https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-cZzkS_g5hI
It’s been a while since we seriously engaged with the text. There was a lot of conversation and struggle around this cave stuff. And I think we’re going to rehash it again. Not so much what’s being said, but what’s important about it. I need to get my notes up. So, yeah, maybe someone else can start with their reflections over the last months now. Like, how has this Plato stuff been reverberating in your life? You’re doing what’s being won against in some sense. Yeah, I’ll go for myself. I was trying to look up the previous intentions, but they were kind of snowed under. So I guess I’ll leave that for what it is. So I’ve been reading a lot of Bible stuff, and I’ve seen it occurring there. And also just in the religious realm as such, I just see the connections and the framing. And there, yeah, I had an interesting conversation about the Trinity yesterday, and I had a realization about how trying to stabilize a relationship within an analogy is the cause of a bunch of discord. And it’s so alien to me that it’s like, oh, if I give this means to looking at it, then I’m in a heresy. And I’m like, well, that’s not how it works. Like, I give this means of looking at it because it allows me to do something. And I think that is true, but it’s incomplete. And this incompleteness aspect is the thing that everybody is missing. Everybody is like, well, you set the thing, and therefore there can be no more. It’s the whole story. And I feel everybody’s really stuck on that, that there’s just like, oh, you gave the answer, and now you filled the test. It’s kind of that attitude. And so, yeah, I’m interested to see my ways out of that trap, to find a good strategy to resolve that tension. And my intention for the book is, because a lot of what we’re going to talk about is education. And there’s something behind that. Like, there’s a motivation behind that, and that’s still unclear to me. So that’s the thing that I want to get out of it. What’s the form that Plato is presenting that education should follow? Mark is really engaged, so I’m going to give the spirit over to him. Yeah, so what struck me about this, and now this is my third reading of this book, because we keep saying we’re going to do this, and then something comes up, and three people can’t show up. And I’m always preparing just before on purpose. This is a deliberate exercise I’m doing. I’m reading the section we’re going to go over right before it. Browser, no working. Can confirm. The thing that struck me about this book is this is the cave, and the way people talk about the cave, whether they’re talking about the cave in the matrix or where Plato’s cave is played out, they don’t seem to have read the book. It’s really that, at some point, it’s that simple. They make allusions to the sun being outside the cave in Plato’s state. Specifically, it is not everything outside the cave or the den or whatever the hut, whatever the heck it is in your translation, forms. It’s soul. The body, the person, does not leave the cave. That never happens. The soul is the thing that ascends, and it seeks intelligibility. And that’s what keeps striking me about this is the discrepancy between the recent interpretations and what the text actually seems to say in multiple translations. And that has really caused me to contemplate education as such, which, as Manuel pointed out, is actually in this. And the nature of education and the poverty of what the ancient Greeks were calling education versus what Socrates claims true education is. And so my intent is to explore this discrepancy further, because it’s a significant discrepancy. It’s kind of the difference between understanding what an analogy is and not being able to understand the concept of analogy. And I think that is kind of the point, that struggle, which the so-called modern neoplatonists are struggling with. And so my intent is to talk more about that. I guess Ethan can go next. I guess my insight, or my intention is to find the insights from you guys, which you have to say. I’m going to be an ass and ask you, do you have a sense of how to do that? Well, to sit back and listen. I don’t know. There’s a lot of things in here that I don’t know. I want to see what you guys have to say about the study of arithmetic, geometry, solids, astronomy, what’s going on there, the one and the many, the fingers, one’s intelligible versus one. One requires one you immediately know, and then one requires thinking. See what you guys have to say about that. See what exactly is going on here. Yeah, I’m interested to know what I have to say about that. I do. Well, that’s Verveki’s one book to read if you only read one book on Plato. So yeah. But Verveki misses a bunch of things that are in the book too, which is kind of a fault. Well, not surprising. Well, I think more to the point, anybody who claims neoplatonism, and game on me for not seeing this sooner, new Platonism, you’re implying you’re getting past Plato. No one’s ever gotten past Plato. And most of them are part of the same idea. In fact, when Verveki just recently had him on, and Verveki had to explain to Schindler what neoplatonism even was. Oh, for real? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the thing is, and Danny kind of hinted at this, and so did you, right? The things that people are claiming are neoplatonism are sitting in book seven. So they’re not new Platonism. They’re just plain old Platonism from Plato, from the Republic even. Not even just right in. And not even from the Republic. They’re part of the book that starts with the cave analogy and moves forward from there. So at some point, this gets absurd. The fact that people are missing that many pieces of something that’s that obvious is sort of like a little suspicious. But also, that’s very clearly, very obviously, observably, you can grab the copy yourself and look what’s happening. And talk about the irony of not being able to see clearly with your soul the intelligibility outside of the affectation created by the fire that you’re trapped in. I mean, the levels of irony are endless at this point. And just like I have 42 note points here. 42. And I only went halfway through the three books of it. Because that was about all I could manage. Yes, Manuel. But you have to remember, I haven’t taken a single line of notes until now. That’s the significance. Not that I took good notes or complete notes. But I haven’t even bothered to take notes until book seven. And now I’m like, ah, no, no, no, no. And I did it all this morning too. So these are all fresh notes from my third reading of the first half of book seven. So I want to make a point. I think what the Neo-Platonists did is they literally decontextualized what Plato did to put it in their framework. Which is ironic, because I think he actually literally says not to do that. You need all of the ways, and then it’s still not enough. Right? And yeah. And that’s a good point. The theme is it’s not enough. That is explicitly the theme of book seven, at least the first half. I haven’t done the second half. The theme is it’s not enough. And that is a pattern throughout the text. And we have to keep that in mind when we’re reading this. It always starts out, or at least except for chapter one and perhaps the last chapter, haven’t read that, or book one, I should say. It always starts out with this low resolution mapping of something physical. And then they immediately expand out the metaphor or the analogy. Immediately. And they expand it from the material, physical, actual, if you will, out to the forms. Always. That’s the format of every single book so far that I have read, the seven of them, is that format. And that’s extremely important to understand. Because if you’re not seeing the pattern of the books within the Republic, then you are missing an important source of enlightenment that is contained within the format. Yeah, it’s a progression. And it’s also, right, like it goes from the individual to the city, right? So that’s also taking the same abstraction to do more universal. Yeah, I remember, yeah, he’s like, it’s at the individual. And I get to the very end. He’s like, but then he goes back into the cave. Why would he do that? That’s not in the individual’s interest. He’s like, oh, we’re not talking about the individual anymore. Yeah, so that’s the context, right? And it’s really hard to do one reading of the book and keep track of all of these aspects, right? It’s like, OK. And Verveke talks about this in the Lectio Divina stuff, right? Like, you read the text for information, and then you read it again. Well, you read it multiple times for information. And then you read it again. And then you let yourself be inspired by the text, right? Then you let the text speak to you. And if you let it speak to you without reading it for the information, then you’re going to imagine it instead of that you’re inheriting it from the text. And actually, when I was talking to Jacob, he said something about the plain understanding. And I’m like, yes, there is a plain understanding of the text, but it’s mostly inaccessible to people because then they have to remove their person from the engagement with the text and just relate to what is. And that’s just not how we function, right? Like, we function to make things relevant to us, not to what the writer was trying to convey or is literally saying. So yeah, that’s just an interpretation problem that people presume that they can do that. They obviously don’t have that skill. Well, I wasn’t going to like Korean, but I guess we can do that later. So I’m just going to go through the cave, right? So you wake up towards the light. Look towards the light, you get pain and distress. You get someone else to explain that you’re an illusion, right? So that’s an external factor, revelation. And then instructors requiring him to name objects, right? So there’s again an imposition to. Well, you’re moving past the whole cave, right? Well, that’s what’s happening in the cave, right? But no. No, no, but before that, you have to kind of set things up. I mean, one of the misconceptions of the cave that everybody keeps mysteriously to me repeating is that you somehow free yourself from bondage. Yeah, that is a mistake. It’s a clear error. Yeah, it’s a divine intervention that frees you from the cave, I believe. Well, or a person, right? Something unexplainable. It’s outside your agency. That’s basically the point. Well, it just says that there’s a force. And then what is later said of that force when they talk about dragging down. So it’s not in the context of the cave anymore because we’re past that metaphor by that point. It’s Glaucon and Shockwitches. Because they are the creators of the city. And this is what I mean by the larger context. They are the creators of the city. They’re effectively playing God. Explicitly, this is from book one. And book one has that pattern. Oh, you can’t understand justice from the point of view of the individual. You can’t understand justice from the point of view of multiple individuals. You have to understand justice from the point of view of cities. Let’s create the perfect city for justice. That’s the framing of the entire text. That’s the purpose of the Republic. And this follows that same pattern at a micro scale, right? It’s very fractal or self-similar fractal in nature, right? And what they’re talking about here is your accessibility to information. And that’s what the cave is supposed to convey initially is your material interaction with the world around you, rather explicitly. And it doesn’t explain why you can’t look left and right. It doesn’t explain why and how you’re bound. There’s different, it’s ropes, it’s chains, it’s whatever. Those things don’t matter to the point of the text. You’re compelled to keep your head motionless throughout life. So you’re not moving at all. The not moving is actually being a statue and being compelled to be a statue. Or being dead in Christian terms. Yeah, and it’s a strange image. And Galtan says that right after the first set of descriptions in the first paragraph. And it’s basically saying all of your experience is being controlled by two things. One is people that are controlling the world around you that you cannot see. And the other is the fire. That is the source of light that projects the images on the wall that you see. And that is referred to as shadow. And then what happens is you’re dragged out of the cave by a force like I said that is later revealed to be Socrates and Glaucon. And it should be implied actually, because again the format of the book is such. But it’s revealed explicitly to be Socrates and Glaucon later. And your freedom is not of your own ability or capability. And when they talk about, everybody talks about if you went back into the cave and tried to explain it to others. In the first half of the book, that is not mentioned. That is a fantasy of whoever’s telling you that. What is mentioned is that if the force, in this case I think it’s specifically the entity that drags you out. So it’s something drags somebody out. If somebody were to drag somebody out of the bondage, not out of the cave, they never leave the cave. That’s actually really important. No one ever leaves the cave, not physically. The physical body is never out of the cave. That doesn’t happen. But they don’t, the physical body that allegedly left the cave and allegedly came back, it works without that. Physical body that sees that it’s a cave or a den or whatever and sees that there’s a light and that they’re being manipulated and that they’re bounded, he does not return to tell anybody. I mean, maybe taking the second half or something, but this seems to be a misunderstanding or a misapprehension. What is said is that the men would attack the entity that tried to free them from their bondage. Not the guy who was already freed. They never mentioned him in the context of the other people. They only mentioned him as a contrast to the other people. And so they attack that entity. And they mention, and this might be a translation issue. They mentioned in that same section there, which is only a couple of sentences or maybe a paragraph or something, they contrast the wisdom of the people who are bounded, who are trapped in the cave, with the person who knows about the cave and how it works. And they’re saying those are two different types of wisdom, which I found fascinating. Again, might be a translation. No, no, no, no, that’s also in the Bible Mark. Oh, I believe that. Can you say that again, please? The types of wisdom? Yeah. Part of the reason why they attack the entity is because their version of wisdom is based on the applications from the light, the fire and the sounds that they hear and the fact that they can’t move. So they attack the entity because they’re effectively comfortable with the wisdom that they have. Yeah, I would frame it differently. So basically the purpose of education is to promote the good. And so when you come in and you disrupt their framing, the way that they’re gonna understand you is as an agent of chaos and therefore not good and they will attack you for that. Yeah, that’s not at all unfair. And then, go ahead, Ethan. Could you repeat that manual about the agent of chaos part? So there’s earthly wisdom, which is basically pragmatism in some sense. It’s like, okay, this works, this works, whatever. Basically, they’re talking as philosophers about philosophers, so that’s basically the context of the people or the people with authority. And then when the sophists, they have their way of being, they have their way of understanding, they have the ways that things work on earth. And then you ascend into the world of forms, like Mark said, I do think. So the constraints thing is interesting, but in some sense, you’re bound to your body, in the Bible it’s also talked about. So you release yourself from the bondage and you try to engage with things as they truly are. And then you’re able to gain a new understanding and they go through this whole process of what that entails. But effectively, because you’re relating to the essence of things, the actual participation, you get a different type of participation to the shadows that are presented to you, because the way that you’re understanding them is gonna be different. So for example, if I tell you, don’t affirm this person, and then the person tells me, no, I need to affirm that person because they feel bad. And then I’m contributing to them feeling bad. So then me saying, don’t do that, is me disrupting what works for them. Like it’s the devil they know. And it’s not good if you have a working system, it’s not good to uproot that just because someone tells you to. It’s only good to uproot the system if you have a system in place that can supplant it, that’s better. Right? And that’s- That works for them. That works for them. Because what the big reveal, the big reveal in this book is that there are different classes in the city. That’s the big reveal. It’s that the people that are stuck in the cave are supposed to be stuck there. They’re actually supposed to be there. They’re not supposed to be anywhere else. You’re not supposed to free yourself from the cave. You’re not supposed to leave the cave. That’s the big reveal. But that’s later. I mean, there’s so many misunderstandings. A lot of people associate being outside the cave with seeing the sun. Socrates explicitly refutes this and said, the sun is the fire in the cave. He said, the sun is the fire in the cave. That’s what it is. And the journey up or out or whatever of the den, the cave, whatever it is, is a journey of the soul, not the body, the soul, probably the noose. Who knows that the translations. Not all that important. It’s not physical. It’s not Neo in the Matrix learning to fly or whatever, dodging bullets. Not that, explicitly. But it’s extremely explicit. And the sight that you get from not being constrained by the fire that is the sun, but by the way, for anybody who doesn’t actually know, the sun is just a big fire. Like actually in science. It’s just, you know. I guess the ancient Greeks knew this, by the way, and we only rediscovered it recently. That sight is related to intelligibility. It’s not related to physical beings. So that’s your two worlds mythology. That’s your realm of the forms. So being outside of the cave is involved, not with the pragmatism, with the practical, with the physical material, but being outside of the den, the cave, whatever, is related explicitly to the intelligibility of the forms. And yeah, I think that framing actually helps. I do wanna contextualize this with the actual ascent and what it entails, at least in the first way that it’s presented. So the person wakes up, so they’re stuck in whatever framing that they’re stuck in, and then they wake up, and they look towards the light, which is the sun. And then they get pain and distress. So what’s the analogy? Like, oh, like everything I see on earth, I see because the sun shines light upon it so that it gets reflected into my eyes. It’s like, holy cow, like that realization, that just blows your mind when you realize that for the first time. So it’s a contingency thing. And then this is where the instructor comes in. Like, it’s really explicit that there is an instructor. Someone explains the illusion. And I think the person that this gets to explain to is the philosopher, because he is willing to listen to the instructor, in contrast to the other people that get woken up in the cave. And that’s, I think that’s- No one in the cave ever gets woken up. That’s part of the problem. There is no mass enclave of cave people getting woken up. Yeah, yeah, but- Well, but this is actually, but this is really important. See, and we need to go in order because we can’t, like the jumping around is where people get this ridiculous idea that the sun is outside the cave and all this other nonsense that is refuted. It’s not that it’s not there. It’s explicitly refuted inside the text. Because what happens is that any soul that is exposed to being outside, right, they are no longer interested in the shadows or affectations within the cave, the den, right? They’re no longer interested in the pragmatic interface. And again, they didn’t wake up. They were freed. They weren’t asleep. They were born into this condition. It’s explicit that they were born, right? And then two problems are outlined. One from going from dark, which is cave, to light, which is soul enlightenment. It’s towards the intelligibility of the soul, right? Explicitly. And then a different problem, which we would not see as different, but they state is absolutely different. And they make that distinction from light to dark. So there’s two problems. And then they say that the people that are in the cave are happier than those, and I’m sure that’s a mistranslation by the way, but whatever. Well, I’ll call it contentedness, because I think that’s, the Greeks didn’t give two garbages about happiness. It was contentedness that they actually thought was the higher thing. So the people inside the cave are more contented than those who have seen the light. And he would laugh at the soul for coming from the light in pity. Now he’s talking about third-party observers here, right? In other words, Socrates and Glaucon, because they’re the only third-party observers in the entire text. Well, they’re not the only ones, but they’re the only ones in this chapter, in this book rather, right? So it’s pity for the soul coming from the light into the dark. Okay? And that I find very, very interesting. Yeah, there’s asymmetry, that’s the form going top to bottom, but laughing from going bottom to up. Right. Right, yeah, but that’s, well, yeah. I wanna, yeah, I wanna reframe it back into the path, because I think we need to go through the path, right? So, because it’s important, right? So someone explains the illusion, right? Which is a revelation, like, oh, like there’s something different. And then the instructor is requiring him to name the objects, right? So there’s again, compulsion, like it’s all compulsion here. Thinking the shadows truer than the object, right? So there’s the distinction between the shadows and that which creates the shadows. The shadows is assumed real, right? So that’s the nature of experience for the people in the cave. And he needs to cultivate the capacity to even see the reality of the object that is creating the shadow and having the realization that that’s truer than the shadow itself. Well, but actually, Manuel, look, when you read that, and then this is exactly the point that I’m at in my notes, right? With detailed order at this point, right? What they say is that you can, they talk about education, okay? And each soul has the capacity to see. And it basically refutes the ancient Greeks modern idea of a recent idea of education. It says, what we say education is, is not education. They basically assert eyes to see, which would be the Christian context. That’s what they say. They throw out the idea of explaining things to people entirely. They say that does not work. Explicitly, this is no person telling you anything. They say that you have to have eyes to see. And that’s the magic. So that’s autodirectism confirmed, right? And then it says, the cave is about the assertion, but the cave is about the assertion of education as a means of asserting knowledge into the brain, which is refuted by being impossible. And the fact that you, the capacity for eyes to see means that education comes from eyes to see and not from inserting knowledge into people. That’s- Yeah, for reference, I have to underline, I just barely underlined this. Education isn’t what some people declare it to be, namely putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes. Right. It’s completely explicit that explaining things to people is not the thing that educates them. And that was fascinating to me because all of these people in academia are preaching to you effectively about the cave, which is refuted in the book that talks about the cave. I don’t know how else to talk about the absurdity. It’s even worse, Mark, later in the chapter. Well, absolutely it gets worse. I’m fully aware, I know. But it’s interesting to me because after that, it says seeing is a function of coming into being together or conformity, right? Which is what it means to know or to become educated. Yeah, it’s intimacy, right? Our modern conception of education is unintimate. It’s one-directional. Well, the image of rape comes to mind. It’s one-directional. We’re putting it into you and there’s no participation on your part. This is what you say with training versus education. Education is a communion. It’s a participation, a form of intimacy that requires some sort of relationship. That was the real. What part is that right there that you just referenced? That’s two or three sentences past what you had underlined. Okay. So I had a realization when I read today about the dialectic and I think the dialectic is actually circumambulation effectively. It’s you in relation to the idea. You dialogue with the idea, not with people. Yeah. That’s where the revelation comes from, not from talking to people. Talking to people is just a means of doing that. Yeah, well, and right after this coming into being together, what I’ve classified as conformity, the idea of seeing is refuted and it’s couched in turning around or circumambulation to accomplish the object, which again is a bringing into being of the object, right? Which to me is explicitly the statement of neoplatonism that John Breveke uses, which makes it platonic, not neoplatonic, right? That you’re bringing the whole into being by circumambulating it specifically. Right, right. But yeah, but we’re skipping ahead and I’ll note also that the way Sarkozy defines dialectic bears no resemblance to how we talk about dialectic. None, zero. There’s no, it’s not even not Hegel. It’s not anybody in recent times. It’s literally not any of them. There are zero people using what is outlined in the Republic as dialectic. What they’re talking about is something not only completely foreign to the idea of dialectic in the Republic, but explicitly refuted in the Republic as dialectic. It basically says dialectic can’t be this. And that is roughly not just the Hegelian, but other people’s conception of dialectic as such. And so the problem is that people tend to, this is what I mean by everybody’s got the wrong conception of the cake. They keep taking the stuff that comes after the metaphor is done and over with and dispensed with and dragging it back into the physical material manifestation where the metaphor starts in the very beginning. It’s the first few sentences, right? That’s an invalid way to judge the book because the book is an unfolding. And the purpose of the unfolding from the beginning is to show you that this very simple model doesn’t work and that you have to go bigger in your analogy. You can’t leave the sun outside the cave. The sun’s actually the fire in the cave. Because everything outside the cave is the realm of forms. It’s where your soul goes. And then you relate the virtues of the soul back to the body, right? So after this whole thing about how you conform to something, how do you come to know something, to bring it into being, right? It relates the virtues of the soul back to the body, which is interesting because again, it was separated earlier in the text. Leaving the cave is leaving your body. It’s your soul that leaves the cave. That’s super important because what it means is all the analogies that happen outside the cave are things that happen to your soul and have no bearing and no correlation and no correspondence to the things that happen to your body. And the reason why they relate things back is to show how they’re related, not that they’re the same. And that’s where the confusion is. People go, oh, this relates to this. Therefore, it’s the same. It’s not the same. They’re explicit about that in the text. And it kind of indicates that things are not there until they’re brought into being. In other words, all these parts don’t form into conformity and they don’t conform to your conception until that happens. So the implication there is that the people inside the cave who were born that way, they weren’t trapped there, they were born that way, cannot interface with those larger things. That’s why they’re blinded in essence. We went over that earlier. But this is the closing of the is not cap. It’s saying that there has to be something drawing your soul for in order to bring objects into being. And until that happens, they’re not brought into being. At least, the implication is at least not for you. Right? It’s not making a statement of objective material reality, for example. It’s saying they’re not brought into being and it’s kind of leaving it there. How about you flip it? You’re not brought into their being. Well, that’s not in the text. I mean, you can flip all kinds of things. That’s not in the text. I mean, you’re not brought into conformity with them and therefore they’re not brought into being. That’s fair. But that’s more of an equivalency statement. Not a, we’re not talking about priority. But that’s super important because then the next case that’s made is that the ability to discern good and evil relates to how much evil you accomplish. The awareness of evil makes you more responsible for your participation in the evil. Which is fascinating to me because, and this is 518A, compulsion is stated but not defined here. So what he’s basically saying is that if you know about evil and you do the thing that you know is evil, then you’re culpable. It’s the statement of innocence, effectively. Which to me is fascinating because that’s always been my definition. Always. Now I have to wonder if I read the Republican, just don’t remember because reasons, right? Because it’s right there. It’s as clear as day. This is the same thing that Peterson said when he was talking about baking the dough about foo-koh. Same thing. I think it’s just in the cultural cognitive grammar mark. These things are what our system is based upon and actually I’ve been realizing how we’re degrading it because when you lift up politics, right? Like the cultural fashion element of politics as the thing that dictates law instead of the principle, you start confusing this stuff. Well, yeah, that’s part of the theme, right? The theme of dragging things down into the cave, destroying them, is in this. They talk about that explicitly. Okay, well, we need to go there when we get there. Go ahead. Just to go back, Danny mentioned Brown 528. This is a little bit further when they’re talking about education. Yeah, just wait till we get there. Like, why are we? Yeah, wait till we get there. We’re 518. Okay, well, I thought it was relevant to the point, but. I’m reminded. It’s just an echo that there’s two, there’s classes of people, right? There’s the cave dwellers and like what you’re saying right now. There, well, Glauconism gets embarrassed by Socrates because he’s like, oh, you’re trying to, you see, nevermind. All right, I would forget about that. No, I’m curious. Just continue, please. So they’re talking about methods of education, whatever, and Glaucon is like, oh, yeah, well, that’s good because it will help you in the military and doing all these things and Socrates is like, hold on a second. You’re afraid that people are going to criticize you for studying things that have no use, practical use. He says, forget about all that. The reason that we study these things is because for higher reasons, not before they’re implementable use in the world. But anyways, the people at the bottom of the cave that are, according to their wisdom, are going to kill you, right? They’re the ones that make fun of people for studying these, the virtue and stuff and goodness. Like what we were saying with modern times, like it’s kind of flipped to the people at the bottom are, they’re kind of governing everything. We’re making decisions based off of their utility, right? What their measurable effect is. Well, that’s always been. Right. They’re arguing that that’s the world that they’re living in, and that’s why they need to make the city. Right. Yeah. Governed by use, not by goodness. Anyways. Right. The problem is that the people governed by, allegedly governed by good, it’s not, it’s compelled. Again, it’s interesting because the only compulsion comes from Socrates and Glaucon still, which they, I doubt they’re ever going to resolve that. I don’t think they’re meaning to resolve it. No, no, no, no. I actually think, and Danny said this, right? Like you need a purpose or something. I don’t know what word you used. I think the purpose only gets established at the end of the book, right? Because when the book gets completed, right, like that is the complete justification. And you can’t have the justification midway because that doesn’t make sense. Right. And then you can reinterpret from the end of the book. Except the justification doesn’t exist because the product of the book is that the system that is outlined can’t work. Yeah, but that becomes the larger issue because the system is not working. That’s the larger issue because the purpose of this is to say you can’t build a system that works. That’s the whole point. Right. Right, but they don’t. They build that case up, right? And that case starts in 519 where they entirely switch up the materialist metaphor. And they throw out the case as the materialist metaphor. And they use this metaphor around children, lead weights, and they connect the eating of pleasure or refinements with turning the vision of the soul downwards. And so this is the start of that argument. This is why jumping ahead is dangerous because that argument starts at 519. That’s where the argument starts. And it says when you pull things downwards or point them downwards is what they’re saying rather than pull. But it implies that the pointing will cause you to go downwards, which we all know is true. The world is tension, right? That’s definitely what happens, right? They associate this with being cut off. And then in 519 it talks about those without education. That’s that new definition of education, the eyes to see definition, not the stuffing of knowledge into people’s heads, right? Through book learning or whatever other kind of it could not make adequate stewards of a city. And this is the first time, by the way, that they’re talking about stewards of the city in this in book seven, right? But they’re pointing back up to the point of the entire manuscript, right? Which is to create a city that instantiates justice. I want to say in book six, there was also the case made with the divided line, where there’s a way that you can get pulled up. And I think they were connecting to nature. And then there’s a way that you get pulled down back to the shadow effectively, right? That would be the analogy. And yeah, so I think that’s just a pattern that’s all throughout the book. Yeah, and then they start talking about these stewards for a bit, right? And so they say the stewards of the city must be in constant education. And basically their public and private lives must be the same. Which is, I mean, this is shocking stuff, ultimately. Like they have no privacy. There’s light everywhere effectively, right? In order to be a steward of the city, you have to be in that state. And then it again invokes our job as founders. So again, what are they saying? Our job as founders of the city. Founders of the city are Socrates and Glaucon. They are effectively playing God, right? With undefined terms because they say their job is to compel the best natures. They don’t bother to talk about what compulsion looks like or what best natures are. They’re doing this deliberately. Like I’m not knocking them for this. It’s part of the, but the- Well, they actually do talk about it later on. Well, later on, but that’s the problem. They talk about it later on. But the ambiguity around compulsion and best natures is seminal and important to the point of Book 7. It’s not optional. It’s actually important that they don’t define it here. After having defined something like education. And the fact that they’re playing God explicitly and saying that they’re doing that is equally important to the point of Book 7. And this is where you can get the Gnostic element. Where it’s like, oh, we’re trapped by, like we’re not being educated. Like we’re trapped. Right. Well, and it’s interesting that you bring in the Gnosticism because here they refute. So they’ve all, I would argue they’ve already refuted the Gnosticism. Right. By basically saying it’s an ineffective, invalid way to educate. But here they refute the mysticism. Right. Because they must be forced up. But not allowed to stay. Right. Despite that being the best thing for them. So we’re talking about this philosopher class at this point in the text. I don’t think that that’s necessarily explicit. Right. And they must be forced back into where the class of people that were previously cast as being in the cave, right. Although again, now there’s two classes of people. Because there’s the children of lead weights, the guys in the cave. Right. And we’re all still in the context of the city, which they brought back in right after talking about the cave. Right. To again, they’re expanding the metaphor. They have to share the labors and honors of the prisoners. And some of those honors are kind of lame. To put it in modern speak, we’ll say in recent language. The honors, no matter how low or high those honors may be. Right. So that’s what it says. These philosophers that we’ve elevated, that we’ve enlightened their soul. That’s the terminology in my translation. Enlighten their soul. That’s what it means to be, quote, outside of the cave. It’s a soul journey. And it’s enlightenment of the soul through intelligibility, basically. They have to be forced into that situation. Right. They have to be dragged out. You don’t do it as an individual. Individuals framing in this book. Sorry, guys. It’s not there. Anybody who tells you otherwise lying to you, probably shoot them to save the world from their evil. Because it’s not what Plato says at all explicitly. But then they have to be dragged down again. Even though it’s not best for them. And Glaucon objects to this immediately. On the basis of the injustice being done to the people being forced back down. Being forced back down. And then they have seen the intelligibility. And they’re, oh, we’re taking them out of the mode of being, you know, going further and further in through the intelligibility through the soul. Right. And then Socrates counters Glaucon’s objection by saying it is not the concern of law that one class of the city fare exceptionally well. There’s some interesting equality doctrine for you. Which I happen to disagree with. In other words, the city constraints. The fact that you’re part of a city constrains even at the group level. Which is that we’re talking about the philosopher. Not talking about individuals. We haven’t been talking about individuals. Right. We’re talking about the entire class of philosophers. Has to be constrained because this project as a whole. In other words, the text of the Republic is about the city as a whole. Not about individuals. It’s not about classes in the city. It’s about the goodness of the body of the city as a whole. He says it right here in my, it says spread happiness throughout the city. By bringing the citizens into harmony. He doesn’t say anything about each person being equally happy. He says happiness as a whole on the city as a whole. Right. Just because. No, no, no. But the argument is being made, right? Like there’s different sacrifices required of the plebs, the guardians, and the philosopher. Right. And the more you get enlightened, the more sacrifices you have to make. And if you’re ultimately enlightened, you have to make the ultimate sacrifice. In fact. Well, I don’t actually think that’s what it says. What it says is that sacrifices are different. So in one sense, and this is the light going from dark to light and light to dark. It says they’re different sacrifices. One’s a pitiable one. One’s a laughable one. Right. And the reason why they’re different is because what it’s saying is every class of person, it’s not about individual, has a different set of labors and honors. Right. A different. The people that are in the cave are not leaving the cave. They’re not supposed to leave the cave. And that is a poverty to their soul. To their soul’s ability to intelligise the things outside of the cave. So they’ve already made that sacrifice. That sacrifice is inherent. No, no. I’m disagreeing because it’s not in their nature. It’s not a sacrifice that they made. It’s a constraint of their being. It’s a constraint of their being. But that, but again, the constraint of dragging the philosophers out of their enlightenment is also a constraint and it’s a constraint of the city. Right, right. Which is a different nature. Right. So we were talking about justice. I’m not saying it’s not a different nature. I’m saying it’s also a constraint. Okay. Yeah. But that’s what they’re talking about. Right. Like justice. Right. I don’t think it makes sense to say that a constraint of nature is in relation to justice, but a constraint imposed by man, right, effectively, because that’s the imposition, has to be justified. No, it’s not. It’s not man that makes the imposition. They’re compelled by the creators of the city who are playing God explicitly. It’s not a constraint of man at all. And that’s the thing. When he mentions law earlier, right, like it’s the whole thing about not the concern of law to any one class of the city. He’s talking about the law of the creators of the city, not the laws that are passed by men. This is a common confusion in recent times about law. But they go into the understanding of the good, right? And the only way that you can truly understand the good is that you can refute any arguments made against it. Right. Which is actually a thing that Socrates denies that he can do. Right? So the only way that they’re gods is when what they’re saying is true. Right? So like there’s… No, no, no, no. In the context of the book, of the manuscript and of each individual book, because each individual book, they’re playing God with a new city. The reason why Glaucon says, Socrates, we can’t do this is because he realizes the people that are dragging people away from the chains, the people that are compelling the philosophers back down are Socrates and Glaucon. They’re admitting to this. They’re saying, no, no, no, we’re doing this. It’s not a force of the city. It’s not a force of nature. It’s not a force enforced by man. Because these are ideal cities. They’re not, they have no resemblance to anything we could ever possibly build. That’s going to be the end of the book. I have a feeling. Right? And so I haven’t read it yet, but I’m pretty sure on this one how it ends. Like a spoiler alert. But they’re the spirit of the city. Like… They don’t mention that here. Yeah, but they’re not… Like I have a problem with the word God because it’s their… They’re within a different… In a specific constraint of the city. I mean, we’ll do away with the word God, but it’s nothing in the city. The architects, that’s the word that they use. It’s nothing that the people of the city have created. It’s outside of… It’s a force larger than and outside of not only this city, but all other cities. And that’s made explicit later on in this particular section where they start talking about this. They actually, again, mention the word politics. Are you… Is that this rogue concept? Is that in 518? Oh, yeah. Right. Well, that was my point about to know evil makes you responsible for evil. Right? And to be ignorant of it means you do less of it. Exactly. Right. Well, and it also says that not everybody has accessibility to it. It’s not very explicit, but it does say that. Some people belong in the cave and will never leave the cave. No, no, it’s… And they’re not supposed to. No, no. It is explicit many times over. Like really explicit. Like it’s even explicit in the way that it says the people who should be doing this education because they’re partaking in these professions are actually incapable of doing these professions correctly, effectively. Yeah. Well, it just, yeah, it simultaneously denies the ability to put knowledge in people’s heads, but also it’s not paradoxical, but it seems paradoxical for the recent understanding. Also, there is an educator class in some sense. That’s a poor way of phrasing it, but it’s the closest that we got. The whole point of producing this stuff is not for their own benefit. Again, because Glaucon’s just objected to dragging the philosophers back into the city, effectively, which is the example they go into. They’re produced, the philosopher class is produced by the city, by the way, not for their own benefit, but for the building of the city together. And I put revivifying the community. That seems to be the point of this whole thing. And then Socrates states, we, which again, he’s referring to himself and Glaucon here, won’t be doing an injustice to philosophers, again, by dragging them down, right, back into the city, right? But rather say things to them while compelling them to care and guard for others. In other words, philosophers will not care and guard for the people of the city unless they are compelled by the creators of the city, the forces outside of the city that are outside of human law and the body, right? That greater force that is narrating and creating the city. Right, yeah. If you finish that sentence, I don’t know if it says it in yours, but in mine, it says will be just. So the initial complaint was that it was unjust. And Socrates just flips it around and says it actually is justified for this. You’re absolutely right. Something that’s outside of the city brings us, I mean, the four causes come after this, but I can’t help but thinking that the city is a form, right? A formal cause and they’re dictated by the final cause, which is not within the form. Yes, yeah, that’s very well said. Something else I wanted to bring up here that, you know, it goes along with this thing that we keep talking about, the architects. So this is from Schindler. He makes this, this is a very, very, very big point that Schindler’s, Schindler is saying this is very significant. He says it here, however, Socrates not only transcends the allegory, he also breaks into it from above and becomes present within it. The simultaneity of being above and in is reflection of the twofold nature of the good. There’s an echo here. This is what’s really interesting. There’s an echo here of the catalogical reversal, the sun imagery by which the good broke into the analogy and became really present in it. You can see Socrates’ presence in the cave allegory in two respects. First of all, he is the one who sends the philosopher back down into the cave. And in this sense, directly intervenes in the plot of the allegory as the founder of the image enters into it. He enters into it in order, as it were, to direct the action. There’s no other image in the Platonic corpus in which the author intrudes in such a direct way. In fact, the rhetorical gesture appears to be unique in ancient literature. But at a more profound level, we see that the paradigm of the philosopher who returns to the cave is none other than Socrates himself. There can be no doubt that Plato intended this connection. He also goes to, this is a very significant, this is a climax of the whole work, and it’s echoing back to the very beginning, the first sentence of the work where he goes down, where Socrates, how does it start? I think the first few words of the book one are, I went down. He goes to the harbor. He’s going down from the hill where the religious ceremony was taking place down to the harbor. Yeah, so this is the peak of the work and it’s echoing the very beginning. Yeah, that’s that onion-like nature that Dr. Lanternjack talks about in Ancient Greece, G. Klasoff podcast series there. Right, and it’s something very interesting here that’s, it’s like, with the divided line, it was like, yeah, it goes back and forth, but here it’s a lot more dramatic. It’s like the author of the analogy appears in the analogy. Right. Yeah, that’s the breaking of the fourth wall. Well, and what is the fourth wall? It’s the fourth cause. And now it all makes sense. Yes, yes. Oh, yeah. That’s the thing that’s outside of the form that gives the form its form. Right, and that’s people’s desire to see the final cause, which we cannot see because we don’t have the ability to have eyes. But then the interesting thing about Socrates and Glaupon grabbing the philosopher class and dragging them into, and it is the city now, like right after he said, no, we have to do this to justify it. He says not only do they have to drag them down or just visit, they must get habituated. The people that they drag down, the philosopher class must get habituated to the cities, to those below, because they can see 10 times better, to discern reality better. And that’s the purpose, the just cause of dragging these guys down because not in their best interest, class of people to be dragged down. And then this is where it talks about the city. If a city is being governed by men who fight over shadows, and I call those affectations, because it’s a better recent term, right, is normal. But those ruled by least eager is free from this, right? So affectations cause arguments and fights and battles within the city. This is all even within, it’s not even talking about cities, it’s talking about within the city. So if the ruler’s worried about money or worried about status or any of these things, there’ll be fights. But the least eager to rule is free from this, or the least eager to engage in affectation is probably the better way to interpret this. Or the one that is unbound. That again, I find that fascinating. What? The one that is unbound. Right, well, yeah. The one whose soul is unbound. Yeah, the one who’s liberated from the constraints that pull him down. I don’t think that’s what’s happening. They don’t imply that anybody gets liberated. What they say is, if a- No, no, no. If a person were to be liberated, this is what would happen to them. No, no, no. They don’t actually say anybody gets liberated. No, they literally say that the rogue is stuck within his needs, right? And he hasn’t been- Right, we’re well outside of the cave analogy still, which is good to note, because the rogue was never in the cave. So that’s important. And yeah, there’s guys outside of the cave who were never in the cave, because you’re born into the cave and you can never leave the cave. That’s actually explicit in the text. You don’t leave the cave. Nobody ever leaves the cave. That never happens, right? The fact that they take somebody out of the cave is hypothetical within the metaphor. That’s how it’s- And that’s in the beginning of the book, and it’s not repeated anywhere else. But it isn’t hypothetical that is applied to the rogue. So like, okay. The rogue was never in the cave. So the rogue wasn’t in the cave. He wasn’t freed from the cave. And so you can’t use the cave on the rogue, because no one ever gets freed from the cave ever. That never happens in the text. It’s not there. Again, this is where the mistake is. People keep saying people were in the cave and they got out of the cave. That never happens, ever. Not anywhere in the text. Okay? There is a hypothetical if somebody who was born into this condition could be freed and look at things this way. And then they dispense with the cave entirely. They do away with it. And they say the soul can be freed and go out, but the sun is the fire in the cave. The sun that you see in the sky is the fire in the cave. Everything else is in the realm of forms. Right? The rogue is not in the realm of forms. The rogue is in the city, because we’re always talking about the city. The fact that we start with an individual metaphor talks about materiality and groups who are stuck in a cave is the beginning of the metaphor and it’s thrown out immediately or expanded upon if you want to be super generous about it. But it’s actually thrown out, dispensed with entirely. The new metaphor is around the ascension of the soul through intelligibility towards goodness. That happens immediately after they throw out the cave. The whole idea of leaving the cave is about the soul or probably the noose, but whatever. It’s not about anything physical at all. It’s not about a person. It’s not about that. It could not be more clear in the text that it’s not about that. Absolutely not about that. So when you’re casting these later parts of the story back to the cave, you’re wrong because it’s not in the book and it’s refuted explicitly in the book. He says, no, no. Any rogue that was in a city like that, that was in the cave, would still be in the cave because the sun is in the cave. The sun is actually stated to be in the cave. The sun is the fire that they talked about in the cave. There’s nothing outside the cave that is physical. I don’t think the sun is relevant. And also it’s said that he’s developing eyesight, which they’re talking about the eyesight of the soul. Like so. Then the soul’s relevant, yes. They’re talking about the soul because they’re not in the cave. I never made the argument that the soul was irrelevant. I want you to stop pretending that I did. No, I didn’t say that. That’s what your mind said to you because I literally never said that. You said the soul wasn’t relevant, dude. It is relevant. No, like I didn’t say that. No, no, you can go. It’s fine. Right. So that’s physical constraints, right? And so the knowledge of physical constraints, and they go into this later, the knowledge of physical constraints is fundamentally different from the knowledge or we’ll say experience. It’s probably a better way to put it. The experience of physical constraint is superior to the experience of harmonic constraint or resonant constraint, right? In other words, it’s different from art and music. And they do go into that later on just before the halfway, I think it’s just before the halfway point, right? And again, this is important because yeah, the rogue is related to the children with the lead weights and looking down. Nothing to do with the cave. We’re out of the cave. The cave is gone. There’s no cave. They’ve gone a long time ago now. No more cave. Pass that, right? But that’s important because now you understand, right? Based on the setup in order, without mixing them, why the cities that’s governed by men who fight over shadows is normal. But those who were ruled over by, I think, I don’t think it’s the least eager. I actually think that’s probably a mistranslation, but that’s what it says in my text. It’s free from this problem of fighting. And the reason why I don’t think that is because later on, that’s not what they say. They say something completely contradictory. Say, then I don’t think Socrates or Plato or whatever was contradicting. So the important part, though, is we go back into this pattern that we’ve been in. Where Glaucon wonders if the pupils, which in this case are the philosophers, disagree, right? And Socrates, oddly, very oddly, appeals to them as not being unjust, which is a weird appeal to make. And therefore, the arguments to get them out of the root, what he calls the pure region, which is this region of soul enlightenment towards the good, as stated earlier, will work. Which makes no sense because it’s actually contradicted earlier on. They have to be compelled. Now, the argument is that probably the best argument is that the compulsion is through argumentation. But again, even there, you have to break the fourth wall, right? You have to say, oh, that argumentation is coming from the creators of the city, not from the leaders, from the creators of the city, because they’re the only ones that can know the goodness in this sense, even though, again, it’s gone completely undefined. And I think that, you know, that to me was very interesting. And that’s somewhere, either in the beginning of 520, the end of 519. And then 520E is this contradiction, right, of that whole setup of who’s eager and who’s not. Like, suddenly they become okay with the idea of ruling. Like, oh, those people will want to rule all this. This isn’t really clear to me why this contradiction exists. And then it makes another weird move, right? It starts talking about the really rich are not those with gold, but those with a prudent life. So it’s redefining what is valuable away from the material and back over to the ethereal, right? And then it says no other life despises rule. So now we’re flipping back over, except pure philosophy. So again, we’ve refuted the sophists all along, right, the whole way through. Sophists are bad. The bad people are the sophists, and all sophists are bad people, sort of a thing, which is absurd. I get it. A lot of the book is absurd on purpose, right? So no other life despises rule except pure philosophy. So we’re flipping back over to now they’re not, the philosophers aren’t going to want to rule. They’re going to, they’re going to despise rule, right? And that’s, you know, that’s- I’m going to go to my other book club. See you guys. All right. See you. Yeah. So that’s interesting to me because of all of this flipping. And then in 521b it says, who else will you compel? And I think that just a bunch of missing pieces in the translation of that, because it’s hard to track where they’re, you know, where they are. And in 520c, again, they do mention this thing they almost never mention. So, yeah, they say in 520 in this translation, therefore the benefactors of one another, to be this ant, he created them not to please themselves, but to instruments in binding of the state. So they’re actually referencing an instrumental thing. And then they’re, well, he’s also making the claim that it’s not in just. Right. They’re the instruments of the city. In other words, they’re constrained by the needs of the city. Not their own. Their identity flows from the city. But yeah, there’s something really strange about identity in ancient conceptions. We were talking about that, I think yesterday or the day before, right, Danny? Where you said that in your translation of the Bible, it said that his identity compelled him or fated him to. Well, that’s how you know what to do, is your identity. Yeah. And well, this is the binding nature, right? And so you can look at something that you bind yourself to and then start making presuppositions from that new nature. Or you can say, no, like every moment I have to keep being bound. And it’s actually an active expression of agency. That just completely expresses Protestantism. Right. It’s like, oh, or maybe not Protestantism, but Calvinism. Right. It’s like, no, no, you’ve been bound to and now we’re in a new real and we’re going to reason from the new real instead of acknowledging that you still have to participate in the manifestation of the new real at every moment. And also there’s a denial of the hierarchy. Because destiny implies this breaking of the fourth wall, like, oh, God destined this. Right. Whereas appointing can be done by human forces, like you’re appointed by the city to serve in some role. So there’s a very different proximal cause. There’s a very different relationship between destiny and appointment. Right. Destiny is appointment by God, but appointment, not all appointment is appointment by God. Right. And so that’s actually a super important way to think about it. And yeah, in the ancient world, again, like, they were the, so I could use in Glaupon are the stewards of the city. They are the final cause. They are the gods, the controllers, the creators of the city explicitly. They’re not shying away from that at any point. And if I’m talking, thinking about the word conviction, right. And if you’re convicted, you can accept your punishment or you can reject it. Right. You can be in rebellion to the authority that imposes the punishment. Right. And if you accept your punishment, you’re in a process of redemption. Right. Like, it’s like, okay, like I have to undergo this consequence of my action. And so if you talk about conviction through God, right, it’s like, well, I had this revelation, right. And the revelation tells me that I should act this way, which is against what I perceive my best interest. Right. And then you can either go along willingly or you can reject it. Right. You can reject and then you’re in rebellion. Right. Like you’re challenging your understanding and then you go out of balance. Like you betray your conscience. I think that’s the best way to. Yeah. And I think, again, it’s interesting that the word politics is very rarely mentioned in the public. It’s fascinating to me that it’s kind of like an extra word they throw in as a footnote to some minor point. The point of the Republic is not to resolve politics or political issue or talk about political frames or frames. That’s not what this manuscript is about, even a little bit. It’s about justice. Well, it’s about the compelling structure that dictates politics or something. They don’t go into detail. Well, they haven’t so far gone into detail. No, no, no. But the point is, right, if we have all the pieces right, then the emanation will manifest correctly and therefore we have ideal politics. I think that’s the implication of the book. I want to give some historical context here because actually this part of the Republic now, midway through, there wasn’t really much extra context I could give. But now we’re getting into something which is very much resembling and would have been in the minds of Socrates and all those involved in this conversation. As it pertains to the founding of the city or governing of the city, there is this concept in the ancient world of this well-known character in the ancient world of a lawgiver, like Herguss gave laws to Sparta and the Romans had this man called Pompilius. And all of these men weren’t the law makers. They were just the law givers. And every single time you read the stories of these men, they’re always in communication with the gods. In one instance, talking about compelling the philosophers to retreat from their… Pompilius, who was one of the major figures in the early part of Rome, he’s the one who comes and reforms the Romans as a people and directs them to a more pious end. And he is somebody who comes from outside, who has to be convinced to take his place, not just as governor of the city, because they’re asking specifically for his spiritual guidance, because he comes to heal divisions among them, among this body of the newly founded city of Rome. And he’s taken from his countryside residence where it is said he regularly walks in the consecrated places that he engages in the life of a philosopher and that he’s actually in contact with some minor deity. And that impacts his place in the Roman city. I think that would have been… There’s some resemblance. And this is a trend that you see throughout the ancient world. Another good example might be Theseus for Athens, which is the city that this is happening in. Theseus is the founder of Athens. And so there’s a lot going on there. Yeah, and it’s not politics per se. The political life. Yeah, and I will say in all of these historical accounts, not once is the word politics mentioned. It’s all actually very much talking about spirit. It’s talking about something higher. And it frequently uses, you know, Numa was a just man. He disliked injustice. That is how it is phrased. And it’s like, you know, what’s going on here? What’s, you know, there is something common to what they’re describing. So the conversation is shifting, I would say, if I could be so bold, into a sort of trope, not a trope, but a kind of a familiar scenario to all the people involved in that conversation. They would have known the stories of Theseus, of Lycurgus. These were men who lived, and Numa, you know, 250 years prior to their lives. Yeah, and I think a couple of factors here. One is, I think 521 takes a big shift in the book, in book seven. Like it just, there’s an actual break. And given that it’s about that time anyway, I think actually this is sort of the halfway point for this chapter anyhow. It’s like a natural break in what we’re talking about. Because now, you know, again, we long ago left the cave, and we’re going to be in the cave. We long ago left the cave, we long ago introduced new metaphors, nothing to do with the cave, right? We long ago sort of exited that whole framework. Not that we’re not going to refer back to those metaphors, that’s what metaphors are for after all. But like we have new, better metaphors effectively for having re-enchanted this concept of the injustice done to classes of people by virtue of being part of the same city. And so that is how I would wrap this particular part up. I would say this first half of book seven is right up to 521, is all about the justification for instantiating seemingly unjust actions on entire groups of people for the good of the city. And that’s what the justification is. And again, it’s never really resolved, but it’s like, yeah, it’s Glaucon and Socrates who are performing these magical acts and acts of compulsion upon these entire classes of people within the city, up to and including disrupting them from their soul’s refinement through intelligibility. That’s explicit. I’m not even misquoting here. So Glaucon and Socrates are in some sense not taking the place of somebody like Numa or like Hergis, but the spirit who’s informing both of them in their law giving. So that’s actually probably important to say that Glaucon and Socrates are not taking the place of these law givers. They are now putting themselves in the lawmakers, but not human lawmakers. They are, I would say, they’re taking the place of something like Athena for Athens. Or let’s say Romulus in his deified form for Rome. So not Romulus the man, but after he kind of disappears in cloud, which is an interesting thing anyways, but he’s worshiped as a god. So that’s interesting, right? And the guardian deity for the city. Yeah. And there will, in these stories as well, or in history, these gods are not really the same, but there’s a shift in focus. So in Numa’s story, he’s kind of shifting the focus away from the god Mars to kind of, what is it? The Greek word is Demeter, the god of farming and agriculture, which is very interesting, the later implications that has on Roman history. So I want to get my notes on governments. So that’s, it’s not politics, it’s governance. And I think the distinction there is the hierarchy, right? Like you govern a hierarchy and politics is when you haven’t resolved a hierarchy, that’s effectively what politics is. Well, populus is people. So yeah, that’s a good observation. So reluctant governance, right? And it turns to quiet governance, right? And so the reluctance is in some sense conservatism, right? It’s the unwillingness to intercede and mess things up, right? And so no overstep, react to the situation. Reactive to what is brought up, that’s I think my interpretation. So things get presented to you instead of that you impose from your position, right? If we go to a relationship to emanation and emergence, right? Like it’s like the emanation should only manifest upon that which is revealed, right? It’s brought to light to the head, like that’s where you get the analogy with the body as well, actually. Yeah, then provide word in virtue and wisdom. And if you want to govern, right? And so that’s the imposition, right? Like that’s dictation. I think that’s what wanting to govern is. That’s where you attract competition, right? So if you are creating ripples, there’s going to be a response. And I think so if you have the recognition of the truly good, you will flow with the manifestation instead of uh make an unnatural mutation and therefore there will be peace. Like I think that’s basically the message behind that. That’s pretty cool. Yeah, let’s launch the plane. Because I do agree that this is a natural transition. I think there’s another transition somewhere later. But yeah. So I guess I’ll remind everybody of their intentions. So Danny was trying to find means of simple explanation. I was trying to get to the principle behind education, which somewhat succeeded. And Mark was going to inquire into the nature of the analogies. Yeah, we can kind of reflect on those intentions and set an intention for the week. Of what to pay attention to so that we can grow. I wanted to make a point about intimacy. Because I think intimacy is a consequence of the relationship to the form. Right, so when you have a familiarity with the form, you can recognize its manifestation outside of the specific context, right? And then you can have a relationship. And so if you don’t have that quality, right, you need to instantiate the trust like nature in the moment. Because you can’t have it from, well, effectively the reliability of the pattern. And so the way that you have to understand it is, in some sense, through empathy. Well, that person is seeing what I’m seeing, so we’re in the same group kind of thing. And that’s really dangerous, right? Especially if you don’t know what you’re seeing and you let the other person tell about their story of what they’re seeing, right? Which is, well, it’s going to be a fantasy most of the time, right? So I think that, I don’t know how to deal with that problem. I don’t know how to relate to it, right? But it is mapping onto the two ways of sense making, I guess. And then I guess there’s a third way, right? And the third way is you are narcissistic, right? And you don’t care about the intimacy and you just treat it as a tool. And the toolness gives you a certain sense of trust, right? But now you’re in control. And I think this is the point where, well, when people have to submit, they have to give up that control. And it’s just incapable of link overseeing that control because that removes their intimacy or trust relationship with what they’re doing. And that would just mean that they, well, they don’t have any affordances to participate at that point.