Plato's The Republic, Book 4 Discussion, part 1⧸2 (J-pva0R8aoY)

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Well, one of the themes that popped out to me is you got to treat people appropriate to where they’re at. We were kind of talking about education where it’s lifting people up. Some people never got lifted up. People are still four-year-olds in some ways or maybe most people have a way in which they’re four years old. How do you approach that? How do you treat that? Is there a distinction between someone who’s at the start of their development and someone who’s in other areas at later stages of their development and how you’re supposed to approach them in that area? Those are questions that kept me busy. I don’t know. Yeah, maybe we should talk about that later a little bit. So yeah, this idea of education is really interesting. The intention by which I want to participate today is I think now we’re getting to some meaty bits. I listened to it on the audiobook so I might have not catched some things. I might have not catched some things. So I really want to get to know some of the meat of the structure of the book because I think it’s now starting to go here into a more whole. So yeah, I want to pay attention to that. Danny? I’m never prepared for this reflection bit. I don’t know, maybe can I dodge if anyone else is ready? Is anybody else ready? You can dodge. You can just settle in tension. That’s fine. I’m not even prepared to do that. I was listening to what you were saying and it was like, I was listening with the way you were saying and it was not thinking about a response. Let’s go to Mark. Sure. So yeah, I mean, book three was pretty rich and four is very dense. And yeah, the interplay, I mean, I have a little bit of a head start just because I listened to Dr. Lantern-Jack’s layout of the Republic. He doesn’t go through the Republic, he goes through the, you know, an overview of the chapters and how they’re configured. So it’s like an onion and things are done in reverse. So you go from A to B to the middle book and then you do the inverse on the outside from the middle chapter. So yeah, you can kind of, to your point, you can kind of see that process taking place where you’re going in, right? And then you’re going to come out on the other side. And so I really got a sense for that in book three. And then what I’m hoping you get out of book four is just that flavor for, now that we have an established pattern and style, that flavor for, you know, what the argumentation methodology is going to be, you know, sort of going forward for that. So Casey, you want to do your reflection? So from book three, one thing, one of the things that really stood out to me was like the discerning of different types of music. What that related to was like, the things outside of us that have an effect on our interior life, which then radiates back out to our actions. And I’ve been paying attention to how, let’s say, our surroundings and things other people say and do and how that reflects back to us and how that affects what we do. So I’ve been paying more attention to that in my life. And I’ve been noticing we’re getting, like Mark said, we’re getting closer and closer to the center of what Plato’s argument is and about justice. And I don’t know, we’re going to sort of circle around justice for a little bit and see what that is and then see how that sort of radiates back out to his set up of the structure of the book and how he plays with the argumentation. And my intention is to just see exactly how he’s going about determining what justice is and how it relates to other things. So, Ethan. What is the question reflecting on your last week and then your intention for this week? Last week, I’m trying to remember, of course, when there was the music thing. I remember what Emanuel said about the blowing instruments and the plucked instruments. That was really cool. I remember thinking that blowing is more of a covering and strong instruments are more of an opening up, which I thought was really interesting. Let’s remember. And then the intention for this week is how to embody justice, I guess. Have a just soul. How to be a just person. How to be like the just city, the just person. Fabulous. You’re new, so you might want to share some of your experience with reading so far. You said an intention about what we want to get from today’s session. I heard someone talking about music. I believe everything is energy, then has a vibration and bad energy. Different music produce different energy and the bad energy does make us more angry and aggressive. But I don’t think the way Plato and Socrates trying to go about it is the correct way because they try to control it and to force it to censor different types of music and different kinds of education. Everything, morals, etc. For me, that’s not the way to go about it because if you blow the natural ways, then you’ll get the outcome. You let people to decide for themselves and they will come to the sensible conclusion after a while. I heard somebody talking about early stage of life and later stage of life. Someone famous said life begins at 40. The first 40 years is for research, for experiment. But of course, not everyone’s life does begin at 40. Most people still live very unconsciously after 40 these days. Have you read a book called King Warrior Magician Lover by Robert Moore? No. So we have all this energy. That book is about how to become a man from a boy and he uses archetypes to describe everyone has all these energies within themselves, these innate archetypes. But before we integrate, before we have a second birth, we usually operate the shadow aspect of those energies, those archetypes, warriors, magicians, lovers, and then nobody, good person basically until they have a second birth, which is similar to Ko Yong’s idea of integrating the shadow. I noticed that Plato was trying to sense God’s behavior. They attribute certain virtues to God and then the shadow side, they attribute to someone else, maybe the devil, which is similar to Christianity. By doing that, we are naturally resisting the part we think is not good for us. But the correct thing to do is to accept that we all have different parts and accept them. Then only until then, after we integrate it, we will not project our own shadow onto other people so we can fully love and accept ourselves. Then love and accept everyone else. When that’s done, then we don’t need governments anymore because everyone’s, we need government. That’s a projection of our lack of self-government within ourselves. So we think we need to govern or be governed by others. That’s due to the projection of a lack of self-governing ability. The premise, the underlying assumption of this republic is that we need to be governed. The premise is wrong, I think. But I understand. The premise of the book is to talk about justice, nothing to do with government. Government is the way that you talk about justice. It’s not the point of the book. It has nothing to do with politics or government. The point of the book is to explore justice. To that end, who’s got notes that wants to start out talking about chapter four so that we can get moving here? I was listening, not really thinking, but my week has not really been balanced. That’s kind of, I guess, where my mind is at with respect to reading this, is trying to stabilize and become balanced person, which are some of the themes that they talk about in chapter four. I’ve always struggled with balance, just in general. So kind of an all or nothing type of guy. I do have notes. If you’d like, I can kick off. Yeah, that’d be great. So initially, somebody asks a question. These were thrown together very quickly, so forgive the lack of precision. Why don’t the guardians become disgruntled because their lifestyle is going to be really restrictive? And they say, okay, let’s explore this idea. And so they say, well, the way that we’ve established the image of the state is it’s set up for the good of the whole. They have this utilitarian stance about what the purpose of the state is itself. And they do kind of get into, right away, they say, what happens if you beautify the eyes to a degree such that they’re no longer eyes? So they say, when you have to keep things in proper proportion. And then kind of the first sort of thing that they get into is that they make a statement about the husband men. So the guardians have this restrictive life, but the husband men, they can get swagged out with nice clothes, maybe lay around, do whatever, maybe have a nice life. So how do you prevent, what’s the distinction between the categories of classes? Like, how do you draw boundaries around where the husband men should be versus, you know, the guardian? The citizens, if they live for revelry, they live for revelry, it said, but the guardians live for duty. And so if happiness or fulfillment is not even a concept, then that means the guardian’s lifestyle will need to be out at one of compulsion. So the guardian’s primary motivating, like, you know, it’s maybe we do need to dictate every facet of their education, of their nurturing, etc., in the name of the nobility of the state. And then, so that’s kind of the, this is all the pretext. Slow down, slow down. Go ahead. Yeah, I just want to say, yeah, the way they make that proof is they say, happiness isn’t happiness. There’s no universal happiness, right? They say, like, the carpenter does what the carpenter does for, right, we can’t swap out the roles in the society, right? And they’re pretty clear about that. And so the idea that a certain class of people would want to have what another class has is already, you know, not correct, right? So that’s how they go through the Chilean argument is that there are different roles. And different people actually enjoy those roles. And they talk about things like, well, if somebody, if somebody isn’t adhering to the, to the idea of guardian, we kick them out. Like, yeah, we give them a new role. Right? And so they make the argument, I think, very clearly, although I wouldn’t necessarily call it a good argument, they make the argument very clearly that even if you use the rubric of happiness, which is, you know, I think, sorry if this makes this clear, not correct. Like, happiness is not a thing. It doesn’t matter because what makes people happy is different. And therefore your happiness and my happiness are predicated on different roles anyway. And so it really reduces back to roles, right? And that’s the utilitarian. You can’t, you can’t swap out the roles, right? You can’t just take somebody who’s good at farming and make them and make them a guardian and vice versa, right? Because it doesn’t work. Because there’s some, so they make the case for specialization in here. And they also make the case for the need for the roles for the specialization. And they also make the case that specialization has something to do with happiness. You know, it may not be all of happiness or anything like that. Because again, they’re not talking about happiness. You’re talking about justice, right? They’re not talking about government. They’re talking about justice. They’re talking about society as such. They’re just trying to talk about justice. So like they, they, you know, they’ve deliberately sort of paced over all this stuff. So is that, is that something that you saw? The fact that they tried to wrap it up in happiness and it ended in roles and responsibilities? I saw them beginning to blur the lines between concepts in the way that they have not done before. So in, I think in chapter two with Resimicus, it was basically like, if you’re stuck in a hermeneutic suspicion, you just can’t get off the ground. So this, and I think this is maybe addressing some of what Faye was saying at the beginning is that we don’t think that they’re, okay, I don’t think, rather, I’ll speak for myself, that they’re being literal when they say, we have to control everything. I think that’s kind of the rhetorical style of saying, this is kind of like sci-fi. We need to have certain variables locked in in place so that we can proceed to reason about higher order things. We’re going to use the state as a macrocosm or as an example of the individual. So we’re going to build a state and then we’re going to try to bring lessons down to the level of the individual. Now what I see them doing is they’re starting to, basically, to which, you know, which I’ll get to this point in a second, they divide the city into the rich and the poor. They say, okay, well, we can’t talk about the state or a city. There’s now the city of the rich and there’s the city of the poor. And they get into later the city of cities, which we’ll get there in a second. But that’s, I think, what they’re doing is they’re setting the pretext, the rhetorical pretext, to begin to perform some maneuvers that they haven’t done before. That’s my interpretation of the introduction. So, but I don’t know, maybe they’re making that point about happiness. I don’t know. I’m not sure. Could be. So I’ll hesitate for a second. So after they say that, basically, like, citizens live for the revelry, guardians for duty, and we can’t use the metric of happiness to, we can’t apply the same, the same, that same metric to both parties or to both categories. Then they say there’s, there’s two things that deteriorate the arts, wealth and poverty. So that’s kind of the first clear expository statement that they make. I’ll just, I’ll just hesitate. I’ll just pause on that and see if anybody wants to comment on that. So, please go ahead. So for example, like if you’re a potter, Hey, did you not hear Ethan? He’s going to read a synopsis. Oh, no. Maybe I just muted him for me. Sorry. I guess it was an individual mute. Sorry, Ethan. My bad. I don’t fall for being loud. Even the austere lifestyle afforded. Polus. That’s the word he’s using. Callipolis. Question Adamantis raises about their happiness at the beginning of this book is a natural one. Everyone is supposed to be happy in the callipolis. The guardians who have the most power do not seem to have been made happy at all. Socrates’ response is complex and should be read together with, should we get read together with 465EFF? Whatever. The goal of the callipolis, he says, is not to make any one group in the city outstandingly happy at the expense of others, as Thrasymachus claimed. To make everyone as happy as his nature allows. This will be accomplished, he argues, if everyone in it practices the craft for which his natural aptitude is highest, whether it be producing, guarding, or ruling. Hence the guardians must above all protect their system of elementary education, for this provides the training and civic virtue without which no system of laws, no constitution can hope to achieve anything worthwhile. That’s very important. Though Socrates has proposed many innovations in religious education as part of his reform of music and poetry and physical training, he is more conservative when it comes to religious practice. The laws concerning that, he says, are to be up to the traditional lawgiver, namely the Delphian Apollo. The callipolis is pronounced established since it is completely good. It must have all the virtues of a city, namely wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. Therefore the search for the justice in it is guaranteed not to be futile. At the time that the search has concluded, and justice have each been identified with the distinct structural features of the callipolis. Those identifications will not be secure until the very same structure features are shown to be identical to those virtues in the individual soul. This leads to the argument for the division of the soul into three parts, the appetitive, the spiritual, the spirited, and the rational, corresponding to the three major classes in the callipolis, producers, guardians, and rulers. Once this argument is complete, it remains to find the virtues in the soul and to show that they are the same structural features of it as the callipolis. The final question raised in book four is a central one of the republic, namely whether it is more profitable to be just or unjust. Akon is ready to answer it at this point, but Socrates is not, for in his view the question cannot be clearly answered until much more work has done on virtue and vice. And actually I think that it kind of breaks here and then they don’t take up this part of the argument until like book seven or something like that or maybe even book eight. They kind of take a break and then the core of the republic goes actually into kind of what goes into goodness, I think. But anyways, that’s the synopsis. And by the way, Fiu, did I say it right? Fiu? Fiu. Fiu. Yeah. Fiu. You are right in the sense that we are governed by justice, maybe not governed by a worldly government, but we’re governed by justice. More appropriate thing to say. So in other words, we’re submitted to justice, not to like an earthly authority like you were saying. Yeah, if we’re not earthly authorities, then we don’t need man’s government. Well, that’s actually the theme in here. They’re talking of there’s a, well, let me see if I can find it. But I’m just going to point out the problem of skill, right? So we go up to the city and what’s the problem with the city? Well, the city needs to have a cooperation between different groups of people. And this is where the complexity comes in. It started off with three cities. And the first city didn’t need politics. The first city was just everybody’s doing their own stuff. But when you start the specialization, when you start the organization, doing the right thing by yourself is no longer sufficient because the things have connections between each other. And now there needs to be a governing of the things between each other. And that is impossible and insufficient, right? Because you can’t co-locate it. Yeah. And he says you can’t, what is it? They pass laws on subjects we’ve just been enumerating and then amend them. And they think they’ll always find a way to put a stop to cheating on contracts and other things, not realizing they’re cutting off the head of a hydra. They say here there’s things that you can’t, I wrote something down. I said, education, not legislation. There’s things that you just cannot legislate against. Like what’s he saying about the hydra? If people just get incredibly legalistic, the one thing that came to mind was abortion. It’s like at the time you’re making laws for or against abortion, some love law already lost. Well, it depends on the purpose of law. The purpose of law is not to mitigate behavior. It’s to determine punishment. That’s it. It’s not to prevent things. And so you only pass laws after things have manifested in your society. You can’t pass laws before things happen because you don’t know about them. And people don’t understand this concept because they grew up in a world where everything was explained to them that had come before, but they did not grow up in a world where things were surprises to them because everything’s basically a surprise to us. And so we don’t understand that distinction. And so until the technology exists or the issue becomes big enough, there’s no reason to pass a law. You can’t pass a law governing every single thing you do and every movement you make, although some people have tried in the past. It doesn’t work very well. And that you only pass laws that either have some outsized impact on the population or affect some large percentage of the population. And so a great example of this is the laws around the purchase of pseudoephedra, cough medicine, in the 2000s, I think. So what happened was the Midwestern states and the Southern states had a big problem with what is now math. And one of the ways to make math is to buy this pseudoephedrine stuff, which is in cough medicine. And so they very much wanted the Congress to pass laws so that people couldn’t just go to a pharmacist because a lot of medicine is actually legislated at the federal level. You can argue about the merits of that in the United States, making it illegal to buy too much of it at once and putting it behind the pharmacy counter and all these other things. And what ended up happening was the other states that didn’t have this problem, hadn’t seen this problem with math, didn’t want to participate. They didn’t have any desire in passing the law. So they didn’t pass the law because it didn’t affect them. The minute they started to have a significant number of math deaths, then all of a sudden the law got passed and everything got changed and they started selling it, restricting over the counter sales. And then they immediately started restricting it to pharmacy only. So you needed the doctor’s note to get it. And so you can see the way in which laws don’t exist in advance of the problems there, but they’re not trying to make you do things. They’re just trying to create deterrence or punishments so that you can’t do them again. I think laws are created to solve problems, but they usually cause more problems. But I want to talk about universal happiness. Do you agree there is universal happiness or not? No, it’s right in book four. There’s definitely no universal happiness. That is, right in the beginning of book four cannot exist. And that is true. Well, I disagree. That was just Plato’s idea. I believe there is universal happiness. Just look at children. If they are fed, cared for, accepted, allowed freedom to do what they are like, they’re naturally happy, playful, curious, not at all. And it’s not universal. It’s not true or universal. What it means to feel accepted is different for different children. So it’s not universal. Like we get a kid who gets everything cared for on the server, or not the server, but another server, every day, and he’s crying all the time. The kid is crying all the time because he wants the thing that he can’t have, and then he gets the thing he can’t have, and then there’s another thing that he can’t have. So that’s what children do. Okay, sorry. When their feelings are acknowledged, they’re naturally happy and curious, active, and loving. Let’s go back to the child, then. How do you acknowledge someone’s feelings about something that they can’t have? How do you acknowledge a child’s feelings about a thing that they cannot have? You let them have it. Yeah, but they can’t have it. By letting them have it, they’re naturally happy. They can’t have it. No, they can’t have it. There are things you cannot have in this world, lots of them, most of the things in this world you cannot have. Like what? A gun, a flamethrower, a car. Being at the top of Mount Everest without climbing, I would like to have that. That would be great. I’d love to be at the top of Mount Everest right now. I want a rocket. Well, I think those things are, if their feelings are met, they will not naturally want those things. Yes, they do. They do right now. You can just talk to them. They want to be firemen and policemen and doctors and you know, some of them want to see girls want to be Barbies or own a pony and they can’t. So I know. Okay, you’re talking about older children now. They have been domesticated by adults using reward and the punishment. Are you reading Plato today? I’m talking about smaller children. Somebody’s reading Rousseau. Okay. No, none of that is anything works in the world. I don’t. Okay, I just disagree with Plato. That’s fine. You can disagree with Plato. We do. So what did you mean by happiness? Because people have like, there’s like 18 different definitions and I don’t know what people mean most of the time. But it can’t be universal because people have preferences that vary and therefore there’s no universal. Like it’s really simple. When your individual need is matched. Would that be? Does happiness people think of like an ecstatic state of emotion? That is something more closer to content and contentedness, something like that. But then would it be more like contentedness rather than an ecstatic sort of happiness like children sometimes? He’s describing content. Yeah, you diamond. Yeah, something more like you diamond. Yeah. So they talk about this in Chapter two with the ring of guy. I want to have another question like to explore this a little bit more. Right. So if I have a need, how do you fulfill my need right now? The adults. I cannot articulate. I have a deep feeling that I want something, but I don’t even know how to say what I want. Well, that’s your responsibility to heal yourself, to make you less emotionally numb, to be conscious and aware. I thought you were going to fulfill my need. To fulfill your need, you are adult now. So when children, small children, when their needs are… But the children also don’t know what they need. They also don’t know how to articulate what they want. And they can’t articulate it. Yeah. So it takes very conscious parents to attune to their needs. How does the parent know what the child wants? They have to know what they want first, then they can… And they’re just projecting what they want onto the child. The point is that the parents don’t know what they want. Needs are universal. We want to be… No. Needs are not universal. They’re not. You don’t know what they are. Manuel just demonstrated that. Can you let me finish please? Who needs are universal? That’s to be seen, to be heard, to be accepted, to be unconditionally loved. Okay. Can I step in here? Can I step in here? Hang on. I think, getting back to Plato, I think we could replace the word happiness with many other concepts and say that we can’t apply this concept. He just used happiness as an example to make a distinction between the kind of person the guardian is versus the kind of person the citizen is. But I don’t think we need to get bogged down in this happiness discussion. I want to say something about the happiness because the happiness is used, because that’s the metric that Glauchon uses in chapter one, I think, as the metric for a successful life. So this is actually reflecting the final result of the first level argument that was made in the Republic. That’s why happiness is used. That’s interesting. You’re right about the point. The point is humans don’t have universals of the type that can be defined at the abstraction layer where you can provide them. In other words, a good vacation to me might be the beach and a good vacation to Danny might be the mountains. The mountains makes Danny happy. The beach makes Mark happy. Happiness is not universal. It’s really exactly that simple. When you try to make it any more difficult, you’re dealing with abstractions and then you’re not dealing with ways to make people happy anymore. That’s an easy trap to fall into. That is actually the nature of the argumentation in this book. It points out that there are not universals. The point of chapter four is that the thing that makes the carpenter happy is not the thing that makes the guardian happy, is not the thing that makes the trader happy. That is actually the point that he’s making in chapter four, one of them. So Mark, when you said mountains make you happy or beaches make Danny happy, that means that you actually still have a boy who stands to your needs for pleasure, for recreation. So you both still have similar needs. It’s just… No, they’re not similar. No, they are not similar. Beaches and mountains aren’t… Yes, we have needs. Everybody has needs, but that’s abstraction. You can’t provide those needs necessarily. Your needs is recreation and pleasure. That’s similar. Okay, but that’s different for everyone, so it’s not universal. Mountains or beaches. But the need is similar. Let me go back to the child. Okay, so the child needs leisure. The child needs leisure. Okay, like let’s say there’s 15 million ways to provide leisure to a child. Okay, now the child needs leisure. You don’t have time to test the 15 million ways to provide leisure to a child. So you cannot provide leisure to a child. I think that’s not an option. Yeah, and what it means to actually do that is different from saying that it exists. And yes, leisure exists and leisure is universal, but what leisure means to each individual person is different and therefore there’s not a universal leisure. There’s a universal concept of leisure in recreation. Those are universal concepts, but providing them is a whole different problem. And again, this is the problem of scale that the Republic is exemplifying again. It did it in the previous books as well. When it comes down to actually doing it, everything changes. So the fact that it’s out there as a concept doesn’t really help you because the concept can’t necessarily be implemented. It can be, but there is no point in arguing. For children, because they are helpless, so they need to be unconditionally loved. They do love themselves, but for adults, it’s our own individual responsibility to acknowledge our feelings, to satisfy our needs. Then we can be like children, happy, and that’s universal happiness. Adults can have it in the same way children have it. It’s just that children, for children, is provided for adults, we provide for ourselves. We take responsibilities for our own happiness. Instead of using collusion and violence and hierarchy, these kind of tools or guilt and shame to get other people to meet our needs. So there’s an explicit line about this. I’m reading the verbatim from Plato, chapter 4. It would seem, Adi Mantis, that the direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life. Does not like always attract like. So this is the whole idea behind their guardian classes. The first roughly seven years, and they knew that it was seven years, funny enough, before modern child psychology, the way that you raise someone up is going to determine what kind of desires they have and stuff. So I think that’s really what they’re trying to get out here, is that you’ve got, as you grow a state, you’ve got competing desires, you’ve got competing principles. So how do we sort this mess of competing things? How do we sort out all this mess? I think that’s kind of the endeavor that we’re embarking on. But I think it is important to acknowledge that there are differences among people. Again, we don’t need to get hung up on happiness. I don’t think it’s relevant. I think we can probably move on. And this much of it was like one little paragraph. And I mean, it’s setting the quality. But we’ve said it a thousand times already. Like what something is to mark is not the same thing that it is to Danny. They’re setting it’s like different classes and people do different things. That’s what we’re going to talk about in this book. There’s different classes and different people doing different things that cooperate together to make a justice of polis. And even within the class there’s distinction. Probably, yeah. So if I may, they introduced the first two things that could deteriorate the arts, which if we’re talking about different types of people, these are the things that are important to you. They’re trying to map towards the individual what are these things? Why do people have different values and prefer different things? I thought there was a really funny, they said, isn’t it the case that we’re going to have to go to war with bigger and richer states? And they had this really interesting passage. It was like a scene out of the 300 movie where the guy’s like, what’s your profession? I’m a potter. I’m a blacksmith. I’m a trader. And then he goes, Spartans, what is your profession? And he says, I brought more men than you. So he said there’s this idea of spirit. Suppose before, if we have to fight two cities, okay, fine, we’ll go to war with two states. But our soldiers, our guardian class will just be a better spirit and then they’ll count for more. And I think that this idea of counting for more is actually relevant. We’ll footnote that because they get into this later, I think. Yeah. The spirit is also Aristotle’s final cost, right? What’s your tell us? And that’s the thing that helps you to specialize. My tell us is to make pots, okay? Probably a better potter than the average person. My tell us is to fight. You’re probably a better soldier, right? Because that’s what you, that’s your aim and your aim actually matters. And so, yeah, I just wanted to add that flavor. I know I’m foreshadowing some Aristotle that isn’t in here, but I think it’s important because that, you know, Aristotle got this from somewhere. And I also think that it serves to unify the individual, right? Because like earlier, they were talking about, well, you can’t have multiple professions, right? Like, why can’t you have multiple professions? Like, your soul gets split, right? Like, you’re partially committed to one thing and then you’re partially committed to this other thing. And then you cannot do either thing right. And so that’s bringing that back in, right? And then if you’re doing the one thing right, you’re worth more than two people who do it half right, right? Or just a person that picks up a weapon. And I wanted to point out the thing about the affluence and lack of the about the affluence and lack of being rich and poor, right? Because that was also in the last chapter as well, right? Where there’s two ways in which things can go wrong, right? When you have too little, because now you have to fight for sustenance, or when you have too much, because for your gluttony, in fact. I think they put it in context with beauty this time or something with art was I’m speaking about the going to war. I remember that they said, well, we don’t we don’t want wealth. You don’t have no need of wealth. What does he say? We will go to the neighboring city and say it’s against our religion to have to have wealth. So if you come fight for us, you can take all the spoils. That was kind of funny. Yeah. Yeah, this is similar to what was written in the Torah, Hebrew Bible. It just takes all. Ethan, would you mind muting when you’re not speaking? You can have all the spoils. Getting some leakage out of your mic. I don’t think it’s mic leakage either. I think it’s something on your computer. Baby, what were you saying? This is like. Sorry, go ahead. What were you saying? You were saying this sounded like Hebrew Bible or something? Although a victim can take all the spoils. Yeah, in Exodus, right? Where God says you have to get rid of all the gold and silver and images of the gods because you can’t have them. An image that came up late, which I guess we’ll get to in a minute, was mixing wool and linen. But we’ll get there when we get to the purple dye part. Going to another interesting thing that you mentioned before they actually they mentioned that going to Warsaw, they did divide the city into the rich and the poor. I wonder if something rhetorically is going on there. They seem to always be doing this contrasting. Now this is the first time they’re saying, oh, wait, let’s take the state and break it into wealth and poverty. So they’re using this concept of wealth and poverty applied to things that deteriorate the arts. And now they’re saying, let’s take that and apply it to the state. Now what? Which is, I thought, interesting. That part actually confused me. I don’t know if it was my translation or what. I thought they were talking about other cities and not our city. It was other cities. I especially said that our city is unified because unification is the primary principle. And so the other cities are divided. And what’s the easiest way to divide? Well, the people who need things, right? So they need to fight for what they don’t have. And other people who have things who need to protect what they have from people who want to take it. I remember that. It’s like, wait, hold on a second. Make sure you know what you mean when you say city or something like that. And I kind of got held up on the term city. Anyways. Well, yeah, I think to the problem of identity, right? Like, what is one if it’s not unified? Right. Yeah, they went over that a lot. It was the whole idea of what is this unification? What are you unified around? Which is really the question framing. We’ll have to find a greater title for the others. We’ll have to find a greater title for the others because each of them is a great many cities, not a city, as they say in the game. So yeah, so he’s like, when a city is divided between the wealthy and the poor, and blah, blah, blah, they’re actually many cities in one. Not cooperating towards a common, not in communion with each other, I guess we’ll say. I just want to echo, because I think Manuel’s correction is an important one. The concept of unity. They say when they’re expanding out, they’re trying to define the boundary of a state, and they say, what would you propose that is? And they say, what’s the limit of the growth of the state? They said, I would allow the state to increase so far as is consistent with unity. So yeah, that was that was that’s an important distinction. Because those other cities, which are inferior, or you’re not perfect, ours is perfect. Those other cities are the ones with these internal problems. And here, which says that it has to grow, the guardians have to guard it to keep it, not from being too small or too large in reputation, but it has to be of a sufficient size and number to be able to remain one. Right, and they never defined any of that. But you’ll notice that they do, unlike the postmodern, say it’s really important how big and how small, whether or not it even qualifies as the category of city. And they, at least in my translation, it uses the word category. And so the idea that a category can be wrong is very important and is known by Plato, and it has been ignored at least since the 1920s in around here in the western parts. Yeah, I think when we’re talking about unity, it’s well, I guess we’re going to couple unity back to justice, actually, because I think they’re linked. But unity is not in one dimension, right? And so we have separate processes. For example, the raising of children, which is happening on one time scale, and then there’s, well, there’s the year, right, which has all sorts of things that happen on a different time scale. And then you can do months and weeks and whatever you want. But the problem is that all of these processes have a limit, right, for the union. And like, exceeding the limit in one area might only show up way later. So I think that is a way bigger problem than they make it when they say, well, not too big, not too small, because like, I don’t know about whether you can even solve that, because it doesn’t sound like it. But you have to solve that to do this experiment, is the whole point. But then again, there’s a lot of things you have to solve. This is, as Jenny said, an exploration, right? It’s sci-fi. I’m just locking down variables. But look, ultimately, the answer at the end of the book is you can’t do this. And here’s all the reasons you can’t do this. That’s the point of philosopher King and the point that even philosopher King, given all the variables, wouldn’t work. That’s the whole point of the book. The book is to show you the absurdity of trying to do the thing in the first place. But they make it absurd to exemplify the point that they’re getting after, which is justice. Yes. You have to make all the variables as extreme as possible, but yet one thing will still stick out inside of all this. Exactly. Justice. So after they make the point about unity, they lead into education, the nurture of people, citizens, etc. And they mention that the music in gymnastics must be preserved in their original form, and no innovation must be made. So they really want to—they harp on this over and over again, music and gymnastics, all the time. And once again, we’re back at the same concept. But this time, we’re kind of coming top down. I think the last time, if I recall, we kind of came—I don’t really know how we came, but this time we’re coming top down. They put out a bunch of variables and then said, not this one, not this one, not this one, not this one. Right. Yeah, yeah. I think the other one was based upon experience, actually, right? So like, because the diamond was invoked a couple times, it’s like, well, yeah, when you listen to music, then this music does this, and this music does that. You can’t affirm that, because I play music, right? Like, so there was a whole participatory justification happening. Yeah, that’s very bottom-up. So they mention the diamond here. They mention the new kinds of song. They say, we don’t want new kinds of songs. I don’t know what that means, but they mention it. And then they kind of get into the idea of lawlessness, and they start talking about lawlessness can creep in in the form of amusement. First, it seems like it’s harmless, but then the spirit of license sets in. It finds a home, and it grows. It penetrates into manners and customs, and then it kind of grows up into the—where the point, which, as Casey mentioned earlier, it starts to corrupt contracts between men. And then it grows more, and it gets into the problem of corrupting the laws themselves. So, and it’s all—and ultimately, it ends in an overthrow of all rights, both public and private. So— By the way, I looked up that word. In my translation, they use lawlessness. I’m not sure what—it probably sounds like they use the same one in yours, Annie, but it’s a—it’s a paranoia. It translates as—also as transgression or iniquity. Um, it’s used in the Bible a couple of times. I can’t remember. I think the King’s James Version used transgression to translate that word. A lack of morality or transgression, something like that. So— It sounds to me like they’re making a difference, a distinction. Like, it doesn’t sound to me like they’re getting at sin. I mean, maybe it is. Maybe they’re trying to get to the same connotation of sin and—or missing the mark in some other more fundamental way. Maybe this is, like, at some higher level or something. I don’t know. Yeah, but if you take it as legislating the moral dimension and trying to do that—and that’s—I would connect that to sin, right? Legislating the moral dimension is legislating sin. Uh, and trying to do that is gonna end up with a system that can’t hold itself, right? Like, this is what Faveki was talking about with the AI, right? It was like, well, we’re gonna need an overhead system that will check the system, and then at a certain point the overhead system becomes too big because, like, there’s too many things to check because it becomes combinatorially explosive, effective. And we see that now as well, right? There’s tons of laws that nobody even uses anymore, right? And they’re still there. But, like, just imagine that they were still implemented by whatever cop on the street. That would be a mess. Yeah, it’s kind of like what we were—reminds me of what we were talking about yesterday at the end of that stream, PVK stream. Paranomia. So, as you were saying, if it’s not mitigated, it gets out of control. And so, like, the idea that, oh, we don’t need to worry about it. We’ll just make—we’ll just give people better options to do good. That’s not gonna work. You have to control against this lawless paranoia, or else it’ll take hold of everything. So you have to carefully—you have to make sure that your—it all comes back to the education, right? The poetry and music and the poetry, how we educate the young to make sure that this—that they’re in the guard against this corruption of paranoia. Yeah. In this system at that level, right? But then, of course, Plato’s famous for pointing out that there are the passions, and there’s—you have to control the passions, and they’re internal to you, and so you can’t get around that problem. He’s just not addressing it here. He’s addressing everything at the layer off. Right. And again, I think you’re supposed to see this irony so that you know to not—it interprets as literally, because it’s a literal contradiction here in that they say—so it’s by music that they kind of set the habits of the kids, and then that kind of—and then that provides the affordance, or that—and then whatever happens emerges. And then they go on to talk about the business—the business of the agora, or, you know, the marketplace, I guess. And they say, well, there’s gonna be all kinds of ordinary dealings with man about agreements and commitments between all their artisans and all the, you know, you injured me this way, you know, commencements of actions, all this stuff. And they say, well, there’s too much there. Whatever’s gonna happen, it’s like we’re gonna build a simulation and let it run, and then we’re gonna let whatever emerge emerge. But they say we can’t legislate every little detail. We can’t get into every single little law and every single little nuance there, they say. And they’re very explicit about that, which is kind of ironic to the whole design of The Guardians in the first place, if you think about it. It’s like, okay. Well, no, it is absurd. Right. Right. Throughout the book, like, like follows like. In other words, if you educate someone that way, that’s the way they’ll be. This is an absurd statement that anybody knows is not true. Right? Like, everybody knows that that statement is ridiculous, that the conditions that you’re in do not determine your behavior entirely by any means. And so you’re right. It’s an exemplification of the fact that this is an argument for, even if you had perfect control and things went exactly the way you expect, you can’t manifest the perfect city. That’s perfectly just because the nature of justice is such and the nature of people is such that this is impossible. And you can get as close as you can with Philosopher King, but there’s still a final flaw. And that’s the ending, basically, is nope, ain’t gonna work. So the thing, go ahead, Ben. Well, you know, I like, I don’t, I don’t like this, this irony aspect. Like what I think is that they’re trying to establish a symbolic category. Right. So music is variable that represents all the dynamic nature. Right. Sports is the dynamic that, viral, that represents all the physicality things. Gods is the dynamic that represents justification for action. Right. And so they’re trying to establish that. And then they say, we fix it. Right. Like we fix it on a means that we’ve perfected it, whatever that perfection means. Right. And then it’s like, okay, so we have calculated pi and now we can use pi in our equation and we can just like make it work. But like you can’t calculate pi, but we’re just gonna put in pi, which is representative of the variable that we can calculate. Yeah, I just wanted to add, I’ll be real quick with this. So I think if we’re gonna use our language that we use, I think what they’re saying here is that you can’t make laws against an embodied bad spirit. You have to prevent that spirit from being embodied in the first place. Because once it’s embodied, you can’t make laws against the actions that that people are making that are possessed by that spirit. So the importance of cultivating the persons and the city to be orientated towards a good spirit is vital. And maybe that’s what like follows like is, right? Like if someone sees the spirit that he’s attuned to, he will participate in that spirit. And our education is there to attune a person to a spirit. This is one of the things while I’m reading the Bible, for example, it’s like I have to remind myself this is a spiritual book. Like the material interpretation of the text, they’re trying to capture a spiritual relationship. And if you regress to a literal understanding, you can no longer participate in the dynamic interaction that that’s being represented. Because now you’re like, oh, I know what pi is, but you don’t. Like you have to use the symbol pi so that you can put it somewhere, so that you can do magic tricks. Because you can’t really do the magic tricks because you don’t know pi. Yeah, and that does also get back to the fact that we use law two different ways. We use the term law as a natural law. And the natural law is something like gravity that you have no choice about. But the laws that we pass, we do have a choice about. Like otherwise, they’re useless. You can break the law. That is a thing that you can do. So it’s not a preventative. Natural law is stated as a bunch of preventatives. As in, you can’t on your own jump off your roof and fly. That’s a violation of natural law. If Congress passes a law that says I can’t walk down the street, I can still walk down the street. It’s curative after the fact. It’s designed to be curative after the fact. It’s not designed to prevent, unlike natural law, which basically is the statement of something you’re prevented from doing. Like or track like. Like or track like is just one law. That’s a similar is attract, but also opposites attract, which is another law and many other laws too. And if like attracts like, I think that also is true of intemperance and licentiousness. They say that the two things that destroy this, you know, this agora, we have this marketplace and say, well, we can’t legislate every little detail, but what we know we don’t want is we don’t want like intemperance and licentiousness. And, you know, they already gave an illustration of how that grows. And that’s the first reaction that they had to that, which is if only God would preserve the laws which we gave them, there’d be no licentiousness or intemperance, you know, but which I thought this was interesting. Without they said and without defined helps at adamantus, they will go on forever mending their own laws and their lives in hope of attaining perfection. So I wonder if they have some idea of the licentious or the intemperate maybe. I wonder if they have some idea of some alternative perfection, or maybe this is a lack of submission. I don’t know exactly, but I thought the language they used there was interesting. And that they’re trying to go ahead. That’s the uberman. Right. Like, oh, I can create my own values. I can create a system by which the things work. It was like, yeah, well, that’s an Atlas project. You can even like listen to people like Hegel, right? Hegel says, well, yeah, we’re never going to reach perfection because we can’t, but we can have perfection in the internal process. Perfection, right? So that’s the progressive spirit. Like, oh, like if we take the next step, we can get closer to perfection. While if you take the conservative spirit, it says, no, perfection is already present. And all we do is all we need to do is participate in its being. So. Do you say something? Oh, can I present a conspiracy theory that the conspirator is not human, but some higher power. So I’m very new to philosophy. I just read Plato’s Composing and then Republic, a few books, and then two chapters, Confucius and the next. I found I discovered the conspiracy theory about 2500 years ago. Oh, some higher power used Confucius and the Plato, these philosophers, to create different systems in this world. In China, Confucianism teaches people to to model, to worship parents and ancestors, and Plato, so the consequences, each generation gets weakened because they cannot surpass, exceed their parents because they are commanded to even, you have to not deviate from the ways of your parents three years after your parents have died. And Plato, on the other hand, is creating this flawless God image and command and ask people to model after God, no weakness whatsoever. No weakness whatsoever. It does produce, I mean, very tough humans, tough guys, because they say to all the bad things, bad qualities should be assigned to women and children, not men. That is not what he’s doing. He’s literally saying that women are supposed to have the same access as men in this book. I think he goes into the next book. No, no, he already went there, I think. Yeah, he said it already. You’d have to give me references. In books one, two, three or four. They talk about you talking about women in the next book, I believe. Yeah, it’s peppered throughout the book. If you’re not modeled after your parents, that’s fine, but then you need an alternative. If you can find an alternative that’s better, that’s great, but no one’s ever been able to, so I’m a little suspicious. That’s really one of the themes of this book, the whole book of the Republic, is what are you an image of? They talk in, I think, chapter one or two about when Thrasymachus gets refuted with hermeneutic of suspicion, which is this cynicism saying, what do you mean by that? What are you talking about? What do you mean? How did you come to that conclusion? How do you know your own desires? Okay, justice is for the strong. How do you even know what you want? On this idea of conspiracy, they kind of get sort of at that a little bit. They talk about how the licentiousness or these people who have no restraint, it’s like the opposite of a guardian. If you’re the kind of person who can’t, okay, Manuel’s laughing, but if you’re the kind of person who can’t restrain yourself, they get into, they said, well, those other cities, those other inferior cities, they can’t change their constitution, too. They have that locked in by law. It’s on pain of death. You can’t change the constitution, but what you do have is you can have skillful people in your cabinet that maybe manipulate the statesmen, and then you have the rule by the crowd, by the praise of the applause. Then you have the statesmen who think they’re a placement, but really they’re just the puppets or mouthpiece of all these other forces, of their cabinet, maybe of what the people want. So there’s all this stuff where it’s like, okay, well, it looks like our city is the same, but it’s not because the spirit’s different. There’s licentiousness and there’s intemperance in this other model. So you have like in our unified state, which is apparently doesn’t have that, right, we can now run our simulation and make what it makes and proceed with our argument. But they’re giving, they paint this alternative picture where if you have all the stuff running amok, it just, it doesn’t work. The idea here is that we’re going to assume that this city is just, and we’re analyzing this hypothetically just city so that we can pull out these three virtues, wisdom, courage, and moderation so that we can subtract those and so we can get a better view of justice. Then later on, we’ll look at cities that are in just and compare the cities embodying vice to the city that is embodying virtue, justice. So about 2,500 years ago in both East and West simultaneously, spirits are, so different forces, I think spiritual forces are creating two different systems. One is more better, both patriarchal and both are authoritarian, both are coercive governments to enslave mankind, let people to think we need to be governed and or we need to control other people and also be controlled by others. And this, and Confucianism has impacted Chinese society for more than 2,000 years, which has led to this collectivism. I think that communism exists in China and attributes to Confucianism impacting Chinese people’s psyche and capitalism or democracy or democratic republic existing in the West also. Yeah, but you have to realize, right, like to these philosophers that existed 2,500 years ago. Yeah, but you have to realize that they competed with other systems and other philosophers and other thinkings and other religions and they won. Yes, you can say they enslaved people, but they also made sure that they survived. Until we become whole and healed and whole, we don’t even know we are enslaved. But only we have to worry about that. Why is the enslavement connected to any of these philosophers? Like the philosophers actually, I don’t know about Confucius, but I know that Plato literally talked about liberation from the enslavement, like this book is actually about that and about having a class of people that actually in that liberation and therefore can take care of the people who haven’t attained that. And that is a principle that is happening in a bunch of societies, right, like there’s either a ruling class or a priestly class that literally has this duty so that they can make correct decisions instead of be deluded by their egoic needs. Well, all cult leaders claim that their ideas are liberating. I get it, but they’re still like either you have the cult leader or you have a random person. Like that’s the problem. Like if you don’t have the cult leader, then there’s somebody else who will take that place. Who’s even worse? Like that’s the problem. Well, that’s exactly it. It’s this kind of dichotomy thinking that’s enslaving mankind. I think, oh, if we don’t do that, who’s going to lead us out in your system? Like who’s going to be our global awakening? So you might have a step in. We’re talking about some ideological abstractions. What were you connecting this idea of conspiracy or enslavement to Plato? Were you making a connection to the text, Fei Wu, when you brought up this idea of conspiracy or enslavement? Yeah. What were you connecting it to? I was trying to create a cult where people have to sacrifice their individual happiness and needs for the great good. People, they have to choose a profession and then not change it. Oh, that’s not what he’s saying at all. Look, anybody can have their individual whatever, as far as they want. That’s fine. Go live in a cave. And it’s solved. Like you can be as free as you want by living in a cave by yourself. It’s fine. And you don’t need, you’re right. You don’t need Confucius or Plato. And they’re fine with that. They’re not telling you that you have to live in a city. They’re saying if you want to build a perfect city, this is how you would build it. So there’s no problem here. There’s no conflict. Don’t live in a city. Don’t live in a city. But if you want to live in the city, there’s certain obligations because that’s a city is a thing of obligations, right? Because you get a bunch of stuff out of it. And this idea of specialization, like you can only do one thing and you’re one person. This is not to be taken literally to. This is symbolic or maybe ironic. He’s trying to, it’s like sci-fi. He’s locking his in. Suppose we paint a picture like this. And then we’re going to, or like, like we’re like designing a simulation. We’re going to design the state and we’re just going to let it run. And we’re going to follow where it leads. Because if you don’t do that, we can just, we can just pick up, we can, we just get trapped by in our own cynicism by saying we can’t even define terms. So we have to start with some assumptions. And that’s, I think, one of the methods. So I mean, yeah, he’s not saying that, yeah, we should literally enact this image. It’s philosophy, not a constitution. It’s important to remember that. Yeah, they’re not telling you what to do. They’re specifically not telling you what to do. But there being you. Speaking of freedom, I thought there was a little bit further on in this book. They refer inferior people as free people. What does he say? Those, he says, how one finds all kinds of diverse desires, pleasures and pains, mostly in children, women, household slaves, and those of the inferior majority who are called free. Yeah, and then you don’t call that patriarchal. Yeah, but all these people who are not free, they have duties, they have obligations. Our obligations, well, towards ourselves, to satisfy our needs. Towards the city. No, towards the city. We do have to interact with other people. Like, we pretty much don’t have a choice. We don’t have to. No, no, you can live in a cave by yourself. You want to be truly individually free, go live in a cave by yourself. You can do that. You don’t have to interact with other people. That is your option and your choice. You’re the one enslaving yourself, and nobody’s enslaving you at all. Not Plato, not Confucius, not the government, not the city, not the people around you. They are not. When you choose to interact with them, however, that’s on you. That’s not on anybody else. Yes, that also applies to all cults. But, however, when you are born in a country, you have no choice. Citizenship is mandatory. Paying taxes is mandatory. It’s not my choice. No, no, no, no. Paying taxes is not mandatory. I have to. Paying taxes is not mandatory. You are paying the laws and regulations. Paying taxes is not mandatory. It’s my choice. In the United States, less than half of the population, if you live in the woods, they’re not going to take taxes from you. You don’t earn any money in the United States. They will not take taxes from you. You don’t even have to file. They’re not mandatory. Not in the U.S. Yeah, but- I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but in the U.S., taxes are not even close to mandatory. But if you make a certain amount of income, you don’t have to pay taxes? Well, but then you’re participating. Yeah, then you’re submitting to the government. Yeah, if you want to make use of the fact that there’s a job for you- No, by not submitting to the government, I have to be poor. Yes. Yes. That’s correct. You don’t call that poor? There’s no right to be rich. You don’t have a right to be rich. You don’t have a right to things that you didn’t make yourself. You’re voluntary slaves all over Europe. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that’s true. Can confirm. Every person that wants to cooperate with another person is a voluntary slave to that cooperation. That is necessarily true. And that’s part of the commentary of this book is you have to choose your poison. You have to choose to be a slave to something. Right. And you have to choose to submit- because we’re in a world with other people, you have to choose to submit yourself to certain things. And so part of what can be learned from this book is to gain greater discernment about what are those things, where is my attention going, what are the things that I’m submitting myself to. That’s part of the- I think what’s going on rhetorically here, among many other things. Right. And again, in book one, he said there is a city, right, this is kind of like living in a cave, where you don’t have to submit to all of these things. But then you will eat beans and grass or whatever every day. Right. And then there was this other city where you kind of needed to submit a little bit and then you could have shoes and you could have a bunch of other stuff, but you didn’t have luxury. Right. And this last city only exists because they all agreed that you wanted to have luxury. Well, if you don’t think we have any noble rights to conduct our lives and through free associations with other people to live an abandoned life, then you’re really- We do. We do. But that’s not free. There’s no such thing as a free association. There’s a cost to every interaction and action that you take. That’s your interpretation, because you are- No, that’s not an interpretation. That is the way the world appears to unfold to every single person. So we’re spending kind of a lot of time in this abstract and political lens. I’d like to kind of rewind and kind of come back to the text here, to kind of where we kind of- So they introduce, so they give this example of the ruler who’s being led by applause of the multitude and that he’s deluded by maybe his crumped cabinet or whatever it is. And then the next thing that they mention is they say the most important thing to protect is the institution of temples and sacrifices. So again, they’ve done this pattern many times where they basically start with this idea of an image of a god. The image of the gods is very important, but they do mention that, protecting that, because we were talking about how the guardians had to have, what was it in place? I don’t remember. Anyway, I’ll just move on here. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We can’t move past religion. They can want that. All right. Well, this is pretext. Let me just make the last point. So they’re setting- Well, yeah, they were talking about this is pretext to go on their expedition to find justice. And then they say, okay, we’re talking about all these other things, but where amid all this is justice? And they say, okay, well, let’s go try to find this whereby they’re about to introduce three virtues. But okay, Manuel, you want to pause on the religion piece? Yeah, right. So they started with religion in Book 3 as well. So now they go back and they say, well, this is the most important part, right? And so it’s also interesting that- I think they basically proclaimed the one God, right? Maybe correct me if I’m wrong here. But they basically said there’s one God and every has to deal with the one God. And now they’re like altars to make sacrifices to the bunch of gods, right? So I’m a little bit confused about the way that they envision this religious system where like, what is the purpose for the sacrifices within this perfect city? Because that’s not clear to me at all. I mean, this is one of the problems that we have with, we’ll say, more recent interpretations of the ancient Greek philosophical system. Take religion for granted as a starting point. We would call post-1530 modern religion. And the way that we interpreted the idea of religion changed in 1530. But because we have to be anachronistic about it, because we changed how we use the word effectively, they took all that for granted. Every single philosophy appears to be grounded in a religious tradition that is taken for granted. And it’s only Immanuel Kant, who sort of is not the only one that did it. He’s the one that sort of put it on the map that that line should not exist or isn’t so clear or whatever. And that is A, wrong, and B, useless to think about because you don’t have a choice. You need a starting point. That starting point is always religion. Religion is the definition of your starting point for your axiomatic assumptions about the world, such as one of them would be emergence is good, that’s Gnosticism, or ends in Gnosticism. The other would be, say, being is good. There are other possible starting points, but those are fundamentally religious assertions and nothing else. And so, again, Plato understands, and they’ve stated it before, in fact, it’s the backdrop of the whole entire text is returning from a religious ceremony. Like, it’s not like religion is the grounding in which the book is set. The purpose of the philosophy, to some extent, is to save polytheism, ultimately, to say, well, how do we rationally resolve all these things? I know we can use this thing called philosophy to get a purchase in values. And, of course, you actually can’t, which is part of the message of this book. But that’s why they don’t, they just take it as foregone conclusion that these things are required, because everyone’s doing them all the time anyway. So, of course, we’re not going to do away with them in the city, perfect or not. So, let me read this. As founders of the city, we should be unwise in trusting them to any interpreter, but our ancestral deity, he is the God who sits in the center on the navel of the earth, and he is the interpreter of religion to all mankind. So, they’re making a God that is connected to the individual city. And in my translation, there’s a footnote, it says, when he says, the rock at the center of the earth, which it says in line, it means the rock in Delphi, which is believed to be the navel or the center of earth. So, all values come from Delphi, basically, is what he’s saying. This is an important part for us modern people. I mean, right before what Manuel just said, he says, what is now left for us to deal with under the heading of legislation? Plato kind of, and Socrates kind of throws up his hands, like, don’t ask me that question. He says, for us nothing but the Delphic Apollo, it remains to enact the greatest, finest, and first. It’s like that’s beyond us. Then he goes on to say what Manuel just read. We have no knowledge of things. It’s right there. It’s right there. That’s the axiomatic assumption, right? We have to go with it because it’s what we’ve been doing. It’s what we’ve got. And yeah, too bad. It comes, it comes. There’s your religious axiom right there. They don’t even try to rationalize it. They don’t even try. And I think people, when this was written, I mean, his response is nicely put. And that’s what we must do. It’s like, of course. Exactly. Exactly. It’s obvious to anybody of the time that this would have to be true. And we’re just throwing it out, trying to make an arbitrary dividing line between philosophy and religion, when in fact, that was never enforced anywhere in the world at any time, right? Because the religion is the fundamental substrate of all your axiomatic assumptions and how you proceed. And it is simultaneously the thing that points to the riches and the values. And I think, again, that’s what they’re getting into here. And it’s only people in more recent times that make the mistake of thinking that this is something apart. And they make that distinction because philosophy is the bucket of ontologies. All ontologies exist as philosophies to the ancient Greeks. Natural science is natural philosophy. That’s what it is to them, right? And there’s different philosophies, but they all exist as philosophies because philosophy is the set of things that can be categorized. In other words, a set of things that have ontologies. It’s not a single ontology to rule them all either because, well, Tolkien went into that best. There’s no single thing to rule them all. Except the Ring of Gyges. All right. So if, go ahead, Ethan. I was just going to say further on after they located the first three virtues, he says, Then, Glockon, we must station ourselves like hunters surrounding a wood and focus our understanding so that justice doesn’t escape us, vanish into obscurity. For obviously, it is around here somewhere. So look and try eagerly to catch sight of it. And if you happen to see it before I do, you can call and tell me about it. If you remember how the book started, they just returned from venerating a hunting goddess. So it’s just… It’s very poetic. He also says, I wish I could, but you’ll make better use of me if you take me to be the follower who can see things when you point them out to him. Follow them and join me in a prayer. So anyways, just wanted to point that out. So in my mind, that paints an image of a muppet hunting party where, we’ve found it. Justice is right over here. I got it, guys. So that’s what we’re doing. We painted this picture of a state, and now we’re going to go on a discovery quest for justice. And so they talk a little bit about their methodology. They say, if there were first four things and we’re searching for one of them, wherever it might be, the one sought for might be known to us from the first, and there would be no further trouble. Or we might know the other three first, and then the fourth would clearly be the one left. So I don’t know. I thought it’s kind of weird reasoning, but that’s what we’re going to do. So, go ahead. The question that I have is, why is there four, and why is it this set of four? He just made it up, I think. I don’t think there’s any reason for this. I think they just made this up. I think it’s kind of flowery and poetic. Maybe symbolic. I don’t know. Lots of three’s. That’s probably not wrong in their conception. Again, there’s a whole—this is read within the context of other cultural materials. We don’t have those cultural materials at all, necessarily. I don’t think we have any of them, actually, although I should ask Jack or something. So, yeah, we don’t know what other books—we don’t know their set of virtues and values. So we’re working on virtue cards. Their virtues were not the same as our virtues, right? So they just had a different list. Where that comes from is probably the religious tradition and probably not stated here. A happy memo? There was a— No, I’m not happy. Me either, but— No, but what are you going to do? It’s not in the book. Okay, yeah, it’s not. They didn’t state it from the book. Ethan? I did underline this part. If you pay attention, there’s little kind of things that Plato throws in there. He says, binds together—this is later—binds together those parts and any others there may be in between. So he’s like, yeah, we’ve got these three parts and any others that may be in between. So he’s kind of—he’s letting you know that he’s not being all-inclusive or wholly reducing things to these terms that we’re using. But nonetheless, you do have to—I mean, you have to stake something somewhere so that you can work with something or else you’re completely—you have nothing to work with. You can’t do philosophy. You have to have things. You have to have identities that you can work with. But he’s not stupid enough to say that, oh, this encompasses everything. These are the identities. Nothing else in between or anything else. I don’t know. I just wanted to bring that up. He does that every once in a while. He’ll throw something in there, like a little line. Well, yeah, so the way I look at it is as a pyramid, right? So he’s establishing this triad, where effectively you have the king on top, then you have this guardian buffer, and then you have the rest. And in some sense, the top cannot interface with the bottom, right? So it needs this other thing. And I think that’s the principle framework that he’s trying to establish throughout the whole thing. He made many, many such—and this might also go to the theory of the forms, right? But so I think he’s doing the same thing now with the virtues, right? Because I think he’s connecting the virtues to each class, right? And he’s giving them different significance. And then he’s taking this fourth thing, which has to do with the body that is made up of the parts. And then he’s connecting the fourth entity, which is called justice, to the wholeness of the body. And that’s the unification again, right? The thing that unifies. That’s what I’ve got here. You’ve got—if you’re gonna have—I also drew a triangle. The top, which would be wisdom, middle would be courage, bottom would be— Moderation? Yeah. Justice kind of circles everything. Wait, is it temperance? Because I don’t think temperance is moderation. Yeah. Well, yes, it is. Yeah. Temperance and moderation. Different translations. They used the same word. I think it’s the same word. Yeah. Casey and I were talking about this this morning. Yeah. Temperance is moderation. Yeah. All right. Ethan, that was a good addition, Manuel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, Ethan, that was a good addition. Manuel, that was a good question. Well, okay, it’s described as volunter— We could look up the original Greek word. I mean, we can’t do that now, but that—the original Greek word and seeing how it’s differently been translated. I think— Casey has this. They brought it up later. Sophosune? Yep. Very widening. Self-control, good sense, reasonableness, temperance in some context, chastity. Someone who keeps his head under pressure or temptation possesses self-resonance. That’s what my friend out says. Interestingly, it seems like there’s a bit of hesitation by Plato or the dialogue to kind of spend too much time on this third virtue, which I thought was kind of interesting. I don’t know if any of you guys else picked up on that. When they get to it, it’s like, do we really have to do moderation? I was like, well, yeah, we have to because we don’t want to do moderation after justice. And let’s just get it out. Yeah. Well, because it’s a big problem, right? Because Plato is the one that talks about the passions and the head, right? The lion, the monster, right? All that stuff. That’s all—so he knows full well what rabbit hole that is and that it’s unresolvable. So yeah, of course he doesn’t want to spend too much time on it. I don’t blame him for that. Is there a way we could find justice so as not to have to bother with moderation any further? Right. All right. So even— There’s another one real quickly. And Trachea? Oh, no, no, that’s when he’s talking about self-discipline. There’s another kind of disclaim that he throws in there when they’re talking about the third part of the soul. Yeah, they say self-control, right? And they probably use that second word. Yeah, exactly. Well, then that’s it. And that’s the issue. Again, the way you implement temperance self-moderation or self-control, like that’s the implementation of temperance. I think right now we’re kind of synthesizing things, and I think we should introduce our terms first. So, you know, Ethan’s image of wisdom, temperance, moderation, or courage, rather. So the first they introduce now, they get into the first virtue, which is wisdom. And they say that wisdom, you can’t have it with ignorance. You need a type of knowledge to have wisdom. But if we say that you can’t—it’s not the type of knowledge of a woodworker or of an agricultural city. Then we just—if we have—if a city has a good knowledge of agriculture, we wouldn’t call that wise. We would just call that an agricultural city. So what is this thing that we call wisdom? Like, what knowledge of what? And they propose that it’s knowledge of the perfect guardian class. It’s knowledge which resides in presiding and ruling parts—ruling the part of itself. So if you have a state that’s kind of decomposed into parts, it’s that ordering principle of that subpart. I think that’s what they’re calling—and in the case of the guardians, they do make the point that it’s—they have been ordained by nature to be of all classes the least. I think they mean the smallest in size. So that’s their picture of wisdom. That’s right. Right. But it’s—yeah, I’ve defined wisdom as knowledge of knowledge as well. Yeah, yeah. But what is the knowledge of knowledge? Right? Like, you have all the individual things, right? Which is what knowledge is, right? Like, oh, this works this way, this works this way, this works this way. And the knowledge of knowledge is how do the things that work in certain ways relate to each other? Right. That would be the frame. Yes, but it would also make the whole, right? Like, that’s the thing that makes it a system. I didn’t get the gist of knowledge of knowledge. I mean, my translation says— That’s it. Knowledge is pieces. This is what I think Manuel is trying to say. Knowledge is pieces, and wisdom is the ability to know what pieces make a valid whole versus an invalid whole. Right? In other words— And how? You can look at simple examples. Like, you can say, what is a valid way to understand the sex of a human, right, or an animal for that matter, right? And you can say, well, non-binary is not a valid way, right? Because it’s not a whole that can stand. You can put parts together in a way to make non-binary, but it doesn’t work. And wisdom is the thing that tells you, yeah, that’s dumb. That’s what wisdom does. It says that whole that you’re trying to create can’t exist. It’s not real. I guess, I mean, to me, as a software developer, I really don’t—I mean, the idea of being very comfortable with encapsulation and abstraction, I feel as though I’m better than the average bearer, at least, at knowledge of knowledge and understanding the relationships of models. That’s not knowledge of knowledge. Knowledge of knowledge is what application would work. That’s knowledge of knowledge, not encapsulation. Those are just different sub-pieces. Well, knowledge of knowledge—again, I don’t think this is what the text is. This is not what I got out of the text. Go ahead, Casey, if you had— Well, it’s just like the two Greek words they use for wisdom, which would be Sophia and Phronesis. And the original meaning of Sophia was like skill at a handicraft or an art, was the original meaning of Sophia until it got turned into like clever, skillful, intelligent wise, something like that. And Phronesis is like a type of intelligence relates to like practical situations. So they’re almost the same word. Do you know which one they’re used to? They’re all relating to like physical—I don’t know. In my translation, it doesn’t tell me which word that they’re using. No, I don’t think that’s correct, Casey, entirely. I think they’re not related to the physical operation. They’re related to the relationship of the physical operation to the telos. And that is the point of wisdom. Wisdom is what is a good telos, which is what is a bad telos. In other words, look, you can pursue being a serial killer. That is a hole that you can pursue, but it is not a good hole to pursue. You can use different parts of knowledge together, right? They do that. They get into that where they do the whole thing. Well, it’s not this and it’s not this. Like, is it the knowledge that is possessed by carpenters? It’s not. The knowledge that should be for the leaders is of leading a city, and it should be for the leaders of leading a city. And it’s only the smallest part that can lead the city. Knowledge, it’s this specific kind of knowledge that is applicable to this. So if that—if I might, if you don’t mind, Manuel, that what Mark said, that’s what I think the text says, and I—it makes sense to me—related to the embodiment of—towards a reason. What I was objecting to was just a higher order reasoning. I was objecting to—that’s what we were saying, I didn’t think that it was about abstractions that function at a higher level, because we could do that all day long. I can come up with abstractions that work in my head, but they have to be real and they have to serve a purpose. And part of—go ahead. But what is higher order? If I go from city to country, I go up a level. I don’t— It doesn’t change, though. A higher—in programming, a higher observable—a higher order observable would be an observable that returns an observable. If you have a category of something, if you have—come up with a, you know, a factory that produces factories, a thing that is a second order derivative, right? It’s like velocity versus acceleration, right? You say it’s a higher order function, right? And I can keep doing that. I can go the third order, I can go three, four, and then it gets—man, you’ve got to be smart to figure out after three orders of derivatives, gets hard in your head. But you can keep going on and on. Yeah, but like— Right. And that’s why it’s elite. It’s just hard to do. Right. That’s the point. The point—so to answer Casey, here’s what I would say, Casey. The number of people determining the valid wisdom for all the city and all the subparts of the city is a small group of people. Yes, that is true. But I think that is implied in the text, or it may not be explicit in the text. I don’t remember if it’s explicit. But that is implied in the text that, yes, it’s a small number of people, but wisdom isn’t the thing that applies just to those people. It’s the thing that those people have to apply to the city. Because, remember, the guardians are the things that are keeping all aspects of the city the way they need to be. And so wisdom encompasses all the aspects of the city in their, we’ll call it, right, relationship, right, just to use some reasonably familiar words. And the art of doing that has to be done by an elite because wisdom is, say, rare or expensive or maybe both. And so, you know, we don’t have much of a choice in the matter. Yeah. Yeah, Mark, it’s right here. Then is there—is there some knowledge possessed by some of the citizens in the city we just founded that doesn’t judge about any particular matter but about the city as a whole and the maintenance of good relations, both internally and with other cities? There is indeed. So there it is right there, explicitly stated. But with this wisdom, there’s three—there’s a couple things we’ve got to look at specifically. It says few people, judgment about good relations for the whole of the city. And by the way, I have one word. We—my translation, and I’m assuming all English translations use the word knowledge, which comes from gnosis, which is not the word used here as epistemic. I also can translate as know how, I think. Or understanding, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it’s judgment, good relations of the whole of the city. So— Yes, I was having a discussion, explaining to my mom what the function of the head is, right? And so one of the functions of the head is to maintain the cohesion of the body. And another function of the head is to relate the body to the outside world. And so the body has to be a singular entity, because if you have two captains on a ship, there’s going to be two bodies, right? Like, this is the poor and the rich city. So we’re doing also a fractal-like thing, right? Because I was going to go to a country, like, what is a country? Well, a country is a union of cities, effectively, right? Where the cities are, the things that manage the local land, and then management of the local land needs to be encapsulated in a higher principality. So I think—and then what does it require? And Pichot talks about this, right? Like, what is the discernment on the level of the city, even more abstract, on the level of a country? Because, like, what are the things that you attempt to? In some sense, you have to trust that the city isn’t going to self-manage, because if you’re going to have to micromanage the city on the city level, then you’re going to get lost. Yeah, it’s not even possible. It’s a judgment. I think it’s really important. I think a lot of people—and maybe this was Thursimachus—can seem to confuse wisdom with justice. I think it’s very important that we—very obviously they’re not the same thing. That’s what he’s saying here, which is hard for me. I think that maybe it’s just the way that we’re educated, as we confuse— What’s individualism, I think. Yeah, yeah, individualism. But yeah, the wisdom, this higher virtue is definitely some sort of judgment. Like, if you think of the father of the family as another example, like, in children are fighting, they’re going to go to the father, and he’s going to tell them, okay, well, you did this, blah, blah, blah, and he’s going to say, you need to go do this, and you apologize, whatever. He’s a higher—it’s something that’s able to look down and make judgment. Right. Well, the thing that keeps the whole together is the head. Like, if you have two heads, you have to have two bodies. It’s the thing with the head. So yeah, and there’s some negotiation there when it’s forming, for sure, but also, yeah. It’s called thing to solve, right? It’s not something you can resolve easily. Oh, and now I have to think about a hydra, because a hydra is one body with many hands, which is the inverse. Yep. So why does it have one body? Because you can’t—it’s the statement of a perennial pattern that can’t be solved or resolved, right? There’s no way to get rid of the hydra by—it’s not a question of how you’re going to try to cut off all the kings on it, right? It’s got a bunch of heads. You can cut off all the heads you want and more regrow because there’s a vacuum created, right? So that’s the statement of power vacuum. So that’s what that symbolically represents, that there are things that do not have solutions that you have to live with. Verveki would call them perennial problems, but of course they’re not problems because you can’t solve them, so I call them perennial patterns. I think of the hydra—go ahead—as an image of intemperance. Hercules slayed the hydra by killing the body—striking the body—not by striking to the heads, because it’s like a cancerous growth. They already talked about how licentiousness can infect and grow, right? That’s kind of the symbol or imagery that I see of the hydra’s body is—in fact, they talk about intemperance, which we need to go through courage first, so we’re jumping ahead again. But they talk about how—temperance is basically—you have better and worse principles. When the better principles are under control, we call that self-master here, master of the self. Otherwise, we call them unprincipled. So it’s when you have this inversion of—when you have these principles that have to be in harmony and you have the one that I guess we don’t like in charge, then that’s, in my mind, that paints a picture of a hydra. But we’re jumping ahead. Maybe we can come back again in a minute. We’re coming up on time here, I think. Yeah. So is what you said—is it that it has to contain its own identity or something or self-regulation of its own identity? Is that what— I don’t know about that, but I think the heads of the hydra are the product of a bigger— No, no, I wasn’t talking about the hydra. I was talking about the temperament. Oh, okay. You said that it has self-control or something, and then— Temperance is self-moderation. Yeah, but— Temperance doesn’t have self-control. It’s the statement of the virtue of being able to moderate self-control. Yeah, but the way I understood what he said is that it is—temperance is that which lets something that is a whole stay as one whole. So, okay, let me—this is hard. This is difficult. I was talking to Casey about this this morning. So there’s wisdom and courage that you can say, you know what, that guy’s got more of those things than another person. You know, that guy’s more wise, that guy’s more courageous, whatever. But with temperance, due to the nature of temperance, you can’t do that. So I’m going to read this passage here. Why? Because temperance is unlike courage and wisdom, each of which resides in a part only, the one making the state wise and the other valent. So that’s—right? Not so with temperance, which extends to the whole and runs through all the notes of the scale and produces the harmony of the weaker and the stronger in the middle class—well, they go on and on. I’m going to skip to the last sentence. Most truly, then, we may deem temperance to be the agreement of the naturally superior and inferior, as to the right to rule of either, both in states and individuals. So I think what they’re saying there is that temperance is, by definition, a thing of balance. And so we can’t say that that person is more or less intemperate. Maybe— That’s a wish, actually, that you just described. Could be. No, temperance—temperance is proper submission, that’s for sure. But it’s in the same way that they say, what about the beast? Like, the difference—the guardians, in their courage, is submitted to the law of the state. The beast can exhibit characteristics of the guardian. He can maybe be strong and maybe have a look like he’s courageous or something like that. Or, oh, they talked about—oh, see, we skipped courage. There’s a problem with jumping ahead. I think we should roll the bat—maybe we should do it next week, actually. Yeah, we’re going to do it next week. I’m going to prepare. We’re going to do the three virtues again, because I think we can spend more time on wisdom. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Maybe we should do the bash for viking while we’re at it, because I don’t think he’s using Plato’s version. So, yeah, does anybody have any closing words or any intentions or ideas for next week so that we can prepare for that? No, I think we’re going to pick up with this three-piece ensemble, and we can brush by the fact that they’re saying, if you know the three, the fourth is obvious, which is not—facts stated not in evidence. But there’s a lot of the book that’s like that, so fair enough. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to that. It’s comical how they find justice. It’s like, comical how they find justice. It’s like, they’re setting it up like, oh, yeah, it’s going to be obvious to find it. And then it’s kind of funny how they end up finding it. The first time I listened to this book, I thought it was a comedy. It literally feels like a—what do you call that? European—it feels like a Monty Python, where they’re like, all right, we’re going to talk about this. And then they go off on this route. And it’s, you know, yeah. Yeah, that’s kind of what comedy is, right? Like, it’s like, they’re talking about truth in a way that’s a little bit strange. So, yeah, let’s wrap it up. There’s some reflection. Reflect on the things that are salient, emotionally, intellectually stimulating. And then try and connect them to your next week so that you can set an intention or a goal. So, yeah, that’s it for this week. So that you can set an intention of how to approach living and studying for next week. Thank you. So I was having this talk. About how a symbol might open you up into a symbolic space. And then when you’re there, you see the nature of it. You look back at the symbol, which would signify what is behind it, that it’s not capturing what you see fully. I don’t know if anybody ever had that experience. Yeah, I do all the time. I mean, a lot of that is, if I come back to the same thing from a different position, too, that’s another way to have a sink when I think I’m hearing you saying, no. No, no, I see a symbol, for example, the thing with music, right? Because I’m having frustrations about that book tree, right, why they’re using music. So music is like a way, the doorway into a framing, right? Like, it’s the space with these characteristics that relate to things. And then when I look back, I’m like, music is not capturing what I see behind, like, what should be there. So I’m like, I’m not capturing what I see behind the door. I’m not capturing what I see behind the door. So I’m like, I’m not capturing what I see behind the door. So I’m not capturing what I see behind the door. So I’m not capturing what I see behind the door. Like, I’m not capturing what I see behind the door. Like, what should be there. Right? So I feel like music is not the right word to be used to make that analogy effective. And I think this is what happens when you try and create symbolism. When you try to create your own symbolic language, you’re limited to your own perspective, and you’re going to not see things. You can, people are complaining this about analogies, not symbolism, but analogies in the modern times, right, when they’re doing the mechanical association, or now with the computer, right, or now with the quantum, right, and how they cannot capture certain things, and then we get stuck in a certain type of self-image. Um, well, I don’t think that music is used as an arbitrary symbol here. For one reason, music is completely different to us now than it was to them. But it might actually, I mean, he might actually really be meaning music. I mean, we walk into a Greek Orthodox church, the music that they use is very specific and very controlled. So, I mean, I don’t know, whenever I hear, I think that they’re, we’re taking music for granted. There used to be a gap there between us and Plato and what music actually is. Yeah, music to them is inseparable from like religion and community. Like music didn’t exist without those things. I’m not saying you’re, maybe you can find some insight from it. And if you can, I actually want to know it, because I’d like to know more. Because I feel that gap. I don’t know, I don’t know what he’s talking about with the music either. He gets into a little bit of what he meant into before. Yeah, but I wasn’t talking about the music specifically, but I’m talking about this this phenomena, right, where the thing that’s pointing beyond itself, right, is like pointing at only part of the elephant, effectively. Why don’t you realize, like, no, no, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff there that’s not being captured by the pointing. Yeah, I mean, that’s the purpose of the symbol. It’s a gateway into something bigger. It’s not. And a proper symbol points in a way that things reciprocally open. We’ll say a poor analogy, which is a symbolic representation, right, deliberately, points only at certain aspects. But a good analogy points to the potential and possibility it reciprocally opens. So everything has that aspect still in symbolism. Are we doing it all next week? Doing it all again? Yep. So I guess we got done here? Yeah. All right. Killing the recording.