https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EEUgwb3zDq4
Okay, so intentions I have from last week, Manuel was to be unstructured, Mark was to see what’s happening in the text, see others interpretations, mine was to meditate on madness, Ethan was to recognize patterns in the modern world. Yeah, well, I don’t know about the reading itself, but life definitely got unstructured for me. I was all over the place. Still, there’s good sides and bad sides. We’re going to see where everything will settle. Yeah, I was actually really surprised about this end of this chapter. I hadn’t read it last time, so I was reading through it and there was a bunch of stuff where it’s like, oh, wow, again, this thing that nobody talks about that everybody should be talking about. It’s like it’s all there and it’s also not there, apparently, because people can read it. And then at the end, it’s like the heavenly city in your mind. And I’m like, holy cow, like, are you going to rub it in more? Yeah, like the relationship is obvious to me. So, yeah, what’s my intention going to be this week? Yeah, I feel like there’s a lot of things that can be pointed out from what was said. So I want to point out of the text, from the text and see if we can make connections to the world and realize what’s happening in it. Danny? So, I mean, I’ve been kind of I’ve had a lot of interesting revelations. There’s just too much to talk about. I mean, I’ve also been thinking about meditating on this idea of madness for a long time. I’m not really prepared to talk about things off the top of my head right now just because I’m not prepared. But I did recall concluding I’ve been thinking a lot about the stuff that we’re all much closer to insanity and madness than we think. Or at least I that was at least, you know, I realized, you know, we’re far fewer steps away from from things that you could be conceived as being horrific or inconceivable. Anyway, I could I could talk on this for a long time. I’ll leave it at that for now, though. My goal, my intention this week is to meditate on intimacy. There’s multiple motivations for that. I’d like one one goal. One is with respect to Plato is. Gratitude response, like the components of intimacy. Why is it important? In terms of the conclusions that Plato reaches. And then secondarily is application to my life is that there’s there’s there’s there’s relationships that are starting to be formed in my city. I’m in now and I’d like to get those going somewhere. It’s like I’ve been talking to some people about Plato and yoga classes I’ve been going to, for example, and I’m seeing interesting conversations and things like happening there. So I’ll leave it at that. Ethan. With the intention of I’m just going to keep it the same identifying patterns in the world. Say. Seeking seeking to seek greater intelligibility in the world. No, same thing. And how that can help me navigate it. Yeah, I think. In particular, the second half of. Really provides. To your point in a bunch of stuff, no one’s talking about it. Sure, you read the Republic and you don’t find any more relevant commentary than your misinterpretation of the cave. Like I guess, I don’t know, I’m seeing I’m seeing some stuff in eight and nine. A lot more relevant than than than the misinterpretation of the cave, proper case, a different story. But also, you see what I would call a re-enchantment within nine that. Is worth exploring because that does open the space for for intimacy. And then think about interpretation of the text and why people are interpreting the text the way they are. Why they’re mentioning certain parts of the text and not other more relevant, interesting parts of the text given current circumstance. Just contemplating that, I think is is more going to be my focus. Like, what is it about these parts of the text that are much more significant and important? That is causing people to pretend as though they do not exist, because that seems to be the case. A lot of armchair philosophy, I just saw a thing on Plato’s cave the other day from psychology. How the parable of Plato’s cave helps us as individuals sort of thing. It’s like you’ve got to be kidding me. Why you mentioned the more interesting psychological aspect of eight, nine, for example. So, yeah, that’s more my intention now is to sort of piece piece together what is so unpleasant or. Unresonant about eight and nine that. Should be getting a lot more attention that causes people to not not talk about them because. They really need a lot more discussion. Well, yeah, I can. Answer that question in a few ways, because they’re basically pointing out the place that they’re at right. And so when you when you’re at at the cave, right, we’re we’re at the highest. And then when you’re at the highest. In some sense, you can imagine yourself to be there. Right. And there isn’t a lot of contrast. And you can be liberated by being with the goods and like we all have access to the goods because we can just get out of the cave. If we just try hard enough. And when we’re in this chapter or or maybe more so, the last chapter, you get to see the regression. Right. And then that’s the mirror. That gets shown is like, OK, and when we get into this part, it’s like, yeah, we start talking about. The monster. Also, not not in the way that for Vicky explained it, at least like I didn’t. I don’t understand that the monster was a high draw with good heads and bad heads. All of that stuff like that, that would have been nice information. So this it’s it’s it’s interesting. Hmm. Or Vicky’s putting good heads on Hydra. No, no, no. Plato did. Plato does. Oh, wait, where does he say that? In this book, we got past it. But it’s interesting to. To see all of the things here, and I’m just looking at this book, and it’s like, yeah, now I got wherever Vicky got his practices. Right. He just takes a passage of the book and then he transmutes it into what what he. Well, his agenda effectively, instead of. Maintaining its relevance within the context of the book, like like it’s it’s the de contextualizing. We remember that all the ritual that this context of this book was set in has been lost, totally lost. We don’t have it anymore. And to try and resurrect it is not to resurrect it. It’s you know, it’s the whole it’s the whole sorcery thing again. So you have to be careful. I mean, the as much as he’s going to hate it, the cause that the only thing alive today that’s incorporating this into ritual practice is going to be Christianity. I mean, maybe there’s something in Islam, but I don’t I don’t know. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t know. But yes, it’s going to be Christianity. That’s the closest thing of incorporating what you’re reading in this book into real. If anybody wants to gain a sense of how we have lost the cultural context of what this book is saying, I’m on I just watched 12 episodes of the Anatomist, how we got here like this week, which is a lot. I’ve been listening to it as I drive and everything, dude. I’m so depressed this whole week, like post World War Two guilt to the drugs and hippies in the 60s, to the me generation in the 70s and all the horrible cultural artifacts. Now, he does focus on the negative stuff. But like, dude, you sit down and watch that densely. You’re like, man, this is like our culture so hard and brutal and graphic and terrible. Like people behave very differently 100 years ago. Like psychologically, we’re in a very different place now than I don’t know. Maybe we ever have been. But like there’s certainly in terms of meditating on madness. That’s that’s kind of why I say we’re much closer than we think is, you know, if you want to gain a it’s an interesting experience. If you sit down and watch that maybe as densely as you can, like it’s graphic and it’ll probably move you emotionally in some ways. Like there’s some disturbing things in it, in my opinion. But that are worth seeing and meditating on. But that’ll give you a good sense of. I wouldn’t. Good. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn’t say we’re, you know, we’re closer to madness than you think. I would say that explicitly, if you actually step back for a second and look at what people are saying. We are in the middle of madness. Yeah. What kind of society you have where somebody puts forth the principle, somebody else puts forth an inversion of that principle to show the principle doesn’t hold. And either people are laughing about it or people are upset about it. This is a problem that needs to be addressed immediately and dealt with in the moment. And no one’s doing that. And that’s the madness. Right. When you get to the point where you see contradictions, see paradox, where you see a problem of that magnitude. And no one’s doing anything about it. Right. They’re all, you know, they’re talking about doing something about it, maybe. Right. But they’re they’re, you know, I’m going to buy more guns. What? That’s not going to change. Right. Or I’m going to wait till they come for me. That’s not going to change anything. Right. Everyone’s in the state of inaction due to too many too many ways. Nobody knows what to do. I would say we’re in the middle of madness. And it’s a good reference. I mean, I did the same thing. I kind of binged I kind of binged the the series myself. And yeah, a lot of the things we sort of think about, change of context are completely gone in the postmodern error because it is an error. People think they can contextualize for themselves. And you’re just too stupid to do that. It’s everybody. It’s me, that’s you, that’s everybody. Just too stupid. You can’t possibly contextualize even a tiny part of the world. People don’t even understand what’s going on in the computer industry. You know, I mentioned this in my live stream last night. Jonathan Blow, the end of civilization talk that he gives. It took him a long time to see it. I saw it 10 years ago, at least maybe 15 now. Wow, you know, everything’s getting more and more broken, not more and more better. All right. And AI is improving things, making things exponentially worse. And people don’t realize that. And it takes them a long time to do it. And that is madness when we’re not actually able to see in the moment where things are headed. That’s technically madness. Yeah, a good indicator of how screwed we are right now is you can look at what the exemplars of our culture are currently. And at best, they’re experts at worst. They’re celebrities. And experts are members of the bottom class. And celebrities are also members of the bottom class. They’re worshiping, you know, pleasure, comfort and sex. And the experts are worshiping knowledge or expertise. And both of those are, as we read here, are contained within that lower class that all the tyrants come from. They become tyrants when they’re elevated to the top. And that’s what our society is doing. And we haven’t fallen into a complete tyranny yet. But if you look at the pattern, we’re just not right on the verge. That was well said. You should tweet that first part out. Yeah, but nobody reads the playdoh, so I don’t know what I’m talking about. OK, so we got these three proofs. I actually have not got the first proof prepared because I started reading from the second one. Does anybody have a conception of the first proof? Yeah, so the first proof starts at 580, but I kind of wanted to back up to 577 a little bit. The first proof at 580, they say, cherishing vices will make you… Oh, they’re saying that criteria for our evaluation is virtue and vice or happy and misery. So they’re basically saying of the head, the heart and the belly of those type of men, which is most miserable and which is most virtuous? So that’s the first proof. And they basically just elect the rational to basically be the most happy and virtuous, basically on their own authority. I mean, that’s kind of what they do at 580. But one thing that setting up for this as they’re talking about the nature of the tyrant in 577, one thing that struck out to me is that the tyrant has no volition. They say he can’t act voluntarily. And so like what came to mind for me was, you know, if you have to pay debt service to a lie, you’re not you don’t. I mean, voluntarily, you can’t do something voluntarily if you’re obligated. You have to have the option to do it. And if you’re paying debt service on your lies, you’re not an optional space. Or at least you’ll suffer the consequence for telling the truth. Right. And so I think like somebody who tells the truth, like they don’t know what the consequences of telling the truth are. It could be good, could be bad. But I think a virtuous person submits himself to something higher when they resolve to act with conviction, irrespective of outcome. And the other thing that came to me was that you can’t dabble also like the Democratical man who’s sometimes idle, sometimes goes to the gym, sometimes does philosophy. That’s that’s another aspect of I think the characteristic of the tyrant is I think, you know, that that that was underscored in terms of describing the tyrant. There were a lot of texts. This is quite a bit of text, but I wrote down a couple of adjectives. He’s poor. He’s fearful. He’s miserable. He’s lustful, dainty and greedy. So those those are some adjectives that were used to describe the tyrant. And then. Feel free to pitch in if you want. And then and then they make a distinction between the public and the private tyrant, where the public tyrant can’t even travel around. He has to live hidden. And so that also made me think of the intimacy crisis and the concept of living hidden is that it’s one thing to have your soul corrupted to the point of you have all these scars where you’re willing to, you know, perform all these violate violate virtue privately. But then there’s another thing to be tied up in and have skin in the game in the external world such that I can’t I can’t go outside because for fear of being mocked or whatever. And that’s just that’s a terrible way to live. Like, that’s that’s the opposite of intimacy. You know. Yeah, I think, again, there’s that re-enchantment within this, particularly the second half of the book here that. Because you’re expanding the world to three things, right, because you’re differentiating between public and private and putting the agent in the middle. Right. So there’s a public aspect to the agent. There’s a private aspect to the agent. And then the agent is mediating those things. And are they integrating them? Are they rejecting them? Are they choosing one over the other? Right. Because all of those are options, not just two options. Right. That that that really gives you, we’ll say, a handle on the idea of. Quality of your relationship being important. Yeah, so I guess I’ll go over what I’ve written, because they’re trying to make a comparison between the city and the man. Right. And did you can only understand the man if you understand what happens to the city. And it’s, he says the best people in the city will suffer, suffer enslavement. Right. To the tyrant. And the same will happen for man. Right. So the best parts of man will be enslaved. To the needs, effectively. Right. And that will create the soul of a slave. So there’s a lot of slave talk around this. The ability to act on volition is not present. The soul will end up with remorse. Fear is guiding. Right. So now we’re stuck in identification against. You’re just locked in that identity. Tyrannical man does not have ultimate misery. The structure of society protects the slaveholder. He needs to create division through promises. The tyrant will be bound in a prison. Right. So he’s just a slave. Right. So he’s just a slave. Right. Society protects the slaveholder. He needs to create division through promises. The tyrant will be bound in a prison. Right. So he’s just creating the structure to maintain the structure. Right. We expand the bureaucracy to keep up with the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. That type of vibe, I guess. He will be jealous of the freedom of others. He has to be the master of others while he’s not master of himself. And that was then defined as the most miserable state. Right. Where you have to lord over others while you don’t have control over yourself. An invalid leading the life of an able person. The true slave stands on top of the tyrannical hierarchy. So they’re making a comparison between having to alter the authority and being subjected to an authority. I guess the altering of authority comes with this existential question that’s just going to destroy you. So I guess that’s the first proof. Now we can talk about the first proof. Before we get into the first proof real quick, one thing, as I was meditating on the nature of the tyrant this morning and stuff, there was a video by Samuel Longcar, a YouTube channel, I mentioned this before we started recording, where he said philosophy is about caring enough about yourself such that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to live the best possible life. I just remember thinking about the nature of the best life. I just remember thinking about the nature of the tyrant and that it sounds kind of like a kindergarten level of insight, but like it says in 580, cherishing vices will make you miserable. I just remember thinking about the nature of the tyrant and that it sounds kind of like a kindergarten level of insight, but like it says in 580, cherishing vices will make you miserable. And that image in 579D of the tyrant can master over others but can’t master over themselves. I just remember, I mean it’s very simple, yeah, if you spend your time consuming media in a certain way or giving your attention to things, that’s very important. Again, it’s very simple, but it should be made that if you decide that you cherish vices, you will be miserable. And so maybe if you’re miserable, you should take a step back and ask yourself what you’re putting all your resources into. So I could elaborate on that, but I’ll leave it at that for now. Well, that’s clean up your room, right? Yeah, well, but also, I mean, I would push back on this definition of philosophy having to do with yourself. Philosophy doesn’t have anything to do with you ever. And if your pursuit of philosophy is to your own ends, you’re a sophist, by Socrates’ definition, by Plato’s earlier writing in here. They’re only concerned with themselves, or they’re primarily concerned with themselves. And philosophy is really about everyone else. Well, right, so the antidote to nihilism is recognizing that you have a presence that has inherent value and you need to participate in the world. And that’s where the effect of, let’s say, curing depression, for example, might come from. The effect of curing, if you’re a depressed person, the cure to your depression does not come from excellence. It’s not that I produce excellence and now my depression is cured. It’s a recognition of where you fit into the world. That depends on the type of depression, right? Yeah, the fundamental problem with depression is depression is nothing more than a reciprocal narrowing of how you view the world towards the negative. And once that happens, no amount of success will suffice. It’s not that they want the perfect, it’s that they feel everything they do is insufficient. And your pursuit in the world should not be towards your agency, it should be towards virtue. And this is where the problem comes in. We’re all capable of doing things. That’s not the issue. The issue is what things should we be doing? And that’s what philosophy is concerned with. Not what things should you personally be doing, but what things should we as a group, and this is again the central thrust of the text of the republic, can’t understand justice from the perspective of one person or in the relative frame of one person to another person, or in the relative frame of the relationship of one person to another person to the city in this case, which is effectively city back then is the same as our culture, right? Because you almost never left the city and when you did it was whatever, right? It was rare and those people are traders and that’s fine. They’re supposed to trade. Trade is good, but they’re still carrying their city with them. They’re representing their city. There’s no such thing as nation states back then. They’re all cities. Exactly. And so when you’re engaged in what they were thinking of as philosophy, the danger is sophism where you’re doing it for yourself. That’s sophism. When it’s you, when there’s one person in the picture or one primary person in the picture that’s you, you’re a sophist. That’s what it means, right? What Plato is talking about here is, you’re born within limits. There are classes in the world. They use the word classes at least in the Bloom translation here. There are classes and people are part of those classes and they’re not able to get out of those classes. That’s the correct interpretation of the cave. That’s explicitly what the so-called cave, as Dan and my interpretation says, is that people are born into different types of bondage and there are different material types of bondage and then there are ethereal types of bondage, right? The king can no more ascend into philosophership than the guardians can, which is to say neither of them can, which is why you need to drag the philosophers down to the kingly state, which is the premise of this particular text. And it still doesn’t work, by the way. Keep that in mind. Not a solution, right? And so what that means is that when you’re talking, particularly in the latter half of book nine here, about the nature of these men, it’s not that the tyrant pursues pleasure and the non-tyrant doesn’t pursue pleasure. At least in my text, he’s still using the word pleasure, right? What’s changing is the object of the pleasures. So what that means is that you need to find as a proper, proper, I don’t want to call it philosophy because they wouldn’t have used that term. Your proper relationship to the world, proper intimacy, quality of relationship to the world, is wrapped up in the hierarchy and where you sit within that hierarchy. And the expression of the tyrant, as was mentioned earlier, is you’re taking something lower and raising it up higher where it doesn’t belong. When you take the lower thing and burden it with higher things that it cannot handle, which maybe isn’t explicit in the text, maybe it is, you guys can tell me, you get corruption. And you get the corruption of the things that are the best first and worst. Like that corruption is worst for those things. When you raise up the celebrity, right? When you raise up the expert, you run into the problem of you’re corrupting them by elevating them to a position in the hierarchy they are not prepared for and cannot deal with. Any order that the chained man in the den would be useful if he weren’t chained. Like unchaining the man, the key to the cave or the den is not unchaining the man. The key is to show why that isn’t a good idea. Everyone’s getting backwards. And this just is a continuation of that theme. It’s not a good idea to try to make things equal, to draw things up from below and put them higher in the hierarchy. That’s what Napoleon was doing, going around freeing people from caves, and then suddenly he was a tyrant. Wow. Well, actually the thing that you’re talking about, I think, is in this chapter, because they’re talking about the beast ruling man and man ruling the beast. And how that when someone is reasoning from the lion, whatever he will access, it’s not true happiness. He’s not using the word corruption, but he’s using the lesser version. And it’s less true. I guess if you pursue something of lesser truth long enough, you end up with corruption eventually. Right. Yeah, no, I mean, all of that is here. Yeah, I mean, look, I would say that anytime you foment of what we would call a revolution, I would, of course, as I have before, exempt the so-called American Revolution, because it’s really a rebellion. But anytime you foment a revolution, you’re taking the lower and raising them up to a higher position. And then the problem is that it self-consumes. And that’s what happened in the French Revolution rather explicitly. See my video with Adam on the French Revolution on navigating patterns. It’s rather explicit. That’s what happens. And then that killing machine doesn’t end until the killing machine eats the people or kills the people that originally started it going. And that’s fine. And then Napoleon takes over and basically does more of that, because Napoleon’s effectively from a lower class. Interestingly, and here’s the irony, from the country he’s trying to lead, like he doesn’t even, he’s not French, he’s Corsican. He doesn’t like the French. He couldn’t even speak courtly French. Like he was as not a Frenchman as you could possibly get in some sense. And here I think maybe he would have made an excellent leader of Corsica, but he could not make a good leader of France. He was trying to be too high. And he just didn’t have any, like couldn’t even speak the courtly French. He couldn’t embody any of what was needed to be embodied in the position that he was taking, which was the emperor position. He couldn’t do it. So yeah, and yeah, I think that’s explicit in here about what happens with the tyrant. So Tom Holland was… His expertise lied in canineering, right? In trigonometry and stuff like that. Yeah. That was his education. Yes. And history. He had eight years of education in military academies, which were monasteries, apparently. Right. No way. They were former monasteries? No, actual monasteries. You learn the art of war. All education was in the monastery. It’s that way in the East too, right? You look at the Shaolin monks. What are they? They’re warriors. All monks are warriors, actually. Wow. Right. Right. We don’t see it that way because we separated it out. But to your point, and Adam and I talk about this too, right? Napoleon is the birth of the power of accuracy and precision to move the world. And he does, he shows that by becoming emperor of most of the known world, effectively, right? Or most of the civilized world. He conquers all the quote, civilized West, pretty much. I like this idea of having to develop sense-making. At your level of the hierarchy. Because we’ve talked about this more, right? Yeah, you don’t know what the person above you has to deal with. But this point that there is a different culture on the higher level, I think is also really important. There’s just a different way of being. High society, right? It’s not called high society for no reason. Because there’s all of these customs that are there for a particular reason. Right? And that’s why new money is a problem. Because they’re not integrated in all these systems that allow wealth to relate to, back to earth, back down. And so, yeah, so Tom Holland was talking about some prince that got invited to Mexico or whatever. Right? They wanted to have a king in Mexico. So they were just shopping for royalty in Europe. And they ended up having this prince that was like, yeah, he couldn’t get his stuff with his own family. So they dragged him to Mexico with the French army. I think it was also in relation to Napoleon. Anyway, they dragged him to Mexico. And then he spent this whole trip preparing the court, like the rules, like the way that people should dress, how many pianos there should be, right? Like the whole thing. So he comes to Mexico and he tries to implement all of this. These Mexicans are like, hey, dude, we got to eat. So that’s the other way where there’s this high culture that needs to relate to the low culture in a way. And you can just impose a system that’s developed over hundreds of years onto a backward Indian population. Right. And Plato’s solution in the Republic, this is the point of the cave, the actual point of that parable, is that those guys have to be dragged down. They have to be dragged down. Now, he doesn’t offer a practicable solution, right? I mean, it’s explicit, but Glaucon’s pissed off. Like, why are you, Socrates, dragging the philosophers down to the lowest level of the city? And Socrates is like, because you got to. That’s what he says. Like, you have to. Like, it’s for the good of the city. It’s not for the good of the philosophers. Right. They’re supposed to be, I don’t want to call it humbled, because that’s not the way it’s cast in my text, right? But they’re supposed to be brought low so that they can fix the things that are down there. Because when you’re busy going higher and higher and higher and higher and higher, you’re not looking at what’s going on down at the lowest level, right? And then, and he says this too, it’s the same for all the other levels. It’s not like, oh, you take the highest and every once in a while they go through the slums of the city and your problem is solved. No, no, no, they’ve got to visit all the layers of the city, right? They have to. That’s what the cave is actually about. Classes are not optional. You have limitations. People within classes, those classes are determined by their limitations. And that’s why the people with, we’ll say, different limitations need to be brought low, dragged down to be hated, but make the corrections that need to be made at the same time. In other words, it’s a double sacrifice. The sacrifice of their personal, their pursuit of personal betterment. And it’s also the sacrifice of their reputation in some sense, or the love for them, or the magisterium around them for the purposes of making the city better, because it’s not about them. It’s about the city. And yeah, the tyrant is a person at the lowest who cannot have that, that they’re not in that pursuit. And when you raise up people who are miserable, people who are unhappy, people who basically don’t want to be or can’t be where they are, then you end up with a corruption problem. Ethan says, the good cannot be quantified. A reason can’t be given because goodness transcends reason. This is where Glaucon’s frustration comes from. Well said. But to respond to two times ago when you spoke, Mark, about the philosopher. The philosopher is qualified, it says, I think, in 581E. He’s qualified because he also has a lower appetite as well. It’s not that the philosopher, you were talking about how the object of the pleasure should change when I said living your best life. Yeah, living the most virtuous life would be a better way to phrase it. That should be an obligation that you have. Like, when I woke up this morning, I was still alive. I don’t know if I’m still alive. I woke up this morning, I was still alive, I don’t have cancer. And the time was given to me as a gift and it pre-existed. That’s the starting point. That’s the starting point of determining where I am, what I should sacrifice for, etc. I should start with that frame and go from there. And if you start there, I think, well, there’s a lot of implications of that. I’ll leave it at that. So for me, in my text, Yanni, I assume you’re saying philosopher as the lover of wisdom, which is fair, right? All he’s doing there is changing the pleasures. Again, and I mentioned this earlier, right? The fact that you pursue a pleasure does not change. In other words, the aesthetic man is not the man with no pleasures or no desires. That’s not it. It’s what you’re pursuing and what you consider to be pleasure. Pleasure is not an optional state you can do away with. And so what he’s really saying is that the lover of wisdom is holding one thing higher, right? And not eschewing the other things for it, effective, right? He’s not reducing it. He’s not doing away with it. He’s not saying no to these things, right? In other words, he’s not an aesthetic, right? He’s somebody who’s engaging in the pleasures in a different way. Yeah, it’s an integrated thing, right? Like it has integrity. And because everything has their place, right? Now, justice can manifest and then things can be true. The fact that they can be true is inherited that they’re in just participation. Ethan says the central theme of Dante’s comedy is the proper order of pleasures. Well, that’s part of the theme here too. That’s great. Okay, so do we want to say something about the first proof? I guess like that the tyrant is a slave. So that’s the first argument. Okay, then we go to the second proof. Then we go to the three-part soul, desires and governing powers. And learning leads to knowledge of truth. Anger leads to conquering and fame. And appetite leads to money that facilitates the appetite. And to, well, accruing gains, which I called having mode. So conquering and fame, that’d be being mode. Like anger, like there’s a natural expression there. I don’t know if I want to map those on the modes, but learning, seeking knowledge and truth kind of sounds like becoming mode to me. So it kind of fits in my mind. No comments? Okay. I mean, the basis of authority for the first argument to me was always suspect. They kind of elect themselves as judges and say like, I mean, I don’t disagree with it and I don’t have any problems with it. It is just in terms of they don’t try it. They basically just say, we’re going to elect ourselves as judges. And we’re going to decide that the virtuous man is the most happy. Or the aristocratic man is the most happy and is the most virtuous. And then when they get into the second proof of the nature of the objects of pleasures and pains, they’re already kind of axiomatically set up to arrive at where they want to go. I mean, that’s the only, again, I don’t have any problems with this, but that’s one of the observations that I made. Like if someone were to object to Plato, it’s likely that this would, like, in fact, if you look at the comments, it’s like, if you look at comments on Plato videos, a lot of the times it’s like, just trust me, bro. Like Plato, just trust my opinion, bro. That’s kind of the attitude that people nowadays have towards Plato. A lot of the times, like, it’s just an arbitrary opinion or something. I don’t think it’s arbitrary. It’s definitionally true, right, which is annoying. It’s like, okay, like the good is that which allows other things to be, and therefore you can either participate with that which allows things to be, or you can ignore it. Right? And out of that, just as follows, right? And so, you can reject it if you reject the existence of good, but if you accept the existence of good, then I don’t think you can reject it. Right. Well, I think the modern problem is that contrary to what everybody believes, the so-called education system, really more of a training system, has spent a great deal of time destroying our ability to think critically about that. And therefore, it doesn’t know a proof from a non-proof, doesn’t know a good proof from a bad proof, doesn’t know what proof is. And the proof has limitations. A proof has to be grounded in a set of axioms. And, you know, the reason why a text like the Republic is so ridiculously significant is precisely because the way it’s laid out exemplifies that problem, the problem of accepting or rejecting a proof. And, you know, that’s what’s going on. That’s what that’s what’s actually happening. So either they’re accepting or they’re rejecting this crazy proof, and then they’re proceeding from these axioms, right, saying, okay, well, yeah, that axiom seems to hold up. And therefore, and it because we don’t have the skills of and therefore, we don’t understand what follows from the thing we just stated, right? We jump to the utopic vision, the end goal, right? And we don’t understand. No, no, you just moved a piece on a chessboard and that changes the relationship of all the other pieces on the chessboard. So you did not have the pure outcome that you were hoping for, right? So when you get rid of the mental hospitals in the United States, right, the outcome isn’t that home that mentally ill people don’t get abused. It’s that the nature of their abuse changes. So you didn’t solve a problem. You moved it. And maybe you improved it, but I don’t think so. I think you made it much, much worse. And you can always argue that you made it better because these people aren’t being abused in this horrific way. Are you sure that the people that you just put on the streets and are now homeless aren’t being abused in a worse way? Because I don’t know how you’d measure that, right? So you might have made the problem much worse without even, but now it’s out of sight. It’s out of sight better, right? We don’t have the ability anymore to understand, oh, you can’t just change political parties and expect the government to be drastically different. You can’t just pull out of a war zone overnight, right? Because that has consequences. The world has a bunch of quality relationships, intimate relationships, if you will, that matter. And that’s exemplified in this. That’s why you can’t raise the lowest up to the highest. That’s why tyranny happens when you do that, because they don’t have a right appreciation or relationship to how the world is structured and configured, right? So a couple things that came to mind in terms of accepting the good, making proofs, and the and therefore skills. Before we get to and therefore skills, you’ve also got the frame of your starting position, which is very problematic in our age. Here we have two problems. One is binary frames and identifying against. So I’m going to call this binary subversion, where Plato says, okay, so we have this line of reasoning where if you go from sick to healthy, you go from pain to pleasure, or you go from healthy to sick, you go from pleasure to pain. Plato says he uses the trick of the triangle to break that binary framing. Say, okay, well, what about a neutral position? Say if you’re in a neutral position, can you go to either a state of pleasure or health or sickness? I know that’s inconvenient for your labeling in categorization systems, but it’s kind of like there’s a meme in the market discord, heretical memes channel the other day. I think it was, I don’t remember who put it there, but it was like I’m non-binary, thus creating a binary system making you binary again. And so somebody who’s saying something like that doesn’t actually mean what they’re saying. What they’re doing is they’re hijacking this identity of normativity and then identifying against it. So they’re actually capturing the frame by force on their own authority. And they’re just saying, all they’re saying is, I reject the values of the normative position. That’s really what they’re saying. But that sounds aggressive. But by saying I’m non-binary, you cast yourself as a victim if anybody tries to attack you. But in reality, you’re the one who shot first. Exactly. Well said, Danny. Yeah, I’m totally gonna steal binary subversion. That is, that’s great. So binary, and we’ve seen this all throughout Plato’s, that binaries create relative positions. And we see how Plato uses the dance of relativity, oftentimes with comedy. By the way, before we move forward, I just wanted to mention this because people think that like philosophy is heavy. Where was it? Oh, I just remember I laughed a whole bunch of times and I’d only wrote down one time, but it was in 580. And Plato was like, they’re like reasoning, going back and forth to certainly, when he’s just like, shall I add whether scene, well, they’re talking about the criteria of their evaluation. And then Plato’s like, shall I add whether scene or unseen by gods and men? Let the words be added. I just, you know, I was kind of acting it out in my head. It’s just, it’s very dramatic in like, it’s impossible not to see the comedy. It’s just so funny because I’ve watched lectures of people who are like, it says, Plato says you shouldn’t go to bed angry. Like maybe he’s being serious. Like that’s probably actually good advice. In terms of like about the werewolf, the dreams, the subconscious, like, you know, they might say, they might like take a line. It’s like, we’re going to take this sentence and interpret it as literally like, oh, he was ahead of his time psychologically or something like that. But then it just, we’re so inconsistent with how we read it and it’s just comical to me, especially the fact that we have like PhDs and we’re teaching these things in like university setting. It’s just crazy. Anyway, but yeah, reading Plato is just funny. It’s a pleasure to read. Go ahead, Ethan. Oh, I was just going to say on the identifying against thing. People take something and they think that they can assume the position of zero. So therefore they have a new identity. So, but if you have zero apples, you’re still submitted to the category of apples. And so you’re actually still playing on the same identity, which I think I was watching a thing on the history of the number zero one time. And they said zero used to be outlawed by the church because they thought it was evil, ha ha. But now we have zero now. It’s like, maybe there’s a reason why they discouraged or prohibited the bottom class from messing around with this number zero. Because it will look at us now. Now we have this misunderstanding about the world and everybody’s identifying against and protesting. And yeah, anyways, also real quick, I wanted to underline that what you said, Mark. All judgment is based off, what did you say? All proof is based off of an axiom. Yeah. And that’s hard for us because we’re so used to, we take this objective material reality for granted. That’s actually secretly the axiom that we’re not aware of. So that’s the zero position as well. Yeah. It’s the position where you don’t have an impact in the world, which isn’t a position that you can ever have. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So anyways, sorry, Danny. So yeah, like people have been talking about this idea, right, like the tension of the opposites and blah, blah, blah. Right. And like, I don’t, when I see what he’s doing in the text, right, he’s taking the two extremes, right, or the two poles, maybe that’s a better word. And then he starts moving, right? And so he’s, well, he’s already defined it as a spectrum, right? And then the movement is generating the participation, right? Because like he’s drawing it out of the absolute into a relationary framing. So I don’t know if he’s necessarily doing something with a third position or whatever, right? But I think he’s breaking it up into the meaning, right? Like he’s saying, okay, like these words, they’re pointing at something abstract. But if we look at how we relate to that abstraction, then something else appears. And maybe we should relate to that which appears to us, as opposed to the words or the abstractions that language provides us. So I think I think he defined philosopher as lover of wisdom or lover of knowledge, which is interesting. Do we have the word for knowledge that he used there? I know that in the Bible, they also go together, right? So like, I think all of that stuff is taken one. Do we know if he used episteme or gnosis? Or maybe it doesn’t matter. No, it probably does quite a bit. Right. This is because our version of knowledge is very flat propositional. And that’s really the issue is the biblical definition is he knew his white obviously not like you describe her using words. Right. And so, yeah, this is where we get into trouble. That translation into knowledge is already a big issue. The huge whopping problem that people that people in recent times do not appreciate. That’s why I call it the agnosis on Twitter, right? Because, yeah, our idea of knowledge is completely corrupt and putting it on top is corrupt. And it’s corrupting us. It’s corrupting our behavior in the world because of that. Because, yeah, love of wisdom is more important than, we’ll say, the lover of facts of the world. Yeah. Yeah. I think it would still be episteme, but it must be qualified, right? It must be a knowledge of something. So you might have knowledge of particular things and then wisdom is a virtue, right? Knowledge of a virtue. But then again, Gnosis is a description is like an ontological union, I think. And the problem with the Gnostics is, well, they weren’t Christian. So they were trying to commune with something that was refuting matter. But the thing with, if you’re Christian, you say, well, the goal is some form of Gnosis with God, but God is, God would be incarnational. So that would be a love for the whole world. Anyways, not to drift on that, but it would be helpful to be able to see how the words they’re using and how they’re using them and everything just gets translated as knowledge. You’re saying that early Gnostics are trying to refute matter? Yeah, I mean, that’s historically how they’re defined. Yeah. Epicureanism is something or is it, what does it mean to try to refute matter? Like it’s a mystical tradition or what? Like, yeah, all of your constraints is material. And so if you want freedom from constraint and consequence, like maybe we do now, we use freedom, then you’re rejecting matter. They were basically death cults. Like they were like, we’re not going to reproduce. You slide into Dionysianism, right, into pleasure, pursuit of pleasure, and then you slide into nihilism or meaning crisis, right, because there’s a loss of intimacy. With the physical, like it’s just a physical, because you go too far, right? You go, oh, it’s all pleasure. So why do I care about maintaining anything? Then nothing gets maintained. Everything collapses around you. Now the option of intimacy has been removed. What are you going to be intimate with when there’s no more city? Right? This is when Verbatim talks about domicide. The domicide is the thing you did to yourself. No one did that to you. You did that to yours. It’s not, it’s not Alexander conquered the world and caused my domicide. No, first of all, that didn’t happen at all in bad history. Second of all, the only person who can domicide you is you, because home is where you hang your hat, right? And so, oh, what does that mean? That means that domicide is the result of the loss of a spiritual home, not a physical material home. And when you don’t have those two in right relation, because you’re busy rejecting one of them, you’re going to end up in nihilism. You’re going to go right through dianesianism, or maybe slide directly into depression and hit the nihilism. There’s no other way for it. It’s a loss of faith. It’s a consequence of adopting the hermeneutics of suspicion by basically experiencing trauma. And the trauma is just like, oh, now I don’t know what I can trust anymore. Like this happened after the Black Plague as well, right? Just like society could like re- well, tumbled around just because these people experienced something that was so upsetting. How do you live after that when half your city dies? Yeah, I like that idea of the consequence of adopting the hermeneutics of suspicion by trauma. I’ve never considered the connection between the somatic experience of trauma and the hermeneutics of suspicion as being your primary lens. But it makes complete sense. I don’t know if you’ve tweeted about that, but you should. I’m back on the constraint thing, though. That’s something that we’re learning here in the Republic, is that, hey, you know what? The constraints actually might be a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can’t- the ultimate problem, the thing that people don’t fundamentally understand is you can’t have definitions without constraints. The two are almost the same thing, not quite. If you don’t constrain things, you can’t define them. And if you can’t define them, you can’t have them. And if you can’t have them, you’re stuck in the ethereal or spiritual realm. And this is the logical conclusion of the Gnostics. So that’s why they refute matter. And you read about them historically or in a class, like why would they refute matter? Well, this is why. This is how they’re seeing the world. And Plato is- what we’re learning here is it’s very going against that. And further on in Christianity, that takes it to the most extreme that you possibly could. There’s a deep love for the world and the creation after the advent of Christianity. So much that they start venerating the dead bodies of people because there’s such a profound love for the material and the world and the constraints. I wouldn’t use the word love there, Ethan, just because it’s so ambiguous. I would use the word care. Right. We start caring for the physical in a new way that’s not hedonistic, that’s not Dionysian. We start caring for the physical in a way that’s generative. And that is a very different thing from what the Greeks were doing. The reason why Greek society wasn’t stable and couldn’t be made stable is because of the lack of caring. Right. They cared for the city at the best. For all I know, for all anybody knows, most likely, that’s the result of misunderstanding the Republic. Right. Because they stop at the city. They don’t talk about the nation. They don’t talk about the country. Right. They stop at the city. And with good reason. Like, you know, it should be good enough, basically. But if you misunderstand what they’re saying, then, yeah, you’re not going to understand how to apply those principles one layer up and create a country. And a lot of ways, that’s what we’re suffering from. We’re suffering from trying to change the way we define countries from what kings say and what kings rule over to what governments say and what governments rule over. And we can’t even define government. We’re having a real problem defining government. Plato does a better job of it than we are doing in recent times. Yeah. Didn’t you guys go over that in one of your videos, the difference between Greece and Rome and how Rome was able to, why there was a Roman Empire and there wasn’t a Greek Empire? Well, there was a Greek Empire, but it lasted like a day. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s, I think, my first talk with Adam about Greece and Rome. Yeah. Yeah, it was a good talk, too. All my talks with Adam are great. I hope we get another one in with him soon. Yeah. That is a fundamental difference. And then, ultimately, Rome has to come in and conquer Greece for real, even though they didn’t want to. And Rome isn’t a conquering nation state. It’s not an empire. I mean, it’s an empire, but it’s not an empire through conquest. You know, through force. It’s not. If you look historically, right, and basically until Caesar, it wasn’t. And Caesar was the one that, the crossing of the Rubicon is, once you use force against your enemies, there’s no reason not to use force against your own capital. And that’s the story of Caesar right there. And that has good things and it has bad things. And that’s, people miss that lesson. They totally miss that lesson in the Caesar, the story of Caesar, rise of Caesar and rise of dictatorship. Right. Which Caesar opens the door for tyrants in Rome. So to go back to the tripartite soul, I think that’s actually a framework of positive motivational structure. So what are we called to do instead of what are we forced to do? So it’s interesting. I think the whole book, we’ve not been dealing with the negative, like poverty was mentioned a couple of times, right. But it was basically ignored, right? Like either you deal with it or you don’t, but it just is. Instead of, we went to luxury and the problem of luxury. So that’s really interesting. And I think if we focus back on society, right, like what are we trying to solve, right? Like are we solving poverty or luxury? Right. Because it’s important to realize where you’re coming from in your motivation. Because I don’t think when solving poverty, you can’t do good, right? Like you just produce bad. Honor comes from attaining your aim. Just to pause on that real quick, just because I wanted to mention, I remember this was a formative experience when I was in college in my 18s or 20s or something. I think it was a lecture by Ravi Zacharias who contrasted George Orwell’s 1984 to the Brave New World as the problem of pleasure versus the problem of evil. To me, being raised Christian, the problem of evil was always simple intellectually. It’s just what yardstick are you using? What do you mean by evil? That’s just an emotional issue. It’s not a logical problem. But he proposed that the problem of pleasure, which is why would you get out of bed and do anything at all, is a harder question. So in other words, what good are you submitted to? What’s the purpose of life? That kind of thing. That’s actually a harder question. Or at least for me, I remember I heard that. I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s a problem of evil. People pretend to be tripped up over that, but it’s really a non-problem. The problem to spend time on is the problem of pleasure, so to speak. Yeah. And getting into the third proof, right? Right there. What is pleasure? Well, we don’t understand the difference between the measure and the motivation. And the reason why people think the problem of evil is the hard problem, like Verveki talks about this and Peterson talks about this, it’s like you guys are being insane. Right? That’s not the first thing to solve, to your point, Danny. First thing to solve is motivation, not where things are after you’re motivated. And first, you’ve got to solve motivation. And it’s weird to me that all these wicked, smart people are caught up on something that, A, I would argue doesn’t need to be solved, it’s already been solved. But B, can’t come first. And they haven’t solved the first problem. Yeah. But if you solve evil first, you’re identifying against something. Yeah, but if you’re already in something, right? This is the problem, right? If you don’t accept God, right, as your box, then you’re in a box. And so you inherit from your box axiomatic stuff. Yes, that’s why you can’t derive the good from the evil. You can’t do that. Well, but the problem is you have the good. If you’re in a box, you have the good, because the box gives you the good. Like, that’s the problem. So the good is axiomatic to them. Like, they already know the good. They don’t need to know the good. Right. They don’t pursue it at all. I like what you said, Ethan. If you start with the problem of evil, you must identify against. Yeah. And there’s the binary thinking, and Manuel exemplified the middle out thinking and all of that. And that is where we’re stuck, in my opinion. I have videos on all of this on navigating patterns. I’ll clean up. So yes, this is where it’s behind Elf, by pointing. Right. This is why we’re confused. This is why we’re confused, because we haven’t read Plato properly, or we haven’t taken Plato seriously enough or something. Okay. So honor comes from attaining your aim, right? So in some sense, honor is you being effective and being able to show your effectivity, and that will grant you respect. Reason is the faculty of judgment. Judgment is necessary for other things to be true. Right. So that’s how they start building. Wisdom leads to the best. Life… One thing, just real quick before you move on. One line I liked is that when it said that reason is the instrument of the philosopher, I just loved that image of reason being an instrument. I mean, because it’s submitted, because reason is submitted to the performance of a song. The nature of reason is that it’s submitted to a purpose, right? And so whenever I’ve been thinking about that in life, when I hear people using reason to do something, trying to look into the poetic energy or the poetic side of like, what are you on about? What exactly do you want? Something that’s been in my consciousness for the last month or so. Right. So when you said instrument, my mind was like, I want to use scientific instrument, right? And then I’m like… Musical. Yeah. Like, what is a musical instrument? Right? A musical instrument is weaving things together, right? Like it’s weaving something harmonically, right? Which is ineffable in nature, like ultimately. Like it’s just that which comes together as you and the air and the environment, right? Like all of these things, they join up into a manifestation. And if you see reason as that, right? As that which facilitates that coming together of all these aspects in harmony, right? Like that’s… Yeah, I like that picture way better. Okay. So wisdom is what leads to the best life. And then they go into a trial dedicated to Zeus, the savior. I have no idea why they nicknamed him the savior at this point. Where are you at? Just 5… 583 B. I have a footnote there. I have a footnote there. The first toast at a banquet was to the Olympic… The first toast to a banquet was the Olympian Zeus, the third to Zeus the savior. By combining the two aspects of Zeus in a single form of address, Plato seems to be emphasizing the importance of this final proof. The beginning and the end. Oh. Oh. Oh. Okay. And then the sage… Thanks for the note. Then it goes into… The sage whispers right in your ears, Ferveki, stupid sage. Which is actually not a person, right? Like just to… Correct. It’s the spirit, just like the muses. It’s the spirit of the philosopher. Only pleasure of the wise is pure. Right? So this is again a divine insight. Like now, Danny, now you can be upset. What am I upset about? Well, like the sage whispers, like this is an appeal to revelation. Like I don’t know what else to say. Right? It’s like after we’ve gone through this whole deliberation, I dare to state that only the pleasure of the wise is pure. Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, he’s been doing that the whole book. But I love the dramatic rhetoric of it. Sage whispers in my ear that no pleasure except that of the wise is quite pure and pure. It’s great. I don’t know how it’s… This isn’t great. It’s just fantastic. And he’s… But yeah, it’s fun. 583B. All others are shadow only. After Zeus, like after… The third trial, which is dedicated to the Olympian Zeus, the saviour, sage whispers in my ear that no pleasure except that of the wise is quite true and pure. All others are a shadow only. And surely this will prove the greatest and most decisive of false. I have none of those words. Right. Me either. I have… And the Olympian Zeus is the end of that Zeus thing. Observe that the other man’s pleasure except for that of the prudent man is neither entirely true nor pure, but is a sort of shadow painting, as I seem to have heard from someone of the wise. And yet this would be the greatest and most sovereign of the false. Yeah, I have something much more akin to that. Except he says in mine, this translation says instead of a prudent person, a person of prudence that says a knowledgeable person. Well, that’s a recent translation. That’s age of necessity. Prudence is almost certainly the right term, given what he’s describing. Right. Well… Neither entirely true nor pure. So what mediates that? Truth and purity is mediated by prudence. It’s not mediated by anything we would recognize. Knowledge. Like I had the image of the conscience whispering. That’s kind of what came to mind to me or some voice whispering. But when I hear those, it sounds a little bit more external, but not entirely. I don’t know. Anyway, this is more valence. Pleasure. But it just says observe that the other man’s pleasure, except for the prudent man. And then I seem to have heard from someone of the wise. He doesn’t say he heard from someone of the wise. So that’s the spirit. The spirit of wisdom or something. And yet this would be the greatest and most sovereign of the false. And then… False? What does he mean by that? Well, I think it’s the fall into tyranny. Right? Yeah. Okay. Or the fall. Oh, right, right, right. Okay, got you. Yeah. Yeah. And then the next line is, yes, the greatest, but will you explain yourself? So that’s the affirmation of the importance of this last verse. Which is funny, by the way. It’s, yes, I agree, but please explain. They always do that. Yeah. This is a wonderful, wonderful trick they use in the book. It’s like, why are you agreeing so easily? Well, I do that with people when I talk, actually. It’s like, yes, but why? Because I don’t care about what people say, right? I care about how they get there. I don’t care a shit. Well, and that is the part of the structure of the book. It’s absurd for that reason. It’s absurd to highlight, you can be right, you can be wrong, but how did you get there? Because again, the fact that you made a statement that you were correct about doesn’t tell me if you actually researched it, if you actually did know what you’re talking about. Being right doesn’t mean you knew. The thing that means you knew is that you did the work. To find out. Right, and this goes back to knowing the good, right? Like, you only know the good if you can justify every part of it. And like, if you can’t, then you don’t know it. Right. Uh, okay, so pleasure as opposed to pain. Can I pause you on that real quick before we move on? When you say the, sorry, I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but I mean, I’ve been thinking about, in terms of how to behave, there’s things that happen, especially in real time on the spot. Like later, I can always think about interactions that I have with people and think, oh, I made that error, I should have said this and that. But we were talking once about conversations that we were having, and a habit that I have had is like an error that I make is imposing a framework and then trying to put somebody into my framework. It doesn’t work. But like, if you’re objecting to somebody, this is something that we were talking about, is your responsibility is only to say, I oppose what you’re doing is evil. You’re going to have to kill me. Now, now, now I can’t, I can’t explain to somebody every part of the good. When I say, I think what you’re doing is evil. Like a lot of the times I’m not, I’m not fully able to articulate it. So what do you mean when you say you only know the good if you can justify every part of it? Like, what do you mean by justify? Because you’re, you’re literally defining a shadow of the good at that point. If you can’t articulate it, you you’re relating to a shadow of the good. That doesn’t mean that it’s not good. Right. It just means that it’s a derivative. But it’s not that you, it’s not that you have to have airtight apologetics for your, the positions of the world. No, no, you can’t airtight apologetic and you should never engage in apologetics, but different, different discussions, right? But to know the good, it’s, this is that back to what, what do you mean by know? Biblical know, not propositional know, right? Participatory know, not I can describe it to you. I can explain it to you. Explanations and descriptions are propositions, effectively. And it’s not that type of knowledge. But also you don’t have to contrast evil with good to prove that it’s evil. I think that’s not necessary. The nice part about like goodness, in effect, goodness doesn’t prove itself, but evil does. Like evil just proves itself, right? It just takes four seconds and bang, that’s definitely evil. And we’ve lost that skill. Like I grant you in recent times in the age of gnosis, we’ve lost that skill to point out evil. And people go, oh yes, that’s definitely evil, right? You know, because again, we are in madness. We’re at the point where somebody says, that person didn’t lie. That person said they lied. They admitted to lying. Like I don’t know why you’re defending somebody who has admitted to doing the thing. Like that doesn’t make any sense. That’s madness, obviously. It’s obvious. We were there. We’ve been there for a long time, by the way. I got good. I got receipts. I could show you, right? But that’s not, that’s not the point of this. The point is you don’t prove evil by pointing out good. Because good is not the opposite of evil. And so if you want to prove evil, you need to prove it on its own terms. And you should be able to. And if you can’t, maybe it’s not evil, maybe it’s neutral. Might not be good. And that’s why this three-part system is so important. Because lots of things like breathing, maybe you’re breathing because you’re a serial killer. Then breath might be evil. Maybe you’re breathing because you’re trying to give birth to a baby. That breath might be good. You got to consider these things. It’s not that the breath doesn’t really play a part in it. It’s a neutral state. And because we don’t have the neutral state, we think we have to contrast everything in the dialectic. Get stuck in this binary thinking, right? And which leads to binary subversion, as Ethan adroitly coined for me. I’m totally going to steal from now on. And now we’re in a pickle. We’re in madness. I mean, that’s what causes the madness of binary subversion. And I think if we’re going to take Plato’s advice, what does make the breath good? Well, that it moves something. And the movement is either up or down. And so we can define the movement, but we can’t define the breath. Because it’s nonsensical. It’s inanimate. The breath animates something else. And so something else reflects back on the breath. And to go back to what I think Plato says, it’s like if you know the good, the knowing means that you can call upon the good to make your argument. And so you don’t know the argument. The argument gets revealed in the context that it is required. And that’s knowledge, right? Like, so the knowledge is the capacity to engage with a level of intimacy that’s sufficient. It fulfills the purpose. Yes. Well said. All right. That was really good. I had to clip that. Clip that. Definitely clip that. Okay. So he’s opposing pleasure to pain. Right. And then I’m in my mind, I’m removing pleasure and pain with positive and negative. Because I think that’s what he’s actually talking about. Right. So you have the absence of negative. And then the removal of positive is also a negative. Right. He’s basically stating that there’s an ambiguity. Right. He’s destroying your frame. And then there’s a rest state. And that exists both in the positive and in the negative. And then, oh yeah, pleasure and pain are motions of the soul. Right. Because it’s not only motions, but it’s motions of the soul. Right. And if we look at the soul as that which is grasping onto the intelligibility, that’s our interface with it, then there’s something that harmonizes and there’s something that disharmonizes. Right. And I think at least where my mind goes immediately is that if that is under a higher principle, right, that higher principle is always providing the harmony. And so when you have friction on a lower level, that friction is never disrupting the higher harmony. I think that’s where you need to go. Right. And I think so a little bit later he goes into, well, people who pursue wisdom, right, they think all these other things are secondary. Right. And what does it mean for something to be secondary? That it’s not disrupting the primary relationship. Right. And if you have a primary relationship that is eternal, right, like it has a stability that’s independent of your current context, then that stability allows you a level of detachment from your current context that allows you to put it back into the higher principle in whatever means is available to you. And clip that too. There we go. You struck his ego once. Yeah, that’s all downhill. Top driving confirmed. No, it was good though. Yeah, that’s hard. I mean, that’s a hard topic. Yeah, this third proof is just, you kind of whizzed through the first two and then this third proof, it’s like, whoa, it’s kind of a wall. It’s definitely. What makes you say it’s a wall? Why is it? Because it’s just much more dense and has much more depth. It’s just slower, you know, getting through it. Yeah, yeah. This is why I abstract from the text because like the text is, yeah, I had a wrestling with the text as well, but when I take it outside, it becomes easier. So yeah, so rest is neither, right? So the rest is not a motion of the soul. Like it’s the absence of motion of the soul in some sense, which makes it really weird. Yeah. Well, it’s also, I mean, I forgive me because I’m just repeating what you already said, but this image that you just said about goodness being this like breath, a thing that moves and then arguments get revealed. Like you don’t based on where you’re going with somebody. And then, and then like, if you have that kind of image of goodness and that you have to, it’s in, it’s in the movement that it gets resolved isn’t the right word, but like things become manifest. Yeah. Yeah. Then, then, then what is in terms of balancing your life? Like I have to work, I have to do other things, but I also have to pursue wisdom. That, that can’t be statically defined. Like you have to, it’s not possible. It doesn’t, it doesn’t qualify to say, okay, 40 hours is too much. Like you can’t, it’s not possible to even do that. You know, it’s, it’s. Right. Right. And that’s why attention is important. Right. Because attention is that which draws in the relevant aspect. So if you’re not attending, you can’t take responsibility for that. Well, I would say awareness is the thing that allows you to draw it in. Tension is the thing that mediates that. Right. But what that means is that, yeah, you can’t do that. Have an answer. So that’s the bad news. The good news is you don’t need to. Right. Because you can apply and move your attention appropriately. And then the, you know, some, some recent people would call this the problem of attention. Right. Which it’s not. Right. Or, you know, attending to what you attend to or some other nonsensical, ridiculous, reciprocal, defining. Meta attention. Meta attention. Right. Yeah. It just goes down and down and down. Right. The proper way to think about it is what you attend to matters. Right. And so you need to know what you’re attending to. And part of the way you know that is through what’s not getting done. All right. It should get done. And what is getting done. And how well. And so when you’re not looking at outcomes, when you don’t stop and take a look at, oh, I’ve been doing this over and over again. And it still hasn’t accomplished what I set out to do. Then you lose track of where you are and you lose the world. Yeah, this is why having eyes to see opportunity and having other people and contrast is necessary if to see. And this is why it’s important to not be a tyrant and scar your own conscience. Because then, I mean, it’s kind of, it’s kind of like if by watching the anadromist, for example, how we got here, it’s like, it was to me, that was kind of a shock to my system. Like when I when I zoom out the time frame a little bit, it’s like, man, there’s so there’s so much in virtue and there’s so much just ugliness and vulgarity in our culture, in our world today. It’s like, man, it helps you have to have you can’t, you know, it’s it’s anyway, I’ll leave it at that. It’s important to not scar your conscience. And we need we need to relate to one another in order to have contrast and see things properly. Okay, so then the book went to smell anticipation as I guess, positives that are not relative or something like they’re at least in a in a different dynamic. I, I really was surprised to see anticipation. Because, yeah, that that’s like in a whole different realm. Now we’re we’re we’re in the potential. We left the actual. And then one of the most amazing quotes from this chapter, going up doesn’t tell you how high you are. That’s not a quote. That’s real quick, since you’re in 584. Right now, one thing that jumped up to me was in 583. He said pleasures and pains, both pleasure and pain when he talked about the neutral position. He said pleasure and pains are motion of the soul. Are they not? I’m assuming the soul means psyche. So I’m assuming he’s saying that, yeah, we’re talking about psychological phenomena. Psychology doesn’t even exist to them. They’re not foolish enough to use such a useless frame. Or well, yeah, but whatever whatever whatever whatever label they put on it, they’re they’re in that the realm of I mean, OK, ephemeral. I mean, they’re saying what we’re talking about right now is ephemeral. And we’re not literally talking about the physical. Like when we’re talking about the remote, like having being in a position of pleasure and then having that taken away, like if you’re hungry, you eat. It’s just a cessation of appetite. And then if you’re spirited or honor loving and then you prove your efficiency, what you know, you’re just you’re just filling in the void of the need for validation, basically. And then as we go, why does it matter? Like, why does it matter what they’re talking about? I get they’re talking about a principle. It’s just I’m just observing in the material. Yeah, I’m just observing that the frame that they’re using is opposed to the modern materialist frames that are popular today. That’s all. And they don’t fit in. No, they’re not using a frame. That’s the problem. Like using a principle. Right. And so in other words, the better way to say it, Danny, is that when they’re talking about pleasure and pain, they’re talking about, we’ll say our language, the ethereal or the ephemeral and the material at the same time, because that principle doesn’t change between ethereal and material. It doesn’t change. So they’re not denying the material. They’re not doing any of that. They’re saying this principle is a higher principle. It’s so high that it exists whether you’re talking about physical things or nonphysical things. It doesn’t make any difference whether you’re talking about things that exist or things that don’t exist, things that are real or things that aren’t real. That principle is what’s intact. So that’s the better way to think about it. It’s an encompassing principle. It’s not an identification against principle. It’s not some way of saying, no, the material frame is wrong or even incomplete. It doesn’t say that. It just says you can’t bring that down to the material frame because it’s way above. That’s why I translated into positive and negative. But when you translate it into positive and negative, now you disembodied. So there’s a trade-off there. Yeah, I think the temptation is to elevate the ethereal in this framework, because then chapter 10, he’s going to move towards forms, but he’s not. I think it’s a more integrated position. He’s saying the world matters, and he’s also saying that the ethereal also matters. He’s saying they’re both important. I don’t think he’s saying that one is… To use the Christian position, right? We’re spiritual beings first. It’s not a denial of the material, but it is the saying that the material gets informed by the spirit. It’s primary. Primary, yeah. That’s the denial of materialism, which is the opposite. The material is primary, which is what psychology is. Psychology is an attempt to drag the ethereal into the material and say, oh, this thing inside your head. That’s not what’s happening. You don’t even have to call it primary. It’s just that’s where the change happens. That’s where the relevant aspects of the world manifest, because the rest is happening. The rest is just deterministic, literally. Yeah, technically you’re right. It’s not that the spiritual or the ethereal is the primary mover of the world, although it’s that too. It’s that it’s the only mover of the world, and the material movement doesn’t happen without the spirit. That’s a tough pill to make people swallow, so I tend not to go there. Now we’re in the Tao, right? Because the movement is the breaking of the natural flow of things. That’s what movement is. Right, exactly. And then people miss that. The Western Buddhists miss that every time. So, I don’t even know exactly how to frame this question, but we started off in the tyrant is the guy who when he dreams you do lawless things like you murder and stuff. The tyrant is the one who doesn’t restrain himself when he’s awake. That’s the image they started with. Now that we’re talking about this, we’re back to perception versus reality themes here, in terms of appearance. This is an appearance, only not a reality. Since we’re talking about anticipations, is there something fundamental about movement? I mean, does that? I don’t even know what the question is. Well, the spirit only is in movement. Yeah, or movement only exists as a result of spirit. So this is kind of like the difference between an act. This is why meditation is not an action. And so movement only qualifies to actions, and actions, what you need, you need feedback from the external world. I don’t know how we define these things. It has to be outside of yourself. Otherwise, it’s fantasy. And the only way you know if something is outside of you is if somebody else also experiences it or observes it. Right. Now, that doesn’t mean that something that somebody else observes or experiences is external to you, but that’s the only way you would know. You can’t know by yourself. It’s not possible to know what happened outside of you from your own perspective. That’s silly. Well, I don’t know if you can know, because there’s always a question. But I think the way that Plato defines things that are real are the things that last. Right. So the eternal things are actually real, and all the other things have a lesser quality of reality, right? They’re shadows of what’s really real. And I think as an individual, you can have relations to what’s real. But how do you know? Because the things that are not real are real until they change for you. Right. And this is why people get stuck in trauma, because they start relating to things that are not real as real, because they’re real to them. I’m reminded of when you say real, the real are the things that last. I’m reminded of the necessary and unnecessary pleasures. When he said that, he said the necessary pleasures are the ones that are more like appeal to nature. And I’ve been thinking about this appeal to nature. I don’t really have thoughts on it yet. There was this really nice thing. Noble is what subjects the beast to God in man. Right. So basically what he’s saying is that there’s two natures. The fine nature and a manly nature in man. And in the lion and in the monster as well. What is in nature? Nature is that which, well, to go back to the Tao, which flows from the starting position. Right. Without an intercession of will, will manifest. And so when a dog gets cultivated by man, it develops a new nature. But that is its nature now. Like it’s not that it still has the doggy nature, because that’s nonsensical, because the dog is who it is right now. Then it’s like, okay, so this nature is obviously attuned to something. Right. It’s in relationship to something else. Yeah. So that was the other quote. It’s like, yes, subject the beast to the God in man. So there’s a necessity to subject the beast. Right. Because if the beast is not subjected, the manly nature cannot manifest. But you still want the divine manly nature to dominate, not just manly nature as such. Right. So that’s to go back to what we’re not seeing. Right. So you can state one of these things is true. Right. Like manly nature needs to dominate. But if it’s the evil manly nature, then that domination is more the good thing. Right. Like then having the lion or the beast do its thing is probably better, because it would be subjected to its proper place in the hierarchy instead of, well, will to power. Right. Like that’s what man is. It’s will to power. Okay. So there’s gradations of sharing in existence relating to the variable and invariable things. And then he starts talking about the essence. I don’t know if that’s in your translations as well. So the essence is connected to truth and knowledge. Right. So let’s say that the truth is the quality of the relationship and the knowledge is the object of the relationship. Those both need to be true. And then you have access to the essence of something. And the essence is not, it has a variable quality. And I think that’s the most important part. When we’re talking about the essence of a horse, right. And I think we use the word form of a horse. Like I always have a problem with that example. Because like what’s a horse? There’s not a horse or an ideal horse. There’s an essence of a horse, but it’s not concrete. It’s fuzzy. And therefore it has on some level a lesser reality than a square or a perfect circle. Right. Because if I relate to that, I actually have some essence that I can relate to. Yeah, that’s my vision on that. So the essence might be maybe a good place to start to wind down too, because we’re running to the hour. But on the MarkerWizm Discord server, the discussion is ethereal. Ethan asked a question and Father Eric about existence. And Father Eric responded on the word essence. He says, being is kind of the combination of existence and essence. E and S is a present active participle. He’s talking about the other word, I think, essential now. Essentia is a noun. And essay means infinite. So he says all three can be captured by English being. So there’s a lot of work. Ontology can be confusing and stuff. But I remember finding that definition helpful. Right. And idos is a better word for forms than we use. Right. And again, yeah. Yeah, but. So the essence of a horse. Some people say, what’s the nature of a horse? You know, that’s we’re all kind of talking about the same thing. The idos, the forms, the form of a horse. And I think that’s the essence of a horse. And I think that’s the essence of a horse. And I think that’s the essence of a horse. And I think that’s the essence of a horse. Talking about the same thing. The idos, the form, the identity. What it looks like. But when I look at essence, it’s like the components that are necessary for existence. That’s what an essence is. And when I look at a form. Yeah, but when I look at a form or an idos, I don’t see the same quality. Right. That’s because we misunderstand essence. But that’s how they’re using essence. Yeah, yeah. A materialist will see components. And the Greeks didn’t see components. And that’s refuted earlier in the text in the Republic. You know, you can’t break these things down to components. Right. Because a different combination of components would work just as well. But it’s not arbitrary. And that’s where people break down. And that’s the postmodern problem. Right. Oh, we can just arbitrarily define things. No. Oh, then things are defined thusly by component. No. It’s somewhere in between those things. And that’s what people have a hard time with. And that’s why you either go to, you know, total dogma or total chaos. And this is the problem of today. Right. Everyone wants to go, oh, we can’t have dogma. And therefore, we must have something else. And that something else is, and it’s total chaos. All right. I think I’m now going back to Nick with inverted hierarchies. Right. Like that’s the deuce star, actually. Right. Like there’s a hierarchy up and there’s a hierarchy down. And then there’s a space in between where the hierarchies overlap. Right. So there’s something where there’s a need. Right. Like there’s a purpose that’s given from below. Right. Or called for from below. And then there’s the principles coming together, fulfilling that purpose, coming from above. Right. And then there’s a Venn diagram overlap or whatever that where those two can meet and fulfill the role, right, the purpose. So that might be a better way to square that two triangles. I don’t think you can. I mean, I think that’s the problem is that you actually you can’t. And people want a scientific method to do this and a procedure. And there isn’t one. And there isn’t going to be one. And you don’t need one. Bad news, you can’t do that. Good news, you don’t need to. It’s completely unnecessary. Do you think we’re at a good starting point or do you guys have any other points you wanted to bring up before we wind down? I don’t know. Where do you think we made it to here? The essence invariable. The invariability is 585 C-ish. Right. Wow. OK. We didn’t make as far as I thought we would. OK. I thought we’d finish it up, but I guess not. OK. Fair. Yeah, I still have like two pages of notes for this chapter. Well, one page. I suspect we won’t get through book 10 and under three parts either. I actually we only did one page today of notes, although we visited some of the future stuff. But it was really fruitful. I think having the big gap, like there was a good part in having the gap between. So, yeah, let’s relate back these intentions. So, Danny, make connections from… That was me. Manuel, make connections from the book to the world. Meditate on intimacy for Danny. Ethan wants to identify patterns in the world and to seek intelligibility and a relationship to that. And then, I think we’re at the end of the book. And a relationship to that. And Mark wants to contemplate why people leave out parts of Plato. So, yeah, let’s reflect on that and the occurrences and set an intention for the week for ourselves. That’s also.