now there’s things from the outside that can invite a process within the body to make that happen. But they can’t make it happen, right? Like the body has to cooperate in that process in some sense. And that’s the statement that’s made. Now if that’s within will or outside will, then we can have a big discussion about. But the whole point is that the body has to participate in the corruption. And without the participation of the body, nothing from the outside can do anything. Where do you get the notion of the participation being necessary? Do you happen to have that? I’m not saying that you’re wrong. I just don’t see that in my notes or my reading. But that’s an alignment. He’s talking about eating straw, right? So you eat straw and in order for the straw to affect the body, you have to get sick. So the straw doesn’t make you sick. You become sick. Because you have to eat it? No, because you have to have a reaction to having eaten it. And your body doesn’t necessarily have to have that reaction. Now you can say, well, there’s no way to stop the reaction from happening except taking it out of your stomach or whatever, right? Which we do sometimes actually. But the response, it’s stoicism into the extreme. Something happens, you don’t have to react. That’s all it says to the best of my understanding. So I’ll just go through my notes. So the evil is that which corrupts and destroys. So there’s two things. I was actually mapping that on the feminine and the masculine. So you have the corruption, which is feminine, like it’s disintegrating. And then the destruction is an imposition upon you. And then the good is that which saves, which is also the feminine, and improves, which is the masculine. And then everything has a good and an evil. So now we’re getting into objective material spirituality or whatever. I don’t know how I like that move, but I think good and bad would be better. I don’t know about this evil framing. So the evil is inherent within the thing, right? And then the thing only exists by virtue of its talents, because I’m just going to add that. And that’s how you can judge the good from evil, because it doesn’t make sense. Looking for that which is corruptible, uncorruptible. The unjust man doesn’t perish through his injustice. So he’s making the claim, and this is also all over the Bible. If you’re unjust, that doesn’t mean that God was might to you immediately. But that’s basically what they’re stating here. And then it says evil cannot kill the soul. And I think this was the point where they’re also making the argument. If you’re evil and you experience something evil, that is not necessarily bad for you, because it’s like, materially at least, because it strengthens you materially often, because you are adapted to that world effectively. That’s what you’re adapted to. It’s unreasonable. I think the way that he makes the point that evil can’t kill the soul, I think is very important, and I don’t think that there’s much commentary on this. He basically makes a claim that the soul is immortal. When you die, you can’t become more evil and unrighteous or unjust. But if you take the position, he immediately says here’s my argument, and then he addresses the counterargument. He says, if you take that position, then injustice, it won’t just kill you, which hey, maybe that’s not so bad, because it’ll put an end to your misery. But the problem is, and the key problem is that the nature of evil is such that it murders others too, and then it survives itself. So I think he’s making an argument to say that evil is in the immortal realm, and the reason why it’s a perennial problem is because when the unjust man participates in it, it not only kills him, but it also has effects outside of him as well. No, but he says it doesn’t kill him. It slowly destroys him, but it doesn’t kill him. This is the problem, like Plato’s re-enchanting the world by saying things take time, guys. Okay, yeah, but that’s close enough to the point. No, no, it might kill his spirit, but even that’s not completely true. So yeah, the text says it sees a disease. So yeah, that was my language. Well, it’s important, right? Here is the statement. It’s unreasonable that something can perish from without, through external evil, if it cannot be corrupted from within. Basically, it’s saying if it can’t happen inside, then it can’t happen from the outside. So the corruption is already inherent in the body, and it can only be appealed to by something outside of it. Getting sick is a reaction, not an imposition. That’s what I got out of it. So the sickness that you get, or that evil person is in, is a reaction. It’s not that the world makes you sick, you become sick by the way that you act. And I think that’s where he secures the agency. He says, no, it’s all you. There’s nothing outside of you that determines the state of your soul. Do you agree with that, Mark? By my reading, it’s ambiguous. By my reading, the agency is ambiguous. I think there’s just a lot of variables. You have a responsibility to resist the disease, but I don’t know that it’s inevitable that if you’re around evil, you’re gonna… I don’t know. I don’t know that he makes absolute claims about your control of your soul. He makes absolute claims about the evil and the badness. He doesn’t make absolute claims about the engagement, because luck is all through this book. Right. That’s how I understand it. It’s two separate claims based on two separate things. One again is the stoic claim. Bad things are gonna happen. Chance is a factor. You’re not in control, and so you’re gonna hit grief. You’re gonna hit sadness. These things are gonna happen to you, irrespective of all other factors, because luck and chance exists. So you know what to do there. But evil is a different thing, or badness is a different thing, and you shouldn’t engage with it. So your task is to filter out bad things. You can’t do that perfectly, but also, bad things are gonna get you, because luck. Both of those are true. They’re two different modes, though. I think, again, people compress it, and that’s where they get confused. The fact that you have agency doesn’t mean that you’ll win. Right? I’m not making the claim, or Plato is not making the claim, that because you have agency, that you’ll be able to execute. But he’s making the claim that, no, you fundamentally have agency, and you have to relate to your agency. Okay, so let me just see if I understand what you’re saying. I’m seeing in the text where he uses words like saying, this is a 610c, and the soul or anything else, if not destroyed by an internal evil, can be destroyed by an external one, if not affirmed by any man, blah blah blah. So he introduces, because you brought this internal versus external thing up, I don’t have a way to place that into where he’s going in this book. Like, to me, that’s just like a wise observation about how the world works, but it seems more significant to the case that he’s building to you, if I’m understanding you correctly, Manuel. Like, what’s the significance of bringing up the internal versus the external? Why is it important? But if you go to the myths, right, and these souls have to choose, right, they’re not choosing by any imposition, at all. Okay, so that’s, you’re, okay, so, go ahead, sorry. Well, like, it’s important, right, so, there’s this neutral state that’s being highlighted every time, right, and that’s where you have to reason from, right. In order to be a good philosopher, you have to say, like, I got sick in response to eating the bad thing, right, it’s not the bad thing made me sick. And if you, if you do the bad thing made me sick, then you’re not placing yourself properly in the world, and you cannot use reason. Like, it’s… Exactly. Reason doesn’t apply. And again, luck is a factor. And just to drive home the point, so, in Bloom, in 610c, he uses the word alien. And I think that’s where the inside versus outside stuff comes up, or maybe it’s at the end of B. But when an alien vice comes to be in something else, right, and so he is using inside outside language. It’s just not, he’s not using those terms, but it’s definitely true. It says to me, like, but the soul or anything else, if not destroyed by an internal evil, can be destroyed by an external one, is not affirmed by any man, right. Like, that’s internal, external, explicitly, like, in my sense. Well, let’s not permit anyone to assert that a soul or anything else is destroyed, right. But yeah, the vice doesn’t come to be in it. Oh, he’s making a completion argument, I think. He’s basically, so basically, in order to set up the argument for the soul, he’s basically saying, like, the soul is this thing that can’t, it’s not destroyed. When we… No, it cannot be touched, Danny. Right. And so he’s saying, he’s basically saying, he’s basically saying, I am going to cover the basis of from with it or from without. He’s just covering those bases. He’s basically making a conclusion argument. He’s saying, if we’re going to use the word metaphysics, we can’t prove a causality. Yeah. Well, I think it’s a justification for his idea of where he goes to set up his myth. I think that’s really all this is. I don’t think he’s offering… No, no, I’m like, like, if we’re going to use the word metaphysics, this is the point where we’re going to use the word metaphysics. Right. No, that’s Yeah. This is the point where you have to take some axiomatic statements in order to do anything. And this is that point. Right. It’s not the only point, but this is the point where it’s like, oh, yeah, we have to separate the soul back into the ethereal or spiritual realm. Right. From the material realm. Part of the reason I think why I’m having a hard time understanding you is because I completely do not read this through the lens that you did when you said there’s a neutral state to reason from. I think what he’s saying is the deck is stacked based on where you positioned, who your gods are, which city that you’re in. And then, like he’s saying… No, no, no, he’s… No, like that’s what the Philosopher King is. The Philosopher King is the state, well, it’s not neutral, it’s informed by the good. But the Philosopher King is a fictitious character that doesn’t exist. And they’ve already kind of alluded to the absurdity of the idea of there being this… No, no, no, no, no. Like he doesn’t manifest, he does exist. Yeah, in a form. Right. But yeah, so he’s… The argument in the text is for the Philosopher King’s existence. Sure, that’s fine. That’s the method by which he gets it justice. Right, yeah, okay, that’s fine, totally fine. Yeah, there’s a form for the Philosopher King. And we need to engage with that form in order to get it justice. But I mean, that’s what we’re getting at in the reincarnation thing in the myth. Right? Like that form defines the good. Right, so what I’m saying is by… Yeah, so I was just… The only… All I was trying to say is that I don’t see the significance of bringing up the concept of the internal versus the external. And I think what he’s doing is that he mentions that in order to say that the soul, this idea of the soul, I’m covering the basis of it can’t be corrupted either from within or from without. I think he’s just painting a picture to elevate the concept and saying… The internal versus external is there all across the book, okay? Like it’s everywhere. Right, it can be… That’s why we run to the sea. Okay, but I mean specifically the Six Tenth Sea right here. It… Yep, but look, it can be corrupted. It can’t be destroyed, which is a different thing entirely. It can’t be destroyed by that, not that it can’t be destroyed. It can’t be destroyed by that. So he’s just making a claim that in order to get hit, you need to be physical. Basically, that’s what he says, right? Because if I’m not having a body that you can hit, then the fact that you’re trying to hit me doesn’t do anything. But he makes the opposite argument too, right? He says that no one will ever show that when men are dying, their souls become unjust due to death. In other words, the physicality does not affect the ethereality in that way. The material doesn’t make your soul change as a result of the transition away. So again, back to your earlier point, Manuel, the things we do in the material world don’t have the direct effect that we expect in the soul, right? Or in the ethereal realm. But it can, right? Because the natural thing would be, oh, I’m dying and I’m suffering and therefore you’re letting go of your virtues, right? Right, it’s your thoughts that do that. He makes that separation early on. He’s like, it’s not the physical actions that do it, it’s the mental act. And that’s what the cooperation is, right? Again, so what the emotions and then the, what was it, the word that I used? The emotions and then the desire, right? So the physical body emodes you in some way, right? And if you grasp on a desire that gets manifested by the way that you’re emoded, then your soul moves with it, right? But you don’t have to do that. Like that’s always a choice. Right. I have still many more notes. I’ll stay quiet. I’ll try to. Okay, yeah, okay. Oh yeah, so they’re making a claim that evil cannot kill the soul as well, right? Soul cannot be destroyed by an external evil. That cannot take the soul of the unjust. And this is something I wanted to discuss at this point. What can affect what, right? We kind of have been dancing around that, right? Because there’s direct causality, right? Or I guess things that happen inside the body in the left hand sphere, right? And then there’s things in the right hand sphere. And I think that’s what’s being talked about. Like what is within and what is without? And what is the relationship to what is within versus what is without? And only disorder within is that which can destroy the union of the inside. At least that’s how I’m reading it. If the soul is separate from the body, it must be immortal. I guess that’s the argument that’s being made. I actually really liked that observation that you got. I just didn’t understand how you got it from the text. Like when you say only the thing from within can destroy the union of the body. That would be super key in the argument that he goes with the soul. But where did you get the insistence? I know you keep saying that the insistence of it’s the internal thing. Because he’s making separation, right? So he’s saying that you eat the bad thing, right? And then it moves the body in a response. So that line confused me for the longest period of time. Why is he saying that we call the food bad and then you eat the food and then we call it disease and we don’t say that the badness transfers from the food to the person. Because it’s not the badness. Like what’s happening? So he’s emphasizing the internal process. Okay, so that’s basically at the crux of any nature argument. Any nature argument is going to get at some kind of union, bodily union of a thing. I mean, just pattern recognition, right? No. Nature arguments are discrete deterministic materialistic things. That’s the problem. And then they appeal to connectedness. But they don’t talk about the relationship. And so you have to kind of split hairs down to the azot gap and say you know, and some people talk about this. They’ll say if you eat your food with bad intent, it will make you sick. Right? But if you eat your food with good intent, it won’t. Same food. Same. All we’re changing is intent. Or easier. Homemade food tastes better. Right? Right. Like that’s an easier one. Same argument. Right. And that’s the problem. Is that your interaction in the relationship matters. In a material world, you don’t have an interaction. All interactions are material. Right? And so your soul doesn’t have an interaction because it’s not material by definition. Right? And so your thoughts are not material. You can talk about chemical synapses in the brain, but that’s not getting to your food. To make it taste different. Right? So what’s going on? Right? Well, and it just turns out that there’s this gap. And that’s roughly speaking the same as the azot gap. It’s a harder proof to make. But trust me, it’s true. And then what does that mean? Well, that means that your relationship, your thought relationship to the material matters. Like it’s a determiner of something. That is already a choice. And that choice is important because it changes the nature of the world around you. And that’s the argument naturalists won’t make or physicalists reductionists won’t make or materialists won’t make. Because they can’t. Right? They’re trapped with relationship as physical, discreet, one-to-one interactions. And that’s why we proclaim things at church. Because it’s all the time. Like I proclaim that this will happen to me. I proclaim that I will not be harmed by the principalities. Blah, blah, blah. Right? It’s like it’s cultivating a mental state and a relational dynamic that will allow you when you encounter things in life to engage in the right relationship. And at that point we can talk about the transjective. But I think he’s explicitly not talking about it here. And separating the two realms. Like he actually doesn’t want them to connect. Right. Yep. He’s separating them on purpose. It’s very important. I know the so-called Neoplatonists, which don’t exist. Garbage idea. They always want to get back to the unity to solve a problem. What Plato is saying is that the act of unifying is a choice and that choice matters. And it has repercussions. In both sides. Right? On the material and the ethereal side of the register. So, the soul is separate from the body. Okay. So, Nani is inviting some sort of practice to contemplate the original purity of the soul. So basically he’s saying, well, what we think of as soul, that’s not anything close to what it actually is. And now we’re kind of at the sacred self space. But also your energies. Right? And now it’s like how are we going to frame it? What is this soul thing? And you can even say, well, does Mark have a different soul than I do? Because I don’t know. I think at this point are we all sharing in the same soul? Because we’re not necessary. But then it’s also like, what are you worshiping? Because we’re all united in Christ. That’s basically saying we’re sharing only one soul. And that’s the divine soul. And we’re all gathering into that one soul. And I think that’s literally what Plato is proposing with the city. Right? Like this union under this one soul. And even though there’s different aspects of the body. Adherence to wisdom reveals the true soul. Right? So that’s the way that you clear the image. The soul needs to be liberated from the flesh. That’s my translation of what he’s saying. But basically, yeah, the body is just crap. Man is supposed to be just even if invisible for man. And God, this is where he goes into the two myths. Right? And he’s basically saying, yeah, like doing just is not because you’re watched. Like you’re not doing it because God will punish you. You’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do. They basically state justice has to be worshiped also in other people. The gods know the nature of the just. So like apparently they have a special connection. The gods take care of one who pursues the just. And so this is, yeah, like now we’re getting into what’s it called? Prosperity gospel. That’s the word. The just man finishes the action and takes the prize bestowed. And that’s meaning. Right? And then the crown, which is the honor that’s also going with it. And then they’re going into the crazy fantasy sci-fi thing. Do you want to do the fantasy sci-fi thing? Yeah. I read this pretty differently. Alright. Hey, this is Danny. Which cat? No, I just I mean, I don’t know if I can make the case very well, but it seems like what he’s saying. Like remember the just man that appears on just and vice versa? I think what he’s doing is he’s recalling from the past when he’s saying like he because he’s talking about the rewards and the glories of justice which come from Homer and Hesiod. I think what he’s doing is saying previously in the Republic, we talked about how I’m going to justify the merits of justice without invoking the gods. And I think what he’s doing is he’s basically pointing to the fact that this is breaking down. Now he said I’m going to associate the rewards. Did he say that he wouldn’t invoke the gods? Like I don’t know. It was in like book six, I think we talked about it. And maybe two. Yeah, book two. I think that’s when this frame started. I don’t I don’t recall. But he’s not invoking the gods. So, okay. So but part of it part of it is when he uses reason and rationality, it’s like how is he what is he wielding and how does he do it? And I think what he’s doing is like that’s so for example, like when you when you said the just man gets a reward or something like that, the the the emphasis that that I got from that point was it’s the way in which he runs the race because it says the just man is like the guy who runs the race in such a way that he gets a crown at the end and the unjust guy is the one who runs the race in such a way that he doesn’t get a crown even though he finishes it. And I think I think I think that’s really what he’s trying to put emphasis on is like the way of being is what I’m trying to highlight here. And that has nothing to do with internal and external dichotomy. No, it does. Actually. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It does. It does in the sense that like then my sticking point there is just there’s this line that that I pushed in but basically he says they basic they basically state justice has to be worshiped also in others. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So there’s there’s this interconnectedness between the internal and the external that like like the communion needs to happen in order for it just to be properly manifest. I think the mental error that I have is I just can’t get out of a flat frame when I hear internal and external and it’s not necessarily external can also go up and down as well. So when he appeals to evil and injustice then he’s basically appealing to higher principles. He’s saying like I’m now appealing to inherent values of things like the value of life. The reason this is the reason why you can’t sell your children for any amount of money is because he makes these he makes these universal absolute claims about he says that as a category that they exist and he invokes them in order to move up to point out the higher principles and the issue that I have is I’m just equivocating this internal external thing with being in a flat frame and that’s maybe what’s bothering me. But it’s a detail that doesn’t matter. You literally have to know you literally have to look at it this way. You have your soul which is disconnected right. It’s from a body. It has no body. Well it has its own spiritual body. It’s disconnected from your body. Right. It is so it is the interface is mediated by your will. Right. And so and also your soul within the spiritual realm is also mediated. Right. Like you choose the principles that you adhere to like they’re also external to you. Like it’s not your internal principle. You can internalize it. Right. Which means that you bind yourself to it. But that it’s still external. Right. Like now you’re a vessel for the principle. Right. Like you’re you’re basically allowing the spirit that flows through you be mutated by the principle that you’re adhering to. Right. Yeah. And so like this that is you. Right. Yeah. And and and so and the way that you are is by everything that you connect to and the way that you connect to them. And one of the things that you necessarily connect to at least as far as we know is a physical body. Yes. So my when I when I’m saying like it’s bothering me that I read this differently. I we agree on the I think ultimately what is the most important place where he ends up with saying your soul is a vessel for principles. What I my reading is that he’s I think he says gods small g are real and inevitable and and and they are first like like the gods that drive you are the are are more primary than whatever the behaviors that are going on in the temporal realm because the just guy can appear unjust and the and vice versa. And you can run you can have two people run the race and have they both get to the end. But there’s actually just the way in which they do the thing that actually matters. So I think the way that we get to that interpretation I don’t think matters as much but as as it does it he sets up this image of the soul and it’s in its relationship to the eternal in order to get into the myth and then therefore get at virtue. Yeah. Yeah. I I don’t know. I didn’t really read that. I think it’s because the way that he relates to Homer and the way that he treats Homer in the poetical that’s kind of what’s got me really dug in the trenches on how insistent that he is on the importance of the gods being the primary movers of of of people and not rationality like I’m really I’m really hung up on this idea. I am a little bit confused about what he means by the gods. Right. I think of it as a pantheon but I don’t know like lost anger the affections all the like he kind of goes into it in the midst right like because then he’s he’s doing some sort of pantheon right. But he’s maybe he’s limiting it to to to the to the planets effectively right and then he’s basically doing astrology which is referencing back to the people needing to do astrology right. But but astrology is effectively trying to capture movements in people’s life right in the movements in the stars right. So basically they’re trying to to see a corollary between between the things right and then use the stars as a map to to the human psyche. And like if if if that’s the argument it’s like okay like there’s a bunch of forces that move you throughout your life right and and and they’re on some level inevitable and and these are primary over the physicality or whatever it’s like yeah fair enough right. But again like that doesn’t say much about how they manifest just right like. Oh well thank you. I completely did not understand any of that star stuff and that that means exactly what I want it to mean. So thank you for that. Yeah there are forces out there that move you that are inevitable that that are primary. I think that makes that makes sense. I didn’t understand any of that stuff so. I don’t I don’t know if he makes them primary like like I don’t know maybe it could be another another way to interpret it like that. Like like like you’re you’re or not not you right because he’s not even talking about a person in the middle I think. Just like the unfolding of time as such is within these things right and and then they’re they’re given a human quality by well making them gods to us but like yeah. I mean another way to interpret it is that he’s doing the same thing anytime he brings up math it’s like he’s he’s being absurd. It’s like a comedy or it’s heavy irony when he’s just saying I’m going to do some hand-waving rationality that’s going to be complicated and hand wavy before I make my next jump to the now suddenly we’re at Judgment Day. So he’s like he talks about all this star stuff and then like suddenly he’s like oh yeah there’s going to be a Judgment Day and now let’s get into the myth and he makes that weird step. Right so I mean I don’t I don’t I don’t know all that star stuff. But no but he’s he’s he’s had a bunch I’ll just go through it. He’s had a bunch of specific things right so the spindle of necessity right on the light of the belt of heaven. So there’s something that constrains right and the necessity constraints right and all revolutions turn upon it. And the spindle. You’re way deep into the myth. You’re way deep into the myth. Yeah because all the other stuff I couldn’t take notes. I was like okay whatever like. Okay well a lot of it’s the beginning is the setup right. Like it wasn’t anything relevant in my mind. I was just like okay okay okay. So okay just real quick before you jump down. It’s just some things that jumped out to me when they’re talking about the star stuff is they did reemphasize interval and harmony. Oh I’m sorry I’m farther ahead than I thought. My bad I’m sorry didn’t mean to interrupt you. Yeah that’s where I was. Yeah no I thought I was back farther. Oh. So wait one one one quick thing well that’s maybe somewhat useful about how before they get to the spindle of necessity they talk about how the tyrant is the only unforgivable sin and he goes like straight to eternal punishment and Christianity there’s a word for hell. One is Hades the other is Gehenna. When Jesus sometimes will say things like to the Pharisees and I think John 7 or 8 he’ll say things like where you’re going I cannot come and the Pharisees will say things like is he going to kill himself because in their mind the only unforgivable sin in their world is suicide and that means you go and when you commit suicide you go straight to Gehenna and not to Hades. And so that’s why in the Bible you can have these weird things that kind of don’t make sense in English if you’re just reading it and you say Jesus says where you’re going where I’m going you cannot come and then the Pharisees say are you going to kill yourself and you’re like what are they even talking about is because they think that he’s saying I’m going to go I’m going to take myself to Gehenna right so there’s anyway I just wanted to bring this up this idea of like there’s this unforgivable sin concept pre-Christian just seems interesting. Now should we frame the myth before you jump to the spindle needle for anybody who probably hasn’t read the… Did you want to? I can’t. You can’t. Okay so there’s a temporal or an earthly realm there’s two portals left in Greek mythology from what I understand always means bad right tends to mean good there’s a heavenly realm there’s these two portals there’s these souls there’s there’s an intermediating ghost in between actually before you know actually before we get to that the souls are coming from earth from up and down and they’re meeting in this middle space there’s a mediator that they have to talk to behind the mediator there’s three ghosts the ghost of past the ghost of present the ghost of future the names are like Lachesis is the ghost of past Clotho is the ghost of present and Apthros is the ghost of future I’m going to be honest I didn’t even think that the ghost of present and future even played a role in this myth so I’m honestly not even sure why they’re there other than to just span the eternal spectrum but like the ghost of past is the one that these souls are coming up and trying to talk to through a mediating profit they call him where they have the opportunity to choose a genius for the next life so in other words it’s a reincarnation model and that’s just half of it we’ll get into the rest of it Yeah but you you you you you you you you skipped like a lot of stuff like important stuff because before you get to these ghosts I don’t know whether they can’t that’s the way that Maiting described them so you have these spindlers and they’re holding the light of heaven that gets turned around them but they’re not they’re in each other they’re not separate like they’re integrated like it goes into the integration a little bit and like I think it was sequential but then it also goes into that it’s taking different strands but the point being is that they’re taking from the same source and I think eventually they’re making one thing but a bunch of other stuff happens so I think that’s important so all revolutions turn upon us right and so these spindlers they’re referencing the solar system right and you can see how the things in the sky make everything on earth happen right like is that what the spindle necessity is pointing to is it like an astrology reference or something yes oh my god that’s what I was saying yeah okay thank you like it was even talking about Mars and the Sun and the Moon oh this explains why I’m confused so okay thank you anyway so these things are all doing things right like these planets are affecting what happens on earth effectively right which is basically having modulating earth and then they have sirens right so this is a second reference to the sirens in the book right and these sirens they are hymning in harmony right so these spindles together they produce an harmonical melody and then the fates which are the daughters of necessity and the spindle is necessity right so when you were saying that they’re what was it primary like I don’t know if necessity is primary but it’s the necessity is that which drives right that the necessity is where the emotions come from right because the need will emote you to do things right so it’s pre-emotional which is pretty nice insight there so these fates they accompany the sirens in their harmony right and so the present uses the outer circle which is basically I don’t know like that through which it mediates to the outside I guess right like that which envelops the whole machinery and then the future is doing the seven internal things right and then the past gathers with the left and the right hand which I know if the left is good and bad right like then she just make good things happen and bad things happen right like the things come together for good and for evil and so that’s basically when we’re talking about metaphysics right like here we go again right like this is pre-existence in some sense right and that light right to go back to the thing of the cave right like we look at the sun we see the light right like that that’s being shown at us right so that’s like how the light gets created and actually now that I think about it in the story of Job there was actually God was saying Job you can’t do this but apparently Plato did it anyway okay and then yeah so then it basically says oh we’re in a new era we’re born again like for real right like like it’s so analogous to what Christ is doing so we’re now in a new age and you will choose your genius right so now there’s a free will aspect in the ability to choose your future right and now you also get this thing right like you get a random distribution right and then I think this is what the last shall be first is kind of referencing to in some sense really directly right because yeah like what’s his name called Odysseus he’s last right or he’s among the last and he’s the one that yeah and he’s the one that chooses the best right he chooses the soul based upon the wisdom that he gathered in life right so his participatory knowledge revealed good from evil and basically it was like I don’t want to be plagued by whatever I was plagued out in my previous life and so I’m going to choose this. Just real quick since we’re talking about things that Christianity stole from here in 612e there’s also the everything works for the good of the friends of the gods which is like Romans 8 all things work together for those who are called according to the love of God and called according to his purpose or whatever it says like it’s like Paul is a gangster Paul definitely read this and it’s all over Paul’s right like there’s so much all over Paul’s writing it’s all right here it’s crazy anyway yeah well but he’s responding to the Greeks right so like he has to make what he’s talking about intelligible to the Greeks and convince it so like yeah so how does the soul work as a system recognizing that is required to choose the best soul right so basically he’s saying well the soul has some components right and they need to come together in the right way and if you don’t know how they come together then how do you know what a good soul is right evil is the life that will make the soul unjust good will make it more just right so this is a more argument which I don’t like but okay all else the good person will disregard right like so he will only look at good and evil and all the other stuff is irrelevant and here we have our relevance realization in Plato there we go so one of the things that I found important when reading that line when they’re choosing their own genius like you said when they said virtue is free and as they set up this concept the notion of inertia as a man honors or dishonors he’ll have more or less of her the responsibility is with the chooser then they say dash god is justified so they just they just like put a ham you know they just say god is justified and they just put a you know like boom that’s the way it is like there’s inertia in the story you know and they just let it be so it doesn’t let it be thus and so well yeah but like it’s definitionally true right like this is the problem like it’s just definitionally true like god is by definition just sure yeah so yeah and and like I don’t you don’t want to know how often that that’s being so in church right but yeah I like this this idea right so you you you look at evil and you look at good and everything else is is not relevant and then you have your relevance realization and then you get you get some Carl Jung in here too because man has to choose the mean and avoid the extremes so even the last choice gets a fulfilling life right so now he’s making a statement about like every life that you’ve been given you can be virtuous and therefore you can have a good life which is also a pretty intense claim and then the one who makes the bad choice doesn’t blame themself right it was this guy who was first and he was like oh the reason I picked the wrong thing is is everything but me right which which is the victim narrative and like it’s all there too and it’s also yeah like that’s also what makes him incapable of picking the right thing at the same time right because he’s not reasoning from from that responsibility and then he’s he’s making a claim about that soul too right that soul was only virtuous out of habit right so even though he came out of heaven he wasn’t truly divine because he didn’t he didn’t choose the divine answer so that that’s that’s the argument for your training thing mark yeah those from heaven had not been schooled by trial let go participation and then they’re talking about the throne of necessity the plane of forgetfulness and the river of unmindfulness right so this is the way by which we forget who we were or whatever right so necessity drives us and then because we need to do things we forget other stuff that which is important right and then in the river of unmindfulness we we drink and we indulge in sin effectively right and only the wise people stop drinking and and they’re saved by wisdom well I think it’s ambiguous I think I think their fate is ambiguous is that there’s a class people who indulge too much go ahead they’re not as screwed like like they’re not they’re not stating that they’re saved just stating like like that’s how they yeah the people who over drink are condemned to their inertia and the people who are wise it’s kind of leaves it open ended I think that was my interpretation which no no no but but they are saved from worse right so it doesn’t mean that that they have the good it means that they’re not in hell basically if we are obedient we shall cross over the river right and so now he’s making a reference back to the state but just obedience as such I think where the the actual solution is not wisdom but obedience that that is the thing that allows us to cross the river and our souls shall not be defiled right which which is also in Christianity like it’s like anyway yeah and that that was the end of my notes one thing that really jumped out to me in this myth is the language and the the topics that they touch on we’ve been touching on but they really do I think as far as there’s maybe maybe difficult to interpret certain parts of it or understand what he’s getting at but the language that he uses towards the end is in my opinion quite clear at what this whole book is about like I’ll just read this section for example I don’t have the part before this but something about souls are trying to learn and discern between good and evil and so to choose always and everywhere the better life as he has opportunity he should consider the bearing of all these things which have been mentioned several and collectively upon virtue and the relation to the human soul so there’s previously they were talking about arguments about how you’re connected to the many considering the many as well as the individual aspects he should know what the effect of beauty is when oh let me pause right here before this before they got into this treatise on covering all these topics they talk about how in this mediating space talking to the prophet is a whole bucket of muppets it’s people from all kinds of different backgrounds shapes and walks of life so what they’re saying is everyone can come here and everyone’s dealt a different hand in life and everybody has a variety of circumstances and one of the things that they said earlier is that which when they were building the cities I didn’t mention this let me rewind and try to find this they said well they said something to the effect that rationality can’t handle variance in the soul like when we forming the law we have to just we have to put everybody in a straight jacket in certain ways and so part of what they’re getting at in this judgment day thing is that like there’s a bunch of complexity in evaluating all the various circumstances of one’s life and this is kind of an image of where you have this you know maybe perfect judge or something like that he should know what the effect of beauty is when combined with poverty or wealth in a particular soul and what are the good and evil consequences of noble and humble birth a public and private station of strength and weakness of cleverness and dullness and of all the natural and acquired gifts of the soul and the and the operation of them when conjoined bubble when he goes on they mentioned that evils the thing which makes the soul more unjust and there’s lots more language like that but it’s those passages that really touch I think the full gamut of all of these different facets of life that I think really shows that the people who are in this world are not just trying to navigate these things I mean what do you think Mark you seem like you have a skeptical look I mean there’s a there’s a lot going on in public obviously right and ultimately it looks to me like what they’re doing is what Plato’s doing specifically is he’s using a poetic heroic idealistic archetypal of the Socrates to not talk about justice that’s the surface level but to explain to you how to be a good person and they’re doing that with very high contrast to absurdity whole text is absurd every part of it is designed to be technically absurd right it’s this or that it’s just nonsense obviously nonsense and they’re poking fun at the fact that they’re doing that And ultimately at the end of the book here this final few pages I don’t even know what to make of it is clearly a poet it’s a story it’s a poem right it would have been considered a poem by the ancient Greeks and the purpose of that is to talk about explicitly what makes you a good person versus a bad person and what are the penalties and rewards in each case and so it’s as if the very end he’s revealing his true purpose of the text which is not in fact to merely talk about justice although he certainly does that but to resolve the issue of how to be a good person And throughout the text he’s talking about this juxtaposition between the things and your relationship to the things and your attitude towards that relationship and that’s the key right if you were to boil down John Vervickie’s words he’s talking about the relationship between the things and your attitude towards that relationship and your relationship to the things and your attitude towards that relationship and that’s the key right if you were to boil down John Vervickie’s words and say relevance realization is important that’s what relevance realization will ultimately end in is you have to know what to pay attention to which is going to be a relationship ultimately and you have to have the right attitude towards that relationship in order to manifest anything at all and then the relevance realization also is wrapped up in you have to realize that the manifestation that you’re doing should be towards the good and not towards anything else because there’s two other options the neutral and the bad Well two things right so the good only exists in relation to a body right because you have a corruption of the body or you have a building of the body right and then everything else is irrelevant right so that’s your relevance realization Right yeah that’s part of it it’s not the whole thing and then the larger one of the larger points that you get out of the republic in my opinion is that trying to reason things or think about things or rationalize things or logic things doesn’t work That is as explicit in this book as it can be made you know without being you know necessarily disagreeable like me and saying that just doesn’t work guys like the book is clear the whole structure of the book is designed to show you that the vaunted logic reason and rationality will fail you even if they are afforded every possible plus Like you just hand them everything they ask for and it doesn’t work and the reason why it doesn’t work is because there’s this soul that is not separable but it can be thought of as separate from your body and then as Manuel said that the goodness doesn’t manifest without a body And maybe there’s a physical body and non-physical body that’s not really addressed in here that I can tell but the idea that we have that as individuals we can logic our way or reason our way or rationalize our way to answers to things as complex and ethereal as justice is absurd It is impossible and it’s not so much that you can’t do that you can’t even frame it that way and that’s explicit from the beginning of the argument that is made in the text you cannot understand justice by yourself on a desert island there’s no justice doesn’t exist it’s not there It cannot be there it can never be there you cannot understand justice merely by the interaction of you and many people or many people and many people justice can only be understood in the context of a city and the structure of the perfect city cities have classes and the interaction of the people in the cities is not optional even though it’s hard and it’s going to end up with struggle and people are going to be unhappy Like all of that is made explicit in this text and the fact of the matter is he ends it with a poem he’s obviously not against poetry come on he basically said he’s basically what he’s basically saying in book 10 is logical arguments do not move people as much as poetry he reaches the end of the logical argument and then deliberately switches into a poem to move you Like no one’s ever said that to me before and I’m a little angry I’m like what book did you read and what were you paying attention to because holy crap like not only is it that he doesn’t throw up poetry it doesn’t happen you’re fantasizing you’re leaving out a whole section of the book if you think that’s what he says he actually turns around and uses the poetry because his logical argument fails Now that statement is a whopping brain exploding nuclear weapon for the project of what we’ll call modern philosophy after Plato and Aristotle and what it basically means is that that whole endeavor is completely bankrupt and Plato makes that abundantly clear in the Republic and wow you’re not going to hear anybody say that But wow they really should kind of an important point that all the stuff that comes after is nonsense and the fact that people can be moved by logic reason and rationality is not very impressive and ultimately it is we’ll call it proper poetics that wins the day and that’s why the book ends with proper poetics and look it’s hard to make the proper claim but I’m going to make it But I’m going to make it anyway because I think Plato is explicitly making that claim and the reason why it’s a proper claim is not only the setup of the book because you can’t do without it you can’t take book ten by itself or the last couple pages by itself and say here’s the poetic argument at the end You have to understand that within all of that setup is important and then within all of that setup is this last effort that is purely irrational illogical and unreasonable this guy came back to life after having been seemingly dead on the battlefield but an unusual preservation walked off the funeral pyre and then starts telling this story Fair enough dude that’s how you’re ending your philosophical text fair enough like I’m all in like I I’m there I’m thoroughly in and then the story is about what it’s about life death and reincarnation as if Plato is pointing upward to the eternal in his argument and so whether or not his life death reincarnation argument is persuasive to you it is certainly an exploration in the right relationship to the ethereal and two things like virtues and values to justice and goodness And that’s that’s what I have to say about that and man I mean talk about surprise ending to me like that was as surprise and ending and I read it this morning obviously just before this as you could possibly have thought of in my mind Yeah and I really like yeah I said a lot of really great things there I really love the richness of the imagery in just a few sentences Plato can just create these big rich images that cause you to really go huh like I’ve never read a book this is probably the best book I’ve ever read and it’s also the book probably the book that’s causing me to go huh the most often but somebody asked last night if we figured out where justice was on your live stream a couple explicit things here 604 B there’s no known And he’s going to be showing whether such things are good or evil and nothing is gained by impatience so he doesn’t say that if you want to be virtuous pursue patience he says well if you’re not patient nothing good comes from it 612 E the nature of both the just and unjust is truly known to the gods and then in six like the reason why I referenced 604 B about the patience thing is because Manuel mentioned these people who are virtuous by habit only that’s 619 D or E and what they do is they go up to the prophet and they just see they make their decision really fast because it says and this is what I mean by the details of the language it says this group of people who are virtuous by habit only they’ve never been schooled by trial and so part of that is like they also have an impulsive soul there’s another group of people who have in their trials suffered and seen others suffer and those people are not in a hurry what Manuel? What’s the problem with that? No, no they don’t have to have an impulsive soul. The trial is about discernment. Yeah it’s about discernment but… Okay go ahead. Well he did say that they choose to cook it though. No, because discernment… like you can have discernment and be passionate. Like there’s… Right. Like that’s the sin against the Holy Spirit. Like in some sense it’s like oh you know what you need to do and you’re not doing it? Like that’s how you get into hell. He does… go ahead. Well I wanted to change… Okay well I was just… he does a whole lot of pointing to the problems of things because it’s way easier to say hey if you’re impulsive that might take you to hell than it is to say… he never says oh you want to be virtuous, practice patience, perform patient practices. He never… he doesn’t ever say that. But no, but being patient doesn’t make you virtuous. Right, yeah. That’s the problem. I’m just stating that the book doesn’t… But it’s not a proper prescription. Right? Like you can’t make that description. Like we actually went over this, all the patience things in the Bible, right? And why are you patient? You’re being patient in order for God to do things for you effectively, right? Or in other words, you don’t have proper framing. You have to look at what’s happening, right? And then you can see the nature of the body that you’re in with reason, right? And then when you have had the revelation from your reason, you can re-engage because you know the good, right? So the patience is the space that allows you to discern the good. But you have to do that. Like you have to have a means of discerning the good and relating to it. And if you don’t do that in your patience, you can be patient all the time. You can be patient like viciously, right? Like, oh, I’m just going to like wait and see how you make a fool of yourself. Right? Like that’s a way to be patient. Like patience can be used for evil. Like the most evil people are the ones that are like sitting in the corner and then stab you in the back when you’re not looking. So I mean, what else? You guys have any…what else? I mean, this is such a big topic. It’s almost overwhelming. I did, right? Like I’ve been trying to visualize the throne and revelations, right? And I was like, okay, like this is something similar, right? Like this is trying to get at the machinations of heaven, right? But not being concrete. It’s just saying, well, like there’s this one thing and then there’s these many things and they come together and then they get expressed in history, right? And that allows you to have a certain intelligibility, right? It’s like it allows you to have insight in the revelatory process, right? Or the unfolding of your life. Now, what you do with that, like you have to integrate that obviously within other things because I was like, what uses it? But I think when you cultivate something like that, it might like there’s seven chakras. Like why is there seven here? Right? There’s seven virtues, Christian virtues. Like there’s something there, right? Like there’s definitely something happening with the seven. Let me ask you two a question because you two have been interacting with people online in let’s just say wisdom communities for a long period of time, helping them with all kinds of problem. Mark has this navigating patterns, whole set of vocabulary, takes on verveki’s work for types of information, for types of information that’s represented correctly. What are some of the common discernment blocks that people have that do you see any connection to Plato in your experience in talking to people? And I know you guys are big on wisdom practices also as maybe a side note to that question of common problems. Are there also benefits that you’ve seen come out of these wisdom practices you’ve been doing with people? Oh, yeah. Yeah, there are definitely benefits. I mean, the stuckness of people is what is stated in the beginning of the Republic. Right? Again, Plato makes the argument that you can’t sit there and have an argument about justice from the perspective of one person versus many. Even if you’re a third party observer, you can’t look at a situation and then understand justice by not talking about the city. You have to talk about the city and all the elements of the city. So in other words, when you flatten the world and you go, well, I’m just going to look at, we’ll say this court case and what was said in the court case. And from that, I’m going to determine whether or not justice was done. No, no, that’s insufficient. You think you can do that. You think that engaging with the propositional knowledge alone by yourself is enough. But actually, that can’t possibly be the case. And Plato, again, he makes that clear in the beginning of the Republic and they breeze through a lot of this stuff. And that’s what the absurdity is for, to breeze through some of these more difficult arguments and kind of shortcut them and say, no, like really, here’s the extreme case on this side. Here’s the extreme case on this side. Socrates always ends up being right, which amusingly is stated in the book in the beginning. We’re not going to argue with Socrates. He’s always right. He’s always able to convince us that he’s right. It’s stated explicitly that silly. It’s that silly. And I’m not saying it’s wrong, just saying it’s pretty silly. We’re not going to argue with this guy. He’s always able to convince us that his position is correct. So he’s already set up as the authority to fast track some of these issues, but people haven’t read it. And so they don’t understand the level of complexity involved in something like justice, involved in something like what is a perfect city, involved in something like what’s proper philosophy. They don’t have that context and engaging with them in a way where you force them in some sense to explain their position or defend their position gets them half the time, probably frustrated. And then some percentage of that time they leave, they’re gone. They don’t want to deal with you anymore. Fair. I just exposed a weakness. Maybe you don’t want to be around with an exposed weakness. It’s understandable. But about half the time they start to think more about it and start to re-enchant or appreciate the complexity that they’ve stumbled across that they were previously glossing over. And then as far as the practices go, if you can get somebody interested in practices as such, like, oh, you’re not all you could be, quoting Peterson here, right? And there’s things you can do on a regular basis because it has to be a regular basis that can help you out of it. If you can get them to that point and get them in some kind of practice, we had the group meditation practice. Right. That was a great one for various reasons, because the way Vervik does his group meditation is very focused on you have no idea what’s going on with you. Like you don’t even know yourself. It’s not explicit in that way, but it is in that meditation. And then you can jump them into something like a group practice with readings from prose and poetry that’s facilitated properly. If you can do that, that seems to get people unstuck and in the right direction pretty reliably. And we are working on redoing the instructions for that practice and renaming it, which is why I didn’t hesitate to use our old name, because it’s a terrible name. So we’re still trying to do that and enact that in wisdom communities. Right. We want to set up wisdom communities and get that rolling, because a lot of what Plato talks about here, all these light on the practices, I would say, would fix people. But most people cannot understand this text, myself included, and not only parts of it. Also, man, there’s a lot of depth here. It’s hubris to say I read it once, twice, two, three, four, five times or whatever in the original Greek, whatever, and I understood it. There’s a lot here. There’s so many points that you could understand that I’m sure you understood some of it, but I’m also sure you didn’t understand most of it. And I feel like I’m in that position having only gone through it once. Like, wow. Right. But even of the things that I did see, and I just see more than most people for various reasons, people were categorizing and classifying this text are steering other people in the wrong direction for sure. Like, they’re just they’re just not accounting for very important parts of what Plato is saying, very important messages in the text. And maybe they’re not able to. Right. Fair enough. And that’s why you need practice. Right. And you need groups. Trying to understand, like, I am so glad I didn’t try to read this by myself. Holy crap. What a waste of my time that would have been. What a complete waste of my time. Because there’s so much depth and richness. There’s so many things that can be pointed out and without the perspectives of other people, you’re really cheating yourself of the experience of the read. There’s plenty of other texts like that. I’m not not being exclusive here. But yeah, you know, that’s my feeling about maybe don’t engage with Plato, but maybe appreciate that Plato had a lot of answers to a lot of the questions that you have today. But the thing to engage with and if you’re going to engage with the Republic, do it in a book club thing to engage with our practices that get you out of your stuckness. What do you think, Manuel? Yeah, well, a couple of things. So the way that we started off with the practices is is basically building upon for VEGI. Right. Because he’s like, yeah, there’s all of these things and like we need to account for these problems and stuff. And then we kind of are like, OK, like, let’s let’s use this framework and then we expanded it a little bit and we even made our own language. Right. And and and it’s like, basically, he wanted to make an ecology of practices and these practices are supposed to well, integrate in some manner. Right. And this is where my my big complaint comes with practices. Right. Like you can do a practice, it will be helpful to you, but it won’t be anything close to what it can be if it’s not integrated within a framework. Right. And that’s the beautiful thing about the Republic. Right. Like it is providing the framework to to be integrated. No, what is what is the distinction? Right. Like you could you could say you can learn to ride a bike, for example. But that doesn’t mean that you can do a race. Right. Because because a race has has to do with with training schedules. It has to do with relating to other people on the bicycle. Right. And you have a support team and you have a trainer. So there’s all of these things that come together to allow you to do this specialty. Right. Like when you can ride a bike, you might can get your groceries on your bike or whatever. Right. But it’s it’s not the same as as what what this professional is doing. Right. Like and yeah, here the analogy breaks a little bit down. But if you look at it at your life and we’ve been going to these to these passions, right, like like a practice is a little bit as a passion. Right. Like it’s like it’s something you do for a while and then you drop it. Right. Because like why would you continue? Right. Like there’s no reason for you to continue. Right. So you can’t really build something with it. Like the only only way to build something is is that you you place it into a structure that can hold it. Right. And that can sustain it. Because because if if if you’re doing something and you’re not getting anything out of it. Right. Like you kind of reach the end of it. It doesn’t mean that there’s nothing more. Right. But like you need something for Vicky calls it an acceptation. Right. Like something from another domain that you can bring into your practice to to enrich. And so these these things, they only exist in tradition. Right. Like they exist in people coming together in certain ways, connecting things in ways that you can repeat. Right. Like like and have an experiential component for you. So that that’s what I’ve been going through myself a little bit, like like having that revelatory process. And I’m like I want to grab something of that and take that back into the practices. Right. Like to to build a structure like Mark Marges trying to do something similar with his with his YouTube channel. Right. Where he’s he’s basically trying to give you words that well, because they’re out of his mind in some sense. Right. They’re connected to other words. And he’s he’s trying to weave that web for you. And when when you start having the web right, like when you have the seven planets that are turning in the right way, now you can start seeing movement. Right. You can start seeing an extra dimension within your life. And and then this is the re-enchantment of the world. Right. Like then something opens up. Right. Like now the quality of your participation change. Right. And so what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to focus the practices in such a way that that process can happen for you. And build the and build the framework for the for the practice. Right. So one of the problems you run into, like the focus on framework manual, that was good. You can do the Sam Harris meditation out. You’re going to become a narcissist. Don’t do that. You’re going to become a narcissist for sure. It guaranteed. It’s too self-referential. It’s not in framework. And it’s not that it won’t help you, but it will corrupt you at the same time. And this is a trade off. There’s a price. You can do for Vickie’s meditation, which I love. It’s how we met. Right. Manuel and really Danny and Ethan and everybody. Adam. Right. It’s all it’s all due to Vickie’s daily meditation during the fake news virus scam. But you need to do it in a group. But ultimately, in order to do anything in a group, you need a framework that enables people to get together on a regular basis and helps them with things like accountability. And in order to have accountability, you really need to be part of some kind of community. And one of the failures that I see is people are trying to make one community to rule them. And I think that’s like that’s the Benedictine option or whatever the Christians are talking about. That’s an error. Right. That’s an error. But making communities, making wisdom communities, communities that are specifically focused on what Plato is talking about in the text, I think is super important. That is sort of the main thrust of the of the Mark of Wisdom project in general. I have a Discord server right at a storefront. We’ve got a website. We’ve got to write write some more material for it. That that is the focus is to get that rolling. Navigating patterns is vehicle understanding and drawing people in. And even if you don’t engage in a wisdom community, there’s navigating patterns that will help you understand the world, give you some context and some ways of relating, maybe help you to engage in such a way that you two can refine the practices you already have, see the value and practices around you, which would give you sort of a push to engage in those practice. Because one of the major problems we have is we’ve all been told we’re individuals. That’s garbage. And we’re not engaging with other people. We’re not cooperating. Right. And incorporating into a body so that we can engage in that. And incorporating into a body so that we can cooperate with each other. And that’s a super big problem. Everyone complains about that. We have nothing in common because we’re all busy exploring our own answers to questions that already have maybe not satisfying answers. But Plato already gave us some of those answers. Right. And so maybe we roll with what we have instead of trying to reinvent the wheel and just take his word for it and be careful whose interpretation you listen to. Or even whose translation as we saw today. But engage in a cooperative fashion. Hey, Ethan, we’re recording the end of Book 10. I’m really glad you joined. So Ethan has been a big contributor to the Navigating Patterns podcast panel and Manuel’s Agopic Orientation channel as well. Ethan, we’re kind of talking about the end of Book 10. We’re talking about discernment, the importance of being a body. These are sort of some of the key takeaways from the Republic. And we’re just sort of reflecting on some of the higher level stuff that we’ve learned from the Republic. Do you have any thoughts on what you’ve gotten out of Plato? Or did you want to maybe contribute any… I know I’m kind of putting you on the spot here. That’s all right. I didn’t know you guys are still recording. Did you guys start at nine? Eleven. Oh, OK. I thought this was the after sesh. I’m sorry. I’m glad you’re here. I was curious to see what you guys had to say about the myth of Ur and the fates and all that. We kind of glossed over it and went for the bigger point that how can you say that Plato doesn’t like poets when he ends his argument with a poem effectively? Yeah, there’s just the irony there. Poetry is fine as long as you understand that it’s a means to an end and that’s not the end itself. You can’t identify in the poetry. The poetry is a particular participation in something greater. And when you take the poetry for granted, it’s going to turn into idolatry. Yeah, my point about the myth of Ur was that that is right relationship with virtues, values, justice, all the ethereal things. And that’s what he’s pointing at. He’s using a poetic argument because as he points out in the book, those are more persuasive than logic, reason and rationality. So in many ways, the Republic is a refutation of things, ironically, to we’ll say modern quote philosophy, which certainly is not. All right. Yeah. The thing that comes to mind right now, I mean, there’s I mean, you could spend your life reading the Republic, but I think it’s in Book 10. Plato speaks to Qualcon. He says you have to return what what does he say? You have to return what I borrowed, what you led me or something. I can’t remember. There’s something that he asked for back in that is the appearance assumption. He asked for the assumption. So in like Book 2 or something like that, they’re trying at the outset, they’re attempting to remove the appearance of justice, you know, with the ring of Gaijis and whatnot, where the good man will act. And despite despite what he looks like. Right. We’re trying to get to the true essence of the good. And then at the end, he says, well, you actually can’t without the appearance in the second order of a second order affects the good. Well, I don’t know what language to use here, but doesn’t it almost makes it useless to us because we’re carnal beings and we are we are made out of matter, you know, and so you need the appearance like that without bringing that back. You actually end up becoming a Gnostic and you’re just trying to try to try to dissolve into the to the ether without any carnal existence. So that second, the second order effects are actually important. But the point is, the moral is, is that they’re second. They’re not primary. Well, in the end, right, like how to how to get over the river of forgetfulness is by your bands like If you want, you want one lesson, submit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s explicit in there. Yeah. That is the funny part. Yeah, it’s explicit. The submission is explicit. Yes, the hard pill to swallow for all of us moderns. I think in general, that’s a hard pill to swallow right like submitting is all fine and well right until it asks a sacrifice of you. Right. And that is like, oh, but, but in the past, right, it was less like like who were you without your role, right? Like, if you lose your role in society that’s effectively the exile right because like, like, how are you going to get a new role right and the actual is is just worse than that. We all lost that stuff right like we’re not we’re not that bounce to our station. And we’re convinced that we’re think that’s a good thing but I don’t know. We’re individuals and we don’t have roles so we’re experiencing this this exile all over the place and we don’t even know it like, yeah. We’re living in exile that that’s correct. He didn’t like we’re living in self imposed exile. So that’s the sad part. We got into discussing discernment at the end of book 10. And we were talking about some of the some of the problems I know we frequently reference the age of gnosis and the intimacy crisis and the faith crisis and things. And Mark referenced that people are stuck. Okay. And when you’re stuck, you have problems that need to be solved. Well, what about have you run into many people who don’t feel that they fall into any of those categories? But on the other hand, they don’t have a clear picture of what is that would you do with that fall into the faith crisis when they say, I don’t feel like I can see my role in life. I don’t feel like I have particular problems. That’s nihilism nihilism. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people will say I don’t have any problem. Right. And what they’re what they’re referring to is their affluent. Okay. And so they’re they’re they’re we’ll say materially affluent. And so they don’t they don’t recognize something. And it’s like, why are you here? Right. Because why are they engaging with Peterson or Verveke or Van der Kley or the show? What are you doing there? Because I think you’re only there to seek answers to some kind of a question. And a question is a way of framing a potential issue or problem that you have. And so, yeah, I think that that needs to be separated from the very clear fact that there’s a bunch of people running around who don’t see any problem. And they’re either stuck in it or it’s coming to get them. And it’s coming fast. Right. It’s going to wipe them out. And Peterson kind of talks about some of that. And, you know, Jordan Peterson is great, obviously, being in the Peterson sphere is wonderful because he does give us a framework and a language. Right. I know I sort of refine some of that, we’ll say, based on interactions with people already there, we’ll say, or people who aren’t there yet. The people that are going to get wiped out that are oblivious will say are oblivious. And then the people that have a question pretty much fall into one of two camps. Crisis of faith. In other words, they’ve had some religion in the past, some interaction with it, and they don’t anymore. Right. Or it’s lost its value to them. They’re not using it. Whatever. However you want to think about it. And then the meaning crisis people who maybe have had none or very little interaction with religion, religious concepts. They tend to not understand poetry and poetics as such. And, you know, that’s that’s wrapped up on navigating patterns in the in the knowledge engine model video where we talk about the four P’s of information. Right. Which is obviously taken from John Brevigy’s work. And if they don’t have access to that stuff, they need practices and a framework to do those practices. We mentioned earlier to get into that space because we don’t recognize that that skill is a skill like being able to read poetry and appreciate poetry or music to give a nice nod to Ethan here as a musician. Look, people lose that skill or it becomes corrupted. Like if all you’re listening to is pop music, I got news for you. You’re not appreciating Beethoven six the way you need to. Right. And so that’s that’s that’s actually an issue that you don’t know you have. Right. Potentially. You need practices to get back into that, to re-enchant that, to re-appreciate that, to to get you away from the nihilism that maybe you don’t see it. But it’s it could be coming for you anyway. And that’s what’s really important. And I’m look at some point I’m way less worried about the people who don’t know it’s coming and are going to get wiped out. Then I am about the people who have the question because the people have a question. It’s not very reliable and it’s really messy. And maybe you don’t even get most of them, although I would argue that we do get most of them. At least you can engage them in a conversation that can lead to a participation. And if conversation is good for anything, it’s good for that. And if it’s bad for anything, it’s bad to continue past the point where participation should happen. I know I didn’t give you an answer. Right. But I am pointing to if all you do is talk, all you do is converse, you’re never going to solve a problem. But you are going to make all other problems worse. And that is in Book 10 as well. Right. Like at some point you have to do things. You have to participate in the world to improve them. And those those people that say, oh, I’m fine. I’m affluent. It’s certainly coming for your children, your children. If that is your mentality, your children will not survive if you even have children. And if you don’t have children, you will not survive past your death in the way that you could. Right. And you’re not realizing your full potential. And it’s just funny. Oh, real quick. Real quick, it’s funny now, you know, because we’re talking with the wife and stuff about, you know, you want to help the needy and stuff like that. And it’s funny how cheap food has become, how abundant material has become. It’s almost like there’s a tradeoff between that and the spiritual food. So people are like everybody is spiritually deprived and starving and dying. Nobody’s dying of from malnutrition, at least in the developed world. You know, it’s a weird little inverse there. And to be charitable actually is to do what you’re saying is to engage with these people and get them to a point where they can start participating. So that’s actually that’s the same type of charity that it’s probably a little bit more difficult to do. But nonetheless, it’s the same spirit that would be giving, you know, giving a hungry person food, I think. That was really good point. I really appreciate that. That’s a great point. Another thing is, too, that’s I mean, it’s clear we’ve already discussed it, but they said you mentioned the devouring of children in 619C. We’re talking about the importance of these second order effects. And here there’s a passage here that uses this language. And when he had spoken, he who had the first choice came forward and in a moment chose the greatest tyranny, his mind having been darkened by folly and sensuality. Had he not thought out the whole matter before he chose, that’s where I got the impulsivity from, and did not at all at first sight perceive that he was fated among other evils to devour his own children. So this image is, you know, these people are choosing their fates in this kind of reincarnation cycle. And basically it’s pointing to this fact is that if you don’t acknowledge these second order effects, let’s say, to say the least, it has consequences materially. Manuel, Mark talked a bit about navigating patterns in his project and what he’s doing there. You have a channel called The Gopic Orientation where you talk to people, you have conversations with all kinds of different people. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you’re doing there, what you’ve learned, how that experience has gone? Yeah, so part of what inspired that is Paul Van der Kley because he’s always pitching about how I need to tell more stories and stuff. And I’m like, I don’t want to do this. So like I actually went into the channel to use other people’s stories to point at virtues and values. And more importantly, the transformation that they went through, right? And like what changed and how they got enabled to get there. And there’s multiple benefits to that, right? Because I think when we’re talking about a philosophical text like Plato, like I’m reading it and I’m like, I can’t deal with this, right? Like I can’t hold it in my hand, but I have a ton of stuff in my hand, right? Like I have a ton of capacity for intelligibility, but I need to bring it back into the cave, right? I need to flatten it down onto the screen, right? And like, how do you do that? Well, you watch the play on the screen and then you give commentary and then you invite people to see what’s beyond the flat projection on the surface. And like Mark has been noticing that Peterson gives you a way from your experience to go somewhere, right? And what I’m relying on is that there’s these experiences that other people went through, right? Like these transformations or this resolving of paradoxes within themselves. That’s maybe a better way to look at that, right? That other people also deal with or have dealt with, right? So there’s a way that I can appeal back to the experience of the person directly through these stories, but still point up, right? It’s like, OK, like that happened to you. Well, let me give words for you to relate to it. Let me bring it back to life for you, right? So that you can look at yourself in a new way. And with the hope, right, that the next time that you’re in a situation like that, you now have tools, right? You have a way to intelligence the space that you’re in so that you’re no longer a puppet of fate, but that you can actually be intentional in your transformation. And that’s what these practices are also all for, right? Like part of it is to get your situated within a framework, right? But also the other half is that like from there, you can situate yourself to the world, right? Like it grounds you and it allows you to convict yourself, right? Like in your participation by knowing from the deepest part of you, right? Like this is the right thing. This is not the right thing. Instead of using reason, right? Like, oh, I’m going to project myself in the future and I’m going to look back at me, my decision that I’m going to make now. Because like there’s actually people who talk like that, like we’ve got them, right? Or like, I’m going to put myself in your head so I know what you’re doing so that I can relate to you. Like stuff like that actually happens to us. And it’s like, and even if you’re not explicit about doing that, like you might actually be doing that just by habits that you’ve cultivated, right? You just make these assumptions about how you are supposed to relate to people or things or even yourself. And then you’re just stuck in it. Because it’s the water you swim in. Yeah, like you want to get rid of it. And then I have this other thing where I wanted to have a bit looser format. And there we get into really wild stuff. Like, yeah, like how beauty manifests and stuff like that. And yes, it’s weird. I don’t know how healthy it is, but like, yeah, some people, they just end up there. And then they’re like frustrated, right, Ethan? They need to resolve that for themselves. So if anybody’s interested in what Mark and Manuel are doing, whether it’s sorting things out, there’s loads of other people also that haven’t been in this book club that are just awesome, high caliber people to talk to. There’s ways, if people are looking for ways to participate, what should they do? Yeah, well, I mean, I’ve got the Navigating Patterns YouTube channel. They can sign up with that and interact there. I’ve got live streams. Most Fridays, not every Friday. All right. They can jump in on that, either in the text or actually. And then we’ve got the MarkOfWisdom.org website. And we’re still building that and sort of putting stuff on it. But it’s a great way to get to know people. And we want to engage people in the projects of wisdom and wisdom communities so that they can foster these frameworks that everybody needs. And there is a deep need for it because all the affluence in the world just reduces you to someone who got a care package from an organization. And if they’re not feeding you the care package, you’re not going to get the care package. If they’re not allowing you grounding, if they’re not acknowledging you as a relationship that they have in their life, then it’s a problem. But yeah, that’s what I would say. There’s also a Discord server, the MarkOfWisdom Discord server. You can join us there. Quite often we’re on. There’s a bunch of text channels. There’s some art projects going on. We’ve got virtue cards are coming up. We’ve got a lot of art projects going on. Sally Jo is doing those. They’re going to be awesome. And yeah, just reach out. We’re out here trying to make things happen. And it’s always a struggle because making anything happen is a struggle. But yeah, that’s what we’re doing. Manuel, you have anything to add to that? Well, like I always need guests. So if you want to participate on my videos, you should reach out. I have a couple of other videos that I want to share. And I’m always happy to do that. So if you want to participate on my videos, you should reach out. I’m on the Discord, so I’ll be reachable there. Yeah. Or do a comment under this video and I’ll get to you somehow. Participation would be good. Any feedback of what you liked or didn’t like, things we could do better, anything that you are interested in that maybe should be on the radar of the team. Put that in the comments. Does anybody else have any closing comments? I think we’re going to have to wait for the next few minutes. So we’ll see you then. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. May 19th, 29th. Great. paintings, a bunch of weird things happen to get this to happen. Like Ethan last Christmas sent me this copy, for example, because I didn’t have a copy. The copy that I should have had got stolen from me, unfortunately. So for me, it was a good use of a Christmas present. And like I said, I mean, trying to read this book on your own is like maybe, but probably not. You really should read it with a group. And so this has been wonderful for me and to be able to share and sort of explore and find out how misled we all are about what Plato actually said and what’s here and what’s not. Things like forbidden knowledge, accounting for children in your philosophy are really part of the driving factor of the text. And this idea, which is embracing poetics because it’s more powerful than logic, reason, and rationale. These are all powerful lessons for me. Things that we’ve been on about for a while, actually, in our project. But it’s nice to see that us exploring that is validated by Plato in the Republic. And that’s been wonderful. So look, thanks everybody. I know Adam’s jumped in and out. A bunch of people have jumped in and out. But thank you all because it’s a very rich experience. I couldn’t have had this participation or this understanding of the Republic without all of you. So thank you for that. Yeah, I want to thank everybody for their participation as well. For me, the reading, gave me a new way of reading or at least gave me a way to constellate all of the ways that I was understanding things in the reading, but also during the process, right? Like in discovering what’s in the Republic. There’s also a framework there that slowly seeped in into the reading itself. And then as a book club, I kind of let some things earlier, reading practices. But now I was more leading it because we were actually dealing with the text like the other ones we went through the text together or whatever, right? Like it’s a different vibe. But now when I’m done, I’m like, yeah, this should be a text that if you want to be serious about your wisdom community, maybe you want to go through this with a group, right? So, and then as well, like, okay, what are you doing? Right? Like we were messing around in some sense, right? Like we were not prepared at all, literally often because we didn’t read enough, right? But yeah, like you want to have a story, right? Like you want to have a way to present these things. And that’s the thing that kind of got clarified for me. Like, okay, like, okay, there’s a bigger framework in which these books get presented and what they’re trying to do and all of that stuff. And relating on that level, I think is important in some ways, especially if you’re trying to facilitate things, right? Because I think Danny was a good example, right? Like he wanted to pick the fruits from the text, right? Like he wanted to get it into his life. And yeah, these things, right? Like they’re difficult, right? Because like we went over it, right? Imitation, right? Because that’s kind of where, when you want to pick the fruits, you end up with imitation, right? But on the other hand, it’s necessary, right? Like we can’t not imitate, we have to go through that stuff. So yeah, like I’m interested in exploring that dynamic a little bit more, right? To become intentional around that. Like I think the intention setting was good, even though, yeah, I am far from happy the way that I executed my intentions. Like that’s still a thing that I want to solve that actually doable in a profound way. Yeah, so Ethan, do you want to have some last words? Well, yeah, just to thank you. Thank you, Danny for putting this on and thank you, Mark and Manuel for leading it. Danny for facilitating it and Mark for your insights. It was great, even though at the end, I had to cancel one of my book clubs and I was hoping we could make it all the way through before I had to cancel. But nonetheless, it was great what I was able to do with you guys up until I think the middle of book nine. So most of it, yeah, just another opportunity to read The Republic again, it was wonderful. It’s just, it’s nice to be able to do it with other people, it really is. Thank you. Nine months, that’s a whole gestational period. Wow, I wonder what’s gonna, what are we birthing here? Yeah, it takes a lot of time to show up to this. So thanks to everyone. I know sometimes some mornings are a little more tired than others, but I think it was a great experience. I mean, there’s loads of applications. Again, it’s been said that your first time reading The Republic is your zero time. And so, I mean, once you want, having gone through that, especially once you get a lot of the foreshadowing and imagery and similar dichotomies and all kinds of stuff that’s just packed, you start seeing patterns previously in the text that you’re like, man, I can now wire, I can wire so many more things together. But yeah, it trains you how to think. I like what Manuel said about the intention setting, doing it in a group of people and also over an extended period of time. It does, the Socratic thought process does seep in more deeply. And participating in disciplines also trains discernment. If you’re interested in that kind of concept, like they’ve already mentioned some things, I’d really encourage you to get on the Market Wisdom Discord channel and get engaged with more people. Because the kind of opening, it’s an extremely rich ecosystem of people. So if you have any interested in kind of pursuing this kind of thing more, I definitely try to reach out and check that out. But if nobody else has anything, then this is just thanks to everybody and sayonara.