https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hpIByaIACoI
Go ahead, we’re recording. OK, so first of all, I want to point at where we ended last time. It’s introducing familiar relationship as the guiding principle, putting that as the greatest good in the state. That’s my last note. So that’s like halfway, I think not even halfway, past book five. So we’re probably going to recover a lot of stuff if we think it’s relevant. So Danny’s intention last time was, what are things grounded in? So that was what he was looking at. And then Eaton and Casey are not here. But my intention was relating to the motivation of people. So I was trying to get a more outside perspective. I don’t really feel connected to that intention right now. Apart from the fact that I do have the feeling that I want to take a step back and see the larger picture, I had this idea of soul as the interface between your experience and reality, which shifts things into what’s salient and what’s relevant. So yeah, my intention is to look at the bigger picture. I had a lot of stuff happen since then. I think the main thing is that I’m more capable of relating to the things. Like I have an easier time reading. I have an easier time reflecting. So yeah, let’s hope that bears fruit. So what I have written down as well was last time my intention was connecting with people, motivation, chutzpah, that kind of thing. That’s no longer where my head’s at. It’s moving more of the domicile thing, thinking about home, places of belonging, belongingness, that kind of thing, which is informing the way I’m interpreting this stuff. But I basically did chapter six three times now. I’ve been to the same place three times. I’ve been to the same place three times. I basically did chapter six three times now. And I’m not prepared for chapter five’s not on top of my head. So I’m kind of weighing in it this week. So I don’t really have a prepared intention. But my mind and head space is in a different place. I’ve been seeing all kinds of stuff over book six. So we’ll see how much of that may be relevant to connect with in book five here. Adam? Last time I was here, my intention was something to the degree of seeing what other people’s perspective on the text was, and then seeing what I could contribute in relation to kind of historical grounding of what’s going on where this is happening. I’m still on board with that. Meantime, mostly I’ve just been sort of thinking about what hierarchy among men and how that relates to the society at large and how that shows itself in work. So that’s kind of where I’m at. Mark? Sure. So I have no idea what my last intention was because it’s been too long. I’m not sure what my intention was. But yeah, my intention here is just to explore book five. I’ve actually read most of it twice at this point, and it’s very deep. There’s a lot crammed in there. The knowledge of Mendel’s genetics and stuff is right in here, which is, you know, precedes Gregor Mendel’s quite a bit. So it’s good to know the ancient Greeks actually already had all this stuff, the deep understanding of these things up front. And no one ever talked about that. So yeah, there’s a lot of stuff in here to talk about. Why is it that we think these discoveries happened in the late Middle Ages rather than in the early 20th century? I mean, I think they’re not necessarily found in the late Middle Ages rather than if they’re explicitly inflated. But I can’t wait to explore this and get to the bottom of some of these sort of deep questions. Yeah, I kind of have an answer to that, right? They call it the Enlightenment for a reason, right? So they go with the flashlight. It’s like, oh, here it is. Yeah. So they’re not just examples of heredity. Like when the farmers raise flocks of things, they understand there’s variation among generations. That idea. Yeah, they understood that before Darwin. Is that what you’re saying? No, Mendel formalized that, but also was the one that formalized the procedure for, you know, growing grapes a certain way, sort of a thing, right? Which is it’s the whole thing. It’s not one aspect of it. It’s not something that actually did encompass. But it was already there. Like I said, like, Claude already knew all this. Of course, it’s observable. Like, people in the past didn’t have eyes. They did. They could see these things. They encoded it differently, right? They encoded it in stories and fairy tales and things like that. So the scientific revolution is more about talking about things in a way that’s not really impropositionally, rather than a breakthrough of, we’ll say, understanding the world, right? Because, and I’ve said this many times in many places at this point, but they recently, as in the past few months, scientifically validated that if you were in love and you fall out of love or whatever, you get your heart broken, that your heart is actually physically damaged. And my only comment to that is everybody already knew that. Why is science suddenly coming to this conclusion? And they validated the opposite. When you fall in love, the damage to your heart can be repaired. And it’s like everybody already knew that. Actually, already. Thousands of years. Thousands. But now we have the science knowing it. So I guess that’s better. I don’t think it’s better. But whatever. I think science exemplifies how much they understood about the world. And this is another one of those areas where we’re getting closer to a perfect city, right? We’re getting closer to this perfect. And it’s not a perfect city. It’s a perfect implementation of justice at the city, scale of a city. And you can already see the cracks. Like, well, let’s suppose we have this level of perfection. What about this condition? And it’s like, oh, yeah, well, we’re going to have to sacrifice truth on the altar of justice to make sure that children that are born of the same parents don’t interbreed. Right? And so you can see this conflict between implementing, we’ll say perfect justice and implementing any other of these virtues. And that’s evident here all throughout book five, I would say. Yeah, so I’ll just go from the beginning. So they’re looking to… I think that first talking about people growing up, right? And then, oh, yeah, they went into this thing between different natures of man and woman. And I think that’s, we pretty well covered that aspect. And then they go into marriage, right, and they go into the craziness of how to do that and hiding certain things. So in the end, like, it’s effectively all in the, you know, in the book five, I would say, the most important thing is in the end, like, it’s effectively all in the surface of union, right? So they go into how the city would think about itself, right? And how they would talk to themselves and what is the nature of the relationship, right? And effectively they’re contrasting like a zero-sum game, right, or the earthly versus a love relationship or a more spiritually grounded relationship that’s based on the family effectively, right? So, yeah, I don’t know where we want to get into the specifics because I didn’t prepare in that way. I guess I’ll go with my new notes. Okay, so this is let them strip. So for virtue will be the robes, right? So that’s a comment that is related to the nakedness, right? So there’s this whole thing about them having to be naked. And then they go into the nakedness, right? And then when we’re looking at the nakedness, there’s a way that you can look at the nakedness in which it’s absurd, right, would be like the common perspective. And then there’s a way that you can see in the nakedness, you can see the utility in how it’s participating in the greater good, and that flips it somehow, right? And therefore it’s no longer absurd and in some sense not doing it would be absurd, which is a pretty extreme framing and also fairly binary. Nothing to say? That’s throughout the book manual. It’s deliberately frame. Everything’s deliberately binary in the book, right? It’s always until the end of the chapter. But they knew that all along, right? I mean, first of all, it’s written like a play. That’s important to know, right? But also, he does this throughout. He said, surely if a man weren’t this, he would be this, or surely if he were this, he wouldn’t be that. Throughout the book, that’s been consistent, and it’s absurd and it’s absurd on purpose because they’re trying to create a perfect solution. Yeah. So it’s unity and plurality, integrity as a measure of the good, and then they go into shared emotions as a way of collective sense making, right? So they’re really going full on this unity. And then the shared ownership, right? So it’s also the solution of the self, the solution of the ego. Actions are true to the name that is used. So I think that was a way to define. Oh yeah, so if you have a name, then you can be true to that name. That was an interesting idea of considering what a name is. And actually in the Bible, I’ve been coming around this idea of family or father or whatever, right? Which is also a name in some sense, right? Because you’re doing things in your family’s name or your father’s name, right? And then you’re basically enacting what they enact, right? Like you’re supposed to effectively copy the spirit of the name that you’re in. And in this case, that’s the city effectively, right? Having in common… I guess before we go on, I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but when you mentioned about the nakedness thing as being like, it’s absurd in one way, but then if you don’t participate in it, it’s also absurd to not… That’s not really a way that we think, because there’s kind of like a psychological shadow. When’s the last time that somebody actually thought about, let’s say, integrating their nakedness into the integrity of a good? Because to be aware that you need to have clothes on, you have to have an awareness that there’s a thing there, but we don’t often think about this is an influence that you carry and do you use it for good, right? I don’t think we think about that very often. It’s just not… We’re not. Because there’s mental blocks. It’s like one of those closet things that… It’s not a mental block, Danny. It’s just we’re not paying attention to the good. Not paying attention to… You should always pay attention to the good and then everything else takes care of itself. Or if people think about it, you kind of have to think about it by yourself. Sorry to cut you off. But we’re looking at a bottom-up. We’re looking at, here’s a thing that I do, that’s emergence or emergence is good, right? Instead of saying, what is the good? Oh, it’s good for me to dress up for the book club. Right, because that’s correct. And then the implementation of dressing up doesn’t matter. If you do a bottom-up, it’s like, well, I need to wear this specific outfit for the book club. It’s like, no, that’s not true. You just need to dress up because dressing up is good. Right? It’s the opposite because when you come from the emanation down onto the world, the implementation matters a little bit less. It’s not irrelevant by any means, but it’s constructive but it’s constrained by the emanation. And therefore, you have enough options to choose from without so many options that you get into analysis paralysis. And we don’t think about that, but it is absurd that the whole framework that they’re talking about with the gym and all that is wrong. Obviously incorrect and hysterically so. It’s meant to be funny. And the quote was, let them strip. For virtue will be their robes. Right? Right. Yeah, mine’s a closed-end chastity, yeah. Right, but that’s the whole, like, that’s the joke. Virtue will be their robes. Right? And it’s a very deep statement because it’s the virtue encompassed in the female form as well as the virtue, right? But it’s only applying to the women in this case, even though it should also apply to the men. There’s all these little, you know, verbal tricks going on in that statement. So yeah, so the having in common of women and children, right, so this is this idea that they basically put a pig pen somewhere and breed children in the pen and that you don’t know anything about what’s going on there. But you still have your emotional investment in that and also in the women because, like, I don’t know, like, it’s something like a shared potential. And that is supposed to be what unites the people protecting it. Like, it’s just literally forming a physical heart by moving things together and having them tangled. And that is the source of good. Like, that was a literal statement, right? So that’s like an axiom, right? Like, we’re gonna build from here. So I found that really troubling. And yeah, I don’t even know if… Yeah, if that logic is sound there. Community of property and family and then they go to a different level, right? So these guardians, they’re supposed to be free of the frustration of life, right? So it’s interesting that they’re supposed to be wrestling, but they’re not supposed to have life frustrations, which is kind of strange in some sense. And they’re, like, having this ideal means of resolving disagreement. So they’re gathering the tension before it actually manifests as an animosity, I guess, and they would be using shame and fear as restraint, right? So now we’re back into negative motivation. So in some sense, that is a mission of failure that, like, the good isn’t gonna hold things together. And then if you get captured in war, you are a present to your enemy. And yeah, bye-bye. Like, we don’t care about you. Because you’re a failure. Because your action… Proved that you’re not capable of doing what you’re supposed to be doing. And then they go into the honoring of the Guardian class. In honoring them, we shall be at the same time training them. They’re making a reference to the people who die in battle, and they call them the Golden Race, which is effectively making them a martyr to the city. And now they go into the inter-relational… the inter-Hellenic relations. Offering spoils is not okay unless God orders it. So in some sense, what they’re saying is if we’re having conflict, we’re having conflict because we’re having conflict and not because we want to have conflict. Thinking of the… own land is sharing in… Tempes? I don’t know what this is. Oh. Talos, I think, maybe. Anyway. Is… Is that the right word? Is that the right word? Anyway. Is… Oh, yeah, so this is… Now they’re talking about whether we’re fighting against the Hellens or we’re fighting against the barbarians, right? So is your Talos reconciliation, right? Then you’re effectively… Reconciliation can only happen if you’re sharing something, right? And in some sense, that is participation in good faith. That’s what I took out of that, right? And it’s a correction, right? So if you’re part of the same body, you want to correct the part of the body so that you strengthen the body, but if something is outside of the body, then you’re conquering it, right? You’re putting it under your dominion. So it was really interesting that they had these two fundamentally different relationships to fight over the in-group and out-group, and they increased the in-group from the city to the Hellenistic area. So there’s different group identities there. And that’s the scaling. That’s the change in scale, right? So if you look at the book, the whole way it starts is you can’t understand justice from the perspective of a single person because one person’s justice is another person’s injustice, and therefore we have to scale up to the city. And then what you see here is they’re hinting at the things that we’re talking about here don’t scale the same way when you add other cities, irrespective of what kind of cities they are, right? And so it just hints at the solution we’re giving you only works at the scale of city. It doesn’t work lower, and it doesn’t work higher. And also, it’s worth noting, this whole thing about the Guardians is predicated on this idea that if you bring people up, they will become robots and work exactly the way you expect, which is, again, part of the absurdity of the text, right? And it’s full of this level of absurdity on purpose, right? Because the Telos is designed to basically show you that even if you had a perfect philosophy that could be implemented perfectly, it wouldn’t work. The whole point of the book is it doesn’t work, right? Justice is too big and we can’t do it, which does not say we shouldn’t strive for it, which is what the end of the chapter says here, right? It says striving is important, even if you can’t accomplish. That’s effectively the point of the last, like, four or five pages, whatever it is. And so, in the Guardians, you see this whole idea that there is a special type of person that is molded by a special set of circumstances. So it’s basically nurture over nature the whole way through, right? Except, again, it accounts for nature. It accounts for the problems of inbreeding and all of that at the same time. But it’s effectively asserting nurture over nature. And so that argument is right here, which is good to note because people don’t talk about that, but it’s actually right in the… There’s so many things in the Republic that nobody ever mentions, and I’m just shocked at the fact that that’s true. But it’s worth pointing out how we got here with the Guardians is that they are this highly regulated sort of machine, robotic sort of creature that’s being molded specifically in this way, and then the result of that molding is just assumed to be all of these things, which, you know, I’m fine with all that. I think it’s a great ride, especially because even if that happened, it still doesn’t work. Yeah, so war cannot be because of the whole of the people. So basically what they were talking about is that when you’re having war, there’s only a select group of people that cause the war, and there’s a bigger entity, right, which is the people that have different interests. Therefore, all you have to do is you have to kick out the people that want the war, and then you can have peace again effectively. My observation was that the nation state changed it because the nation state is… and actually probably also the perfect city is binding up their identity within the city, right? So they have to fight till the end. Like they’re bound to… So it’s interesting, right, while that is a strength, well, we can also observe what happens when we did the total wars, right? That’s not a good thing. It’s showing the downside as well as the upside, which is, yeah, maybe you’ve got a stronger city, but also it’s fragile because if you lose it, you lose it and you can’t get it back. If you lose it, you lose the whole thing. If you lose everything, you don’t just lose the city, like everybody dies, basically. At least in the Guardian class. Yeah, and I actually had to think about how democracy was instituted in Athens. And basically the reason… Well, Tom Holland describes it, the reason that it was instituted is it was too dangerous as an aristocratic class to be on top because there was some, right? Either you were in control or they kicked you out and then you’d be dead or in exile. And so with the introduction of democracy, you’d have the backing of the people, right? And then the consequence of losing would be less severe. And that would also at the same time bind the plebs to the city because now they have a part in it, right? Like they have some sort of ownership to the city. So then we get a meta conversation where Socrates gets chastised for losing the spirit of the conversation because he got stuck in a description that wasn’t really relevant, which is interesting, right? So there’s a relevance keeping that’s happening within the dialogs that they’re doing. I don’t know what this is referencing to, but you notice we can judge ourselves according to the standard that we’re creating. And I think this is… Oh, yeah, I think that’s what they’re doing, right? So they’re creating this perfect city and then they can use the perfect city to judge the city that they’re in. And I was like, well, maybe? Where is that manual in the text because I didn’t see that? Well, that’s after the interlude where they go on to… Yeah, I need one of the one of the referencee numbers there. Is that after the whole thing about the houses and the… Yeah, it’s a while after. This is after the thing about the war, right? So that’s relatively like three-fifths in or something. So while we’re at it, no comments or things from what I just heard. I’ll cut out the long pause. But there’s just a lot that went there. We went through a lot of things. Sorry, I have so much to go through. Again, this is… There seems to be a theme, the theme of the uniting thing, whether it’s meals, like it’s a shit, what unites us is the need for food and the same thing, and like, they’re always going back to this need for unity in the whole, right? So that seems to be in marriage, it’s like the thing that unites and causes the marriage to be strong is that we’re united out of a certain necessity. It seems to be, like they said, this kind of a shame frame. They’re kind of using this kind of lens towards looking at these things. On the breeding, I have a note here. In order to preserve the flock, the good must be paired with the bad. And so it’s a question of are they creating a picture where they say, you know what, it’s going to be survival of the fittest. It’s eugenics. We’re just going to breed the best. Or, you know, is there some, do they have a mechanism for tolerating like some of the less good flock? No, in the guardians. Like this is the thing that people miss. It’s only in the guardians. They’re not talking about the other classes. They skip over the bottom class of society entirely, just like, oh, Shoemaker, you know, versus Blacksmith versus whatever. They just skip over that, right? Because they’re not interested in that. Those are functions of the city that are necessary, but they’re not. They take care of themselves, right? So they don’t even, they’re just kind of like, yeah, we know that’s there, but let me tell you about the guardians. Okay, right? And then I suspect, because I know a little bit about the end of the book, but I haven’t read it, that later they’re going to get to leadership. And that’s going to get really interesting, right? Right, because one of the emerging things is like there’s been this theme of purity popping up, right? And so I’m just pointing towards, I see another indication about, there’s purity there again. I don’t know why, but it’s there. We talked a lot about monotheism and stuff last time. Another note that I have is, the pattern is to be getting at justice through wisdom. There’s always an emphasis on getting to the specific through the whole. I think we’ve kind of talked about that at a high level, but I think in order to like, it seems like they’re always using a combination of these lenses, like unity, purity, you know, and they’re always like choosing themes, and then they’re kind of like saying, okay, well, use these lenses and then take a look at the topic, you know? So they just keep, I just find that that’s kind of interesting, because they also talk about the difference between opinion and fact, and how it’s important to not just be good at winning arguments through opinion or heuristics, but to develop the capacity for dialectic. And I think the nature of that is it’s dance-like. That’s the nature of reality. You have to get, you know, you have to be able to think in these, you know, in tripartites. You can’t just define any of these concepts in a static manner. They’re all dynamic things, you know? Like through their natures. And I think that’s very, you know, clear here rhetorically. When they talk about fact versus opinion, reason versus disputing, verbal truth or versus the deed. I think a good functional definition of truth is when the word indeed become one. I’ve heard that before. Well, they exemplify that throughout the text. Like the goal of the text seems to be to exemplify that point. That there aren’t these binaries. So it shows you all the binaries and how absurd they are. And then at the very end of chapter 5, again, the last four pages are shown. They flat out state the difference between fact and opinion and or knowledge and opinion or, you know, however they’re framing depends on the translation it seems. And then they say we can’t get at the knowledge. But we can get close and so all we have is the opinion. But it can’t be an unbounded opinion. Which is that’s that they stated outright at the end. So to try to maybe create some kind of practical tool out of all these things that we’re bringing up, marriage, unity, all these purity, all these things. Like, whenever my intention, I said with motivation, when you think about like thinking about motivations, oh, he did that for Instagram. He did that for fame, he did that for money. The person wanted a relationship. Like language that we would use in the modern day, we have to decode those things and think about them more in terms of like well obviously there’s multi-variable, but also more in terms of spirit, right? Like what are they worshipping? Where’s their attention? Right? Like I think that’s a more useful way to think about, like instead of trying to like a motivation like, oh, he did that for money. That’s just like more of a static quality. I think it’s the wrong construct. It’s also wrong. It’s also wrong. Like nobody does things for money, correct? Because your observation of the world is limited, and you don’t know why people do things. There’s no way for you to know that. You can only know their end results. And a lot of times people do things and get results they don’t expect. And so the fact that they got the result clearly, and that happens to you too, so the fact that you would go in and say I know why that person did something is supreme ignorance about your own inability to implement your own desires. Because if you can’t implement your desires reliably or, you know, perfectly, then what makes you think everybody else is, and they’re not just falling into some ridiculous trap. And that is the important part, you know, to your point. Like, yeah, you don’t know, you can’t know, and therefore, and that is again the end of book five. Well, but right, like when you go to the level of abstraction at the end of book five, right, you can know whether someone is a lover of opinion or a lover of philosophy. Like, you can know. Right. So there is a level of abstraction. Yeah, yeah. You can know the abstraction. But again, the abstraction is useless, and that’s Danny’s point. The abstraction is useless. You can’t know if they’re motivated by money because it’s not an abstraction and you can’t know that. It’s not possible to know a motivation. It It may be possible to know if they’re a lover of knowledge or opinion, but that says nothing about other things that you can know. And that’s the problem. Yeah, you can know certain things at a certain level of abstraction, but the level of abstraction of other people’s motivations is not a level of abstraction that you have knowledge of. It just doesn’t exist, which is why Danny’s point is so salient, because you can look at the spirit. Like that, you can know. You just can’t understand through the implementation what the motivation is. You can only understand through the spirit. And that leads to a bunch of things like, oh, well, they thought they were helping poor people, but it turns out that it put a bunch more people into poverty. Okay, well, what does that actually tell you? Does it tell you that they’re incompetent? Does it tell you that they’re stupid? Does it tell you that they’re evil? What does it tell you? And the answer is that the spirit that they enacted was not the spirit of helping poor people, right? And that’s all you can say about it. You still can’t divine their—not from a single instance. You can’t divine their actual motivation. Now, from their reaction to the fact that their implementation made more poor people, you can divine their motivation. But for one action, it cannot work. No, it does not work. It cannot work because actions are imperfect and results don’t always reflect their intent. And so that’s where people get messed up. It’s like, no, no, no, if you gather enough information about something, you can do that. But you can’t do that with a single action. It’s not possible. It’s just not enough information is available to come to a conclusion. That’s why the abstraction works, because an abstraction is not a single instance and can never represent a mere single instance. And that’s actually really important to realize about the world. There’s a bunch of things that you don’t know through a single observation. And some of those things come clear through multiple observations. And observations are of different quality. So it’s very, very different if you make a claim that, say, some medicine works, right? And somebody else makes a claim that some medicine doesn’t work. And then you find out the person who says it doesn’t work never actually engaged with a single piece of research, right? They’re just saying, no, it definitely doesn’t work over and over again because they never researched it. Like, those are different things. And the quality of those two pieces of information, because it requires two pieces, not one, but you can’t say, oh, they say this doesn’t work and therefore, right, it doesn’t mean anything. That is enough to tell you, oh, they didn’t do their research because they’re asking you for your research or something. It’s like, well, why would you need my research if you did your own? Obviously, you wouldn’t, and therefore, you didn’t do your own research. And you haven’t pointed at any of it. Good indication that you didn’t do your research. And therefore, it’s not that your claim is wrong. It’s that you had no right to make the claim, which is a totally different thing, right? It’s not the wrongness or the rightness of the original claim. You made a claim in ignorance, for sure, 100% guaranteed. And that changes the nature of the interaction because those two pieces of information, and maybe it’s three or four ultimately, do give you an answer. But one instance doesn’t. And that’s very much what they’re pointing out at the end of book five. So, before we move on to the next thing that Manuel mentioned, the war versus discord internal intersectional thing, which is kind of a lot of what we talk about in this information sense making thing is very mechanical. If you’ll spare me a moment, I watched three episodes of Colombo recently. And now that I’m older, I realize how he’s a great character. I think he’s literally a great character. I didn’t really when I was young, I didn’t get I just thought like, oh, he figured it out. But like he’s you know, he’s this dopey character where you think he’s not really paying attention when he’s at the crime scene. He’s like, you know, you got a lighter, you got a lighter, you got a lighter, you know, like, hey, how do you like living here? You like fishing? My wife loves going to the river. You like the fish? He’s asking these questions that you don’t think are relevant or you don’t think he’s paying attention, but he’s actually attending very, very closely. But the key is the way he solves the crime is he’s always talking about the nose. And there’s there’s a feeling that’s necessary. Like he he’s got he there’s a gut and there’s a feel that’s necessary in order for the relevant facts to even come to the table. So the way the way when Colombo unfolds, the way he asked the questions to the right people, what I notice now that I’m older is that he’s a master at skill with people. He knows how to play different types of bad guys against each other. There might be one bad guy that might be very arrogant and he’ll use it against him. There might be another type of bad guy with a different personality and he’ll maybe, you know, do different type of judo. Maybe he’ll use more resistance or less. Right. But, you know, he’s always laid the trap. Right. And at the end, it’s all bang. Like he’ll catch the guy. Right. And it was based on based on but he’s always talking about the nose. You know, you know, I’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s all about the nose. But I think, you know, the feeling and those relationships of discernment of people, there’s something there’s something about that that’s necessary in order for all the fact of the crime to even come together and for the intelligibility and for the puzzle to even be solved. So I just thought that was kind of, you know, he’s a very he’s very like he’s a very Socratic type of guy, you know. So anyway, I just kind of wanted to. Well, it’s a good it’s a good point. Like people don’t really understand what’s going on there. He understands that it’s the relationships that matter. Right. And so what he does is discern the relationships. How how much does this person like to be interrupted? Right. And what he’s doing is he asks seemingly unconnected questions that are connected to the crime. Right. Like, oh, you know, when I asked you for a lighter earlier, you know, you said you don’t smoke, you have a lighter. Right. And it’s not that one fact doesn’t solve anything. But when it’s stacked up in the relationships with the other facts, then a picture emerges. And like, again, it’s this deep confusion because we all want like one thing that tells us an answer and one thing can never tell you an answer to anything ever. And that’s the problem. We’re always using a bunch of context, whether it’s historical or stuff we remembered or stuff we memorize, right, or stuff we inferred in the moment. Right. We’re always using a bunch of information that we’re not really aware of. And that that it’s a good it’s a really good point. He’s very Socratic, where it’s an extremely Socratic character and he does use distraction on purpose. And it always seems to the people he’s talking to as though he’s not paying attention when he when he is. And he looks like he’s going off the rails and he always oh, oh, one more thing, you know, before I leave. Right. As though he’s forgetting to ask this question, but he had it all planned out from the beginning. And and the thing is, he’s testing people’s reactions and giving them superiority over him. Like, oh, this guy’s stupid. He’s never going to solve this crime. And then the people that meet that with compassion are not guilty because they’ve got nothing to hide and they feel sorry for him. And the people that don’t are hiding something. They may not be guilty, but they might have a piece. And he understands all this. And that’s very much what that character is about. So I’m actually glad you brought it up because it’s another modern example of, I would say, a properly instantiated Socratic method that people don’t recognize as the Socratic method at all. And it is a brilliant show, actually. It’s quite brilliant. I think it’s the divine feminine as well, right? By creating the space upon which the stage upon which players can participate and act, right? And that the revelation can happen. That’s yeah, it’s a different way of relating, which is sorely missed in modern society. Manuel, you got anything else? Yeah. And then they’re talking about how their theory is still valid, even if it cannot be put into practice. So basically, they’re making an argument that there’s a validity of theory without connection to reality, which is… No, I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that at all. Well, I think that’s where modern philosophy is based. Yeah, but that’s not what they’re saying at all. What they’re saying is there’s a perfect and we can’t implement it. But that doesn’t mean that our point is any less valid. In other words, I mean, they say it explicitly, like this type of man in its perfection cannot exist. But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. In fact, we need to talk about it. It’s a very layered argument where he says this, then this, then this. Right. So it doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it. It doesn’t mean that just because it can’t exist doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it. Right. Just because we can talk about it, right, doesn’t mean that we can make it exist. So they go both ways. Right. But we need to talk about it because otherwise we can’t get close, which is correct. If you can’t discuss the ideal, then you can’t implement anything in the world at all because you’ll be too far away from something that could work. Right. In theory. And that’s why theory is important. Right. Or at least the modern use of the word theory, not the scientific use. Right. Which is closer to ideal, I would say. So the fact that you have to talk about the ideal is what is established in those last four pages. Like it’s not optional, even though we’re not going to get the ideal. And this is right back to platonic forms. It’s like, yes, you have no access to the platonic forms. That is correct. You have no direct access, but they have to be out there. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to draw a triangle. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see a circle. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to recognize anything. The only reason why we’re able to recognize things is because we remember them, according to Plato, by having encountered them somehow before we were born or as we were born or something. Right. In the realm of the forms. And this is just the pragmatic statement of that fact is that we have to be able to discuss the ideal, the perfection, the perfect way of being in order to try and get there. Right. Because if you don’t have a goal, you’re not likely to reach it. I mean, anything can happen by accident, randomness. But if you don’t have a goal, all you’re striving is in the wrong direction. And I call them to language. Words fall short of the truth. Right. That’s the inability to be accurate. Yeah. The inability to be accurate about the forms effectively. Well, but it’s not. But I don’t think it’s accurate at all. I think that you can be accurate about the form, but you can’t be complete. And so it’s the girdle’s incompleteness theorem. It’s consistency, right, or completeness, but not both. And that’s what he’s saying. He’s not saying you can’t be accurate. He’s saying that your accuracy will fall short because there’s more there than you can express, which is a different thing. Right. It’s not saying like you could be accurate about justice at some small piece of justice, totally accurate. That’s not a problem. Right. The problem is that’s not the whole of justice. And so while it helps you implement justice, it is not the answer to implementing justice. That’s what they’re saying is that it’s incomplete, not that it’s not possible. Godel’s incompleteness, you trade off between completeness, consistency. And was there a third thing? No, it’s complete or consistent. Just completeness and consistency. Okay. Got it. Right. If you come out of math, then you have three things again, because math is propositional, procedural and limited and closed. Right. Whereas the real world is not. And so you gain that third access back again. Yeah. So I think if you have four things, you can make two dimensions. Well, with three things, you can describe the whole. No, three, three things makes, makes two dimensions. Yeah, no, but it, but it doesn’t describe the whole three dimensional space because you can’t distinguish between up and down. I think three things makes two dimensions. Yeah, but it doesn’t describe the whole three dimensional space because. It makes two dimensions. Right. It doesn’t describe three dimensional space. There is no up and down in two dimensional space. That’s three dimensional space. That’s the third axis. No, it’s like you have two points, right? And there’s an up of the two points and there’s a down of the two points. And when you have the third point, it doesn’t tell whether it’s up or down. No, there isn’t. Not in one dimension. If you have two points, you have one dimension. And you don’t have up and down because that’s a different dimension. Okay, whatever. I’m still right and you can talk about it as much as you want. You’re not right. You’re describing three dimensions because up and down are the three dimensions. Three dimensions is two dimensions, dude. Like, oh my god. Two dimensions are anything off of a line. No, you have the X axis, right? You can always put two points on the X axis in two dimensional space. And when you have the third point, the three points does not say whether you’re above the X axis or below the X axis because you don’t have a way to distinguish. That’s two dimensions, right? It’s still two dimensions. Three points can only define two dimensions. No, it doesn’t define two dimensions because it can’t accurately describe two dimensions. Now you’re just adding up and down, which is still the third dimension. No, it isn’t. You need to read Flatland. No, it’s not. We should do a book club on Euclid after this. I think this is what I’m getting at. Oh, man, this is good. Flatland. It’s in Flatland. Flatland is great about that because it tells it in story form and with observations. It’s quite a good book and it’s short so anybody can read it. All right. So what’s the verdict on ideas? These big abstract ideas. Are we happy with them? I don’t know. Are we happy with them? The way they’re presented in the text. They introduced this concept of abstract ideas, which Manuel started to. But I guess sounded like there was some disagreement about it. I have no commentary on it. It’s not I don’t I don’t I mean the whole the whole thing is abstract. I mean, the thing they introduced at the end is the idea that you can’t be perfect and complete about your description of these things, including justice. Right. So in my world, that’s a reenchantment of the of the concept. It’s like you need the ideal. It’s not optional. Right. But you can’t reach the ideal. Also not optional. And you can’t even describe the ideal in a way that is sufficient. But it’s also not optional. Like those three things are true and not optional. Right. There’s no they’re not problems to be solved. They’re not conditions to be met. Right. But but they are there and they have to be accounted for within your thinking, even though you can’t encompass them completely. That that seems to be what those last few pages are saying. Yeah, I’m sorry. Good. Well, so the way that I see words fall short of the truth is that when when you have a description with words, which might be true. Right. Like it still allow like it needs you to give body to that. Right. Like because the words like Mark says, you need to provide the context that provides the meaning that you can use to interpret the words. Right. And that context is not words. Right. So you cannot abstract that and back into the words. Right. Like so the words always fall short. That’s the way that I I read it. Hmm. Yeah, I think both of those things sit well with me. I think. Yeah, it’s incomplete. I think therefore words are always going to fall short. I think that’s a corollary that makes sense. I think in my mind, what keeps coming up on the radar, they keep talking about love, lover of opinion, lover of wisdom. There seems to be an aspect of love and or feeling that is intertwined with the ability to discern the fact even. I mean, that’s that’s something else that I noticed it comes up because well, it just I mean, when they talk about the type of a philosopher, when they go, the requirements of a philosopher is one who loves things and hates others. Other things. Right. That’s but which which lover they use. There’s like three or four Greek words for love. So it actually matters which one they’re using because that our our our conception of love is just wrong. And the word love in English is a worthless word. So we need we need to nail down. Sure. Sure. Okay. We can maybe we could use it. Okay. I didn’t. Yeah. So I like using the same one because they might not be. That’s fair. So yeah, like the nature of the mind, the nature of the soul. We could maybe be more precise on these things. I don’t know that I’m not trying to be precise, but I do notice that there’s something there like. And he who grovels in the world of sense and has only this uncertain perception of things is not a philosopher, but a lover of opinion only. Right. So any time they bring up this like that, when they bring up error, they all it always goes with love or, you know, like this person’s attracted to like there’s some kind of aspect of desire that always ships with error. Right. But you keep using the word love and I have no idea what it is. I think I think the way that they use love right is in relationship to telescope. So the love they use is specifically that affiliate like philosophy. Right. So that’s that’s like an affection or or or usually they say translated as friendship. So there’s a kind of communion. Yeah, communion. There’s a there’s a kind of side to side relation on that as opposed to the other, you know, like like arrows, which is kind of the kind of relation to the reflection of oneself. And I don’t know what the other one is either. But that’s Philia Philia is kind of it’s a communion. It’s a communal sort of thing. So where were they going in Chapter six, eventually to the Allegory of the Sun, where they talk about all these affordances, all the like Manuel mentioned, you have to bring the context in order to interpret the word words. Right. So there’s a capacity that must pre exist. They talk about also the seed like the seed of a philosopher is a rare bird and he must fall on the proper soil. We’ll get there. That’s Chapter six. But they keep bringing up this pattern. I think the soul is actually that that what you bring that that’s what I think the soul is. Yeah, I think so. I think so, too. Something like that. You know, I have a very fuzzy view of it, but I’m there’s there’s there’s a set of capacities like, oh, it’s the kind of thing. Like, maybe if you go to the gym, you can grow that set of capacities. And that seems to be distinct from attunement, right, which we’ve sort of discussed before. So you have capacities or affordances for things and then you can use it. I think maybe that’s where the telos comes in, right. Depending on what your goals are, you can attune towards different things. That’s kind of the way I look at it. And that’s the love like the attunement is is I think what what the law of is describing. Right. So, yeah, yeah, could be could be. Yeah, we’ll get into it when we get into it because we’re going to maybe we should like actually read out that part because it was so intense. And I don’t know what moves they were actually all making, but it was it was highly interesting to me that there was so much stacks. And I’m like, why why are you repeating this from this other perspective? And like, I couldn’t even hold it in my hand at the same time. I just want to say the interesting thing. The interesting thing in book five is that they introduce the philosophers ruling as kings here. Yeah. Right. That’s the introduction of that concept. And that’s how they get into the discussion about knowledge versus opinion and who is qualified to have the knowledge or to claim to have the knowledge and therefore have the authority. So it’s a very Gnostic idea that the important thing about a leader is knowledge somehow. Right. And and and they I don’t actually think they’re talking about knowledge. I think they’re talking about wisdom. And this is a translation issue because they mentioned wisdom when they’re talking about the difference between quote knowledge and quote opinion. But I think that to be a good leader and I don’t know who would disagree with this. And if they do, they’re clearly nuts is to be wise. Like that’s that the feature you want a leader is not to be knowledgeable, to be wise. You shouldn’t require somebody to know. No, no, no, no, no, no. I think they’re actually talking about knowledge. Like I think a knowledge is the ability to grasp being. Right. Well, that did. Yeah. Then I would call that was again. No, no, I think wisdom is on the meta level of that. I don’t think it’s on the meta level and still know. But yes, no, like I think I think wisdom is an abstraction of being able to relate to knowledge. Like it’s not on the same plane. Oh, I agree. It’s not on the same plane. So you first have to have knowledge, right? No, no, no, no, no. Zero traditions believe that actually zero like wisdom is wholly apart from knowledge in every single tradition that that has any text. Actually, actually, it’s not in the Indian tradition. It’s not in the Chinese tradition. It’s just not there. Right. The people that go off and live in the cave and come out wise do not have knowledge. The way that literally and we’ll get to it, like the way that knowledge is defined in the text, I think it is necessary in every tradition. Where is that definition? I’ll get to it. Let’s just. Yeah, it is. Well, it might be helpful, but there’s an Old Testament scholar that defines wisdom as relational skill. That’s which which to Mark’s point, which to Mark’s point, like that that processes knowledge, right? It makes sense of knowledge, but but it’s different than knowledge. You know, yeah, it’s it’s apart from it. It’s totally apart. Like the knowledge is irrelevant to wisdom. They just have no connection to one another whatsoever. Right. So the nose that Colombo talks about. Right. Well, look, he doesn’t have the knowledge, right? He doesn’t know what happened. He’s discovering what happened. And the way you do that is through wisdom. It’s not it’s not your pre-existing knowledge that allows you to do that. It’s your supreme ignorance that allows you to be wise, because if you have the knowledge, you’ve already made the connections. And now the wisdom is forced out because you can’t make better connections, or at least it’s much harder to do so. And I think that’s really where the problem is, is that they are orthogonal and knowledge is just not that important in the world. And that’s kind of the way it is. Like just observing relationships alone is sufficient. And we know this. This has to be true because people do it all the time. People have been doing it. The amount of knowledge your average person had, you know, 100 years ago or 200 years ago or a thousand years ago, it’s just much less. And yet they managed to survive and procreate just fine. I don’t know if there’s knowledge that’s not less. I think that’s a bold statement. I would actually argue the opposite. But whatever. Any modern person would disagree. I mean, this is the chronological… I don’t care what modern people think. We’ll get to it when we get to it, because I don’t think it helps if we don’t have the proper… Where’s the definition, Manuel? We’ll get to it when we get to it. Well, I would just like to add that there are very simple people that don’t know a whole lot about science. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? That are extraordinarily wise and move in the world with extreme wisdom. Right? And there are also people that are extraordinarily knowledgeable. I don’t know if Sam Harris comes to mind, right? That are idiots. I would not call Harris knowledgeable. Everybody else would. That’s really the problem. That’s what they point to. Is this degree or things he wrote or all of these other things? And that’s why I’m saying, well, where is their definition of knowledge in here? Because maybe I missed it. I don’t know. Well, they talk about the corruption of the philosopher in chapter six and the politics. They give an opening in chapter six, but they do address this question about, can we say that Sam Harris is knowledgeable? Well, he’s knowledgeable by the standards of the day, which are corrupted. So they talk about corruption in chapter six, but we’ll get there. That’s why the definition of knowledge is important. Yeah, but if we go back to the guy who’s working on the field that is wise, we’re talking about a philosopher king here. We’re not talking about, we don’t want to put the guy on the field in charge of the city because he doesn’t have sense making on the level of the city. And in order to have sense making on the level of the city, you need to have knowledge about the city. That’s the problem. I totally disagree. Could possibly disagree with anything more. That’s what they’re saying. Where is this in the text? That’s still my question. What are you referring to? There are little numbers in here like 472. Yeah, there’s numbers there, but they’re not on my side. So it’s not helpful. I can give you the translation. So the word they use for knowledge is epistemos. The word they use for opinion, I think, is voxha, meaning that also corresponds. It’s not just like opinion in regard, it’s glory as well. If you look in translations, doxa, expectation, opinion, judgment. And there is another one that I was looking at. Yes, lovers. Oh, yeah. And then, of course, a lover of glory or a lover of opinion is a philodoxo or philodoxos or something like that. So if what Manuel is saying is true, then that fits in very well with where they go in Chapter 6. If what they’re saying is that there’s a necessary precondition that must be met, because the first thing that they do in Chapter 6, which again I’m getting way ahead, but they give an example of a ship crew that mutinies the captain, and they say, like, well, we have to go into fiction. Socrates says, I’ve got to go to fiction in order to make an example. Suppose that the crew has the body, has no knowledge of the headship or of being the pilot, and there’s no naval academies to train a new captain. That’s obviously ridiculous, right? But I think the point there is if you start with a different order in the hierarchy, if you start with a headship of something, and then you go from there, you can get somewhere towards discussion of towards justice. So when you’re talking about the nature of a philosopher king, they list a whole bunch of prerequisites, not the many. Must have clear patterns of the true, just and beautiful, lover of knowledge, good and eternal truth, hate or false, their mean or desires or observes an interest. They list 12 things. They list a bunch of here are the prerequisites, right? And then they give a picture of like a seed. This philosopher is kind of like you start with the right seed and then you got to go to the right soil. I think this whole entire argument that they make doesn’t make sense unless you embrace this idea that there’s some kind of key that has to be present. Like whatever this there’s something that has to be present that it can’t it can’t just come. It can’t emerge bottom up like it. Society is not conducive to the production of philosophers. But they’re explicit, Danny. The key is wisdom. That’s what they’re saying. It’s wisdom. They’re explicit. They’re explicit. So we’re trying to be, I think, pretty precise about what we mean when we’re talking about gnosis then. Right. We were trying to bound like I keep asking for where the definition is. That’s not I don’t I don’t I don’t even think that that is true. Anyway, I’ll just go through the things and we’ll get past them. Change to the state has to be only one or two. That’s it’s raining variable. That’s what they’re talking a lot a lot about a post-homology effectively. Right. Like how do we know things? How do how do we say that we can know a thing? Right. And then they say that we basically don’t have a good way to define knowledge. Right. That’s definitely what the chapter says at the end. No, like they already defined it before that. But sort of philosopher king is the attainment. And they say you can’t have it. So I do. Good at the top of the hierarchy. That’s the definition of philosophy. King that I got out of it. You said it. Can you say that one more time? The big difference to the good at the top of the hierarchy. That’s the function of the philosophy. Okay. That makes sense to me. Anybody disagree with that? Yeah, I like that. That just requires the wisdom to be good. You will burn the truth to keep flowers in youth. Philosopher has a vision of truth. Beauty is the opposite of ugliness. I was like maybe that’s one directional. I’m making a personal note. Like why this directionality and how things relate to each other is. Yeah. Well, that’s asymmetry. That’s correct. The world is asymmetrical. But I had a lot of problems with these. The way that these words were used, at least in my translation. Perspective. Scatter your perception of the contrasting agent. That was a commentary. The connection I made is idolatry is framed as dreaming. So this dreamlike state, I think that’s the state of opinion. It’s literally what idolatry is in some sense. Separating the object from the idea. In that sense, they’re refuting objective material reality. I had this idea in the gym the other day about how music is color for the air. When you listen to a song, it’s like you have this picture that emerges over time. It gets more clear over time. The more you listen to the song, the more you get through the song. Mostly the sound. I don’t think lyrics are super relevant to it. I think that’s what happened when they introduced this idea. Here’s an ideal. We’re going to put forth this idea. We’re going to put it back on the table again. This idea of a leader, then a stronger leader, then a philosopher, now a philosopher king. Every time we get a little bit clearer, it’s a little bit clearer, but we can’t really describe it precisely. They’re going again in Chapter 6 towards the allegory of the sun, where they talk about the upper and lower realms, and they get into the same themes. They’re definitely introducing them from different angles again. It seems to be with slightly higher levels of resolution. That’s the format of the whole book. They make a low-resolution argument in the beginning, and then they say, no, we can’t use a personal argument to understand justice, so we’re going to have to do city. Then they build that city, and they blow it up. Then they start again, and they build a new city, and they blow it up. That’s the whole way through. It’s interesting, right? Because the other thing that happens in 5 is basically the way they get the philosopher king is, unless I said the philosophers rule as kings or those now called kings and chiefs genuinely and adequately philosophize, and political power and philosophy coincide. That’s how they justify this. They say, all right, well, there’s a thing called political power, not politics, political power. There’s a thing called philosophy, and those need to coincide in order to fix this problem of justice, roughly speaking, or to resolve the issue of what is justice, because this isn’t about how to run a city. It’s about justice. That’s how they make the leap. He says, oh, no, you’ve asked me the big question, and now you’re forcing me. I’m not avoiding it, but you’re forcing me into a situation where you’re absolutely going to reject this. Then he gets assurances it’s not going to be rejected. We’re definitely going to listen to you. Then he makes the claim that, nope, because it’s very self-serving, because it’s, oh, philosophers, oh, yeah, it was a coincidence that philosophers get to run the world. That’s how he makes the leap. That’s the thing that makes the leap to the philosopher king idea. No, no, there’s political power, and it needs to be mediated by or crosses with philosophy, which is this love of wisdom, roughly speaking. He basically says that now I’ve left this out of the bag. He basically takes the responsibility and puts it on Glaucon. He says, you’re the one that forced me to say this. This is effectively the same as state and church or the priest king. I don’t think so, because the priest doesn’t have to be wise. Well, but he’s the mediator between the good and the people, right? That’s the same function that the philosopher king has. All leaders have that function. So, yeah, if you’re a leader, right, but the combination of, we’ll say, divine power and political power is a different combination than what Socrates is proposing in the Republic. He says the proper overlap for political power, the proper constraint for political power is philosophy, which is not divine. And again, there’s at least one record. What are you talking about? Like he’s doing the whole sun thing and like the revelation and everything. No, he’s saying it’s clear. He’s not saying it’s divine. They’ve used divine before. They don’t use it here. And again, that’s the important part. Like just before this, right, they invoke Jesus because they’re in the beginning of the argument when he’s setting it up so that he can put the responsibility on Glaucon for him proposing a philosopher king. There’s a reference to Zeus, right? So they’re appealing to Zeus. So that’s not divine. In modern times, we might associate that with religious language or whatever, but they don’t. And that’s the important part. They’re making that. He’s talked about the nature of God at the start of the book, right, or of the Republic. Like, oh, I don’t disagree that all philosophy is seeded in religion. No, no, but he’s got this whole thing about criticism about the gods and that they’re not the true gods and that true gods are static and that philosophy is the means to get to them. Let me do it this way. Yes, philosophy is embedded in religion still. Yes, still agree. No disagreement. They already have people who are ruling by divine right. How would this be a change if it’s not a change? Of course it’s a change. That’s why it is a change. It is a change, but like it is a change in means, not in principle. It’s a total change in principle. Because he’s distinguishing philosophy from religion. Also, I don’t think they were because he was living in a democratic state, but whatever. Whether he’s living in a democratic state or not, he’s separating political power and saying the proper constraint is philosophy, not religion, not science, not a dozen other things. That’s kind of why it’s Gnostic, but I’m still going to go with religious. I don’t think religion is Gnostic. Well, just wait till you get to the metaphor of the cave and the sun and how the sun is informing everything and it’s the source of being. If that’s not God, then I don’t know. That’s not the argument he makes here. No, it is because it’s flowing into that. He’s setting up the argument about the cave. Maybe, but look, their religion is still centered around actual gods. So if he’s not mentioning gods, it’s not religious for him. Yeah, well, you can be stubborn. I just told you he’s talking about the source of the good and that which informs everything. And it’s like if that’s not God. He’s not talking about that here, Manuel. It’s not the argument made in book five is not that argument. I think it’s the same argument. I’m splitting the middle. I don’t know. I think it’s a good question. I mean, the whole theism thing has been a thread that I’ve been curious about the whole book. So we’re only halfway through. You noticed, Danny, right? Did you notice that they keep mentioning Zeus and all these other gods and goddesses throughout the book? Like nobody mentioned that. But I can’t quite get a finger on it. It’s kind of like a professor who you can’t read his political views, right? It’s like, man, I can’t tell if he’s conservative or liberal. He’s doing a good job of sitting in the middle there. Right. But look, it’s easy to tell. Right. I’ll show you. I’ll give you the example. Right. Do you suppose the painter is any less good who draws a pattern of draws a pattern what the fairest human being would be like and renders everything in the picture adequately but can’t prove that it’s also possible that a man to come into being. OK. It’s a that’s part. That’s the argument. That’s the argument. And the response is, and I quote, No, by Zeus, I don’t. So they’re using a religious frame everywhere that logic fails. It’s a failure in logic. Logic can’t resolve that. Rationality can’t resolve that. Reason can’t resolve that. It’s not resolvable using those tools. They make a religious appeal. OK. I agree. I agree that they make religious appeals to punch out when the logic and rationality breaks down. They do that all the time. I totally agree. But I think he does kind of refrain from zooming in too much on that point, though. So in Chapter six, they’re talking about the like fake sophists of the sophists for hire who are like the ones that are corrupted by whatever the beauty standards are and the truth standards are of their day. Basically, like the there are all these seeds of different types of philosophers. They fall in different types of soils. The ones that make it are like exceptional. They’re like they’re so exceptional. It’s like unhuman. It’s like like Jesus level like like characters. There may be more than human who are exceptions. God may save a man. This capital G in this translation, God may save a man, but not his own strength. I don’t know what that means, but that sounds very like like out of the Bible kind of a thing. You know, so they have language like that. But they don’t like zoom in any more than that. They like leave it there. They say like, oh, well, yeah, like there’s this miracle. It’s like this mystery space. But that’s the truth. That was the trope I just gave you. They don’t zoom in on the question of the painter painting the perfect person, right? Or painting a perfect image. They don’t zoom in because they can’t. So they appeal to religion. That’s what they do. All of the underpinnings of the book, including the beginning, and I’m told, although I haven’t read at the end, are religious. The whole text is underpinned and undergirded and contained within a religious argument. Not only religious, because he’s also creating myths. Right. So myths are also a matter by which he steps out of the rationality frame because like he needs to point at something that he can get at with logic. So, yeah, that’s a really good point. We would now call it a myth, but they did not. They what we’re calling a myth in this case, they would call philosophy. And that see, that’s a whopping difference from back then versus now. Like they have this other category, right? There’s kind of this truth category where where you’re being descriptive about things that people can agree happen because they happen independent of a single person. I either not strictly in your imagination. Right. Then you have this other category of these stories that you can’t verify because maybe there was a Troy. Maybe not. Does it matter that there’s a girl golden fleece? I have no idea. Right. But it doesn’t matter how instantiated and independently verifiable reality those things are. Those are myths. But they’re creating, I think, probably creating, although probably not because there’s Pythagoras and all this. Another category, and that category is philosophy, which is kind of the melding of the two. Right. Philosophy is when you have this religion because they had like, you know, 100 religions or something goofy and in ancient Greece, maybe a bunch more. I don’t know. Right. They had all these different gods and all these different ways to worship. Right. But they had to justify within their worship why that worship was OK or good or right. And then philosophy uses terms like virtue. Correct. And value to get you to that point where you’re instantiating a consistency within the religion, even though you’re worshiping different deities with different tell us. And of course, then later Christianity comes along and fixes the issue with with monotheism. Right. And adopts, you know, almost all of this stuff, at least in some form, and modifies it to make it work. Right. And then everybody discounts that goes, you know, we want to go back to the ancient Greeks. They were on the same project. They just failed. Like, it’s not that hard. Everybody doesn’t want to hear that. I’m sure. But they were on the same project as Christianity. They just failed. Christianity took it over with a better conception. And that’s why it just took over Rome. Right. Effectively or took over the entire West or something, including including a good portion of what we now call the Middle East. So then they’re they’re talking about people that have an opinion on they’re stuck in relativism. Right. So they can’t really see the truth. And then it’s like, well, how do you talk to these people? So that was really interesting to me. And I tried to articulate a recipe. So first, it’s affirm the value of the other’s knowledge. Then you say, you know, something, something that you know is what is not cannot be known. And then here, knowledge corresponds to being like that’s the definition that is given there. When people are stuck in in what in truth, a truth, like they’re stuck in a truth and they can’t see something in the opinion. This is how this is your truth busting algorithm. Is that right? No, no, no. These are the people who sit in the cave eventually. Right. So they’re seeing beauty, but they don’t know that beauty is one. Right. They don’t see the unity in beauty. They just find things beautiful. So they’re stuck in relativism effectively. Oh, relativism. That’s right. OK. Right. And so then basically what Plato says is these people are wrong. Right. But how do you how do you help them out? Right. And that’s that’s the way that he constructs the argument to that. Right. So first, they affirm it’s affirming. Right. The thing that you know is real and is of value. Right. Whatever knowledge that you have that is true. Right. And then he’s like, but what is it that you’re knowing? Right. So he’s trying to abstract the knowledge from from their direct experience. Right. And the thing that you’re knowing is that what is right. And what is not cannot be known. So now he’s making two categories. Things that are right being and not being. And then he said he defines knowledge or I don’t know what the word was used. I think it’s epistemic. Right. Like I think that’s actually literally the word that’s used there as corresponding to being. Right. So that’s what knowledge is. Correspondence. Not in my translation at all. That word is not anywhere in this in this translation. OK. Well, this is my translation. He uses what is. Right. That’s it. And to opine is not what is not, which is more interesting to me. Opinion therefore would be neither ignorance or knowledge. It doesn’t seem so. No, it’s before that. Maybe for the year around four seventy six or something. Seventy seven ish. So the right ballpark. Yeah. Well, that’s just he knows something. Is it something that is or is not right? That’s that’s the piece. That’s super important. You got a number. That’s four seventy seven. OK. Probably. Before that leads into that. Yeah. I mean, again, his definition of knowledge is. Right. Since knowledge. Knowledge. Knowledge. My thing is, it’s to do when you know something, you know what is right. And then he goes further on and he says knowledge is corresponding to being right. Knowledge is relative to being and knows being right. So it’s a verb. It’s not it’s not. How far away from that is is that? Because that’s nothing like that is in my translation anywhere. Knowledge is dependent upon what is an ignorance necessarily on what is not. We mustn’t seek also to seek something in between ignorance and knowledge that depends on that which is in between. If there is fact, any such thing. Let me read mine because mine sounds very different. I think is a by the way. And as knowledge corresponded to being and ignorance of necessity to not being for that intermediate between them and not being, there has to be a difference. For that intermediate between them and not being there has to be discovered a corresponding intermediate between ignorance and knowledge. If there can be such question mark very confusing sentence, but he uses all the words that Manuel was using. I don’t know what it means, but it sounds very different even before that. Like that’s that’s like first date. OK, so I’m just going to go to the argument and then we can take it from there. So first what they’re doing is they’re establishing being right and knowledge is your grasp on being right and then they experience non being which you cannot know about because it is not right. So that’s the two extremes right. And then he introduces this concept of opinion. He says, what is opinion? So opinion is neither being nor non being and he uses like 50 lines to establish that. And then he says, well, so opinion is between knowing being and not knowing being and it has. It has. It is about something right. So it has an object or something that that is what that it’s about right. That’s subjected by it right. So he’s comparing it to your ability to sense because he’s also putting it in the context of functionality right. So he’s comparing it to your ability to see right has the domain of sight right effectively right. And your ability to feel as has the domain of feeling and knowledge has the domain of being right. Like it’s about things that are. In my translation just doesn’t use that word. And the difference is between knowledge and ignorance. That’s what they’re defining. And they’re saying opinion is between knowledge and ignorance. That’s what that’s that’s literally what this text says to a word right. But but but ignorance is the state of not knowing right or the unknowable. That’s not how they define it here. Well, then you have a bad translation. I think that pay the picture makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, I think we’re you’re definitely I didn’t deconstruct opinion and knowledge. But I mean, they definitely have those components. I don’t know exactly how they have them arranged in their model of intelligibility. But all those components are there. I mean, I think I think we could probably disagree on the details of epistemic knowledge. But the intelligibility is in the is in the knowledge and not in the ignorance. Right. And the opinion is the thing in between. Right. Yes. Right. Well, yeah. Well, but but but Danny says, well, it’s not really in between because it’s like there’s there’s that’s not a good conception of right. But but but the reason that he’s putting it in between is is that he wants to prove that opinion is about a different domain. Right. So it’s not about being right. And therefore, it’s not true. Right. Because being true is about corresponding to being. And therefore, you need to have knowledge. Right. And then there’s a group of people, which is the biggest group of people. And the biggest group of people, they have what they’re stuck in relativism. Right. So they don’t have a connection to being. And only philosophers, people who love wisdom, have that relationship to to be. So, I mean, the ingredients that I see for sense making that keep coming up is functionality, maybe tell us knowledge or gnosis or something. And then like being. And I think being I don’t know if there’s an aspect of feeling in there. But you need being. No, you need being. You definitely don’t need knowledge. Like that’s the gap. Well, for the creation of abstractions, is that I mean, that’s what abstractions are definition of knowledge is the relationship to being like knowledge is defined by being. I just don’t see that it’s not in here. So I don’t know what to tell you that none of that is in here. Yeah, it’s like the knowledge of the knowledge of the pilot is the one who knows the way of the ship. Right. I mean, that’s the one who can be a good be a good chef. The one who has the knowledge of is, you know, is the one who can who can do the thing. He’s that’s a chef because. No, no, Danny, actually, that’s completely backwards. Right before you know how to sail, you do not have knowledge to sail. And yet you can get in a boat and sail. And that’s the problem. But that’s the business. Right. Well, order matters. Right. Order matters. Right. Do you do you have the knowledge before you do the thing or do you only have the knowledge after you do the thing? In other words, after the isness, right, or the implementation of the thing, maybe then you have the knowledge, but you can’t need the knowledge before you do the thing in order to do the thing, because then you could never do the thing. It’s really not that hard. And that’s and that’s why I’m saying it’s actually really important that it’s not that way, because it can’t be that way. Well, I don’t know. It seems to be that they say. You’re just making your flattening iterative process. Like, I don’t I don’t know why you’re putting it in order in sequence. Like you have certain knowledge, right? Like this. This is what for fake ease. Acceptation is about right. Like you have certain knowledge of things and you can accept the knowledge of one thing to participate in another domain. And that’s the way that you can sail if you have never sailed before, because you have knowledge that you can apply within the sailing. But I think it’s don’t have that knowledge. You’re not going to be able to sail. It all seems to be driven by necessity. Like whatever the uniting principle is, like why are that? Why are the ship people together? Why are we all together? What’s the uniting principle of the body that seems to drive where the attunement goes to the group? It’s all final cause. Yeah, but that attunes where attention is going to go. Right. And so that’s going to and that’s why it’s a loss. Right. And so and part of the attunement goes hand in hand with the capacities. If you’re if you have the capacities of a guardian, if you maybe you have the cape, if a certain person with different capabilities is going to have the capacity to sail. If you have the capabilities, is going to have a different purpose and they’re going to their attunement is going to be differently. I think they’re saying that that’s the nature of how we define these concepts. Opinion versus fact, you know, no knowledge. I think I think I think there I think there is an aspect of relations, relationality to being in the definition. Knowledge versus ignorance versus opinion. It’s OK. Right. It’s that middle ground. OK. So this is the method of correspondence to being and has a sphere of effect. Right. So this is side. This this is knowledge. This is opinion. Right. Or well, opinion, not effectively, but it’s but it’s not as opinion, but but that’s that’s the framework right that they’re working. Right. So there’s there’s something that is to be grasped by you. That’s the framework that they’re working. So there’s something that is to be grasped by you. And then there’s a means by which I grasp it. And sight is one means by which I grasp things. And knowledge is another means by which I grasp things. And that’s the way that they defined it. It’s literally in the text, in my text. So I don’t know what to say, Mark. See if you can fix this example. When you see a trash can, you know it’s a trash can, even though you don’t know why it’s a trash can. And if you threw litter on the floor, somebody’s gonna scold you and say, hey, put your trash in the trash can. You know better, right? You know better. So put the trash in the trash can. That knowledge is a relationship. It’s like, yeah, it’s just a little bucket, right? But it’s what really is the relationship to the way of being. We don’t conduct ourselves that way. And that’s what somebody’s saying when they say, hey, you know that, right? I think that’s kind of what it sounds like, the nature of knowledge. It sounds like the nature of knowledge. That’s what I’m hearing at least. What? I don’t know. Is there anything there? Well, I agree. Like he seems to know. I think that’s correct. Yeah. What do you think, Mark? Have you had enough of knowledge here? Shall we move on or? I have no problem with knowledge. That was never the issue. The issue was the relationship between knowledge and being and how that plays out, which again, it’s not in my text, so I don’t have any comment on it at that point. Okay. But like this piece was like 15 pages for me. It was like a lot. It’s 15 pages for me too, dude. It just doesn’t use that word and it doesn’t make those inferences or relationships anywhere. So back to Adam, what was the Greek word again? Was it episteme or? It wasn’t gnosis. It was epistemos. Yeah, right. Right. Episteme. So an epistemos is how we come to know things, right? Yes, in all the translations you find it’s something akin to science or knowledge, scientia. But it’s how we come to it. It’s not the thing in the, it’s not a thing. Yeah, to know, to have knowledge of something. That’s probably a modern issue, right? To have. Yeah, well, it is all modern. It is, it’s having modern. Yeah. But that’s the problem with the translations all around. Anyway, I literally wrote in the sideline here when I started reading today epistemology. So I like, I just distilled that out of it. Doxa seems to be opinion or judgment. And of course, opinion comes from Latin. And when you look at the Latin etymology of opinion, it is to judge, to judge something, to. Right, right, exactly. And that’s why he’s making the distinction between knowledge, ignorance, and opinion, right? Because there is a mode of approach applied in judgment that is different from knowledge and different from opinion entirely. I mean, different from ignorance entirely. Because with ignorance, you don’t have a mode of approach because it’s not a thing that you can interface with in any reasonable fashion, right? You can’t reason about it at all. Yeah, so the way that I saw they resolved it, right? Like they put opinion as like a distance, right? Like they made a spatial reference because that’s what between is, right? So that was really curious. And then they also made it between being and nonbeing, right? So it’s between knowing and not knowing and being and not being. And then they start talking about the object that is subject of opinion, right? So that’s the sphere. And objects will be judged in either extreme. So yeah, well, they used this to create this disturbed realm. So they used this to create this disturbed realm. This disturbed realm of things, right? Which is the realm of opinion. And so that’s where they break the spatial thing, right? So they’re like, it’s in the middle, but it’s also a separate thing, right? Like it’s not correct to look at it as the thing in the middle. Then they kind of leave it. And then they start talking about lovers of opinion versus lovers of knowledge, right? And the lovers of knowledge are philosophers because that’s what allows them to be a philosopher. And so they’re giving, they’re giving, being given their identity by what informs them, right? So this is, I guess, what all these epistemological people are trying to figure out, right? Like, okay, what is the way that I’m being informed? Because that’s how I can choose my identity, right? So that’s the way they’re trying to figure out, right? My identity, right? So that’s the modern game, effectively. And then I split it up into two things, right? Because like you have what informs, right? Like the knowledge, right? Like the true knowledge of being or your opinion. But then there’s also a means by which it informs you, right? Like how does it inform you? And then the third thing that I added to that is in what context, right? Like in, maybe the context is the telos or maybe the context is your historical grounding. Like I’m not really sure. But that would maybe be a good model to triangulate where a person is at. And that was what I had on book five. Okay. Yeah, just kind of repeat what you just said that I heard you say is opinion is the space between being and nonbeing. When you like, you don’t have a complete grasp on something, you have like kind of a grasp, right? So it seems to me like it grounds out on confidence. Like once I’m competent and I mapped all the territory, like whether it’s a game or a game, sports game, whatever, like, oh, I’ve been here, done that. Or even if it’s different, I’ve mastered the procedures. So it’s like, I’ve mastered the procedures. That seems… But that’s insufficient. To constitute knowledge. You wouldn’t resolve anything. Like now you have to define confidence. You haven’t changed anything. Just created another thing to resolve. All right, but I don’t think it’s, is it resolvable? I don’t know. I don’t know if these things are resolvable. But that’s the thing, right? Like it started off with being able to see the unity, right? Like, okay, so there’s, what was it? Beauty or whatever, like what they were using. And it’s like, if you see how all the beauty is the same, right? How they’re all participating in beauty, you have a different relationship to beauty than the beauty of the world. So it’s like, you have to be able to see the beauty. You have a different relationship to beauty than someone who finds a flower beautiful, right? And like someone who finds a flower beautiful can have like an awesome relationship to flowers, right? Like they can know way more about how to be with flowers, right? They can have all these skills, right? But it’s insufficient. Like it’s insufficient to have knowledge about the specific because you need to have knowledge about the universal in order to contextualize it from the emergence. I see. I see. That’s a good, that’s a great observation. I agree with that. That’s like a key insight. Yeah. That’s what the philosopher is, right? Like the philosophy is the drive to find the emanation in which the thing is participating, right? And that is also the skill that allows you to be on the top of the hierarchy because you’re looking for the top of the hierarchy so that it can flow back into the hierarchy. Right. And therefore to get at justice, we must go through wisdom, yeah, which is where we’re going. Right. Well, we’ve got, go ahead. I was going to just start winding down and maybe ask if Pazani or Adam had anything or Pazani, Adam, you guys have any thoughts? I’ll just say for my part, what stood out to me in terms of not necessarily the knowledge, wisdom distinction, but further back, the Helenes and the barbarians, there’s something interesting going on there, especially perhaps, perhaps I haven’t read ahead, I don’t know if this is going to turn out, but this kind of enemy, what’s the place of access what’s the place of an enemy in this? And maybe that’ll be expended upon, but that’s an important thing to pay attention to, the Helenes being the Greeks and the barbarians being anyone who is not a Greek. And also to say the historical context for that is that they’re, they’re saying that the Helenes should treat each other very well, but it is known in the past that the Greeks did on occasion enslave one another after defeating their enemies. Usually it was done by kings or tyrants. So again, just to put it in perspective, what they’re talking about is an ideal that they’re putting forward. It’s not actually a reality that they’re living in. And they used a bunch of frames, right? So they used slavery, they used property, they used subjugation, right? Well, anyway, I just want to say thanks for the invite. It was cool to listen in and certainly would like to try and be here for the next one. Yeah, glad to have you. Thanks for coming. We’ll probably do a quick wind-up real quick. Manuel, you want to lead that real quick and then we’ll break? Yeah, so we’re going to go back to intentions, which probably everybody completely forgot. We need to have a flashing screen. But I was going to look at the bigger picture. Danny was relating things to domicile and home. Adam was doing the historical and observing from the other perspectives that people had and Mark wanted to do an exploration of Book 5. So we can get our intention and see how we implemented our intentions. We’ll do a small reflection on that. And then things that caught our eye, right, or had emotional resonance and try to fit that in our daily lives. And maybe at the end set an intention for how to go into the week. So yeah, take your time. So I think there’s knowledge, opinion, and there’s definitions, right? I think the field is a lot bigger. So the intention that I set for myself is to clearly distinguish the relationship to what people are talking about so that they can be in right relationship to it. I think that discernment, developing the discernment and a capacity to relate to that would be good. Because that was the thing that I found important, right? He went through this recipe to basically initiate someone to this concept that they’re living merely in a world of opinion and that relativism isn’t true. And I think that’s maybe one of the most important quests that we have in the modern times. Or considering maybe I don’t have as firm a grasp of this as I think, and perhaps I’m in the space of opinion, is a useful attitude or stance to have for all kinds of reasons, right? But I mean, that’s kind of like the color that you might walk around with is, you know what, like, am I in the space of opinion right now? Because I might be. That’s something that just sort of resonates with me. Maybe I don’t need to worry about the mechanics, the details of the mechanics of intelligibility, but like, you know when you’re paying attention to the right relationships. You know what I mean? It’s more of a, I don’t know. Yeah, for me personally, it’s not that big of a problem because I know when I know and I know when I don’t know, right? That doesn’t mean that my knowledge is always correct, but like I have awareness of where I’m standing in relationship to that, right? That gives you also a sense of security, right? Because now you’re grounded in something when you’re acting. That’s the definition of wisdom in the Apologion. Knowing what you know and knowing what you don’t know something. That’s the revelation that Socrates has that really says, I know, I know nothing, which is a total misquote and completely inaccurate. This revelation is, oh, this other man doesn’t know when he’s speaking from opinion, effectively. Right. And I think that’s congruent with the book, right? Because like, in effect, right, like the quest that they’re going to go on is to separate opinion from knowledge, right? Or find true knowledge, which is basically the same thing because you come from the cave, right? You come from opinion. We’ll find out. I’m already ahead of you, Mark. I’m in the audio book, eight and a half, although, yeah, audio book, no good. I’m not reading ahead. So if you are, you should be ahead of me. All right. Yeah, but I’m not catching much. We good? Go ahead and stop here.