https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9ePGY2JXfSE
Alright, welcome everybody. This time I’m a little bit more prepared. I actually want to get going because I’m somewhat excited. Yeah, do a little bit of reflection on last week, right? Like it was the ship, the captain, and then the dog. I think I want to revisit that a little bit because I think I have better framing now for these things. Can I pause you right there real quick? Something I realized this morning that I missed on this captain of the analogy, the key thing there, my translation kept talking about how he knows navigation and the whole point is that he’s a stargazer, right? Which wasn’t obvious to me in my translation and that like he’s not ignorant of the right things because I was like, well, this is kind of a weird forced analogy. Like what do you mean there’s no naval academies, right? But when you say, oh, the captain is the guy who’s the stargazer. He’s the guy who can interpret, you know, who has knowledge of the celestial bodies. It has a little bit of a different tone. So anyway, go ahead. I just, I realized that this morning and it changed reading for it. But the problem, the point was that the others wouldn’t recognize that quality in him, right? Because they would deem him useless, right? And that’s where the tension is. And so let me see. Yeah, so get a taste of the framing of the book. Yeah, I do feel like reading today, I did get a better sense. In extension, I started reframing myself. Yesterday I was watching a series and I started seeing like the shape of the spirit that was surrounding someone physically affecting the reaction of the other, right? And like in cinema or whatever, like that’s accentuated. But like I saw the potential for looking at the world that way, right? Where you can see the influence or something, you can observe that happening. So that was, yeah, that was pretty profound in the sense of having an actual, I don’t know, something to reference that would hold that effectively. So yeah, that’s really a really interesting for me. And I’m, I guess when I’m going through it today, like I, Mark just now made the remark that there’s nothing introduced in this book unnecessarily. And I agree. And so there’s some things that are introduced where I’m like, why is this introduced, right? So I still want to dance with that a little bit because yes, sometimes we just miss obvious things. So that’s going to be my intention for the week. Danny? Well, I’m struggling with this. So at one level, it’s just understanding, I would say. And I don’t know that I have much. That’s really where all of my focus is going to go. I don’t understand the forms. I’m going to just try to give it an honest entertainment. Just trying to get inside of Plato’s mind and understanding this, you know, the mind. How to see the world from this perspective. So that’s pretty much it for me. Yeah. So my reflection is, boy, we kept jumping forward quite a bit last week and I was like, why are we jumping forward? And you can’t really do that in this book. Everything is important. Everything is equally important. And you need it to understand the stuff that comes later. And to Manuel’s point, there’s nothing in here that’s kind of like, oh, let’s just throw away line or whatever. It’s all sort of important. And when you fail to do that, when you’re like, no, I want to get to the essence or I want the meat, right? Or I want to, I just want to understand what this particular piece is about. That’s not going to work. Like it’s such an orchestration. And, you know, by six here, by the end of six, you’re really seeing the pattern. Like every chapter has a very distinct, Dr. Linton-Jack talks about this, but every chapter is a distinct pattern. And what they’re actually doing is just like amplifying that pattern over and over again in every chapter because they’re making deeper and deeper, harder and harder points. In fact, so it’s just a delight to read. And yeah, I think a lot of people, Heidegger, Nietzsche, you know, they’re all famous for, you know, oh, I owe Plato, we’re going to get past him. And maybe they realize they can’t or whatever, they rebel against him or whatever. And it’s like, maybe that’s just because that’s the answer. And maybe you don’t like that answer, but maybe that actually is the, is it going to hint that if it lasted this many years, that probably it’s not wrong. It’s complete and there are no flaws or at least there are so few flaws and it’s not worth picking them out. So, yeah, I mean, this has just been a fun exploration. It’s fun to see what people don’t see and what other people see that I miss. Like it’s just, it’s just great. So, yeah, let’s dive into it. Yeah. So I stopped reading a little bit before the animal thing. I’m going to recapture there. So what they’re talking about is how the majority recognized, can the majority recognize the philosopher, right? And what is their relationship to the philosopher? And basically the claim that is being made is that the majority will necessarily corrupt, right? Like they will corrupt the philosopher, but they will corrupt themselves as well because effectively that’s their essence, right? And the reason that’s their essence is because they’re not pointed towards the right thing, which the dog trainer is an example of, right? And then for the philosopher, now he’s going back to the ship analogy, truth is the captain, justice and health of mind are along the way and temperance will follow, right? So that’s kind of the framework. So you could say the tell us or a tell us is the truth, right? And then justice and health of mind are like, I don’t know, the things that keep it in balance or whatever. And then temperance is in the expression. So I found that really interesting and then he gives a lift of all the virtues of the philosopher that Danny was such a fan of and I did not write down. Yeah, so the corruption of the philosophic nature and its inconsistencies make people unworthy. And then there’s two ways that people get distracted from the philosophic nature. One is the other virtues, so these are qualities that the philosopher is supposed to have, they themselves have an influence and that influence distracts from philosophy, which I found really interesting, right? So there’s a competition between the virtues and that’s detrimental to the philosophic nature. And then effectively the second one is literature, so attain material goals. And then start doing the plant analogy with the seed. You get greater injuries due to bigger contrast, right? So if you have a philosophic nature, you have sensitivity effectively and that sensitivity will provide you being affected by more things that other people like literally are not affected by. And then the third one is the third way. Other people like literally are not affected by. And then they make a statement about that the corruption of the philosopher creates the biggest evil, right? And this is, Mark likes it, right? This is the mad scientist, the mad genius archetype. And it’s like, yeah, like the people who have the most agency effectively or the capacity to influence the world, they can do the biggest thing and they can be undetected for the longest time. So yeah. And that doesn’t even have to be malicious, right? Like that’s the other part, right? Like the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I think that’s kind of what we’re seeing now. Mark also likes to say, well, we give people like these papers that says that they have finished an education and we make them think that they’re smarter than they are. But I also think that we give people more intellectual tools than they’re capable of properly holding or we don’t give them the practice with the tools that would be requisite to maintain a right relationship to these tools, right? And yeah, so that’s pretty problematic from this framing. And then he says, well, there’s always the chance that there’s this individual that gets protected from these corruptive influences by a divine power, right? And like my association is being like, oh yeah. So that person would have to have a divine nature to protect them from these corruptions. Yeah, something like that comes back a little bit later. So I guess I’ll stop here a little bit. Is there anything we want to add or discuss? No, I think that was a reasonably good summary. And yeah, I mean, it’s all leading up to the big statement. I mean, you made this point earlier before we started, right? Like, well, that was kind of made in the end of chapter five, but in chapter six, the volume gets turned up to 11 on the same point, which is ultimately Plato forms. And the setting of the framing here, while it does follow the same pattern as all the previous quote books, is important because that pattern is important. It’s really important. Then one way of corruption is necessity will compel. I don’t understand this writing, but I think they’re making a, oh yeah, like in the dog story, they were, they were, they were basically saying something that’s of human virtue, right? Like they’re referencing the direct experience. And what’s not included is what’s more than that, right? Like what transcends the observable? And I think that was the purpose of the dog story, right? Like there’s only, the virtues only based upon the directly observable and the directly relatable. And then they’re talking about the other state, the other state, the other state, the other states, and that they’re effectively evil because they’re not ruled well. And then they say what is going well or what is being saved within those states is effectively by the power of God, right? So they’re making an appeal to, okay, it’s effectively a miracle that things go right in these states that are- What’s the appeal? Is it to Zeus? I don’t remember what. And it’s like it’s God. Like mine is all, like it’s pretty Christian probably because like, I like it. But like mine also uses the heavens and stuff like that, right? So, but- Oh no, they do use God in here, right? Human beings which Homer too called Godlike and the image of God. Okay. I take that back. Okay. Yeah. Because I think Plato was famous for having a monotheistic framework, right? Like I think that’s what he’s doing. Yeah, one of the many. Yeah, yeah. It’s all about, he’s saying that the sophists are mercenary, right? So in some sense, that’s the polytheism, right? Or like whatever they serve, right? Like that’s- Oh wow. That’s a good insight. Sophism is polytheism. That’s a really good insight. Yeah, it is, right? Because you can pick your value. A sophist just picks the value that they want to exemplify and they ignore everything else and that’s the whole trick. It’s actually that they just pick one thing and they go after that and they put everything under that one thing. Everything is under this one and then they pretend like, yeah, but there are other things. So it’s fine. That’s like, no, no, no, no. You’re playing a trick. Yeah, I like that. They’re polytheists. Yeah, and also the mercenary aspect, right? So they just, oh, like you’re paying me in some way. Oh, I’ll serve you. Right. Well, that’s polytheism because yeah, you just switch allegiances because you can. You can be the god. You can be the servant to the god of the doors one day and the god of the windows the next and it doesn’t matter. The doorknobs. Don’t forget the doorknobs. The doorknobs. The doorknobs never has enough money for me. I mean, I don’t know about you. Yeah, but if they put current on it, then you’d feel real bad if you open the door. Danny, did you want to open? No, not really. The only thing, since on the whole nature thing, since we’re revisiting stuff, one thing I just noticed this morning was that the feel of the book seems the contrast between the beast or the world and the divine seems to be more. There seems to be, he seems to be bringing up this distinction between this divine in these examples, like when he gives an analogy of like the stargazer, like there’s always that that color of divinity in being able to, you know, that’s necessary in order to have proper discernment. I just wanted to make that observation. Secondly, I think it could use some explanation when you say the one in the many is the monotheism things that could use some explanation or we like to beat up on sophists. Why is a sophist not just a lover of wisdom? So in other words, when we beat up and say, oh, sophism is polytheism. How can we conceptualize a sophist in the text in the modern day? Like, what would be like a modern day example of what these people are getting wrong? Well, first of all, right, like what he’s doing, and like this is a pattern that I’m probably recognizing at the end of book five, he was sketching these two realms, right? Like the realm of truth or reality and the realm of opinion, right? Or the realm of accordance to being, right? Being true. And the realm of opinion where you’re neither true nor false, right? Like it’s a little bit aimless effectively, right? And so what is the thing that you’re referencing, right? And then this example of the dog is the perfect example, right? So what’s this dog trainer doing? Well, he’s being in relationship to the dog, right? I’ll just go through it because like, so the dog trainer calls knowledge about the world wisdom. He makes it into a system or an art and he uses that for teaching. He is disconnected from the principles and he proceeds without knowing, without knowing the principle, without and he also doesn’t know what he means by his system, right? Like that’s the literal word that was in my text. Like he’s disconnected from the meaning of what he’s doing, right? So he’s attuned to the functionality and I wrote down the meaning of what he’s doing, down here, an ethic based upon the necessity. And this is what utilitarianism is, right? Like effectively that’s the utilitarian ethic. Yeah. Well, and I think it’s worth pointing something out. So the etymology of Sophos is that it’s related to Sophia. It’s not wisdom. It’s related to wisdom. That’s a very important point. So image of, right, but it refers specifically to an expert of a profession. So when we talk about sophists, we’re talking about the specialists or experts. How’s expertise been working out for us recently guys? Exactly the way Plato says sophists get corrupted. They serve a single master because they don’t have that wisdom or knowledge. So the sophists don’t have wisdom and because they don’t have the wisdom or the knowledge of the principles that they are embodying. And to Manuel’s point, that is made explicit here. The sophists are disconnected from the principles. That’s the statement. And because they don’t have that, now we have a problem. And the problem is that they’re saying stuff like, hey, I’m a sophist. I’m a sophist. I’m a sophist. I’m a sophist. And the problem is that they’re saying stuff like so and thing is pandemic and so and thing is vaccine and so and thing is right, which is disconnected from the principle. And we’re going to solve this problem by doing this thing, even though the thing doesn’t solve the problem. That’s the sophism. That’s exactly what Plato’s warning about is exactly the pattern we’re in now, which is how can you trust experts after what’s happened in the past, like five, 10, 15, however many years you want to point to it. I would say 2014 onward. But you can make arguments for different time periods. You certainly can’t make an argument against the past four years because, you know, definitely a problem. Nassim Taleb, again, great books, points that out left, right and center about the experts we have, particularly in economics. And so you have that deep point that sophists are not wisdom people. That’s not what that means. It’s related to the word, but it means expertise. It means a professional, means a specialist and specialty. You need specialty. It’s not optional, but also it’s not the answer. Right. So that’s basically what he’s pointing out, is that the sophists are slaves to the payment structure. Right. They get paid for these things and in modern, well, sorry, in more recent times, we’ve tended to move expertise into wisdom again. But the very important point of this particular section of book six is expertise is not wisdom. Explicitly, sophism is not wisdom. It’s not. It is anti-wisdom, actually, because it’s disconnected from the principles. And to be wise is to be connected to the principles. And to be wise is to be connected to the principles. And to be wise is to be connected to the principles and not stuck on the, we’ll say, the concrete facts of the matter. Right. Or what we would call the scientific way of understanding and talking about the world. And the understanding part is more important than the talking part. Because you can always go with the English is imprecise in there for, right. That’s what the post moderns do. But the important part is conceptually in your head, right, before you form words, things should not be of the nature of the sophist. They should not be particular professional versions of an expertise on a subject alone. Right. They should contain a connection to the principle so that you can see when the expertise is no longer serving its purpose. Because that’s the problem of today. At what point do you realize that the core thesis of cancer being a genetic problem is not working? Because we’ve dumped so much money into proceeding as if by the expertise and we’ve never gotten good results. Which is not to say there aren’t some good things coming out of it, but honestly every other disease type thing that we’ve tackled with, we’ll call it modern medicine, right. Or medicine since we’ll say the mid 1900s or something has been solved. But not cancer. And we’re really not any closer. I mean we’re a little bit closer, but not really. And so why is that? Well, obviously the thesis that you’re using that underlies the expertise that all cancer treatment is based on is wrong. It’s really that simple. Nobody wants to hear that. But it’s wrong. And it’s clearly wrong. And people have noted there have been articles for at least 10, 12 years about this. It’s clearly wrong guys. We know it’s wrong. We don’t know what to replace it with. Although some people do. Some people have some ideas. But you have to replace it. Why? Because the principle that if this was right, we’d have solved it by now is wise. And the principle of one a cancer researcher researching cancer the same way everybody else does is clearly wrong. And that’s where the wisdom comes in. Wisdom tells you when expertise fails. So there’s a couple things. He’s talking about people, experts effectively coming into the wisdom field. So there’s an appeal and there’s a status. And you can see that with, well, John Favrechi or people like Lex Friedman or whatever. They come in because they perceive inherent value but they’re dragging along their stuckness. And then they’re special because they have this unique angle. And that’s the way that they get a cloud around them because there’s newness there. And then the other thing is that these sophists, they get correction based upon praise. So they do, they understand success based upon affirmation that they’re receiving. And I’m going to use that stupid word again, affirmation, right? Because that’s what praise is. And what will happen if you base yourself on praise? Well, experience audience capture, right? Because now you’ll be subjected to the whims or the fashions of the day, right? Or worse yet, of the people willing to praise you. And that can be a very small number of people that are willing to encourage you in your bad behavior and a large number of people that are just along for the ride. Yeah, right. Like, oh, I can see this bus going to the cliff. And I’m just like, yeah. There’s the rhetoric and there’s the ability for a small number of, we’ll say, very articulate people to manage the narrative of a large number of people through subterfuge because they’re using the sophist, the expert. And look, sophistry was, there was always a word appended on the front, sorry, not appended, prepended to sophist to denote, prefix, sorry, but to denote what kind of sophist. So a sophist isn’t a wisdom guy explicitly in the ancient, it’s not there in the language, it’s just not. Right. But what that means is that they are effectively, well you should just say it, but yeah, we’ll get to that. But what that means is that he is effectively the person sort of taking on the role of steering the ship, right? But the actual person navigating the ship and telling him where to steer are these praise people because that’s what he responds to. So he’s not responding by looking up in the night sky and going off the celestial bodies above. He’s responding to, oh yes, turning the ship a little bit left was great, that was a good work. Right. Oh, oh yes, trimming the sails to slow down was good, that’s good work. Right. That’s what he’s responding to and this is why democracy fails. Or even worse, right, because he kicked the captain out, right. So it’s like, I need to not be kicked out so that he’s motivated by doing the things that will not get him kicked out, which is what we see in politics. Right. It’s the inverse of positive motivation. Well, I do like what Ethan said, a crewman attempting to pilot the ship by looking down only. But again, it’s worse because in this case, the sophist is a puppet of the people who are articulate enough and close enough and willing enough to praise somebody. And then they appear to be navigating the ship. But actually, they’re not navigating, they’re taking responsibility, kind of, for navigating the ship. But the navigation is happening through the praise. It’s happening through the rhetoric, through the articulation. It’s not happening as the result of looking up at something external and having, we’ll say, the wisdom to integrate that into the telos of whatever. And this is the problem with democracy. Because of scale, you can’t listen to 300 million people. One person can’t listen to 300 million people. In fact, a group of people, even say a few thousand, can’t listen to 300 million people. It’s too many voices. It’s noise instead of signal. And so what you get is you get a few influential people that are manipulating the situation. And that might be OK when the person is an elected official and has the responsibility for discerning experts from non-experts. But it’s not OK when the experts themselves are making the proclamations and there’s no filter. Because experts are never responsible. There’s no skin in the game. If you want to use Taleb’s terms, it’s a great book. Got to read all Taleb’s books. That one’s really good. There’s no skin in the game. And so all of a sudden, the experts can just say whatever they want. If it doesn’t go right, it’s fine. Because they got their praise, so they’re happy. And if they were wrong, everybody else pays the price. Oh, well, there’s no responsibility whatsoever. And that perfectly frames influencers. Because why do we want to have Prytmon? Because if we have Prytmon, the ship will do this. And it’s like, only if you live in that world, and only as long as that person is captain. And we know, this is where we start, that corrupt. Like that’s just, it’s a given. That’s not a thing that’s attainable across a long period of time. I like Ethan’s idea for self-correction. And I will preface this before I read it by saying, this thesis is from Dan Carlin’s Painful Tainment. And if you haven’t listened to the four-hour extravaganza that is Painful Tainment, which is excellent, some of Dan Carlin’s stuff I absolutely despise, but this is quite good. This is why we need public executions. And maybe executions are a little too strong, although probably not. But we need public punishment of people so that if they do something wrong, there is a consequence. And that consequence is visible to everybody. Because we need to know when the ship hits the rocks and sinks so that we don’t run the next ship into the rocks. And if we pretend like the ship didn’t sink or there are no rocks or everything’s fine, then we’re going to keep running ships into rocks and eventually we’re going to run out of ships. And that’s not going to be good for anybody. Right. And this also came a little bit apparent with Putin, right? Because like, oh, Putin is being punished because things are not happening by his will. But then what happened was extremely neglectable in impact, right? Because there was almost no consequence of something that could be disastrous. And instead of seeing the miracle, effectively, of what happened, people are like, oh, this is degrading his authority. And I’m like, yeah, I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. Like, I’m seeing a small miracle. And yeah, like, I don’t think that’s detrimental to him at all. But yeah, so that’s the two sides of the equation, right? And yeah, like, I don’t think you can resolve that. And I think we also will get to the fact that you can’t resolve that. So when we say that sophism is like polytheism, we basically, you’re saying we’re picking a first principle that we are going to elevate most highly. And that’s what we’re going to base our expertise on. And that’s what, okay, that’s okay. So it’s an election of what’s most important. And that’s the core. And so the monotheism thing, when you say there’s a lot of fingerprints of monotheism, when you bring up the one of the many thing, is that just, so there’s an irony in the book, and that the philosopher king is the one of the few people who doesn’t just serve one purpose, right? Because you can’t, out of necessity, right? Out of necessity, they can’t just serve a single purpose. No. That’s what he’s bringing up with the corrupting influence of society. He’s saying, you know, like, no. No, Danny, Danny, you’re missing a bunch of stuff. Look, why are the sophists polytheists? Because, right, each sophist has an expertise. They don’t all believe the same thing. They don’t have one thing in common. And this is, again, this is explicit in the text. So like, I don’t want people to get into arguments about translation, and it’s explicit in all the texts. It’s everywhere. They are, a sophist is defined in the text as someone who is actually separated from the principle. And this is the argument, like, they cannot have a single principle as sophists. And because they can’t have a single principle as sophists, they are mercenaries, to Manuel’s excellent point, I think that was off camera. There were also a class of people, right? And there are a class of people that needed to make money, right? And so how do you make money? Well, you please the person that wants your service, right? So they were adept in fulfilling the expectations of who paid them. Exactly. And so even though they’re experts, and even though you need that model, and it’s not optional, it corrupts because of that principle. Right? But they don’t understand that. They, the people involved, experts as such, and still happening, nothing’s changed since Plato, nothing, right? Experts as such cannot avoid being separated from the principle because it’s a trade off. Either you’re an expert, right? Or you’re with the principles. You gotta pick one. You gotta pick one, right? And that’s the difference. But there’s no symmetry there, right? If somebody’s for the principles and somebody else is for the, basically we’ll say the same principles, it’s a bad way to think about it in Plato’s world. If someone’s for the principles and someone else is for the principles, they’re for the same thing. So they are the anti-sophists. But you can’t then point at the sophists and say, well, all sophists are for the same thing because they’re not. They’re actually explicitly all for different things. And it’s like, whoa. But because they’re for different things, the corruption of the money or the, not even the money, the praise, whatever it is, is always there. You cannot get rid of it because you’re not appealing. Definitionally, you’re separated from the principles. And again, it’s not optional. You gotta have sophists. You gotta have experts. They’re not going away. Like the vision that I have, right, is you have a castle, right? And then there’s people storming the castle. And the only way that people can get into the castle is by the ladder that they’re in front of them, right? So there might be a bunch of ladders, but they only have access to the ladder in front of them. And then you have people that stand on the castle walls. And they can see all the ladders at once, right? And they can pick the ladder that they relate to. And they know how the ladders are in relation to each other and all of that stuff, right? So these perspectives, they’re not comparable, right? Because one of them is specifically narrowed up, right? And the other one is broadening downwards. Right. That’s why they’re not symmetrical. That’s why it’s not a dichotomy and it’s not a binary. Because one position for a certain cause is better than the other position for a certain cause. But you need both positions. But you can’t occupy them. And so you need both types. You can’t single it down to one. You can’t say, oh, expertise is bad because it’s disconnected from the principles. And you can’t say, oh, well, true philosophy or true philosophers are bad because they can’t be experts. You can’t say that. It’s just not optional to have both, even though it’s an asymmetrical relationship. And that’s why Plato says that the philosopher is useless, right? Because they’re not experts. They can’t implement. They’re incapable. So let’s get back to it unless someone wants to add something. So, Dal Socrates makes an argument. And he says, you recognize the truth of what I was saying. And so he’s not making an appeal to being correct. He’s making an appeal to pointing at something. And the other person recognizing the pattern that he’s pointing at, like in their own lives. So he’s making an experiential reference, which is a different style of argument than he was making before. What did Eton add? Profits are outside of the structure. Profits are outside of the structure. And the priest were the experts. Yeah, like Peugeot goes into this, right, where you have the saintly characters that operate outside of the hierarchy to basically fix frustrations within the hierarchy. So yeah, there’s ways, but that’s implementation, right? Yeah, but making the distinction that Ethan did between priests and prophets, priests are the experts on the, we’ll say the implementation of whatever the prophets spew out, because the prophets aren’t supposed to get specific. They’re not supposed to tell you, on this date, this time, this will happen. That’s not what they do, right? Because they’re warning you about a potential. They’re not telling you about a definite sequence of events or procedures that’s going to happen in a certain way in the future at a certain time. They’re not doing any of that. Now we’re going back to the philosopher growing up in society. So first of all, he’s making the claim that philosophers must fall under the censure of the world because they will never be recognized. So basically he’s stating that if you’re in the realm of forms, right, or in the spiritual realm, and you’re navigating there, people at the bottom of the castle, they’ll never understand your perspective. They’ll never be able to trust you because there’s nothing that you can give to them that will prove, right, and this goes, yeah, proof is what they want, right? And like a little bit later, you can’t make them see what you see and therefore you just can’t convince them. It’s just not an option. Yeah, well, I did want to mirror what Ethan said, right? Prophets have their eyes directed up. And I know Pastor Paul van der Vleiden talks about eyes up versus eyes down. Prophets are eyes up. Priests are eyes down, right? Don’t get too stuck with it, right? And there’s that natural relationship. It’s not a tension. It’s a relationship. And you can argue all relationships have a tension. Well, yeah, because in order to be related to something, there has to be a tension because tension is also that which binds. And that’s where the submission comes in. So you have to have the relationship between looking up and looking down in order to have the middle ground that we occupy. So basically there’s this horrible court situation being presented. It’s like people recognize the rising talent. And then the talent gets presented with this option, right? Like do I want to relate to the immediate results in my life, right? Like do I want to pursue things or do I slave for insight? That was literally the wording that was used, which is effectively sacrificing for potential and not appealing, right? Like it’s not a thing that you’d easily do, especially if the whole structure around you is organized in such a way that they want to draw you away from that. And then this is where I get skeptical, but people are attracted to the dignity in philosophy. And this is where the sophists come from the crafts. That’s where that came from. And then, oh yeah, the sophists that come from the craft, right, they’re making this analogy. They’re this tinkerer that just put on some fancy clothes and is trying to wet Sophia. And it’s like, yeah, but they didn’t do the internal work, right? Like they just get themselves up on the outside and then pretend to be able to participate. And that’s where the marriage analogy comes in, which is also important in Christian terms. So this marriage analogy, and then they go into, well, can this be a good marriage? Because you have to have, what’s the word, like a certain attunement or something, right? Like so that the marriage can bear fruit. And if you don’t have that compatibility, then yeah, that doesn’t work. Although it’s interesting that the philosophers are bridegrooms of philosophy, at least in my translation, while in the Christian it’s the bride, you’re the bride. So the relationship gets flipped in that situation. And then having the philosopher’s nature is like a man fallen among wild beasts, unwilling to join them, but unable to resist them alone, which I found really interesting, right? Like, so this goes into the collective sense making a little bit, right? And when you’re just this atomized individual, you won’t have the power to resist the collective imposition upon you. And this, again, is this hundredth repeat of the suffering, right? Like every time there’s an accentuation of the suffering and the not being accepted and the horrible nature of being a philosopher, right? This goes back to the first chapter where basically you could either get your worldly things, right? And either that was good or was the thing good, like being in relationship to truth, but then like nobody would like you, right? And like that’s kind of, well, it’s not so much that nobody would like you, but like you’re unable to connect to everybody because you see that they’re all evil. And then you’re unable to be of any use to the people around you, to your friends, right? And we talked about this a little bit earlier, Mark, where it’s like, oh, I’m glad I didn’t read this book before because I’d be disagreeing with people all the time. And so this is pointing at the futility of that disagreement, right? Like you just can’t commune and therefore it basically self-isolates the philosopher, right? It goes a separate way. Right. Well, we’ll see that. And that’s interesting. And of course, I’ve got to rope it in, right? Yeah, you can’t commune. And so to some extent, all these people who are, you know, we’ll say ruminating on, although I would argue that they’re not actually ruminating, they just think they are thinking about the crises of the world and the problems of the world and how things got this way and coming up with these frameworks by trying to pull themselves out of the world so that they can judge it and then making those judgments. But in doing so, they are explicitly not able to commune, which is the problem, as you stated. That’s the problem. That’s actually a problem. It’s not an advantage, right? Of a philosopher is that now they lose what I would call intimacy. They lose that relationship to the world because they’re trying to be as far away from it as possible. And then they’re complaining, well, the real problem is nobody can get along and nobody can commune. It’s like, well, that’s because everybody’s trying to be a philosopher in some sense or a corrupted philosopher in this case. They’re trying to remove themselves from the world and then they’re complaining that they’re removed from the world. They’re trying to not commune because they need to judge. And then when you’re judging in that way, you are not able to commune anymore. And it’s like, well, yeah, you got to pick one. Now, right. Like they have this need, right? And they need it fulfilled with affirmation, right? Oh, you have this great idea, right? They want to have the recognition or the validation of their effort, of their jadedness, right? Like they’re in some sense, embittered also. So there’s this, when you climb up, you dissociate and then, yeah, you lose the capacity to be intimate, right? And yeah, like that is the problem that we’re seeing. And I had this whole conversation yesterday about what’s happening in this little corner, right? And it’s just like this this hole, this black hole that’s sucking everybody in. It’s like everybody’s just looking for validation of that. At least the problem that they’re seeing is, right, like maybe that’s like the first level of validation, right? And then second level of validation is that working on it is appreciated because that they can be part of something, which probably is this little corner of them, right? Like, oh, I can be part of all of these people working on it while they’re not really part of anything because they’re just atoms collected in the cloud. Well, that’s the sophism, right? They’re all trying to be different experts about the same problem. It’s like, yeah, but that’s not helpful because then you can’t commune about a solution, right? You can’t come to a conclusion about what you should do and what the real problem is. And that’s not even an option to you anymore. And that’s the problem. And that’s actually the tower of Babel, right? It’s like, oh, yes, we’re all like they’re all building the same tower, right? Like they’re building their own version or their own side of the tower and it’s not connected. Yeah. Yeah. And then they go into managing of the state is the greatest work. Like these philosophers, out of their good nature, they will do good works. But if they would be at the head of the state, that would be the greatest work because now they can, he can include the country in his personal salvation, like which isn’t obvious to be like, like if he doesn’t get accepted, like why would he be able to rule? Like, but whatever. And then they start shitting on the political systems of the time that they cannot accommodate the philosopher. And then they say, well, we not only need this perfect philosopher to magically appear, we also need the perfect ground to put in the seed of the philosopher, which would be the perfect society. And that also needs to magically appear. And then they need to come together and then it can work, which is literally a miracle. I don’t know how much more of a miracle you want. Yeah. And then they’re drawing in the hypothetical state that they made in the previous chapters, as the state that would be able to hold the philosopher. And then they start saying, okay, what does the state need to provide to the people so that philosophers can exist? And the main purpose is that they get to learn the dialectic. Like the complainant that now people are too distracted from learning dialectic and that is the first thing that you need to do. You need to build your body in service of philosophy. And then when you’ve matured enough, you accept into the gymnastics of the soul. That was basically the framing. So there’s this, yeah, gymnastics. They’re looking for a physical analogy there. Well, and they say it happens. They say it’s useful, right? And they go through the development cycle at the same time. They say there’s this progression from where you start and you sort of get more physical, right? And then you get less physical and then you can do what you want basically when you’re in retirement or whatever. Right. And they go into the physicality because at a certain point it was like, we can’t have the philosophers do work effectively, in other words, get expertise, which is interesting that they separate the work from. But work is not physical because they are like Plato and Aristotle were wrestlers, right? They are physically doing things with a goal, with a telos. But those things are not the sorts of things that gain you expertise as we would understand it. And we’ll say recent times. Right. Because they’re physical and they’re ultimate physical. Like that’s explicit. They’re ultimate physical. It’s like, well, what are they doing? Just lifting weights and being in the gym, right? You know, it’s like, yeah, that’s that’s they’re tuning their bodies. Well, why are you tuning your bodies? Like what’s going on with this? What wonderful topic last night on embodiment, navigating patterns, just saying why are you tuning your body? Because you need to tune your body to know the things that philosophers, true philosophers will say, need to know. Yeah, maybe because they’re not giving the body tunement up, right? And like this probably has to do with integration as well, right? Because like, but it’s not that they don’t work. They work in again, in recent times, we would consider going to gym every day. They’re struggling. They’re struggling. They’re physically struggling. In other words, a good philosopher has to physically struggle with other good philosophers and other people in the gym to be a good philosopher. You can’t do it as an academic exercise. I think actually that’s the dialectic. Like it’s that’s being in the dance. Yeah, I guess that’s basically what intimacy, that’s basically the cultivation of intimacy. If you want to frame it like that. Yeah, I got some comments about everybody’s conception of dialectic. I’m like, ah, I don’t think that’s what Plato was saying at all. I don’t know where you guys are getting this from, because they’re making it purely academic. And I’m like, the framing of this is no, it’s not academic, like right up front. Well, hold on. They’ll go into that more later on. I’m not 100% on that. But like, yeah. So then there’s the interludes. Socrates randomly state that he’s now a friend with Tiamacus or whatever. I don’t know why he does that. Like, I just didn’t catch that, like what he was doing there. Like what? To claim agreement, your favorite new term, agreement. Right. Like, why would he, why did he, what did he base that on? We didn’t, I don’t think he based it on anything, but we should address, Ethan’s got a question here, more on this trade off of the position of judgment and intimacy. I don’t think that’s judgment. Like, I don’t know where judgment comes into it. Yeah, you can’t judge without, you can’t judge properly without intimacy. Right. It’s not, in other words, it’s not appropriate for you to take somebody that you only see on a screen that you’ve never had a personal conversation with and judge that person. Like that’s just not, it’s not an appropriate thing to do because you don’t know the person. So you can’t judge, I’m not saying you can’t judge what they said. I’m not saying you can’t judge their framework necessarily, but I’m saying you can’t judge the person, like, because you don’t know them. And so judgment requires intimacy. And it’s not a trade off. Those two are kind of together. So I don’t know where that’s, where that’s coming from. And attunement is a cosmic truth that scales up and down, even down into the more physical world. Well, and look, I would say actually that attunement starts physical and goes up. Yeah, I think that that has to do with the acceptation, right? Like that, like, I think, I think this is, this is the problem, right? So there’s the emanation, but then there’s our relationship with the emanation, right? And our relationship with the emanation emerges somewhat. So this, I think that’s maybe what the confusion is that people have, like, that the confusing how we get to know something with what you’re getting to know. Yeah, yeah, I don’t, I don’t like, obviously, there’s, there is attunement just means being more true or something, right? So there, that’s the strength of equality or something. Or the boundness or the binding of equality or something. No, being more true, I think is right. When you’re attuned to something, you’re, you’re moving in accordance to the truth of the thing. Right, because truth is a relationship. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a type of intimacy, right? It’s a type of relationship. It’s quality of a relationship. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not in opposition. It’s all about cooperation and communion. And submission or surrender. Well, you need that. Yeah, that’s implied, I would say, and communion. In order to commune with somebody, you have to agree to do, there’s a submission there for sure. Yeah, but, but, but in the truth, right, like in the truth, there’s a surrender to reality. In the truth, maybe in the truth, but I wasn’t discussing truth. I was just discussing being true. The action, not the, not the state. So here’s the point where, so, Khritis, people cannot believe what they have not seen. And then he says, well, these states are unable to manifest without the philosopher king, right? So in some sense, he says the head is primary or something. And then there’s this weird phrasing, my opinion agrees with yours, which is like, dissociation from the ownership of the opinion or something. But it’s an interesting phrasing there. Well, I mean, he’s, again, he’s trying to prove agreement by stating it, by stating the absence of disagreement. Oh, so it’s, it’s, it’s a way around the double negative. He does that all the time. The whole book is that this is so funny. Like all of these, the whole text is full of that trick. It’s full of it. It’s hysterically. If you don’t laugh when you read this book, you’re missing so much. You’re just, you’re, you’re missing the point. There’s a lot of stuff in here that is deliberately meant to amuse you. I mean, some of the hyperbole and ridiculous, they did it again with the, well, of course this must be true. It could not be any other way. Of course this must be true. It could not be. Talk, but it’s so funny. It’s just completely hysterical. So yeah, I mean, if you’re not laughing while you’re reading some of these statements and, and I think, look, they’re very well-typed and they’re in there very deliberately. Like without that, the text doesn’t work. The point doesn’t come across. So you can look at it as the Pomodoro technique. They’re, they’re being serious about something, right? And then they’re breaking it up with a joke and then they’re being serious about something. They’re building up that point and then they’re breaking it up again. Yeah. One thing that comes to mind when reading this is like court jestership and that you kind of need, you kind of need that frame in order to play, right? Cause you need to be able to kind of like maybe be sacrilegious and play in that space, right? And be like, Oh, well I’m just playing around. It’s just a joke guys. Yeah. It’s the deep point that, that people often make about the music that you hear doesn’t work without the silence in between the notes, right? Like, like functionally, you need that break, whatever that break. And there’s different types of breaks. Like in this case, you want to break this stuff up with some humor or hyperbole or, you know, humorous, hyperbole, whatever, right? And, and, and that’s important. Well, they’re doing more, right? Cause they’re also providing the context for reframing. And the contrast for the justification effectively, right? So I think my opinion agrees, right? So what, what does that mean? Like it’s not, I see what you see, right? It’s like, I’m going in the same direction as you’re the direction that you’re going with without. And so that, that’s a different level of agreement. Because they’re starting at different points on the plane. And instead of moving this way, where they have to either move further apart or clash conflict, they’re both looking up and moving closer in that way. That’s exactly what he’s, you know, part of, well, part of what he’s stating there is that, yeah, it looks like we’re both oriented towards the same thing. It’s like, no, we’re not in going in the same direction because I’m going Northeast and you’re going Northwest, right? Oh, you’re going Northwest. I’m going Northeast. Our direction is different, but we’re oriented towards the same thing because that thing is higher than us. And that’s super important. And then I wanted to read Ethan’s comment, being more true, end quote, is universally true. Gymnastics is simply what the communion with this truth looks like at the scale of material slash ethereal level. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that’s the way that they’re using it. Yeah. Because they’re, yeah, later on they’re going to be more explicit about different types of attunement. And I think that they’re trying to point at different importances of being true, different qualities of being true, I guess. So, this is where I started to disagree, right? So now Socrates is making his argument, it’s like, well, if you present the philosopher king in the right way, people will accept him. And then he’s like, well, some people won’t, the sophist effectively won’t, but that’s not most people. Most people will. And I’m like, no, because if you read the Bible, for example, the amount of converts that they get, and we’re just going to assume that they put in maximum effort to get converts, is not a lot. It’s just not a lot. And so I don’t think whatever story you come with, like I don’t, even if it holds a lot of truths, like you can’t get people behind it. No, I think that’s actually correct. I think it’s correct. The reason why I think it’s correct is because you see it all the time. So what happens is somebody picks something to follow, we’ll say an expert, and then they go with that expert. And then most people go with that expert. That’s true. And the reason why more people would say go with the philosopher king is because there’s nothing to rebel against. And then it’s like, oh, well, maybe, maybe that’s actually the way it is. There’s nothing to rebel against and therefore. Yeah, well, yeah, but yeah, unless it’s their shadow, which would be why the sophist can’t go along. Right? Yeah, maybe. Like, I don’t think it’s a good basis for anything, but maybe. Well, no, the sophists are going to go along because they rationalize. But most people don’t rationalize. They just go, oh, leader follow. And that’s my point. Is it most people don’t have have a natural relationship to the leader that much. That’s right. That’s why they’ll follow because they don’t rationalize. They don’t have they’re not trying to have an intellectual relationship. They’re going, well, we’ve got to follow somebody. So who’s who’s who looks like they’re at the top? Well, let’s go with that. Right. That’s why that’s that’s how elections effectively work. Yeah, we’re going to agree that when this leader is chosen, however they’re chosen, because it might not be a Democratic election, for example, because that Democratic elections are extremely rare, historically speaking, then they’re just going to go, oh, this person, this person cut off this other person’s head. And so now we’re going to follow them. OK, you know, that’s the story of history right there. You know, or this person deposed the other person and he’s in exile. So we’re going to not follow the person in exile. Most people are going to follow the person in their country leading them. It’s just natural way to go. Then another controversial statement. People will imitate what they hold reverential. I’m like, No, no, I think that’s definitionally true. The thing they imitate is the thing they’re holding referential. Yeah. Yeah, but. Yeah, but that’s that’s cheating. Right. But it’s it’s it’s different when the referential thing is external to them. Right. Because now they have to they have to overcome resistance in themselves. And like that, it’s not it’s not it’s not it’s not cheating. It’s actually the same trick he uses throughout the text. Right. Which is to say these conceptions are not helpful. Right. The conception because you can’t determine what they revere. Right. The reverence isn’t apparent. What’s apparent is what they’re imitating. Yeah, but that’s no, no, but this like. Like I think this comment was made in context of the emanation of the philosopher king. Right. So like the philosopher king will do the thing and then they will revere the nature of the philosopher king and therefore they will try and adopt that nature. But it’s like that. That is the struggle. Right. Like the adoption of that nature. And like he’s making the case later that the philosopher will the philosopher will adopt the divine nature. Right. Like I’ll accept that part. Right. Like if we if we say that the philosopher is this has has this nature, then he he will not adopt the divine nature. But I don’t know about. In my text, they use the word divine explicitly. For the philosopher. Yeah. For the big philosopher. Right. So it is it is actually explicit. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. What do you got, Danny? Well, you guys have covered a lot of ground and said so much great stuff. I’ve just been writing so much down. I mean, to me, when I hear that sounds like election and to me, I don’t really care about it, whether the philosopher can’t help can go either way. One thing I did want to mention since we’re on the topic of embodiment and stuff is that it was mentioned like Mark said, there’s a lot of really good stuff that was said. But Mark mentioned like it’s when you when you ruminate on the crises of the world that people pull themselves, you know, they get stuck in their head and it causes lots of problems. I mean, the gym, instead of thinking that of the gym is like suffering, I prefer to conceptualize it as just an opportunity to be present and maybe experience some physical sensations. But if you look at it like an opportunity to train concentration, I think that to me, that kind of helps to reframe if you do have some kind of personal practical problem, because that can be done outside of gymnastics. And that’s the kind of the same muscle that can actually be like put to use, I think, in solving practical problems like am I in my head? You know, so I just wanted to just comment out to that do have, you know, I am a bodybuilder of 10 years experience. And it’s all about it’s all about concentration. And this is not just my opinion, every single professional. I’ve heard them say this that they say that the key that what makes a bodybuilder as an athlete distinct and different from every other form of athlete. And again, they all say this, not they’re not going to use this language, they’ll use this thing, but they all talk about concentration. And so I just don’t I think that when people frame things in terms of suffering, it can maybe discourage them. Or maybe like that. I use the word struggle, because I don’t tend to stay away from suffering. Right. I use suffering. So you what? Hold on. The funny part is, you just framed a bunch of stuff that I said last night, the embossment livestream my monologue. So I think that’s hysterical that it came up twice in a row. I just I buy within within, you know, like 14 hours. That’s hysterical. Yeah, like I would say suffering in the use of undergoing, right. So being subjected to struggle, I don’t like the suffering framing at all. I still disagree. Well, but I think if you’re relating to amination, like I think there’s a case to be made for being subjected. I heard something once I was thinking about just now, I was just chewing on this. But I heard when I was young, probably from a church pulpit when I was like 12 or so, but I heard almost everything about war is good, except for the death, bloodshed or loss of life or something like that. And I think they took that to mean like, if you if war is a thing where your actions have immediate consequences, right, it’s the kind of thing that pulls you out of your head into your body. I think that’s kind of what they’re getting at, you know, with that sentiment is. So because previously, we were talking about whether internal wars versus I don’t remember what else skirmishes or whatever other word, whether discord, you know. So anyway, that’s kind of one of the things that came up in my mind is where’s my concentration? What are the acts? What are the consequences of where my attention is being attuned to that kind of thing? War is zero sum, right? Like, that’s the problem. Well, if you have if you have a well, it’s, yeah, if it’s it’s it’s double loss. That’s the problem with war. It’s always double loss. Like you can’t get into any kind of fight or conflict with anybody without suffering a loss. Even if you’ll win for sure, you still lose something. Right. And but, you know, to sort of round it out, Danny, like when you are not concentrating, you may frustrate what you’re trying to do, but that is different from being your own enemy. Right. And that’s sort of the point is that, yeah, the external can be an actual enemy threat that can fully oppose you. But internally, you don’t oppose yourself. That makes no sense. What you do is you cooperate poorly or cooperate well. The better you’re cooperating with yourself, the better you’re doing. And right. But I also Ethan says he’s got a note at 500C about the contagious nature of the good. And yeah, like, right. A man who has his understanding truly turned towards the things that are has no leisure to look down towards the affairs of human beings and be filled with the envy and ill will as the result of fighting with them. Right. But rather because he sees and contemplates things that are set in a regular arrangement and are always in the same condition. What does this sound like? Because we’re going to get there. Things that neither do injustice to one another nor suffer it at another’s hands, but remain all in order according to reason. He imitates them and as much as possible makes himself like them. Or do you suppose there is a way of keeping someone from imitating that which he admires and therefore keeps company with? And so he’s saying if you have a good model up there or not just a good model, but a model of the good, then how do you not follow that? And of course, this is another one of those absolute universalist silly framings, but also valid, right? Like, oh, there’s a there’s a there’s a thing to be attracted to and therefore you’ll be attracted to it. And that’s why people en masse will follow it. A leader who is leading will say in the orientation of the good. Yeah, I think I ran out of notes here, so someone has to pick up on the trajectory. Okay, so well, we haven’t gotten to forms yet. The reason why I was bringing up the thing I was about gymnastic because they mentioned the analogy of the gymnastics of the soul. And so I did kind of want to get into that. So first, we need to introduce the idea of the forms, which is a doozy. I don’t know if we want to go there yet. If anybody has anything before that. Isn’t there like a lot in between still because they’re talking now about truth and attunement to truth, right? So they’re first setting up this framing that Mark was talking about, right? Okay, so like if there is a source of things, right, then that source of things is the justification of things, right? So it’s like a self-referential justification thing. And then if you have the philosophical nature, because I’m going to have to make that contingent thing, right? Like if you have the philosophical nature, you’re going to attune to that source, right? But if you don’t, if you’re a sophist, like you cannot. And he’s, I don’t know how much setup he’s still doing there before he gets to the forms, but it’s important to realize, right, that he draws the analogy of the sun from this divine attractor, which is effectively God or the good or whatever. Because there’s still like five numbers in between, right? Oh here, they will often turn their eyes upwards and downwards. There we go. We have the eyes up and down in the actual book. Right. Well, Van de Klay was right. So yeah, he just didn’t know probably he was referencing Plato. Ethan, this is what confuses people when you tell them you don’t see failure as ever happening. They think it is arrogance, but it is simply this principle. The divine is unchanging and, quote, objective. Yeah, or you can reframe failure in terms of being part of the road. Yeah, right. Well, I was going to say being part of the process of learning and growing and changing. In other words, there’s no learning, growing and changing without failure and therefore there is no failure because you’re always learning, growing and changing. So it doesn’t make any sense to talk about something that is that connected to inevitable processes in that way. But I find this problematic framing, right? Because Christians do this often and they get into this super high God-like perspective and it’s like, yes, right? In the God-like perspective, everything that happens can be redeemed. And so it’s not a failure, but it’s a puzzle piece that fits into the bigger picture. But on the lower frame, it’s still a failure and you need to recognize it as a failure because you need to attune your agency correctly, right? So like. Yeah, well, the failure is the learning. It’s the signal that you were wrong, that your prediction was incorrect and that your action did not match the creation or the source. And that your action did not match the creation or the source or the sun, however you want to. Let’s use all the analogies. Well, yeah, I think it’s also like having this allergic or negative association with the word failure, just like suffering, right? It’s like, yes, if you put a negative valence on failure, then no, but if failure is just basically the state of not having been true, then yeah. Well, it’s a negative signal that helps you orient. And if you don’t take it as a negative signal that helps you orient, then it’s not a positive. But it is a positive because it tells you that you’re off. That’s how you know you’ve missed the mark. Can we do it? Can we get through to the forms? Well, I was just wondering if Danny had some notes in between 500 and the forms. Didn’t have any notes last week except talking about forms and he didn’t even know it. He kept calling it the divided line. I’m like, what are you talking about? There’s no divided line in my book. It doesn’t say that. Well, I’m good in going into the forms. I’ll read it before next time anyway, and then we’ll get back to the things that we missed. No, I’m good. There’s just a ton of processing that needs to be done. I guess maybe before we get there, could we just define the differences between rationalism and empiricism? So empiricism is obviously emergence, just bottom up. The cause of science. Science is empiricism. Science has no cause. Well, okay, sorry. I’m taking that phase out of the book. Empiricism is the highest value is knowing how you know things. That’s empiricism, I think. Well, that’s epistemology. Where are you getting this from, Danny? Where is this in the book? 509 or 508. Now that which imparts truth to the known and power to the knowing, to the knower, is what I would have you term the idea of good. And this will deem to be the cause of science. Anyway, so they say that… Oh gosh. So empiricism is your word because I don’t think it’s in my book. So here’s the thing. So they’re talking about that there are higher levels of knowledge. And so in painting their analogy of the sun, they talk about how some levels of knowledge are higher than others. And so before we… Well, as in the putting on the table the idea of the forms, they put down all the pieces on the table. They say, okay, well, you have a sun, you have an eye, you have a faculty for sight, you have light. Right? So we have all… And their whole point, which was the point of the analogy with the stargazing sea captain, is that if you start with the premise that intelligibility has to start with a relationship to something higher, I’ll just leave it at that, which we need to do. I mean, we need to clean that up a lot more. But if you start with a relationship to something higher that can’t be derived or approached through emergence, then you’ll… I don’t know, you’ll just have different set of lenses. You’ll have this different model. You’ll have a different relationship with the material world for sure. Because you won’t be looking at the shadows first. You’ll be first looking to what is the absolute? What’s the essence of this thing? Yeah, but yeah, it’s a different relationship because you’re looking from a different angle. Right? Like if you go back to the wall, right? Like when… Or what Ethan said, right? Like, oh, like my failure is not a failure. Well, the only reason that the failure is not a failure is because it is organized within a higher telos, right? Which is more important than the failure. Because if the failure would be the highest telos, then it would be a failure. So it’s like, what’s the organizing principle of your understanding? Another way to say that is if you end at the failure, then yeah, that’s the end. But if you end at the end result of having failed and tried again, then the failure is just to step along the road. And so it really does matter that final cause really does matter. There’s four causes. And I think that’s the problem. So I think I understand what you’re doing, Danny. You’re taking the modern misconception, and it is clearly as clear as day of misconception of the science and empiricism and all these garbage terms that have been so corrupted. They’re useless. And framing the text within that, but that’s not in the text. That’s what’s important is that if you actually stick to the text, all he’s basically saying is the sun doesn’t only give you the ability to see through contrast, right? By shining a light, right? Providing the light contrast. And it’s explicit in here, right? But also it gives you nourishment and energy and warmth and, and, and, and. So he says, here’s this key feature that we think of the sun in terms of, but also all this other stuff is going on at the same time from the same source. And that’s a re-enchantment. Right. And this is why it’s called the one and not the good or whatever, because it’s that which is the source of everything. And it’s in its undifferentiated form. And then when it starts to emanate, right? Like it comes into contact with expression, right? That’s where you can have discernment. And when you have the discernment, then it’s, it’s specific, right? Or at least more specific. Right. And but, but the important part here is too in 508D, they’re jumping the Izov gap by saying, well then think that the soul is also characterized in this way. Right. And then it talks about the soul being illuminated by truth, right? And that which the intellect knows and appears to possess intelligence. And so it’s not a single point of illumination, which is very, very, very important. Right. Because again, you cannot reduce anything in this book to one thing. That is, the point of the text, the entire structure of the book is telling you that explicitly. There’s no one thing. It, that’s a ridiculous concept to play it up. It’s, or to the character of Socrates in this book, to be more precise, but yeah, you know, overwhelming beauty, right? And again, the sun not only provides what is seen, but the power being seen, right? But also with generation, growth, nourishment, right? Although it in it in and of itself is not generation. Right. So it doesn’t contain all of the, it doesn’t contain all the components of generating. This is back to my seed analogy that people say, oh, the seed contains all the information to grow a tree. No, it doesn’t. That’s a ridiculous statement. So wrong. It’s not even worth thinking about. Well, it is if you put everything else as stable, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, but then I think that brings us into forms. That brings us to 509, where we’re there, right? We’re pretty much, we’re there. Yeah. I think, yeah, we’ll do the in between next week. We can do a little bit about. I think that statement really rings a bell though, by just saying the seed does not contain all the information necessary to grow a tree. I think that really dispels the error of saying like, yeah, it has to ship with the world. Like there has to be a world in gravity and humidity and water. Yeah. There’s actually an entire world that needs to be present. It’s not, you can’t just focus in on the genetic code because you’re able to splice it with your little tools, right? I think that, I think that, I think that that one little statement really helps to. So the next question, I asked a couple of questions. What’s rationalism and empiricism? And then we were going to go into. I have the thing open, the Google thing. Okay. Can we, yeah. Can we, I want to make sure Danny that your definition of rationalism and empiricism is matching what we’re talking about. So when modern people use those words, when if you talk to a person and says, am I a rationalist or am I an empiricist? And we talk to somebody and they say, oh, I’m an empiricist. You have an idea. You’re always misusing those words. Okay. But okay. So it doesn’t matter. Manuel, go ahead. So the empiricism is basically participatory knowledge is the source of everything, right? And rationalism is the capacity to reason is the source of our reality or the best source of our reality, right? Which they’re both wrong, right? Like we have this model where they’re both there for a reason. And that’s because we need both in order to pinpoint reality, right? So like reality. And in our model there, those two results are the results of four types of informing, ways of informing the world. And so it’s the four types of ways of informing the world that determine those two things. And then those two things play into the two worlds mythology or however you want to think about it, the realm of forms versus the realm of material or whatever, however you want to frame it. And the problem is that the sheet that I saw is materialistic, right? So like even the epistemology is only relating to the material half of, right? So now you can see, right? Like there’s a break here and then there’s a break in knowledge here, right? So you get four quadrants. The vertical and the horizontal, yeah, creates four quadrants, right? Right. And so what’s the statement that, oh, I’m an empiricist is just, oh, my primary mode of understanding is X. Like, oh, that’s the thing you use primarily, right? Which was epistemology first, yeah. Right, right. So they’re both bad frames because they’re epistemology first. Is your epistemology in your head with your reason or is your epistemology in your experience with your embodiment? And it’s like, well, why is epistemology even important? Because I don’t think it is. I think that actually is the problem. Like people are just, knowledge is so important and the way we define knowledge is important. It’s like, no, actually it’s not. Does that make sense, Danny? Yeah, it does. I haven’t watched the live streams. I know there were some, like, there seems to be lots of oftentimes be disagreement over things that are in my mind extraordinarily simple, like correspondence theory or like people, basically a lot of it’s just word games. Like when people say, you know, when we use a word, like say rationalism or empiricism, like just define a term and move on, like, please, like, you know what I mean? But a lot of the time we get caught up in what it’s like, are you saying that words don’t correspond to something in reality? It’s like, dude, what are we, can we just agree on some terms and move into something more productive? I just wonder, so part of it is just searching for why are there such disagreements about nothing all the time? Like there seems to just happen all the time. And in my mind, like, I guess it’s just people come to conversations without a willingness to want to learn. Maybe that’s what it is. I don’t know. No, no, no, no. It’s really easy, right? So I just looked up correspondence theory and what do I read? Truth, the truth of a statement depends upon the relation of the statement to the world. And I’m like, there is no relation of the statement to the world. That’s not a real thing. Right. It’s a trick. The whole thing is a trick. It’s like, well, and then even if you said that there was, all right, well, now you have to define what a relation is and what a valid relation is versus an invalid. Like, it’s a trap. It’s a trap, right? And words are important only to know whether they’re abstract or not. If they’re not abstract, then they’re talking about phenomenological experience. Like there is a tree. Okay. We can phenomenologically experience the same tree in different ways, maybe, but it’s the same tree. Right. Whereas if you’re not doing that, if you’re saying trees exist, that’s an abstraction. You’re not talking about something that we can experience in common because first of all, I can’t experience trees and the fact that they exist, I can’t experience. I can experience a tree and then I can experience another tree and figure out there’s more than one tree. And then I can go, okay, the concept that there is more than one tree is a concept and now trees exist, but that’s an abstraction. It’s not related to your bodily experience in the moment. And you need abstractions. They’re not options. But that’s what most of these people do is because they want, let’s think about this, epistemology is the highest value. Knowledge is the most important thing. Well, how do I have knowledge? All I have to do is speak in abstractions and suddenly I’m smarter than you. And that’s always true for everybody because everybody can use different abstractions and say actually the same thing or nothing at all, or nothing interesting. Look, if you want world peace, it’s easy. We all individually just have to meet each other with hope and love and empathy and then world peace will emerge. That is a true statement. It’s useless because no one can do that. And you’re implying that each individual has to enact those things and there’s no motivation for them to do that even if they say they want world peace, which is again, that’s in the Republic. It’s like, we are, people will say lots of things, but then they’re not willing or able to do those things. And when there are abstractions like empathy and love and, you know, oh, be hopeful or whatever, and I’m not saying, you know, those things aren’t good and important. Of course they are. But when there are abstractions, they’re not implementable anymore. Abstractions are definitionally not implementable. Either you’re talking about an abstraction or you’re talking about something we can find actual agreement on. That’s why the philosopher is useless. That’s why the philosopher is useless because he talks in abstractions. And that’s why you need the experts because they have to be able to translate those abstractions back down, the abstractions that they are definitionally not attached to. You can be an expert, but then you’re detached from the principles. You can be for the principles, but then you’re detached from the world. It’s up to you. You get to pick one. You can’t have both. According to Plato, that’s what’s in the book. It’s explicit. It’s as clear as day. Couldn’t be made more clear if you tried. So does that make more sense, Danny, as to why, and this is why I keep saying conversation is just going to lead to more disagreement. There’s no physical mathematical model of conversation where it doesn’t lead to more disagreement. It doesn’t exist. I’ve done it. You can model it on a computer mathematically. It’s going to lead to more disagreement every time. And it absolutely does. And I’m not the only one who’s done it. So there are articles about this out there, why conversation will necessarily lead to disagreement. So I’m going to have a conversation on Monday with Luke, and I’m going to record this. I don’t know what he exactly said, but Luke has this philosophy about basically Kumbaya and them. Right? And basically, he says you can’t have community without love, whatever. And I’m like, you can’t have community without a principle because then you don’t have anything to commune around. And that’s going to be the conversation. Right? I want him to make his case for how love can do anything because I don’t think love can do anything. That’s going to be good. Right. Well, it can’t. Right. If everybody in the world cared about the same thing at the same time, guess what would happen? Nothing. Because it’s not embodied. And when it’s not embodied, nothing happens. So with that, Danny, does that make sense as to why people can’t? Like conversation is, right? And I talked about this in the live stream last night on my channel, right? Conversation is not this magical thing. It needs to be embodied. And it’s in the embodiment that we find actual agreement, which is a conversation that Manuel and I need to have at some point, either live stream or recording on agreement. Oh yeah, we totally got to do that. We have to iron that out because people will say they agree. And then of course they don’t. To your wonderful tweet. Well, we went over that last night, the live stream. So you’ll love watching it. But you see what I’m saying? Like that’s actually the problem. And that I think is why he’s leading up to that in the end when he goes into forms or as you call it, the divided line. And I’d love for you to just stay in the divided line frame and we’ll stay in the forms frame and we’ll just work it out. I think when we talked, I was objecting with people following the philosopher, right? And so what was the basis for my objection, right? Or imitating. But it’s the level of agreement, right? Like, yes, obviously they’re going to be sheep and they’re just going to follow the spirit, right? Or the wind. They’ll just go with the motions. So that is a level of agreement, but it’s not a binding level of agreement, right? Like it’s just an agreement because it’s expedient, right? Like it’s the right thing to do in the moment and I’ll just go along with you because it seems the right thing to do. Now you can say, well, because the philosopher is always doing the right thing, they’re always going to be with him, but I don’t think the world works that way. But maybe, like… Okay, so if we go back to things like epistemology, Danny, right? Like why would someone bring that up? Like that is the question that you need to ask yourself. Right? Like they bring it up because it’s a tool, right? It’s like they want to achieve an argument with it. They’re not bringing it up because whatever. And it’s like, no, like the argument that you’re going to have with that tool is going to be corrupted because the tool is corrupt. And that’s where the disagreement lies. Like, and also, like, why do you need your epistemology to make an argument? Like just make the argument without the epistemology. Like if your argument is sound, then like you can just agree. Right. So yeah, as far as all the content, it makes a lot of sense. I think there’s a lot of statements that no rational and reasonable person, like affordances must pre-exist. Nobody would disagree with that. You’re limited. Now, if you can sell somebody, I think in resolving a lot of these conversations, if you can sell somebody on the starting point that attunement starts physically and then goes up or in the sense that we have to integrate, if you can sell somebody on that, I think that would be more useful. Like when you make the point and say conversation needs to be embodied, I think that might be a better starting point for making headway. And that’s where actual agreements. Never works. Never works. Okay. Yeah. And also like years, years of doing this. Never works. Like people don’t even know what that means. Well, that’s what I mean. I don’t think it’s obvious when you say attune. That’s because we’re using a lot of jargon, attunements jargon, going up. No, it’s not because they can’t think that way. They can’t think that way. Yeah. Yeah. Look, look, they’re going in with a tell us they’re going in with a plan to be the smartest person in the room. You’re not convincing them of anything. And look, you saw that in the live stream last night and the previous week. Actually, you can watch someone do this. They come in, they’re trying to dominate the conversation. They fail miserably, of course, because really against me, that’s the game you’re going to, you’re not going to win that game. Not winnable. Right. So you can see it. There’s no amount of data or information or knowledge or understanding that you could impart to that person to change them at all in the moment, in the moment. Now, does it work over time? My argument is it does. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. I’d just kick these clowns out immediately and say, nah, you’re lost. But they’re already coming in with a bad frame. That’s why they’re bringing up epistemology, because they’re trying to give a frame where they think they’re better than you, that they’ll win. And that’s all well and good, if that’s true. But if it’s not true, it fails miserably. That’s where the problem comes in is if you’re not the smartest guy in the room, setting a frame where the smartest guy in the room wins is not a good winning strategy. In fact, it’ll never work. And it doesn’t have to be that way. The problem with epistemology is that now you’ve destroyed your ability to make the claim that you’re the smartest guy in the room. But you think that’s the claim that you’re about to make and that’s the game you’re about to win. But that’s not even the game you’ve set up. And so you get wiped out pretty quickly, actually. You get completely destroyed. Because you can get easily forced, if you need to see this, the last two live streams I did on my channel, we’ll show it to you. You get easily destroyed when asked simple questions. And then if the other person doesn’t acquiesce to an identity that you already have a frame for, you can’t score any points. And you just lose, lose, lose, lose, and then when it becomes apparent to that person, we’ll say unconsciously, that they’re being stubborn, they just break down and they can’t function anymore. And it’s really funny to watch. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t take quite so much glee in it, but I do. So whatever. It’s really funny to watch because they can’t make any progress. And because their goal was never to be enlightened, their goal was never to submit to a new idea. Because if you want to have a new idea or an insight, you have to submit to that. It’s not something that just comes unbidden. Your insights and new ideas are coming to you all the time. It’s just that you’re rejecting 99.999999% of them. And that’s the issue. That’s why you have to open yourself up. I want to introduce what Ethan said, right? Like in Exodus, the Israelites cannot come in with God, they need intermediaries, right? Like Moses, but not only Moses, right? Because then Aram, and then you need the wise people, right? And they need people who do the daily implementation, right? So there’s this whole hierarchy that forms that is an intermediary between, well, the source of knowledge, right? And the implementation of knowledge. Not the source of knowledge. No, the source of creation. Well, yeah, but knowledge is your relation to being, according to Plato, right? So you have your expertise, right? Which is a relation to being. And then you have how the expertise fits in the good, right? And you cannot take responsibility for that aspect of your expertise. Right. But you also have to meet it with humility. Otherwise, you can’t become an expert. And when people join a conversation, right, like, effectively, what they want to do is they want to lift up their expertise and put it above you. And say, you’re subjected by my expertise. Exactly. And that’s why they would use an epistemological frame to begin with. That’s the only reason to use it, in fact. Only reason to appeal to epistemology is to try and dominate a conversation through a claim of expertise. And since appeals to authority don’t work with me, or at least not appeals to, we’ll say, scientific authority, they always fail. So what do you think, De’Ani, about this divided line thing now? Is this all clarifying or is this muddying the waters? No, this is all great pretext. I think I would, I mean, we have about what, about 15 minutes left. I mean, I would like to kind of go 511 to the end is heavy. I don’t know if you guys want to leave it or cover it. No, no, like, there’s a bunch of stuff that we still have to do. So we’re going to go back to it anyways. Oh, come on. This is like, you guys are like chomping at the bit and running ahead last week. And I’m like, no, don’t run ahead. I haven’t read that part yet. And now you’re like, no, we gotta slow down. I’m like, come on. I’m saying, when I have all you want, I’m going to tie it back next week. So that’s what I’m saying. Danny, run ahead to divided line. Let’s do it. Come on. Come on. I want to do it properly and I’m not, I have notes all over the place. What is Plato’s forms? Is it the same thing as the spiritual realm? If the answer is no, then why, what does that mean? It is. It is. When you say the spiritual realm. Okay. Now, is there anything more to it that’s key than knowing that the world exists with a bunch of affordances exist outside of yourself? Is that the key? Is that really the key important part? No. The key important part is this mirroring where everything that you will say are in the material world with is a mirror. Okay. Mirror of what? A mirror of perfection. And the perfection is in the forms. And the interesting thing about perfection and the realm of forms is the following. There are exactly one triangles. One, a single triangle in the realm of one. It’s it. It is, however, the only perfect triangle that can ever exist in any reasonable or unreasonable definition of existence. One, its size is irrelevant because it occupies all sizes at once. Its shape is also irrelevant. It possesses all shapes at once. In other words, it’s not an equilateral triangle only. It is the form, the idos, the perfection that is reflected poorly onto the world that allows us to have more than one triangle. Let me rephrase it. It is the affordance for the existence of triangles. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was good. That was a good summary. And that’s what’s important. So the trade-off, and it is a trade-off, is that in the realm of the forms or the ethereal realm or the spiritual realm, however you want to frame it, there are exactly one and that one has no size. I don’t think it has any qualities. This is the problem. It has the quality of perfection. Well, no, but it has the quality of being the source of all the specifics. That’s the quality that it has. It has the quality of perfection and therefore it is the source of the poor copies or instances of the thing. But it also doesn’t, like I said, there’s only one triangle. And the fact that it’s not that one triangle is perfect but not only an equilateral triangle. And therefore that form informs all triangles is the important part about the divided line. Does that make sense, Danny? Yeah, no, I think it does. I think maybe the triangle is a too complex thing already. Yeah, it’s a little bit abstract. A dot is like the source of all dots. No, but I think the key that Ethan helped me with once is when I viewed the captain as a stargazer and the one who’s able to read the stars, that was really the thing that unlocked the understanding. And then also just saying, oh, the forms are the spiritual realm. It’s like, oh, well, if you’re raised, that to me is no problem. I mean, obviously like, I mean, most people who I know, when you ask them to explain why something happened, why did it rain, why did we lose the war, why did whatever, why did you get that grade on the test, most people don’t first look to mechanical reasons, explanations for cause. I think most people, they’ll tell you the spirit. They’ll tell you like, oh, well, I was unmotivated. Like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, I mean, yeah, they didn’t give you a mechanical answer. I got a B because I was sad because I broke up with my girlfriend. That’s the reason I got to be on the test. Right. And most people get it, you know. Well, look, Ethan said something very important. The perfect triangle has no use. Yes. Because if you try to use perfection, you destroy it instantly. And if you need an exemplification of this, I came to this realization when I read Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen because one of the things I came away with from that book, and I don’t remember how explicit it is in the book, but one of the things I came away with from that book was that the more perfect something is, the more delicate it is and the easier it is to destroy. And a small change to a perfect thing completely obliterates it instantaneously. Right. The more perfect it is, the smaller the change and the more complete the obliteration of the perfection. And so if you want something perfect, it becomes more fragile. And that’s why I go back to Nassim Taleb, another great book, Anti-Fragile. It’s like, oh, fragility and perfection are related in some important fashion. And that’s why you can’t have the realm of the forms if you want to go with having mode and being mode, a la, you know, was it Victor Frankl? Yeah. Vervecki talks about it. Because you need to be subjected to it. Right. Like if you’re subjecting it to you, then you’ll break it. You can see it in a dream as well. Try to express agency within a dream. You just, all sorts of stuff happen. And often you wake up. Right. And it’s important to realize, right, like if we have the analogy of the cave, right, there’s two light sources. There’s not one light source. Like there’s the fire, which is manmade, which is pointing at things, right, like images that get projected upon the wall. Right. So there’s two levels of human there. Right. Like there’s the thing that provides the perspective, right, or the source of the light. And then what’s in the frame. Right. So this is all control. And it’s definite, right, like it’s flat. And when you’re outside, you’re dazed and whatever, right, and like you’re overwhelmed, right, but there’s an element of purity, right, like there’s an element of fulfilledness. So yeah, you need to understand that distinction and the different in natures of things. Right. And then you can also like go to what the nature of the philosopher is, right, because like the nature of the philosopher is relating to the delegates in the sun, right, and to the wholeness. Right. Like it’s not that what’s the framing when you’re outside of the cave? Well, like that’s where you are on earth, right. Like that’s as much influence that you have over what the sun is shining at that you’ll ever get. Right. Like that’s just the place that you’re coming from. Well, but I want to bring it back. So Danny, does that make this whole divided line controversy go away or what else could happen? Not go away. So I mentioned this as my intention last week, which is faith. The second to last, 511e, the second to last sentence in this book, to me it seems this faith or sense of conviction seems to be an important glue in order to relate to all this. And so I did want to explore that idea. The thing that’s listed third and that they list fourth, four faculties. Reason is the highest, understanding is the second, faith or conviction is the third, and perception of the shadows is the fourth. So they list out those four things. And this is the very last thing they do in the book. But I was the faith or conviction thing did kind of just perked my interest. I did just kind of want to explore that if you had translations of different words. Yeah. What do you guys think that means? Yeah. Let me do this. Right. So intellect is the four segments, intellect in relation to the highest one, interesting wording, and thought in relation to the second, to the third, assign trust and to the last imagination. That’s very different. Wow. Well, yes, that’s extremely different. That is drastically different. What do you got there? I got the same as Danny, right? So four faculties of the soul, reason answering, right? So it’s like, I don’t think that’s even relating, right? It’s just complete subjection, right? So you could say, like, if you use reason as that which motivates you, the reason to do things, I think that would fit with intellect, right? Because intellect would be the intelligibility or something. But yeah, I also don’t like the intellect. The other way that they would frame it is noose probably, right? No. Do you want? I have it in the notes on this book. So it’s forms and he has IDing after forms, which I’ve been using IDos, right? And then intellection, which is noesis. That’s how, and he’s referencing somebody else, actually, Jacob Klein. And then the mathematical objects is thought, and that’s dionoia. That’s thoughts. And then it’s things, which is trust, which is pistus. I wish Adam were here. And then it’s images is the last one. That’s icesia. So it’s images. So maybe we can leave this for next week. It’s about out of time. I’ve just pulled up a website with these bunch of Greek words that says, that word is of course not faith in Plato, but Neoplatonists, Christians, and commentators have confused the two ideas hopelessly. So apparently, it might be worthwhile to pull up, you know, actually look up some of these words and maybe hit this again next week. I think. Yeah, it’s intellection, thought, trust, and imagination. And trust is related to things, right? Because trust is like, you can trust the bridge when you stand on it, right? And images are related to imagination, because imagination is just projection in your mind, right? And then mathematical objects are related to thought, because Pythagoras, basically, right? And then the forms is the intellection, which is intellection. The better way to think about intellection, from my mind, is the idea, the forms, this realm is related to intelligibility, because of the ability to intelligise, not necessarily intellection, although they’re the same thing here. That’s what Noesis, that’s what the first one is. So I have a different framing in Dutch, so that may be useful, right? So on top is verstand, which would be verstanden in German, right? Which would be, I use my verstand to be wise, effectively. So, and that splits up into, and one is remembrance, which would be anamnesis of the ideas, and the other one would be impressions through the senses, and period. These images, yeah. Well, they put them as objects, like things that are… So, Ethan posted his book, I hope he pulled over for this, Understanding Noesis, Thought, Dianoya, Belief, Pistis, Imagination, Eccesia, or Eccesia, whatever it is. Yeah, that’s the noose, right? Eccasia. No, no, noesis is noose, right, understand. But noose is conforming to the intelligibility of the universe or something. So I think that’s a good note to end on, actually. So, yeah, because there is all this, it’s not faith, that’s a modern mistranslation. Belief and faith are not the same thing, even in recent times, we’ll say. Yeah, I agree. I think we need to be, I’ll need to be a little bit more precise in next week. So I’ll try to be more precise. Be fair to yourself. It’s not just you. These translations are tricky. I really like this. Thank you, Ethan. I really like this book that Ethan sent me, because it’s just wonderful. Alan Bloom did a wonderful job with making the translation as neutral as possible, so he’s not falling so much into the Christian framing, which I think is very helpful, because that’s anachronistic. They didn’t have Christian framing. Christianity wasn’t here yet. So it’s useful not to fall into the anachronisms. Yeah, I’ve been reading Joed because I like the way it reads and it’s easy, but I literally might drop Joed over this. I think those are big translation differences, and I think it’s necessary to get that chapter. So I think I’m going to switch probably to Bloom. Big translations differences. This is the one I’m using that Ethan generously sent me. I’ll just give the entomology for novices and dianoia. So novices is to see, perceive, have a mental projection. So it’s in some sense, it’s outside of you. Like you’re reaching out to it while dianoia is going through the mind, where it’s more interactive. So you have to get that distinction for yourself. Which one was external? You said dianoia was in the mind, thought, and which one was external? No reason. The understanding. Understanding. Right. So understanding is, in Dutch we use the prefix far, to have far sight upon something. Basically a third person perspective. That’s what that is. But then you’re not participating in it. That’s the problem with that. Cool. I like the Dutch. I think I’m good. Mark, did you have something? No, no. I think that’s a great place to close it out and we can pick it up. I can understand why forms by itself would… I didn’t realize forms was in here. I was like, oh, he’s talking about forms. I was so delighted this morning reading this. I’m like, there’s the forms right there. It’s not called the forms. How interesting. Oh, there’s this divided line concept. But in my translation it doesn’t even say divided line, which is even more interesting. It talks about a cut. It’s like, oh, okay. Then it takes the two things. It takes two things, which are top and bottom, the vertical, and then it does this horizontal expansion. That’s where you get the four things from. They’re not on a line. They’re four quadrants. That’s going to be the important part. The picture that I had is that there’s a correspondence, I don’t think it’s that awesome word, between the forms or the idols and the source of the image. They’re joined. They’re communing. But I like the word cut, because that implies a gap instead of a line, because that implies a border, and it’s not a border. That’s bad framing. Take us home. Yeah. Well, I think we all should try and see where we got stuck. Maybe figure out why we got stuck. What’s the struggle that we’re in? Extrapolate from there, maybe a way to be throughout the week so that we can integrate this. I had this new idea about the week, and I might expand on the integration aspect next week, because I might have a more filled up concept of that. Try and integrate a little bit and put that into an intention for the week. I got this image of this banner, this instantiation of a thing, of an idea or whatever. If that’s planned, it has this sphere of influence. I was like, yeah, I want to start thinking like that, where you can see, well, maybe that’s the one and the many, but I would not frame it that way. But there’s the essence and the effect or something. If you can hold both together, I think that would be really good for sense making. I’m going to try that. Good. Yeah, that was great. Yeah, there are lots of just practical things that were said today. I wrote down 10 zillion of them, but in the Philosopher King, if you base yourself on praise, you’ll experience audience capture. Do you have a small number of people who are encouraging bad behavior? If that’s something that’s good to think about. The difference between sophism and sophia. Sophos is not sophia. Are you just trying to have expertise or are you trying to actually use your capacities for something useful? I could just go on and on and on about things that you could reflect on. Well, that’s good. I think two people have a sense for that. They’re like, oh, audience capture is real and therefore what I can do is I can capture the talk by praise. Then they’re trying to do that and it’s not working. In certain cases, it’s not working. It’s like, oh, why isn’t it working? I think that’s actually literally what went wrong last week. When I was having this conversation, they’re trying to use this conversational dynamic and I’m not playing and then they get frustrated. Basically, I’m doing the emperor has no faults, which is really funny because I dubbed Kazee as king of the little corner. That was awesome. You called him out for acting like a king and that was genius. I think it’s just important to see the instantiation of this praise worship. It’s like an unspoken convention about how you do things. You could even see that if you watch the Dutch parliamentary system, there’s certain dynamics and they let people get away with certain things. If you break the dynamics, you’re annoying. You should be ostracized because now the game cannot be played anymore. Instead of saying, well, no, the game that we’re playing is corrupt, it’s like, no, you’re corrupting our expression of our agenda. That’s what happened in the live stream. It’s like, oh, you’re frustrating the expression of the little corner in our image and therefore they can’t get rid of that vision because it’s correct if you hold those values. That’s why I found it so interesting. Oh, yeah, the philosopher king just gives up. That’s what I did. It just gave up. Whatever. I’ll be here when you’re ready to seriously engage. I didn’t really mention this during the discussion or anything, but in the text when they were discussing that there were higher levels of knowledge, they used the same kind of trick that they used previously in the book. They say, well, is it pleasure? No. Is it knowledge? No. Is it being good? No. Is it knowledge of the good? The constructs that they use start to become a little more complicated. They say, okay, well, what about knowledge of the good? Is that a best first principle? Then they get to the point where they talk about how there’s no one first principle. You can’t do things that way. That’s the way that they explored that that jumped out to me during reflection. I don’t know why, but it did. In terms of rising above the region of hypotheses, it seems like they put their game that they were playing away finally, of trying to have… Well, that’s epistemology. They go through all of these things. Yes, on this level, you would be doing epistemology. On this level, you would be doing axiology. On this level, you’d be doing ontology. It’s like, yeah, but it doesn’t work because you’re not in a system. The good is that which emanates onto you. If you’re trying to grasp the good, you’re locking yourself into a reciprocally narrow relationship to it, and therefore it’s corrupt. That’s idolatry. Literally, that’s idolatry. That’s pretty much all I got. I like that line that you just said, the good emanates onto you. I think that’s a good key. That’s all I got. Ethan, Mark, just got any reflections? Not really. I’m surprised that the divided line was so confusing that it wasn’t obvious that it was forms, and it’s not obvious that forms is just spirit. It’s a spiritual realm. Everything’s perfect in heaven, man. It’s that simple. Not art. That’s why I’m always confused. I’m like, this is such a simple concept. Why don’t people understand it? It’s so easy. I don’t understand how you can see Christianity and not see all of these things return in Christianity. What’s the philosopher king? That’s the incarnation. It’s literally the incarnation, the divine manifest in flesh. When these Christian New Testament stuff was written, they were dealing with this. They had to deal with all of these ideas because that would be the arguments that they would be having with these people. That’s the framing they had. They had the framing. This is the framing from which Christianity was born. That’s why when people are like, oh wow, there’s all this neoplatonism in Christianity, it’s like, how else could it possibly be? What else could have happened? Are you pondering a world where there was another option? Manuel, you got anything else? Or you wrap it up? No, just wrap it up. Thanks for watching guys. We’ll see you guys next week.