https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=i3_qYaLO9ck
Welcome everybody back to book six Here’s my notes on book six so A little bit unprepared. I think I’d listen to it twice in the audiobook. So I should have sufficient content Not too much details Yeah What a week I should get my notes I have been starting to think differently during the week I’m working on this this relational perspective Trying to To get to get a better grasp what it what it means to be in relationship What it means to be a person what it means to relate to a person but what it requires of you If we go back well, I want to relate to Bigger picture in the book, right? So there’s a Well, frankly talks about these levels of of Reality that that need to come together All right, and that’s basically what the Republic is is about right like there’s these levels of reality we came to the Basically the world stage right and then goes to the city and then it goes to the individual They they need to commune in some sense They’re trying to Provide well, they say that the philosopher is is the one that can hold This all right. So I guess I’m I’m trying to take the perspective of the philosopher Which which is Which is which is really hard and if if I start comparing my conception to what they presented at the beginning of book six, I Don’t know if I’m in agreement with with the way that they’re framing things so yeah So what’s what’s my intention now I Guess I guess I want to get a taste of the fruit of their framing Because I feel like I’m a little bit disconnected Yeah, Mark Yeah, well, I mean I think The interesting part about say book five and and six in particular is now it now are into more pure abstractions it’s been moving more abstract, right and So it’s harder to to relate that to You know what’s going on in the moment? I think that’s rather deliberate right? The book has been working in this direction for quite some time So, yeah my efforts to sort of integrate are getting harder we’ll say But at the same time my ability to explain unrelated things is getting much easier I would say so that’s so that’s good and Yeah, I mean my intent with this is the same right just to kind of sit with it and see You know what what can be learned about the method of justice and you know in particular? Get some more flavor because six is hard Five might be hard, but this is really hard So, yeah Well, I haven’t I haven’t really been thinking explicitly about the Republic too much during during the week I’ve been basically working But I think it’s been a little bit more difficult to get a sense of the The Republic and But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking Probably about stuff that’s that’s been going on there. I mean the last last time we talked about I think Kind of Was it individualism? If it wasn’t last time then it happened in the intervening times and I was Sort of meditating on that and You know in the When one’s eyes close to others, it isn’t just the public It’s almost like socializing Situation One side the way things are Thinking together is both It’s and and understand from other people’s insights and maybe contribute my own as well. So, yeah. And Danny. So I guess the way that I feel similarly to Manuel and the sense of the taste, like to get a sense of the taste of the fruits of their framing would be useful because like I think it is getting more abstract. Like gaining a first and understanding of this world of forms, that’d be like kind of one first intention, but yeah, my efforts to exact have gotten harder as well. So like in terms of, I’m not really seeing, like when I read this throughout the weeks in general, it seems to be a little bit more mechanical, these like mental models. So first of all, just having kind of a difficulty finding tools to take out of this, but I also feel I don’t understand it. I think I’m probably missing some of the, I’m probably missing a key or an important part. Maybe that’s why I can’t really, I don’t really see applications for some of these, some of the content here. So I guess first is just resolving the confusion. There’s other things besides that, but I’ll leave it at that. So I’ll just agree and say, yeah, taste understanding some of the applications of how they’re framing things and how that’s useful. I mean, it seems to be, like chapters five, six, and seven have to be connected in some way. I mean, they are related when they’re going from the divided line to the sun, to the cave. You know, I’m just, I must be missing an important aspect in that evolution of ideas though. So I guess that’s all I got. Yeah. So, there’s this first return to the initial question, right? Like what is it true and what’s the false philosopher, right? Like this is, they posed a question, right? Like, is it good to, is it good to be good or like, it doesn’t profit to be good? And now they’re basically at the ends where they’re defining, well, like, what’s the person that can actually express the good? Because that would be the philosopher, right? Like, so they’re trying to distinguish between people who are on that path, but they’re misguided, and then people that are on that path that are true. And then, then they don’t think it’s enough to have a true vision. They also wanna unite the true vision with excellence, right? So there’s an embodiment aspect that they’re trying to bring in. So they wanna have the best of two worlds in some sense, right? Like the spiritual, right? Like the higher and then the embodied, they need to come together to form the Superman effectively. The Ubermensch would not be a wrong use here, actually. So the philosophers love truth of an eternal nature, right? So then making a distinction between things that are contingent upon the implementation, and then there’s things that are not contingent. But I think it’s worth pointing out, right? They introduced this idea of the proper ruler as a philosopher. And now they’re going through the process, at least in the first half of book six, of describing what that looks like in terms of, well, what is a philosopher? Because there’s obviously, there’s improper philosophy, there’s those sophists out there, and look what they’re doing. And they will sway you with their argument. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll basically sway you with their deeds, right? In other words, they’ll beat you. It’s like, what, wait? And you see that. And their arguments are all of the type of either overshooting on praise or overshooting on criticism, right? There’s nothing moderate about it, which I find all that interesting. And also the pure philosopher is a bad educator. And I think that’s a mistranslation. I think they mean bad teacher. But, and even that may not get the essence of what they’re getting at, right? Because they’re talking about the man who knows everything about the beast, because he lived with the beast and brought the beast up and everything, but that’s not the person that can educate you about things. And it’s like, well, that’s an interesting way to frame it, unless you’re making the distinction between say training and education, and you’re meant to say training, right? And education would be something closer to apprenticeship, in which case that’s the perfect thing. Master’s to apprentices are not teachers in some way, right? Or not mere teachers or something. So bringing that out and I haven’t finished, but it sounds like they’re gonna use that again for sure, right? Or use that in the context of how to get a philosophical being to manifest. Yeah. So, yeah, to go back to the preconditions, there’s an integrity that you get by binding yourself to the truth, right? So there’s no room for misalignment. Like that’s basically deadly sin. And then my book said that there’s no corner of illiberality within the philosopher, which is really, really strange to me. Like, I don’t know what you guys have, what word was used for you guys in the translation, but. Yeah, what was the word that you had? Illiberality, like this is like a couple of page from the start of book six. I had the same phrase. So I actually bulleted pointed out all the descriptions, any description of a philosopher, I put in a list of bullet points. I came up with 12 initial ones and then two later. You want me to? Okay. Well, I mean, not the many must have clear patterns of the true, just and beautiful lover of the knowledge of the eternal and of true, all truth. Number four, hater of falsehood, meaner, his meaner desires are absorbed in the interest of knowledge. So like subordinated, I guess, like subordinate desires. Spectators of all time and all of all existence. So they kind of have like a long space and time horizons. In the magnificence of their contemplation, the life of man is nothing to them, is as nothing to them. Death is not fearful. Of a social gracious disposition, equally free from cowardice and arrogance, learns and remembers easily. They have harmonious, well-regulated minds. Truth flows to them sweetly by nature. And then I have two more by corollary. I said, must not yield to opinion, follows the gentle and compulsive, follows the gentle compulsion of exile or death. So I think later as they kind of started to connect some dots, I inferred that like they tend to be outcast characters and stuff like that. And they tend to be, anyway, I put 492 down, I don’t know where I… Yeah, so the words that they were using, why, I don’t get the elaborality in your vision. But the illiberal is just basically saying, if you draw a line, you have to keep the line. Right, which? I agree. Yeah, that is correct. And therefore you can’t, right? Because what they’re saying here is that, and you too must of course also consider something else when you’re going to judge whether a nature is philosophic or not. So you mustn’t let its partaking in the liberality get by you unnoticed or petty speeches, which is of course most opposite to a soul that is always going to reach out for the whole and for everything divine and human. And so he’s drawing that line between, we’ll say, people who are in the city and merely in the city and philosophers who are reaching outside of everything, including themselves. Well, the way I understood it is that the elaborality is related to the exclusion of a potential. Right, so you mustn’t let that go by you unnoticed. That there’s an exclusion there. Yep. Yeah, but that would preclude you from being a philosopher. Like that was the way I read it. So if you ever say no to a thing, like a hard no, you’re not a philosopher, which I don’t, that doesn’t seem true. Like, I don’t just, because now you can’t privilege. They’re not talking about philosophers, right? And what you must now of course consider also is something else when you’re going to judge whether a nature is philosophic or not. They’re not talking about whether someone is a philosopher. They’re talking about nature and its aspect to philosophy. And I think what he’s saying is you can’t judge that. Like, because it’s the human that’s philosophic, not nature. Yeah, and there’s no card in the book that says that you can’t judge that. And then no cardness or meanness, that’s the word that I had, but I think Danny had a different word than meanness. But that was also like, like what is mean? Like, like cardness, I guess. But that’s part of the format of the book again, where they’re going to absurdity constantly, right? This is another chapter, a book rather, that’s just full of, it’s just book six in particular seems full of these dichotomy assertions that are there to be absurd. Certainly that must be true. Like it’s that, certainly that must be true thing just absolutely cracks me up. And you see that laying out in the beginning when they’re talking about philosophy, right? Or the nature of philosophy or the nature of a philosopher, maybe both of those things, right? That’s what they’re pointing at in the beginning of six is what is the nature of philosophy so we can figure out the nature of the philosopher, right? And that’s, there’s a lot of, man, the first half of book six two is just shocked, full of references to the gods. I think there are four. It’s like, what is going on here? They just keep hitting the wall on the logic and inference path and then having to appeal to some divine nature or other. Yeah, so the other thing that I had is love of learning. And this is again, some sort of crazy absurd definition, proportion mind that moves spontaneously towards whatever needs to move to. It’s like, well, like this is for Vicky’s relevance realization, Plato, like don’t do this. But yeah, it all ended in a fool, right? Which means a holistic and perfect, which means of maximum quality, participation in being. And I kind of like that, right? Like I think that is actually pretty good definition. If that would be a thing that you could actually observe. I guess you call it grace, right? Like in some sense. I mean, they’re definitely pointing towards some form of integration. I mean, in all of these, so they list all these features of what’s required to be a philosopher. And like when you were saying, well, what’s meanness? And I think, oh, well, elementary school bully, right? It’s somebody who would like, what is causing suffering to elevate themselves or something like that. It’s like, when they describe what’s necessary of a philosopher, they’re like, well, I’m not going to be a philosopher. I’m going to be a philosopher. When they describe what’s necessary of a philosopher, they also listen to like a hater of falsehood. So they do list some things, which if you try to think about what is that in isolation, I can’t really imagine like, what is a hater of falsehood? Like, you have to define that in terms of contrast. It’s like, oh, well, it’s like to oppose the what? Things like that are in the way of truth or inhibiting truth. Like, what is that even, right? It’s kind of like trying to, you know, to say like, there’s a lot of, it’s like a superposition, right? A lot of these concepts, I mean, I don’t know if that’s, that’s a fair way to think about them. No, no, no, I think it’s different, right? It’s like, okay, what’s the measure by which you sort information that comes at you, right? So because you can say, well, I sort information that comes at me by what’s useful for me, right? Like, that’s one way. Or I sort the information that comes at me by means of how I can please my wife, right? Like, there’s many ways that I can sort this information and privilege, right? But what he’s saying is like, your highest value is being truthful, right? So the first filter that you have upon engaging with information is that you don’t engage with information that is disrupting your relationship with truth. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t do that, but like, it’s the value that you hold that allows you to develop in a certain way. And if you have a different value, then you cannot have that development because you’re gonna develop in a different direction. And he says that the soul is ever longing after the whole of things, both divine and human. So in processing information, there’s a soul as a starting point, it seems like in their model, right? And the soul has a longing or a disposition or a bent to it. It has a longingness. And then there seems to be the two planes, a divine plane and a human plane, which is this kind of leads into their model of what the dotted line or the sun, I don’t remember which one we get into here, right? Where you have the realm of which, well, I’ll let you lead there when you think it’s time. But I mean, it seems to me like, oh, before we get even, sorry, before we even get to the Mutant Need Ship Captain, I think that is also about order as well. I think, which is Ethan brought to my attention last week. So I think this is all about like order and hierarchy, but I’m missing kind of the, I think the detail in, you know, I think this seems highly technical to me and I think I’m missing what it’s trying to get at. Well, like this first list, and I guess we’ll get there now, right? Gets criticized within the meta conversation, right? It’s like, hey, Socrates, like, can you really do what you’re doing? Cause like, I don’t like your move here cause you’re dragging us along, right? And what Socrates is doing? Well, he’s just giving you frames, right? And like, he’s like, not fully exploring the frames. He’s not justifying the frames, right? And he’s just asking for agreement. And this is the thing that Mark was remarking about, right? Like they’re doing that in the whole of the book, but now he gets called out. I was like, the way that you’re doing it now is not okay. Cause you’re leading us towards a conclusion and you’re just slipping in, well, you’re basically smuggling Jesus. That’s what he’s saying. You’re smuggling the answer in the framing and then Socrates agrees. It’s just like, yeah, I agree that what I’m doing is not okay, but he’s still doing that. Are you commenting on that? They make a comment that says like, hey, we’re not even arguing content. You’re just so much more skilled at arguing than us. We’re not gonna play your word game. Are you, is that what you’re commenting on? Yeah, but that’s not what he’s saying. Right. He’s saying in the game that you’re playing, you’re moving the bar and I cannot observe what you’re doing because it’s like, there’s so much happening at once, right? And you’re just asking me to agree with these little parts, right? So you’re giving me these breadcrumbs, but every breadcrumb is missing, right? Like it’s missing the mark in some fundamental sense. And if you have the row of breadcrumbs all missing the mark, you’re not gonna get to the place that you wanna go. That’s the criticism. And that’s the absurdity, right? Like that, and it’s like, well, yeah, like why would you think you can do that, right? But on the other hand, like what’s the alternative? Like how would you structure your argument differently than that? So I think that’s the collapse that he’s in, right? Well, that is his argument. He’s not gonna be able to do that. He’s gonna be like, oh, I’m gonna do this. Well, that is his argument. He basically says, what else am I supposed to do? Right, and the answer is, oh, fair enough. And then basically they go back to this idea of the philosopher and they say, well, either they’re gonna follow this path of breadcrumbs and they’re gonna end up somewhere lost, right? Or they’re gonna follow the path of breadcrumbs and they’re gonna end up impotent, right? And one of them is corrupt and the other one is useless. So why are we having this conversation at all? That’s where he starts the parable of the boat to explain that it’s even more fucked up than just that. Right, but that’s an argument for hierarchy. The whole boat thing is just, you need hierarchy. Hierarchy is no option. And you can’t drag the highs down because then you just get disaster. I mean, that’s, the boat owners, right? They flatten the world to boat owner and everybody on boat. And then they say, but that, you know, you’d have to drag the boat owner down too. And then it’s like, yeah, now we live in this kind of world down too and then it’s like, yeah, now we live in this equality chaos hell again. Yeah, well, and then you’d have to lift someone up and then the people that need to do the lifting up are incapable of discerning who needs to be lifted up. And then, and I don’t know if I like this move, but the one that is supposed to be lifted up cannot ask to be lifted up. And I’m like, they can’t? No, I agree. Hey, you see that all the time. Well, and that’s the definition of a good leader. Like everybody says this, right? The only person we want, say running for president is the person who doesn’t want to be president. Yeah, that would be good. Yeah, that’s kind of everywhere in the culture. Everybody has a sense that that’s actually the way it should go. Yeah, but like, there’s something like, I get the sentiment, but I just don’t agree. Like at a certain point, you have to take responsibility, right? Like you have to say, well, You don’t have to take responsibility for the office. Like that is the point. It’s like, if your goal is to be a leader and you point at being a leader, then you’re not fit to be a leader because your goal has to be passed out. It has to be beyond that. That’s the only way to instantiate being a good leader is to be that much higher up the stack of virtues and values than mere leadership. And then you’re able to take responsibility because what you can’t do is be a leader, is take the responsibility of being a leader. That makes no sense. Like that’s not how that works. You’re taking responsibility for the thing that you’re leading and that may be justice or it may be the city, right? But it’s not the leadership. The leadership’s an interim step in essence. And that I think is what they’re getting at. Yeah, well, like if you’d argued in a way that you cannot express your argument for needing to be a leader in a way that would convince them and therefore you would not speak up, I’d probably agree from that angle. No, the act of convincing them points lower. And that’s the problem is that, no, you don’t even wanna convince them because you don’t wanna point lower. You never wanna point lower. A good leader will never point at leadership ever. I think that’s probably correct. A good leader probably won’t ever point at leadership. They’ll point higher, not lower. And if you point higher than leadership, you’re not pointing at leadership, right? And then you have something to lead that you clearly actually care about. And yeah, you always wanna crown the person king who refuses to be king on some moral grounds, right? That’s the guy, that’s always your guy. And that’s kind of part and parcel. I think also you have to look at the book in context and who it’s for. It’s obviously not for philosophers. It’s obviously not a philosophical text to train philosophers. That’s why they’re using the dichotomies and the absurdities and the overly simplified arguments and admitting in the text that they’re overly simplified arguments that are absurd. They’re doing that because their audiences are not deep thinkers, right? But they’re trying to help the not so deep thinkers to recognize the sophists. And how do you do, look, if the sophists all have an IQ of 130 and most people don’t have an IQ of 130, right? Because that’s the way the IQ is scaled by definition, right? Then how do you not be vulnerable to sophists? Oh, well, they’re giving those people tools for that. They’re giving those people tools for justice, right? Because what they’re pointing out is, oh, it actually doesn’t take a genius to figure this out. That’s been the theme throughout the book. You can use very simple examples to disprove some of these sophists and their ridiculous arguments about justice that always happens to end with them being in charge, right? And yet at the same time, they think, at least in the beginning, it seems correct that philosophers should be in charge. And so now they have to differentiate between, say, true philosophers and sophists. And again, the audience is not other people in the group, right, it’s kind of presumed and it’s very subtle, but it’s presumed in the text that, well, everybody knows who the sophists are. We all know, we can all see the sophists. It’s other people that are fooled by that. And so that means that that’s what the book, that’s the audience for the book. The audience for the book isn’t the elite of Greece philosophy. They already see things clearly according to them. And fair enough, maybe they did, right? And so the writing really is geared towards these other people. Yeah, as mentioned, they keep bringing up the majority. Well, the majority of people are gonna think that the philosophers are worthless, but the majority of people, they keep bringing up the majority and saying how they’re not gonna be able to tell the difference between sophists and true philosophers. Right. There’s something I think might be worth bringing up here. Bible 4B, I’ll read this paragraph real quick. We said, I believe that in order to get the finest possible view of these matters, we need to take a longer road that would make them plain to anyone who took it, but that it was possible to give the demonstrations of what they are that would be up to the standard of the previous argument. So to what you guys were saying a little earlier, there’s actually a little footnote here in my book, and it points back to book four. We’ll never get a precise answer using a present method of argument, although there was another longer and fuller road that does lead to such an answer, but perhaps we can get an answer that’s up to the standard of our previous statements and inquiries. I have a little footnote, I have a little note there that I wrote, and it’s kind of stating that there’s a limit to dialogue. They’re acknowledging that. Yes. Exactly. They’re saying, you’re right, they’re saying exactly that there’s a limit to what discussion can get you to. In the same way, they’re saying that there’s a limit to what somebody who say knows an animal by dealing with it all the time can do, right? They can’t be, they call it educator in my book, but I think it’s teacher, honestly. Yeah. This is the second time he said that a longer road that would make them plain to anyone. And back here in book four, he says the same thing, another longer and fuller road. Obviously, this is a dialogue, so we can’t do the long, that would be through over a large period of time and participation. And I think the move there is setting a side room for true philosophers who have walked the longer road, while still making everything, we’ll say, accessible to the, if you want to say common man. I think common man is the best way to talk about it, right? And then, oh, good, Adam’s back. And then I think the important part here, because I have to ask Adam the question. So in this timeframe, Adam, are we in the Athenian democracy? You’re muted somehow. Is that your USB broken again? No, no, I’m okay, cool. But during Socrates’ lifetime, you had, I think, what was called the rule of the five tyrants, I think. Oh, that was the five tyrants, okay. So this is, obviously, because this is, within Socrates’ lifetime, it’s contemporary. I’m not sure when the Republic takes place, but this happens. Yeah, it’s around the Peloponnesian wartime, you have Athens, there is a period, and I don’t know how long the period lasts, but I think it’s, yeah, that’s all I can really say. So there is an overthrow of the Athenian democracy at this time. It would have played, it would have been on the minds of the people in this discussion. Okay, well, that’s good, because as we were just talking about, they keep referencing the masses and their beliefs and what they would and wouldn’t be swayed by. Yeah, yeah. It seems like I remember Lanterne and Jack saying something about this, this was written after the revolution or a bunch of chaos that happened, but it takes place before, and some of the characters in the Republic were played roles in that revolution. That’s right. Yeah, they did, right. That’s, yeah, you’re right. He did say that, I remember that now. That’s quite good. Yeah, if you want another treaty on the Republic. Dr. Lanterne and Jack on YouTube and Ancient Greece Declassified Podcast, excellent treatment of the Republic, that’s for sure. Yeah, and this happens because of the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War. So that’s why that whole scenario is set up. So this happens after that is the case, after that happened. And it was as a result of Athens loss in the Peloponnesian War. So I don’t know how much that impacts the sort of discussion they’re having in terms of kind of the philosopher king as well, because obviously they have that in mind as well. Ethan mentioned that pointed to this idea that words are never gonna be enough or dialectic is always gonna be limited. I just wanted to point back towards in chapter five, remember when it was at least in Mark’s translation, the bloom, use the words heuristic versus dialectic. They keep bringing that up when we were talking about reasoning versus disputing or fact versus opinion or men versus women. Back when chapter five, we were talking about how to divide and bring the right distinctions out about things. And then they keep saying like pointing to or suggesting that like, okay, well, like I recall them saying that this heuristics are cutting corners or using shortcuts is obviously limited. But it seemed like earlier they were pointing towards this dialectic thing that would be like an answer. Oh, like, oh, but that can’t be the Hegelian dialectic because Hegel’s 1700s and this is 300 BC, obviously, right? He interrupted the platonic dialectic. Okay, so this is a platonic dialectic and that’s their solution for ascending levels. This is, is that what they’re, is that basically part of their model here of? I don’t think so at all, but I’m not a scholar here for sure. My understanding of dialectic was it was more or less, well, and look, this whole book is like that, right? It’s surely if this were true, then this person wouldn’t engage and therefore the whole thing is A and B, the whole thing, right? It’s absurd, it’s absurd on purpose. And so they’re not going up and down levels, but they are using it for high contrast. Right, like, sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. No, but yeah, right, so go ahead. I got the definition. So the platonic word dialectic is the investigation of eternal ideas, right? So this is dialogue, Verbecky’s dialogue, basically. Well, dialogue is an emergence from good dialectic and if you get it, you’re lucky, it’s not something you can force, right? To be a little fair to Verbecky. So he says from the dialectic, if you’re fortunate, will emerge the D logos, which is where each party gets something that they couldn’t have gotten otherwise, which I think is an overly strict and ridiculous definition for other reasons, but also completely unnecessary because the act of engagement is sufficient to strengthen you one way or the other, in my opinion. So it’s kind of like, oh no. Yeah, like the distinction between dialogals and dialectic is more so the capacity of the person doing it than actually a functional difference. Yeah, the capacity and the luck, right? If they actually engage. Well, no, I would argue that if you engage and if you have the right orientation, that you’re necessarily gonna get a revelation, like the question is whether that’s valuable or whatever, but that’s different. Well, and the question is you can’t, like it’s not a question, you can’t determine any of that upfront and you can’t make sure it happens. Like you have no control over it. It really is, in that sense, it’s luck because it’s all unknowable. All those components are unknowable. But that’s also what I mean by his definitions are overly strict. One person got something out of it, like, oh, it went to my live stream last night on hallucination. Like a bunch of people got something out of it and one person got absolutely nothing. Maybe not nothing, like maybe a door was open, but in the moment there was certainly no realization of what was happening. So to go back to the ship, two things. The ship example was also supposed to exemplify the horrors of being a philosopher. So it’s like, oh yeah, you’re just there like you have all this agency effectively and you can’t use it. There’s no receptivity in the people to receive what you have to offer. Yeah, maybe that’s like the worst kind of suffering in some sense where you’re like, oh, this could be better but you can’t make it happen. It’s just like, nope, it’s not gonna happen. And then the other aspect of that was, yeah, the people need to want to be led. I think when we look at the function of the text, I think it’s also trying to convince people to be one to be led. Like stop being stubborn and listen to the good guys. I’m sorry, I have a… I’m just gonna explain something like, like the body has to accept the philosopher and if they don’t, all the philosophers or the people with the potential to be a philosopher just end up becoming hermits and completely useless, actually completely useless to society instead of the type of useless that the majority thinks that sophists are but actually useless because they can’t do anything. Like living in a barrel and masturbating in the morgue. Yeah, parasites at that point. But I think that’s why the historical context that Adam brought is important, right? So it’s not like they haven’t seen this happen, right? They’re describing the analogy in terms of a ship but it actually happened to Athens. Like all the stuff they’re describing actually occurred in their lifetime, right? And then the stories of what came before there too. And so they have a very good history and they have a very good idea of what they’re talking about and what it leads to and they’ve been able to examine it, right? And figure out these analogies and why they’re important. I’m not sure, was this covered in the text? Was it mentioned that one of Socrates’ pupils was one of the 30 tyrants? It hasn’t been mentioned yet, but I can recall. All right, well then let me just say one of Socrates’ students was one of the leaders of the 30 tyrants. So, and I’m not sure maybe he was at this conversation. He’s not named, I don’t think. But if the name Critias comes up, he’s definitely part of one of Plato’s other dialogues. They would have known people who took part in that in Athens. Yeah, so now I ran out of stuff. I ran a little bit ahead while we were talking. So they’re talking about planting seeds, growing up. When you have a more sensitive nature, you can be more corrupted, right? So evil, evil is a very, very bad thing. It’s a very bad thing, right? So evil is a greater enemy to what is good than to what is not. I was like, oh, yeah, that’s a pretty big deal, right? So yeah, the purer you get, the more corrupted you get. And especially when in the first stages of our development, like if we get that corruption, and we do have this true nature, the impact of that is gonna be more significant. So Danny, do you have a bunch of notes that you can take over? Yeah, kind of. I mean, I guess in terms of, I was missing the detail in terms of, okay, my understanding, and this is pointed out by Ethan, of the purpose of the allegory of the Captain Mutiny is about hierarchies matters. It matters what your head is, what you’re defining as your head. It matters what you call your body and where your starting points are, right? Then they go on to basically talk about how, so that’s an analogy for the crew. Let me see here. Hypothetically, there’s no Naval Academy for training a new captain. The captain is a sophist, and then there’s all lots of corrupting influences in society that are conducive to thwarting the development of philosophers. But what we were talking about earlier, about saying like, oh, well, the way the book is written, it’s not written to the philosophical elite, then they seem to have kind of a doom and gloom perspective on why philosophy is useless. It seems to be useless because it’s not used and because of the many, right? And so why is the Superman not able to convince, to provide tools to the many to fight the corruption? Like, why don’t they just fight at the same plane of corruption? Why are they not stuck in a war of flesh and blood? See what I’m saying? They’re not trapped in the materialism and they’re not trying to save the world. Their goal is not to basically save the goal through political power, right? Right, but you can’t because they know you can’t. Like they know that’s futile. Like if you fight against the thing with the tools, everything gets worse. That’s the old maxim, no one wins in a war. The minute you start a war, no one wins. Everyone comes out lesser. One way or the other, everyone comes out lesser. Nobody benefits, ultimately. Nobody benefits because there’s resources spent in the war. So the total number of resources is always less after a war, always. And so both sides always lose something, right? Whether one side ultimately prevails in their goal has nothing to do with the fact that there’s a cost to prevailing. And that’s why threats work. If you do this, I’m gonna punch you. And maybe you could beat me up, but maybe you also don’t wanna be punched. And so you decide not to beat me up, you decide to, okay, well, I’ll just give you what you want because that’s better than me getting punched even if I win the fight. It’s the same sort of thing. And it is that pointing higher, right? Because they know it’s also futile for the philosopher to ground itself in material and fight the good fight that way, right? They always have to point to the higher thing. Also don’t use the tools of your enemy. And thirdly, when you say you’ve read this and you have a hard time making the connection back, well, maybe that’s the reason why you can’t do anything because it’s really hard to make the connection back. Right. So I guess I’m seeing some patterns, but I’m not really. So in chapter five, the patterns I saw were about the dialectic and the heuristic, about the distinction between the one and the many. And then I’m seeing the same pattern. And again, we see purity again in the ship captain mutiny picture here thing. And then like you mentioned, we move on to the seeds, the seeds in the soils. So the idea is there are affordances that must pre-exist such as the eye, such as the sun, gravity, whatever. So there’s a realm of things that exists outside of, that must exist in order for agency to operate in. So the seed of the philosopher is a rare seed, is a rare person. And there’s, and you need, so, and then you need the sun to exist. You need the world to exist in order for the philosopher to take root. Yep. And I don’t know, grow into something. But A, not just the philosopher, but there are special things beyond what’s needed for everybody else for that particular seed. And so in other words, if you don’t have a culture of sufficient sophistication, you can’t afford philosophers. Like you can’t grow them because they require a huge amount of excess resources. And people pointed this before in history with the farming hypothesis, right? Like great civilizations can’t exist without farming and specialization, right? Otherwise everyone’s stuck kind of hunting and gathering for themselves. You know, not exactly, but roughly speaking, right? And so in order to grow a society that has specialists, you need specialists, right? It’s that conundrum. And yeah, I mean, that’s very true. But also the fact that you have specialists creates this hierarchy and exemplifies it in a way that’s dangerous, right? And that’s back to the ship again. It’s like, oh, there’s a danger in that because now people want to occupy that space even when we’ll say they’re not supposed to or they’re not able to. And so we move towards, I don’t remember if it’s the analogy of the sun or the divided line first. The divided line is on 509. But we moved to this analogy of the divided line, which is, or I’ll start with the sun. I’m doing this off top of my head. You have an upper realm, which is a realm of shadows and images. Or it’s the same idea with the divided line because you have on one side of the divided line, you have the realm of images, reflections, it’s mirrors, shadows, images, staring into a copy of a thing. So, you know, not the real thing. And then you have, that’s like furthest on the line. And then still on that side of the side of the line, but at a second level, you have material things, real things, animals, plants, anything natural or manmade. So that’s, and then you have, so on the other side of this divided line, you have the intelligible side. And so this is a grasp at through hypotheses. And so this is the idea. On this side of the line, you have the forms or ideas, like the form of the good or the form of the idea. And so they bring this image up for the first time. And I wasn’t sure what to make of any of this. That’s ideals versus implementation. Yeah, I just didn’t know where they were going with it. You know, I mean, I can see that they keep bringing up the same themes. I just, you know, I don’t know, nothing, nothing jumped out at it to me. I don’t know if anybody else really got anything from those images or analysis. What are the themes that you got out of the earlier part of the chapter, right? Because it just unfolds. It doesn’t really, the patterns are just unfolding practically, so. So from my mind, the picture that I got is that if I’m in the matrix, in my mind, I can like choose a set of lenses and then I can use those like set of lenses that I want in order to like, basically I can choose a relationship between the upper and lower realm of things. And so if I wanna just, I don’t know, play with ideas about why is a trash can a trash can? Well, nevermind. I don’t know, I’m just trying. It’s a tool for categorization, I guess, just. What position are you putting yourself in that you think you can do any of that? And like, this is the ship, right? So why is having a ship captain important? Because someone can pilot the ship, maybe multiple people, but someone will say better at piloting this particular ship for this particular task than anyone else, most likely. And if not, it doesn’t matter because it still has to be some one, it can’t be some two or some three or some 10, right? And so as with book five, they’re doing what I would call discernment, right? They’re drawing a line. And so this is just drawing a different line. And so the process is showing you how to discern, how to draw these lines, how to make, we’ll say proper categorizations. And the whole ship captain thing is all about, you can’t have no categorization. Everybody can’t be equal because even if you have a ship owner and people on the ship, that’s your dividing line. That dividing line doesn’t function in the world. That dividing line cannot work. So the dividing line that you draw, the categorization that you put things in actually matters, right? According to a T-Lost. But the whole point is, let’s suppose you’re an actual philosopher and not a sophist because that seems to be the line that they’re drawing, roughly speaking. You’re gonna be disliked because the people that aren’t actual philosophers don’t have the capacity to change lenses and examine and understand things. It’s explicit. And so look, I’m not saying you can’t do that. I’m saying by what authority are you claiming that you can do that? And even if you can’t, you can’t do it perfectly. So why, you don’t know what your unknown unknowns are. So why are you even pondering that? It’s not useful because maybe you can do that, maybe, but also you don’t know what you’re missing in that process that maybe you can’t do. You have no idea. And so what good is saying, I can do this. Can you? How much of it can you do? How much of it are you missing? Like what, because at that point it’s like, well, okay. It’s just not to say don’t do it. It’s just to say, don’t claim that you have a position that you can hold where that is, we’ll say ultimately possible or something. Well, I think maybe the, again, I’m reaching for to accept any kind of tool out of this because I just don’t understand the point of this. But when I look at a trash can, I know it’s a trash can by my participation with it. So the way to see the trash can is through participation. No, no, it isn’t a trash can. You assign trash cans. Oh yeah, okay. So I’m assigning trash because- It’s not based on participation because participation is based on T loss, right? Right, yeah. So this is- That example, right? How about we use the Peterson example of tree stump? Tree stumps don’t exist. That’s not what you see. Mm-hmm. See a chair. You see a sitting place, a table. Structural functional composition. Right? Why, why? Or, you know, Ethan’s excellent example of the, what’s in the middle of the cabin, in the middle of the woods. Right? And you put together three different scenarios and it just turns out that whatever that thing is, changes based on who is coming into that cabin. So obviously the nature is not objective. And that’s kind of the whole point, is that not only is the nature not objective, but it actually does matter, which sucks, right? So what is matter, right? And this is the question, what is matter, right? And this is Petersonian. What is matter, matters. And the thing that makes it the matter, is what matters. Right? It’s the T loss that you’re coming in with, that determines the category for the object. The object can’t self-determine its category. And so the point of this, as you pointed out, from book five, is doing the same thing, is to teach you discernment from different perspectives. That’s all they’re doing in that part. There’s so much more going on here. You can’t reduce it to like one thing, right? But that pattern that you’re seeing is the pattern of learning discernment or perspective with different examples over and over again. And those examples aren’t nearly repetitive examples of the same point. They are examples of, if you could stand here, you would see this discernment this way. If you could stand here, which is a different axis of engagement, right? Relationship, thank you, better relationship. You would see this, right? But they’re, and it’s not like they’re talking about the same thing. They’re just talking about, look at all these different ways to evaluate things. And you need different ways to evaluate things to get at the correct frame. And you could see matter as the model, right? That which birds the affordances that you can engage with to impose your talisman. That’s good. Yeah, I like that. That’s good. Yeah, the thing that birds the affordances. Well, you should talk to Raviky about that. That’ll go well. Did you guys talk at all about the analogy with the beast, the beast tamer? No, we’re not there yet. But Mark already went ahead. You guys were past that already, but yeah, we should go back to that. Cause I thought that was really interesting. Well, yeah, go ahead. Well, let’s finish up with Danny’s thing and then we can go there, I guess. Well, I’m just trying to accept any kind of useful application out of this law, the divided line image. So, I mean, I guess you have this on one side of this line, you have images or shadows. Remember we were talking about beliefs versus opinions. So there’s something there. They’re getting at something there. We need to start with the primary framing. So there’s the eternal, so that which is outside of time, which emanates into time, into the specific. And that allows us to recognize what’s in time by virtue of that is conforming to the form. Right? So the distinction is literally with the philosopher. So are you able to relate to the object? Cause that’s basically what all these OMR people are doing. Like they’re saying there’s objects and if we just know all the objects, then we’re perfect. Right? Or are you saying, no, like these objects are representations, right? They’re images of something that I can have a relationship to. And if I have a relationship to that, which is higher, then I can apply a different type of sense making. Cause that’s literally what it’s about. Like there’s a different way of dealing with things in the realm of forms. And the claim is that it’s better. Right? And why is it better? Because it’s not contingent upon time. That’s the reason that it’s better. So that’s what math is in effect, right? Like math is a way of relating with things that’s not contingent upon time because it’s gonna be true now and forever. It was always true before, before we quote discovered it or invented it, whichever. That’s well said, Manuel. I like the way you did that. That was good. Yeah, I have to figure out what the problem was first. No, that was useful. So thank you. Got it. So like again, right? Oh, you’re trying to get a use out of it. No, no, you don’t get to control this shit. This shit is just true. Right? And you can either submit to it and participate with it, or you can ignore it and be stuck in materiality. I’m like, that’s the intimacy crisis. And in order to accept that, right? Like you have to set aside all of this other shit that’s distracting you. Like that was the whole list of what you needed to be for a philosopher. Like if you don’t do all these things, you don’t get to, like you don’t get to go up there because you’re not gonna be able to. Like it’s just not an option. And so if you’re looking for a use, you don’t get to go up there because it’s not about use. But it’s useful. Right. That’s the limit. Yeah. And it’s the same with God. It’s like, oh, can I take the perspective of God? Well, yeah, maybe, right? Like this is what magic is in some sense, right? But you only get to take it like really temporarily and probably incorrect and definitely not useful over time. So like, why? Like this is my complaint about all these economic systems, right? So there’s an economic theory, right? Now they build a structure on the economic theory. Now in the structure, they’re gonna make the laws of the economic theory as foundation, right? And they build another thing upon it. But now you’re building something on something else, right? So it’s no longer referencing reality, right? And then if you do that two or three or four times, you build something that’s not attainable. And this is the same problem with liberalism, right? So we liberate ourselves from the king. And then we liberate ourselves from the thing on the information. Like information needs to be freed. And then the women need to be freed. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. At a certain point, we built so many contingencies that these things, they don’t have any chance of working anymore because they’re no longer connected to reality. Right, they’re too abstracted, right? So once you get to a second order abstraction, you’re kind of right on the edge. And if you go past that and add more abstraction, you’re so disconnected that you’re no longer anywhere near anything that can be useful because it won’t match reality and you have no way to tell because you’re too far away. When you build on abstractions, you start to get in dangerous territory. And I think that’s the opposite of that. The mirror of that is exactly what the animal trainer story is all about there. Yeah, Ethan, you wanna lead us into the animal trainer? Oh, he talks about the animal trainer. I think he’s comparing the selfless to whatever. This animal trainer that has this beast, right? And the animal trainer, he learns how to shut the beast up, make it quiet and make it happy. And that’s what he derives his ethic from. So what is good is what makes the beast comfortable and calm. And that’s actually an argument, that’s what he’s saying there is that’s actually an emergence is good type of thing. You’re looking down at the beast and what seems to comfort it is good. If you think of, well, it’s easier for me to think of like with children. So if that’s the way you raise children, you’re not gonna raise children. Because if you just only do what makes the child stop crying, that’s actually not good for the child. You have to look above what’s good for the child. So like sometimes what’s good for the child is for them to actually cry. Or, you know, being disciplined or, making them be uncomfortable is actually good sometimes. You’re deriving something, an ethic that comes from above, not purely looking down at the beast or the child. Like what, you have to look up or to, see what is good for the animal or what is good for the child. And he’s comparing that to the sophist, which they just look at the body of people and they say, oh, this is actually exactly what democracy is. They look at the body of the people, they say, oh, what’s going to appease the people or just going to do whatever makes them comfortable, not necessarily what’s good for them. What’s going to keep them from fussing, what’s going to keep them from being honored, what’s going to keep them from getting upset. We’re just gonna do that. We’re not going to actually do what’s, not going to do what’s actually good for them, which comes from above. Yeah, that’s a good point about the sophists, right? He says that the sophists use argumentation until you disagree with them. And then when they can’t argue their way, they do their deeds, which is basically beatings or something. It’s like they come after you when you refuse to be part of their soothing and comforting club. Yeah, and it goes beyond the sophist. It just goes with everything. So then does this person seem any different from the one who believes that it is wisdom to understand the moods and pleasures of a majority generated from all quarters? Right. So when does good come from above? But that’s… But that’s related to where do you ground yourself, right? And there’s this seeing is believing, right? And then there’s this thing about in the Bible, like we walk by faith, not by sight, right? You get to walk by sight or you get to walk by faith. But like when you walk by faith, you no longer control what you’re relating to, how it’s gonna express all of that stuff, right? Like it’s out of your hands because you’re just giving it up to something higher, right? So it’s interesting because there’s… I was thinking about how miraculous it is that the things that we’re doing even work, right? Because like a lot of it is integrated by basically something inside of you affirming the pattern of someone else and then imitating it, right? But you only imitate it if you think it’s good, the pattern. Right, so there’s some distance there where you get to reject it, but you don’t accept it based on purely rational reasons, but kinda still you do, right? And so this sermon that I went to was really interesting because like, what do you remember your father for, right? Like when you’re away from your father, right? Like what do you remember him for? Well, and the answer was the way he treats people, right? Like you remember the patterns that your father participated in and if you think they’re good, you’re gonna go back to him. And if you don’t think they’re good, you’re gonna go away. And then there’s this other idea, right? Where if you go away from the promised land, you end up like in an unknown land, right? And he was describing our current society. It’s like we’ve drifted away, right? We’ve drifted away from our father and now we’re in this unknown land, but things are still working. Like we’re still participating in the patterns, right? Like we’re still having our inheritance of the suffering and all this stuff that the previous generations gave us. And it’s not only physical, it’s not only informational. No, it is like sometimes you get the sayings, right? Like the people who aren’t Christian are more Christian than the Christians, right? Like there’s a spirit that is persisting even though it is not explicitly being practiced, right? And so that spirit, right, is supporting the emergence as a good thing because it’s gonna get expression through the emergence, right? And that’s where the people lose the discernment with the thing because they don’t know what the seeds are, right? That they’re implanting in what they’re doing and they think they know and then they get a positive affirmation of what they’re participating in. So that’s, I think, the confusion that a lot of people live in. They don’t discern the path they’re on. Or worse yet, they discern the path they’re on goes a place that it does not go. And what you were speaking to earlier too is mimicry, right? We mimic and we try not to mimic, but there’s certain things we have to mimic, right? There’s certain patterns we’re, say, stuck in, right? And that’s sort of inevitable. But even, I’m curious in your translation on the animal trainer, because this point right after that was that animal trainer is not a good educator. And I thought that was probably a mistranslation of what they meant was teacher and that they made a dividing line between teaching and apprenticeship or something. Okay, so the first part of the paragraph, it says, not one of those paid private teachers who call people, whom the people call sophists are considered to be their rivals in craft. Teaches anything other than the convictions that the majority expresses when they are garnered together. Indeed, these are precisely what the sophists call wisdom. He’s referring to them as teachers. The sophists, but the animal trainer, paragraph after the animal trainer. Oh. Because he says the animal trainer would make a bad educator in my translation, which I think is probably incorrect. Make a bad educator or bad, let me read it here. As educator in my cotton. What number are we at? 493C. Or 4ND. Yeah, wouldn’t such a man in the name of Zeus be out of place as an educator? Yes, in my opinion, he would indeed. So what I have is by heavens, would not such one be a rare educator? I’m in the wrong place here. That’s different. Yeah, or no, that’s 493C and D. That’s the end of C. Yeah, before D. Indeed he would. And in what way does he who thinks that wisdom is the discernment of the temper and taste and the multitude weather in painting, blah, blah, blah, differ from him who I have been describing. So he’s making a distinction between the sophist the animal trainer, I think. Yeah, this is way off from that. That’s interesting. Yeah, rare is not there. It says out of place. Atropos. That’s what I’m going to use. But that, go ahead. Hold on, what does apropos mean? Atropos. Anthropos? That’s range out of place. No, no, not anthro, atro. Atro. Meaning without turn. Without turn. Doesn’t belong. Out of place, okay. Does not belong. So not rare, but doesn’t really belong. But, but, but damn, you could see that as positive, right? Cause he’s, if you, if you take the sophist as the natural condition, damn, not being natural would mean out of place. I mean, let me look up. Yeah, well, this whole section for me was just a mess. Oh, and it’s in relation to a deity as well. One of the three fates. Depicted as a cutter, a thread of, okay, that’s fine, but I want the actual Greek word. All I have in here is Zeus at the end, but they just bring up religion all over the place. In here, the gods are like every other thing. But that is mentioned in the text elsewhere, Dios, right? So that’s going to be Zeus or by God. But then it goes, atropos, okay, and I, pi, which is teacher, pi, teacher, instructor, I do taste, I can’t really say that very well. But atropos is what they use for strange, or in my strange out of place, something like that. Yeah, I would prefer teacher rather than educator, but that’s, I’m splitting hairs on the difference between education and like apprenticeship. I mean, teaching and apprenticeship. Well, education is the Latin form. So let me just look up this other word that they use for teacher and see what. Are we not in 493? Yeah, 493. 493b and c. 493b, okay. That’s all the same paragraph for me, hold on. Yeah, it’s a big, yeah, it’s a big paragraph. Teacher is didaskalos. Okay, so then this other word that I need to write out. Okay, so then this other word that I need to write out. So I don’t know if I’m going back to the same thing over and over again, but when they talk about the nature of the philosopher and they give this analogy of the divided line, I keep seeing the theme of the first principle that keeps arising. And so I’m wondering how this doesn’t collapse into narcissism where again, you’re just fighting a war of flesh and blood, trying to, you know, why do they not fall into a trap of one-upmanship? Like they have to have an appeal of faith somewhere, I think, in here. They do. That’s actually what 493 is about. That’s like literally what they’re saying. They’re saying there’s a difference between, we’ll say teaching, because I think that’s the better way to say it, and the interaction with the beast and the person who then becomes a teacher. And so in other words, they’re, and thank you, Adam, this is very helpful now, I’m seeing it more clearly, and thank you, Ethan, I’m seeing it more clearly now. So what they’re actually doing in here, and this is why this is such a bear, I mean, it looks, it’s just a, it’s a beast. It’s a beast to be tamed for sure. What they’re doing is they’re basically saying that people who figure out the angers and pleasures of the people, the sophists, right, are then slaves to them. Effectively, in other words, they’re saying that the sophists are slaves to the group. Right, because they’re deriving. That is actually the Hagelean dialectic, but keep going. Yeah, they’re deriving what is good from, purely from looking down at the sum of the group. They’re quantifying, they’re measuring the group, quantifying the group, and that determines what the sophist teaches. I found this body, it says, don’t you think by God that someone like that is a strange educator? I do indeed. Strange educator, yeah. Right, and what do you make of the next paragraph, Ethan? Because that whole, those two paragraphs just confused the hell out of me. Well, no, I think the background of saying the philosopher, right, the one he’s been describing is not the hound guy, but it’s the philosopher, so he’s contrasting the philosopher with the sophist. Yeah, I don’t disagree. I’m saying that what is the point of contrast? Because there’s more than one way to, this is the thing, contrast isn’t one thing. And so what aspect is he contrasting? Because I found it very confusing because they used the word educator. It just triggered all kinds of, no, that’s not right in me. It’s just, yeah, same thing. It’s the person, does this person seem any different from the one who believes that it is wisdom to understand the moods and pleasures of a majority generated from all quarters, whether they concern painting, music, or that matter of politics? So looking down, like they’re not, like if you’re a painter, you’re not a painter, you’re not a painter, you’re not a painter, you’re not a painter, you’re not a painter, you’re not a painter, you’re not a painter, you’re not a painter, you’re not a painter, like they’re not, like if you’re a painter, you’re deriving your beauty from looking down and not from looking up from the transcendental beauty. Yeah, they do trash painters, I remember that. Why are you trashing the painters? So- In order to be a true painter or true poet, you have to be attuned to something higher. You can’t just simply accumulate the majority of people below. And that’s where I have my little footnote of emergence is good. I’m gonna take some more. Yeah, no, you’re right. I didn’t catch that, but you’re right. Emergence is good is right in here. And why emergence is actually not good is right in here. And that again, Danny, that’s the contrast, right? That’s the continual contrast is he keeps pointing at different, keeps pointing at the same thing through different examples, from different angles of attack or approach, or however you wanna think of it, different aspects, and pointing out discernment is important. Here’s examples of discerning. It’s really just the same thing. Everybody wants it. 10 examples or 10 of note, it’s actually one thing from 10 different perspectives, right? That’s actually what’s going on. It’s a very simple thing, but it’s hard to understand, which is why you need multiple perspectives. And that is the format of the book thus far. And that’s why they do this absurdist dialectic. Well, it’s not this, must be this, nonsense. It cracks me up every time, every time. And they do it a lot in book six. And I’m like, this is fantastic. It’s just so funny. So Adam, the so-called necessity of Diomedes, you know what that is? Diomedes is one of the major Greek heroes from the Iliad. I think he’s actually described as the strongest of the Greeks. Oh yeah, in mine it’s a Diomedian compulsion. And I have a footnote there. Yeah. It’s, okay, the origin of the phrase is uncertain, but a likely source is in the following story. Odysseus attempted to kill Diomedes, and the two were returning from Troy to the Greek camp, but failed. Diomedes punished him by tying his arms together and driving him home with blows from the flat of his sword. But wherever the, but whatever the source, the phrase refers to inescapable compulsion. Mm-hmm. Yeah. There’s an episode in the Iliad where Diomedes is, and this goes to the point of the compulsion, is such a dogged and strong-willed character that he chases down, I can’t remember which god it was, Aphrodite, Hera, I don’t know, whichever one favored the Trojans who was helping one of her favorites in the battle. And he had to be restrained by the god who favored him, which I think was Ares, from actually grabbing onto her and actually getting ahold of her in the battle because he wanted to obviously punish her or whatever. But that kind of dogged determination, I think, is also what plays into the insistence that the compulsion of Diomedes, which goes to that story with Odysseus as well. Mm-hmm. There’s an element of that which is below you, right? Because that was the relationship. That cannot be controlled, right? So you’re subject to that which is below you. Yeah, that’s Aldigan’s capture. Yes, exactly. And it’s funny because it says so-called. It’s like, yeah, well, fair enough, so-called. Reminds me of when bands will sell out. Yeah. Just do what’s popular instead of when certain band comes to mind, Alica. Well, oh yeah, and so what’s this other thing, right? So we were talking about the unstoppable object, right? Yeah, in the middle of this. And it’s like, oh, if you bind yourself to the world, that is an unstoppable object. It’s always gonna drag you along, right? And so you’re always gonna have to readjust. While if you’re attuned to the eternal, that’s something that you don’t have to engage with. There’s peace there that isn’t there when you focus on the world. Yeah, it actually reminds me of a month or so ago. I think you guys were talking to, his name’s Nathan, and he asked Mark, he asked Mark about failure. He’s like, what does failure look like to you? And Mark’s response was like, either didn’t answer the question or couldn’t answer the question. And the reason why he couldn’t is because he was attuned, Mark is attuned to things that are not temporal. Because when you’re like, you’re attuned to eternal things or truthful things, like they’re not, they can’t be, I don’t like the word defeated, but they can’t be changed. They’re objective, right? In the truest sense, they can’t, there is no failure. Eternal things don’t fail. Particular things might fail. So if you’re caught up in material things, particular things, then yes, you will fail. Right, and to bind this back to the sermon. Let me go ahead. So if you bind this back to the sermon I had yesterday, it’s like, what do you need to cultivate in order to attune to the eternal? Well, you need to develop a character, right? Like the character that allows you to relate to the eternal so that you don’t fall into the temptation or the drive of the here and now, right? And you can go back to, well, what are these qualities of the philosopher? Well, like they’re not gonna be swayed by their passions. Like they’re not, they don’t find them interesting. Like they’re not salient to them because that’s not where they’re focused. Yeah, virtue, practice virtue. When you say develop a character that reminds me of, I think it’s a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote saying something like, sow a thought, reap an action, show an act, reap a habit, show a habit, reap a character, sow a character, reap a destiny type of thing. So I mean, like in terms of like, we have this divided line idea of, you know, this upper and lower realm or this realm of intelligibility or this idea of like developing the mind’s eye and what do you need to develop? Like to relate to the eternal, it’s probably some exercises you could do if you need to build the tool sets, if you need to build the character in order to, I mean, that’s what they keep getting at and they use this language. They use words like first principle, mind’s eye, the soul. Well, what’s the first principle of a human, Dan? Like you don’t need to practice. It’s so funny. You don’t need any of that. What’s the first principle of a being, a human being? The first principle for what do you mean? The first principle for a human being. What is that? What is the first, it’s not practice. It can’t be. What do you mean by first principle? Though you have being, I mean, you’re starting with existence. What’s the first principle of a human being? The first principle? Yeah. Well, you could use different words for it, but being, existence, excellence. You’re the one in the product that’s talking about first principles. All right. And if they’re talking about first principles and you can’t list any, then maybe don’t engage with that. Like that’s one way to look at it. Like, oh, they’re talking about first principles. I have no idea what first principles are. Maybe I shouldn’t try to put this in an ontology and put together a procedure and get a bunch of practices going since I clearly don’t have a handle on what first principles would be. Because you don’t need a practice. You can actually just go for a walk in the woods, problem solve. And it’s very much along the lines of Ray Kelly and his parkour project. Right? It’s like, yeah, you really don’t need a practice. You can go out and work. So when they use words that don’t have strong definitions. Well, you have to realize, right? The argument that they’re making is not based upon practice at all. They’re saying we need to discern nature, nature, nature, nature, nature. And then when we have the nature, we need to educate it and not corrupt it. And then it lists the things that will corrupt it. And then like literally they say, then the world cannot possibly be a philosopher. So they basically say like the nature of the world is such that it will corrupt any seed before it can become a true philosopher. Very, very doom and gloom about the situation, aren’t they? Well, they’re not doom and gloom. No, they state, right? Like when you have a seed, right? Like, and it is good, right? Then evil will affect it more and corrupt it more. And therefore, in order to protect that seed, you need to do special stuff, right? This is my argument about all the resources that you need in order to cultivate a philosopher. Now, how are you gonna discern from the outside what the thing is that you need to be anticipating, protecting the seed from? Like, what? Like. Well, and also the implication is if you’re born in nature and you are a creature who’s, or one of whose first principles we’ll say is to survive in nature, then that means you already have everything you need, right, to live and survive in the world and do what needs to be done. And the reason why you’re not making progress towards, we’ll say a philosophical life, is because you lack discernment and you don’t need practices, you just need discernment. And then the problem solves itself, effectively. Like the problem ceases to exist once the discernment is available. And that’s it. And you could argue that I could enact practices around discernment and I don’t disagree, but I’ll need to. It’s like, yeah, you could enact practices that might help you with discernment. You probably can’t do them by yourself at all because if it’s something you don’t have within you already or don’t have the ability to cultivate within you already, then why do you think you can do that, right? So you probably need other people, right? And then those practices still aren’t required. You can just go for a walk in the woods. And we’re big on practices. So we’ve done practices that help with discernment, particularly a group like Dio Divina, for example, which definitely gives you discernment if nothing else. And it exemplifies discernment in others, which is even more useful, which you know, again, is the format of the book. It’s exemplifying discernment in different scenarios on purpose to give you a sense of discernment. And it’s insufficient. They say that, it’s a book, it’s insufficient. There’s all kinds of problems with doing this with a book that that’s kind of hinted at left, right and center inside the Republic. Like, well, really a book’s not gonna do it. You know? And again, right, like to go back to the sermon yesterday, like, what do you need to do in order to get right relationship with God? Well, you’re not gonna ask him for things. What is a practice? Practice is effectively asking for something. No, I’m not saying it’s useless, right? Like, you still need to read the Bible, for example, right? Because if you don’t have the relationship to all these things, then you can’t live it out, right? Like, you still have to do the participatory things, but it’s important to realize that the moment you’re gonna assert control, you’re gonna bend the course of the ship towards a place of your will, right? And you don’t know whether that is actually where you should be going. And there’s a really, really high likelihood that there’s something inside of you that’s pushing you there so that you don’t go to the place that you should be going. Because that’s how humans work. Like, I can see it in my, like, everything. Like, oh, I need to study for this test. And then I go clean my apartment. It’s like, I never clean my apartment. Why do I clean my apartment? Because I wanna feel good about myself that I do something that I normally wouldn’t do that’s useful, and also not do the thing that I need to be doing. Like, it’s that simple. And that’s spiritual bypassing, literally. Like, oh, I’m working on myself so that I don’t have to work on myself. And I’ve been having this conversation with tons of Christians, because I don’t think they do a good job of dealing with this. Like, they’re just like, oh, I’ll go through the motions, and then I get out, and then I enact what it’s like to be a good Christian. And it’s like, yeah, but is your heart there with you? Or are you just doing this because God told you so? Well, and their practices aren’t having that result. So practice is good, right? No, but it’s also not a solution, right? Because a lot of people go through practices and they get worse. Practice doesn’t have the effect, right? A bunch of people go to India, or go to Tibet, or whatever, and learn these secret ways, right? And then they come back, and now they’re booted, and they run these multi-million dollar greedy corporations. It’s like, I don’t know if that worked. I think it didn’t. I think that practice failed you, right? Or made you worse, worse yet, which it can. So practices are not, I’m not saying they’re optional, I’m just saying don’t look there for an absolute solution, or even a likely solution, because that is the point of the Republic, is we’re gonna set up a perfect system and show you why that won’t work. All your inferences, all your intuitions, all of your logic, reason, and rationality is gonna scream out for this system, and we’re gonna show you why even in that case, when it is as close to perfect as you can get, it’s not gonna work. I think in book eight or nine, they actually are gonna set up practices for the education. And I was like, that just, when I listened to that, my mind did not retain anything. Like it just didn’t make any sense at all to me what they were doing. And it’s hard too, right? Because a lot of things, especially around us, right? In this moment, in these recent times, are proceduralized. And a lot of those procedures seem to be effective, right? But we throw out the failures, right? It’s sample bias, it’s a classic sample bias, right? Where we’re like, well, you know, look, a million people tried this, okay? And how many of them got the expected result? Well, four, okay? But a million people tried it, like, is it good? No, no, no, I’m not saying don’t try it. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I’m not saying you couldn’t be one of the four, but you’re gonna be realistic because you have a limited amount of time, energy, and attention. And, you know, if that practice isn’t right for you or isn’t going to work for any reason, it might not be the practice itself, again, because I think there’s a lot more to it than mere practice, then maybe you should do something else. And that’s really the issue right there, is that that’s really not enough of a handle to get you where you wanna go. And so practices are tricky because, yeah, they can work. Some people go through the Tony Robbins thing and they turn their life around. But what percentage of people, right? And is that the thing for you? Because maybe that won’t work for you, but something else will. And that’s, you know, everyone’s grasping on, well, how is Elon Musk successful? And it turns out that nobody actually knows, right? They just, they sample one thing and they go, well, he’s really smart, you know, or what? No, that has nothing to do with it. There’s lots of people smarter than Elon Musk that don’t have anywhere near his money or the businesses, right? Who have failed at business time. I’ve met people like this, failed at 12 businesses, never even got them off the ground, got funding and wasted the funding. They had everything they needed to succeed except business acumen, right? And Elon Musk has that, because he and his brother blew $700,000 learning how to fail, right? Or learning from failure or something. And so that’s not a practice, right? And so the key information on how to be Elon Musk is not a practice and it’s not practicable. Clear, right? It’s that encounter with the beast, with reality, with nature as such, that you’re open to learning from in ways that you cannot possibly predict or even understand in the moment. But you don’t need to, like, oh, bad news, you can’t understand this or predict this. Good news, you don’t even need to. It’s irrelevant. And it’s when we try to hold on to knowledge or understanding or get a sense, you know, and if you wanna see this in action, my hallucinations stream last night and navigating patterns, you definitely could just see this, it was contrasted brilliantly, right? When you’re caught up on that, you can’t make progress. And not just at your thing, but at anything, you actually get stuck in life completely because you’re always trying to understand before you act, which doesn’t work, so then you’re acting out of misunderstanding, right? And then you misunderstand and misapprehend the world. And then, you know, oh, you said this, and the person didn’t say anything like that, or, oh, you mean this, or this, it has to be A or B, right? You get into that A or B false dichotomy of the Republic. It’s a natural thing that happens, right? It’s not like, oh, I read the Hegelian dialectic and now I’m stuck in it. It’s like, no, no, no, you’ll fall into the Hegelian dialectic because it doesn’t take much intellect to get there. And once you’re there, you’re screwed. Well, it’s even worse. Like, I’m going over this with Taylor, right? Like, what is a person, what does it mean to have a relationship to a person? And I went through all of this stuff, and I’m like, this is way insufficient, so I need to explore it more. Like, it’s so insufficient that I don’t even know how to explore it, right? Like, I don’t know what I need to be doing in order to have the dialogance. Like, I’m literally lost at that point, but I was talking about two realms, right? Like, the is, right, or the descriptive, and the odd, right, or the relation, right? And you relate to a person. And what is, is, well, that’s effectively objects. And I think when you are in the realm of the is, you need to be doing the Hegelian dialectic. Like, I don’t think there’s an option, and I think that’s why the book is structured that way, because if you reason on one level, and maybe this is how the book is split, right? Like, maybe the first half of the book is on Earth, and the second half of the book is lifting up into the heavenly, right? But if you reason on Earth, you need to set two things in opposition in order to have the contrast. Like, I don’t know if there would be another way of reasoning because if you don’t do that, then I think you’re presupposing some external reference. Because if you don’t have things on a line, right, then, yeah, like, then something has to start appearing above this, right? Like, this is where we started drawing the triangles, right? Like, the thing that is the ideal with the manifestation, and then there’s the implementation effectively, right? Like, I think those are just the rules that you’re bound in, and I’m just gonna say that Wittgenstein figured this stuff out after 10 years of trying to deal with language, and then it’s like, oh, but language is wrong. It’s like, yes, language is wrong because it’s putting you in a certain framework, it’s putting you in a certain relationship to reality, which is necessarily limited, and this fits on the model that we made, right? Like, you have the propositions and the procedures, and, yeah, you go through them with logic, and like, I think the Hegelian dialectic is a way to transcend in logic. Like, that’s the only method that logic can move levels, and since we need to move levels because it’s not optional, that’s the pattern that you’re gonna just self-express, and then if that’s true, then every fucking idiot will necessarily end up there if they can apply logic within a certain capacity, right? Right, well, and I think it’s a good point about Wittgenstein. The other problem with Wittgenstein is, yeah, he brings thought down from the ethereal realm into the material realm of language, collapses it, and then he’s trapped, and he’s like, well, this doesn’t work. That’s correct. If you approach life with only propositions, you are a materialist, or you’ll fall into materialism, and it won’t work. That is correct. So when people are like, Wittgenstein, you know, blah, blah, blah, I’m like, he’s an idiot. It’s that simple. He made a simple mistake. It’s not an uncommon mistake. You know, tons of people make this mistake. Noam Chomsky makes the same mistake. Lots of people confuse language and thought, even though it’s so obvious that that… We know there are things that we think that we can’t express at all, much less well, right? We know both those conditions exist, and yet you think language and thought are the same thing. It’s obviously because you’re solipsistically measuring your own thought through your own internal dialogue, but that isn’t what’s happening. You know, you wouldn’t be able to speak if that were the case, or you’d be born speaking from being a baby. Obviously, you’re not. It’s just that it can’t be what’s going on. And so Wittgenstein and all these guys, this is why I’m just like, really? Somebody read this and took these people seriously? This is an easy mistake that they started from. And once you make that mistake, you will end up in the same place. And you can call it the Hegelian dialectic, or you can call it the Nietzschean problem, or you can call it the postmodern discovery, or whatever other non-sense you want to call it. It’s all the same, and it all ends in Gnosticism, right? And that’s because it is trapped, to Manuel’s point, in the propositional and procedural. And it can’t get out of that, because you can’t get out of a closed-world system created with those tools. And that is what they’re pointing to, especially with the animal trainer in particular. Like, there’s a difference here. There’s a discernment between the solipsist or the sophist, right? And the person that actually has the experience in the participation, Vervik, you would call it participatory knowledge, right? I would call it participatory information. Well said. Well said. Thank you. And I think this is where it gets interesting about the way that they describe knowledge, right? And Mike didn’t like that, but knowledge is the ability to conform or grip being, right? And I really like that definition of knowledge, right? Because it removes it from a static aspect to a skill, right? And now you can also see that the being, which is an expression, right? Which is a pattern you can maybe look at as a heart, right? Where it is constrained in its function, right? But it’s also not static. And then how that would result into a form, right? The form of the heart that is in some sense the abstraction or the understanding of how to relate to heartness, right? To get out of it its essence, right? To relate to its essence. And that, again, is what a perspective is, right? Because the perspective is that narrow relationship of the grip. Because you could have a different perspective on the heart, and that would give you a different essence or a different nature, right? And then maybe you can do the trick of combining the natures or something, but that would be building a body, right? Because now we’re combining different organs effectively into a higher being, right? Or an embodied being that, yeah. And so, yeah, well, if you want to do your ontology, that would be the way to do it. But at that point, what use is an ontology? Because you’re still going to have to develop that relationship in order for it to be of any use, and then if you have it, so what? So now you have a person, a personhood that comes from the wholeness of the body interacting that you can’t produce, right? So I cannot communicate that personhood to you because you cannot hold it. Like there’s no affordance that you have that can hold the thing that I have the affordance for. So it’s like specifically unique to me, necessarily, unless you have the same understanding or knowledge as I do. Yeah, I think we want to wrap it up. It’s about that time. Yeah, well, let’s see. Let’s go back to my intention. Can I ask, just because it seems to be a theme of like this idea of having a different model of somebody and then failing to relate. Like what are some of the causes or blocks? Because that seems to be coming up a lot. Like why does this keep happening that people are detached and were unable to have these productive? Because you have to. Is it because people are trying to form ontologies when they shouldn’t be? No, it’s not. It’s not. Why do you form ontologies? You form ontologies so that you can make simplified models. Why do you need simplified models? You need simplified models to know how to relate to something. Like you need, it’s not optional, right? Except you can’t form a model of me in your head, dude. Again, this happened in the live stream last night. I was explaining this. You can’t form a model of yourself. Like you can’t encompass your whole self. That makes no sense. You can’t do it. Okay? And now you’re thinking you can encompass enough of me that you can have a conversation with me. That’s not happening. It’s not an option. No one can do that, ever. No one’s ever been able to do that. But what you can do is relate in the moment. And the reason why we’re disconnected is because like the guy last night, and we had a guy named David a few months ago did the same thing, right? You’re using a model of me that you’re talking to instead of talking to me in the moment. That is going to lead to disaster because all the models are wrong and some models are useful. So it’ll work, but it’ll be wrong. And then that drift increases over time as you try to engage further with the person. So the more engagement you have, we’ll say on the propositional and procedural layer, the less you’ll have in common. Absolutely mathematically certain. That’s the issue. Right? Whereas if we just go and fish together or just go and sit and have a meal together or we go off and go for a walk in the woods, right? Now we have a different set of modes of communication, right? We don’t have to talk at all. And we come together at something because the T loss was to come together. The T loss of a conversation is either to get your point across, right? To communicate with somebody, right? Or to win an argument, right? Or to maybe prove your superiority, right? You’re in a contest, right? And there’s more. But when the T loss of the conversation, and all of this happened last night explicitly, I talked about all of this last night in the livestream. When the T loss of your conversation is of that nature, you’re already done. You’re already finished. You’ve brought everything down to a layer where you’re going to have nothing but conflict and disagreement. And that’s inevitable. And that’s why people are like, oh, we need more conversation. I’m like, no, we absolutely do not. What we need is more true, good and beautiful. Or aiming towards the true, the good and the beautiful. Because if a conversation emerges as the result of aiming at the true, the good and the beautiful, then we can move into something bigger than or outside of conversation itself. And if we don’t point past conversation, just like in karate, you don’t punch someone’s face. You punch the back of their head, right? Because then you can do damage. It’s the same thing. If you point at conversation, you will get, you’ll come into Zeno’s paradox, ironically enough, and you’ll get close to the face, but it won’t have the impact that it would if you aimed past. Or in this case, up. Sorry, Manuel. Go ahead. So to talk about causes, right? So in order to participate in conversation, you need to have skills. Right? So if you don’t have skills, you need to have things that substitute for your lack of skills. Right? Like this is necessary when growing up. Like, oh, you don’t know what to do, you run to your mama. Right? And at a certain point, you don’t want to run to your mama, so you’re going to have to find a strategy. Not a participation, a strategy. So that, right? And that strategy can be anything. Right? But the strategy is not correct participation. So you need, but the strategy generates stereotypes. Right? Like, oh, this happens, and now we can have a response. Right? So now we’re in, well, we have social, what’s the word? I always forget. Anyway, we have these social norms, right, that we participate in. And because we participate in these norms, we get a certain level of intelligibility, right, and security. Right? Because it’s all around anxiety, this stuff. Right? Because you’re talking to a person, and the complexity of this person is so vast, right, especially if you’re a child. You have no predictability at all over these people. Right? So you need to reduce the complexity in order to be able to participate correctly. Now… That gives you the contrast, too, which is important. That’s what the procedure or the strategy gives you, is the contrast to develop the relationship. Right. And so the person that you’re talking to ideally should invite you in, right, and initiate you or educate you into conversational capacity. But if you never develop that, right, maybe not even through the fault of your environment, but I’m going to bet that it’s through the fault of your environment nowadays, right, but you might have an anxiety that would just like lock you out whenever that intimacy is initiated. Or you lose the skill. Or you lose the skill of talking to somebody else. So one of the skills of conversation is the ability to self-reflect. And when somebody says something like, the thing you just said that I said is false, it is a skill for you to realize whether or not they’re correct and to what degree. Right? And if you can’t do that, if you do not have the skill of self-reflection, where you’re merely projecting your model of me onto the conversation, then you’re not having a conversation with me, but also you’re having a conversation with something inside your head. Right. And that conversation is going to degrade because it’s inside of you. So you’re having a conversation with a lesser version of yourself. You’re not having a conversation with me at all. And that will draw you down and down and down and down and down. That’s why conversation is a net negative when it’s the aim. More conversation is bad for that reason because some of the skills you need are self-reflection. And again, if you want to see somebody not being self-reflective, last night’s live stream will show you somebody who is clearly missing the clearest possible point by three different individuals saying something very clear that he just isn’t getting. Right? And that’s a skill. And he may have had that skill at one time. But like all other skills and what happened recently, right, you lose those skills. Or they get dull or something. And that was clearly the case here in the conversation last night. So it was like, wow. And that’s the issue is that this is not a solution to a problem. Yeah. And so if you progress the arc that I was standing on, you get to what they were talking about. In this idea of the dog, right? Because now you put your moral system based upon the response of the person in front of you. Right? Like that’s the ultimate good implementation. Because there’s words in the implementation. That would be the good implementation. But now you’re ungrounded in your own mind. And again, if we go back to this idea of the ship, right, if you’re like that and you come up against a philosopher or you come up against Manuel and Mark, right, you start talking to them. And they start saying things. And then you don’t have the tools to account for what we’re saying because we’re not operating in the framework that we’re using. Right? So you’re not operating in the framework that you’re using. You’re not operating in the framework that you’re using. So that’s the whole point of the idea of the ship. It’s not the idea that you’re going to do something with it. It’s not the idea that you’re going to do what we’re saying because we’re not operating in the framework that you’re imposing upon us. Even though you have the perfect model of that framework, you’re going to get upset with Manuel and Mark. And that’s what’s happening. Right? And, yeah, like there’s people who are more in more ways and lesser ways outside of the cave, right? outside of the cave, right, and then there’s personal deficiencies and all that stuff, right, which complicate stuff even more. But that is the pattern and like it’s, this is why you need to be reborn because like you need to be reborn in order to have that reorientation, right? And when you are reborn, you’re a fucking baby, okay? Like you need to reorient your whole sense making as a consequence of realizing that there’s the spiritual reality that supersedes your material framing that you’ve had up until that point. And so their idea of birth is in education? Dude, that’s exiting the cave. Like that’s literally, like what is birth? Like it’s going through a hole, seeing the light for the first time and being blinded. That’s what birth is like. Like it’s literally a birth. And now I need to read Genesis 2, I think, or 3. Yeah, anyway. So, yes, is that done? Are we sufficient on this? Good enough for today for me. There’s more in the end of the chapter for sure. Yeah, we’re going to have to divide the line. The divide line is huge. I mean, it’s, yeah, it’s going to take a little bit of studying on my part anyways to be able to talk about it. Yeah, Danny kept jumping there and skipping over the what I thought was the important part, which, you know, thank you, Ethan. And thank you, Adam, because I was stuck on that stupid lion tamer thing. I was like, why does this animal tamer doesn’t make any sense? But now I get it. So that was great. Well, see, I miss that too. I didn’t read the world into the beast. So as soon as you said that, then it clicked a bit more. That’s why we’re here. It’s great. Distributing cognition for the win. Yeah. So I’ll go through the intentions. Manu wanted to get a taste of the framing of the book. I think we’ve worked on that quite a bit. Mark wanted to learn about the matters of justice. I’m sorry, Mark. And I wanted to look at the insights of others. And Danny wanted to understand the world of the forms, which is something that he will get more opportunity to next week. So let’s use those intentions in our reflection and maybe set an intention for our engagement with the week at the end. So everybody set their intentions for the week? Maybe someone wants to bring up their intention, ask for advice or whatever. So I guess mine is oriented around the role of faith in discernment or perhaps intelligibility. So in the dotted line thing, they talk about like four layers. And I think faith is the third layer. And it seems to be like an important bridge or glue between the four layers that they give. But then that and also I’ve been listening to Don Quixote, which is where the word quixotic comes from. And so basically I’m thinking about like, what does it mean in thinking about these models or analogies? I’m trying to imagine like, what does it mean then to go up to the level of justice if I’m at the level of the individual or the level of the city? And then I’m trying to think about, well, a counter example would be Don Quixote, where he’s kind of like a Monty Python style thing. He’s this character who’s read too many too many chivalry novels. And so he’s running around trying to find adventures, but he just gets himself into trouble trying to administer justice when justice doesn’t need to be administered. And so what is it like? It’s this kind of picture of, you know, somebody who’s just focused on the wrong thing. He’s claiming to be trying to go out and behave in the name of but he’s really an ideologue. Right. So I’m just trying to think about like, I’m trying to extract from that example and from Plato. Like, what is the what is that key thing in the mind’s eye, you know, that that is necessary in order to in order to jump across these these realms that they’re getting at that they’re talking about? You’re wincing. You don’t like that. Well, one of them isn’t in the wine. Don’t do that. The whole point, the whole point of Don Quixote is don’t do that. It’s the whole point. It’s the whole point of the Republic. Don’t try to do that. You don’t need to. It’s the whole point. Like, if you’re in the mind’s eye, you’re you’re no longer in the realm of sight. You’re in the realm of. Right. You’re completely ungrounded. Like like Don Quixote and that whole thing is breaking the fourth wall. Right. And what breaking the fourth wall means is that you’re taking the role of God in some sense. It might might not be, you know, the role of God as creator, but it might be, you know, the role of of of God in the instantiation of that particular thing. Breaking the third fourth wall. That sounds like third way ism kind of position ism. No, third way ism is a denial of the dialectic, the denial of of of false framing of the binary. It’s a denial of false dichotomy. That’s all third way ism is to say, you know, the world is bigger than you think. And you there’s a middle path. Yeah. The breaking the fourth wall is participant observer. Right. Right. Right. It’s playing God. Anytime you try to break the fourth wall, you’re playing God. Instead of saying, no, there’s a wall. I’m not going to break it. I’m going to honor the wall and find a better way that isn’t near the wall, but isn’t also as far away from the wall as I can get. That’s all it is. So I think I went into this with Teo. When you’re doing the participant observer, what you’re effectively doing is you’re participating and then you’re orienting. But well, first of all, the way that for Faker uses it, it’s orienting in a way that’s anti participation. Right. So that’s not good. But but even it’s like what are you orienting for? Right. Like you’re breaking your participation. So you’re breaking your flow for what purpose? The only reason is because you’re misaligned with your participation and you need to correct it. Like that’s the purpose of breaking your participation and orienting. But then you need to be capable of doing that in the first place. Right. Which is doubtful because I don’t think many people actually can fix that. Or maybe on a really high level. Right. It’s like, oh, I’m now looking at boobs and I need to go back to the task. Like that level, they might be able to make a fix. But like, oh, I’m lifting the weight and like I know that I’m using my muscles wrong. But that doesn’t mean that you can use them right. Like that doesn’t make any sense. Like just the identification of a lack doesn’t show you how to fill the lack. So I want to connect it back to the fate thing because I. I don’t know if fate is on the third level. Like. I mean, you have to believe in the forms, I guess. Right. So yes, participating in the forms requires faith. So I’ll just read this quickly. I won’t get bogged down here. This is from 493, I believe, unless my notes are wrong. I have two excerpts. I don’t know who’s speaking. You understand me very well, I said. And now to those four divisions of knowledge, you may assign four corresponding faculties. Number one, pure intelligence to the highest sphere, active intelligence to the second, to the third faith, to the fourth, the perception of the shadows, and the clearness of the several faculties will be in the same ratio as the truth of the objects to which they are related. Kind of a mouthful. Then they go on later in another section. They have the same structure, which is this comes later. You have quite conceived my meaning, I said, and now corresponding to these four divisions. Let there be four faculties in the soul, reason answering to the highest, understanding to the second, faith or conviction to the third, and perception of shadows to the last. And let there be a scale to them. And let us suppose that the several faculties have clearness in the same degree that their objects have truth. So there’s a correspondence between the faculties and the objects. There’s a lot there. Again, I said it wouldn’t get. No, they’re not objects. They’re spheres. Well, you have a sphere and in the top realm, you have the real objects and the sun. And then the world. No, like, like what? This is this is the thing that he did right? Like you have the sense making tool and it’s relating to a dimension, right? Effectively, it’s a dimension of intelligibility. Right? So he’s discerning four dimensions of intelligibility. And then he’s classifying the relationship. Right? So, but I don’t like the words that he’s using there because. But. Yeah, so, so if you if you if you say. Well, intellect, right, is. That which allows you allows for discernment. Right. And what was the second one? What it was understanding. Right. So that understanding is. Related to an interrelational framework. Right. So it’s it’s how are your discernments. Commuting coming together. Right. That would be the understanding in that framework. And then you switch to materiality. And then. You have. The things in and of themselves. And then you have the image of the things. Right. Like how they get presented. And I don’t I don’t know why you would need fate to relate to the things. Even of themselves. Well, because they go they go from certain types of knowledge that are again material into other types of knowledge into that are more into belief. Right. So they know that’s. No, they don’t. No, it’s not a sequence. It’s not a procedure. It’s not. That’s kind of the point. It’s not it’s not it’s not it’s not serial. It’s not a sequence or procedure. But it’s just an image. So they don’t go from this to that. That’s not what they’re just they’re just painting a sphere and they’re saying here’s four parts to it. That’s what they’re doing. And they’re not saying that evolves. Depending four spheres. Four spheres. You can always draw a circle around four things and say that they’re one because they’re all sense making things. Right. But that’s not helpful. That never ends. And he’s he’s he’s he’s ranking them in terms of quality. Right. So he’s saying the highest thing has the most quality and there’s less quality. And then there’s basically quantity. And then just the quantified. Right. Right. Which makes material the lowest. Or physicality the lowest. Which also makes a group of four things which would require four types of what? Knowing or information. Yeah. And that yeah that’s why it maps on to our knowledge engine model rather nicely. Because there’s four there’s he’s describing four ways of informing the world. Not one. And they’re not sequenced and they’re not a procedure. And that’s a reenchantment. Right. Oh you can’t reduce this to what? Nope. You can’t. Which means you can’t just get a procedure or practice and have it. Nope. You can’t have it. You can’t just get a practice. Right. You can’t do any of that. It’s not an option. So anyway I need to spend more time with that but I’m not sure about that. Third part still to that description I need to kind of sit with that more. You have to realize that I don’t think these things are optional. Right. So this is why we say like there’s four types of knowledge. Right. So the way that Plato frames it is like well yeah if you climb the ladder you might get up there. And I’m like no. And this is maybe the argument you’ve already seen them at birth. It’s like no. Like you’re already on the ladder. You’re already using all of these realms. But they’re in your subconscious. Right. And what happens when we start talking or whatever. Right. We gain the capacity to get understanding of what we are participating in. Right. And so what’s the easiest level of understanding of what we’re participating in. Well language. Right. Like it’s really easy to hear yourself say something. You’re like oh did I just say that. Right. And you get you have these higher levels of self reflection. Right. Where you’re like oh when I’m participating what is it that I’m participating with. Because it’s not the object. Because I can have the same participation with another object. So there’s a universality in my participation that I can abstract or dissociate from the object. And if I can get a self awareness of that. And you can use that to climb higher. Right. And then you start talking about well how is all of this stuff organized. Well now we get into the virtues and the good. Right. Which are like ways of which these things are interrelated. Which also are things that you’re participating in. And in order to get a knowledge of that which would be like the integratedness of everything. That requires a whole different type of sense making. Which is probably wisdom. So I’m very satisfied that we have very poor language for discussing cultural cognitive grammar these days. And we need better language. I mean I’m happy with that. I’m sure we can get into these. I know. I don’t think that’s a nowadays problem. I think that’s a problem. I think that’s a problem. I think that’s a problem. I know. I don’t think that’s a nowadays problem. I think that’s always been true. Because it doesn’t matter. Like the language is only reflecting of what you already know. Right. And knowing in the sense of you can grasp the being. Right. So if you’re not able to grasp the being. The grammar is of no use. Because it’s not latching onto something that’s real to you. And it’s even dangerous. That’s what for bill of knowledge is in some sense. If I get a tool that can grasp onto something and I cannot map it onto the thing that it grabs onto. Now I’m going to misuse it necessarily. Yeah. And that’s the problem of language is exemplified in my livestream last night so clearly. Because you can see all of this right there. We’re trying to give somebody a concept that he cannot accept. Cannot. Just can’t grasp it. Agrees to all the terms. Agrees to all the framing. Agrees to all the axiomatic statements. And still can’t grasp the concept. And it’s clear as day. Well, Adam or Mark, did you guys have anything? I know I’ve been kind of occupying a lot of this time at the end here. My intent is just to use this to ground myself better. Because six is way up there. So yeah, that’s pretty much all I have to say about intent for this. Adam? To continue to provide historical grounding and apart from that my intent throughout the week has been… What has been the past week, from the past week, find a wife. There we are. There we are. Manuel? Mine too, they’re cheap. I was thinking about how to have this conversation with Teo. Because it’s just blowing up in my mind. Like the strain that needs to be covered and the agreements that need to be had. So in the elimination I got the seed category. So when you relate to a person, you can see seeds in them that are sprouting. You can relate to the seeds that are sprouting. You can see places that require seeding. So you can seed in them. You can see things that require sun. So you can shine a light on things for them. And you can see a lack of nutrition. So it’s like this gardening analogy and what it means to be in relationship to a person. And yeah, like the angles of relating and I’m certain that that list is incomplete. And I’m like already with that list I’m like holy cow, right? Like what did I just do? Like I’m going to have to extend this whole garden metaphor, right? And I’m going to have to connect it with all of these things, right? And then you can place it in interpersonal context and then in the social context, right? And then I’m trying to build up to the relationship with God. So I’m just going to have to deal with that for the week because that’s not going to be fun. It’s just going to blow my mind. Well, I like that analogy about seeds. Seeds and maybe if you’re in the workplace and you have people on your team, like some of them need watering technically or with personal life or with whatever, right? It’s just good. It’s good. Humble perspectives you just have, you know, meditating on throughout the week. Yeah, cultivation all the way up and down. That’s what people get confused. You want to be a good employee. You have to cultivate not just the people side of your company, but the non-people side of your company, right? If you don’t pay attention to the accounting, you’re going to go bankrupt, right? If you don’t pay attention to the HR, people are going to leave. If you don’t pay attention to the people, people are going to leave, right? There’s all these aspects. If you don’t pay attention to technology, the company will fail, right? And that’s why companies are hard because it takes a lot of different skills. But its cultivation is the key, not just the seeds. The seeds are part of it. But, you know, you want to plant them at the right time, right? You want to plant them with the right preparation, right? And then you want to keep up on the watering, et cetera. Yeah, and more importantly, right, you’re going to have to develop a sounds making in relationship to that. And like that, that is not obvious, right? And like, yes, like you’re going to be doing that naturally. But if you want to do it intentionally, that’s a whole different bargain. And then that’s not even accounting for the fact that you’ll get reciprocally narrowed. Because you’re you and you have emotions. So like the amount of putting yourself aside that is necessary to do this correctly is just unbelievable. Yeah, well, that’s why humility is so important. And that’s why you have to be humble. And that’s why you have to be humble. And that’s why you have to be humble. Yeah, well, that’s why humility is so important.