Speaker 1: All right, Jay's Analysis dot com. This time we're going
to discuss Plato's fido in depth. I thought that it
would be helpful to readers of the article that did
pretty well for a philosophy article dealing with the esoteric
side of it, which is generally passed over if you
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treatise of the topic, do you do a cursory glance
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So let's get into this. There's some really interesting elements
throughout this dialogue that build on the previous dialogue of
the Apology, where Socrates is giving it a defense of
why he's on trial by the the people of Athens,
the elders of Athens, for inciting the youth. So he's
charged with rebellion and turning the youth to unsavory opinions
and inciting revolution or rebellion and offending the gods. And
so what we find in the second dialogue in my
my copy and Fido is socrates defense. He's gonna give
his his view of the afterlife, immortality, the soul, and
why he doesn't believe that he's wrong in his decision
to submit to the elders of Athens in their decision
of death. He also will give an interesting approach to
the gods, where he will in one way speak of
them allegorically and in another way he will affirm them
in reality. So we're going to get into that talk
about why that might be. And as usual, I don't
do my discussions with a bunch of notes and outlines.
I just kind of freestyle like that better. That's my
improv coming through. But what we know in terms of
more recent and scholarly deeper studies is that Plato is
borrowing a lot from Eastern thought. Of course, obviously this
is Greece, but ancient far Eastern ideas precede this. We
know that there's a body of tradition doctrine coming out
of Egypt that informs Socrates, and this is explained in
the Tomaeis at the beginning another important dialogue, but here
we are focused on the question of the afterlife, and
the other interesting, crucial Platonic idea that will come to
the four is the doctrine of the forms and the
eternality of truth. I'm also going to throughout this discussion
give my own personal critiques and thoughts on on the
on the dialogue and why I don't believe we should
accept a cyclical view of history, or panpsychism or transmigration
of souls, reincarnation, UH and some other theological issues that
we would take issue with coming where I come from.
So there's a discussion at the beginning about the priests
of Apollo and Apollonian religion. If you've read Nietzsche, you know,
Nietzsche categorize it, excuse me, categorizes it as the rational.
It's focused on the sun, as opposed to Dionysian religion
that is focused on the irrational, the force of nature,
the chaotic, the you know, the the Dionysian banquet where
you get drunk and you engage in you know, Saturnalian
orgy or something like that. So if we were to,
you know, we could contrast maybe I don't know, who's
somebody who's we could think of maybe Jim Morrison as
somebody who's a Dionysian and say Kurt Gurdell as somebody
who's an Apollonian. So two very very different people, but
good images of the Apollonian and Dionysian. So it's crucial
that we recognize the mention of the priests of Apollo
at the beginning of the dialogue because Apolonian religion is
again going to be characterized by masculinity, rationality, order in
contrast to chaos and flux and brute forces. Of Nature.
There's an interesting mention of the providence of God early
on in the dialogue. So it's a debated topic in
scholarship as to what exactly the notion of God is
that was bequeathed from Egypt to Socrates and Plato. Very
possible a lot of the early Patristic fathers, Augustine, for example,
in the City of God, speculate that perhaps the Egyptian
thought was influenced by Moses and the Jews and their
time in Egypt they're sojourn there, but we don't know
for sure. Regardless, there's clearly cross cultural influences here between
ancient Egyptian and Greek thought and you know, very very
possibly Jewish thinking. We know from the text of Exodus
that Moses was learned in all the mysteries of the
Egyptians when he was young at Pharaoh's court before he
decided to go over to his native people, the Jews.
So Moses learned the esoteric side of Egyptian thought, and
it's very possible that, you know, in that interaction between
the Jews in Egypt and in the Egyptian court Egyptian religion,
that there was some sort of blending or body of
doctrine that was passed down. And that's another important understanding,
or an important point to understand here is that Socrates
is the bearer of a tradition. So while it's in
vogue in modernity to deride ancient thinking, ancient wisdom, perennial teaching, traditionalism,
this is a very different stance, a very different approach
to the world and to living. And so the ancient
world was one based on tradition. Ironically, the modern world,
although it derives tradition, is not actually anti traditional. It's
actually just a different kind of tradition. It's something more
nuvo rich, something very or created by the new vo
rich I should say, it's a new narrative, a kind
of technocratic, you know, empiricist narrative that gained sway at
the time of the scientific revolution and so forth. So
modernity's grand narrative is still a tradition. It's just a
different tradition. And it's also a syncretic, blended tradition just
as much as any other. So the real question is
not tradition versus no tradition, but tradition versus other traditions,
and which traditions are true and that's really what the
question that's the ultimate question of philosophy really is, what's
the true tradition. There's some really good thinkers who deal
with that, are deal with that very well. One of
the best essays I can think of is there's an
essay by doctor Philip Schard called Tradition and the Traditions,
and in this he details what he sees as the
central distinguish factor between perennial thought and biblical theism or
a personal theistic God. But that's not where we're going
to go in this discussion per se. There will be
a little bit of that, but suffice to say that
the idea of a body of tradition passed on is
crucial here and something that informs the Platonic approach to
knowledge that distinguishes it from others. So when Aristotle takes
his departure from the Platonic tradition, although we can still
place Aristotle in the school of Platonic tradition, the Aristotelian
departure with hilomorphism, and I'll get into that later, marks
a very distinct departure from the body of doctrine that
is passed on here. But again, tradition is crucial here,
and it's an oral tradition. We don't know exactly when
it was written down, because the oldest copies that we
have of Socratic dialogues are actually pretty late, you know,
eight hundred one thousand AD, so not actually BC. And
if I recall at these are housed at Oxford or somewhere,
I don't know, something I read a long long time ago.
Speaker 2: But the the Greek view here, somebody like Spangler is
very good in Decline of the West encapsulating the Greek
approach to things, and it's very much based on.
Speaker 1: Fleeing from the temporal, fleeing from the time from time,
fleeing from the here and now. So there's a Greek
fascination with eternity, and that's what will lee Greek thought
in Plato from Egyptian thought to basically positing the forms
at the expense of everything in the finite material, temporal realm.
And that'll be crucial later on as well. But before
we get into all that, we begin with a discussion
of pleasure and pain and how the two seem to
be dialectically connected, dialectically related, they seem to necessitate one another. Now,
dialectics is going to be crucial to understanding Platonic thought,
and this is one of the key indicators that it's
borrowed heavily from other Far Eastern cultures, possibly some syncretic
Far Eastern view, from perhaps Persian thought or again Egyptian thought.
But again we should point out that there are distinct
markers that set Egyptian thought apart from the other ancient traditions.
And this could also have, like I said, resulted from
an influence of the Jews in their sojourn, because the
Egyptian belief in the afterlife and the positive view of
the body and the resurrection is something that is distinct
from Greek thought and say, other Far Eastern traditions. So
we've got I've got my book out here. We've got
discussions of art and poetry. That's a debated topic in
Greek thought in terms of the Blatonic view, because in
the Republic Plato talks about how art is dangerous because
art can be marshaled by oligarchical forces or by brutish
forces to incite the mob, incite the masses. So art
has to be controlled, poetry has to be banished. But
Socrates interesting change of thought here he talks about writing poetry.
I had cleared my conscience by writing poetry, and then
he goes on to talk about how philosophy is the
highest of the arts. So a lot of unanswered questions
in some of the Platonic teachings and dialogues. Perhaps Plato
modified his views over time. Perhaps, you know, perhaps there's
a little game at work here, play on words, a
little paradox that he intentionally included in the works. Who knows.
We don't know. That's a long debated discussion as to
Plato's actual view of the arts. But what we do
know is that the reference to Aesop's Fables seems to
connect to the idea of religion and allegory because Plato,
Socrates says, he has a recurring dream, and the recurring
dream keeps telling him to what was the exact quote, Socrates,
practice and cultivate the arts, and so he tried doing poetry.
He wanted to write his own Aesop's fable, Socrates says,
but he said it didn't come out very good. So
he just kept doing philosophy, and he came to the
realization that philosophy is the greatest of the arts, and
that he thought this was the meaning of the recurring dream.
But the recurring dream seems to suggest recurring life, because
when we dream, we are in a different realm, the
ether or whatever, and the soul or the psyche is
experiencing things that seem to transcend the here and now.
So is there a possibility of, you know, Plato thinking
that dreams, you know, indicate this metaphysical past life or
higher dimension or so forth. Very possible, because the discussion
begins to divulge or diverge into the issue of whether
or not, excuse me, I lost my page here, whether
or not we had a past life, and dreams could
be the indicator of that Plato things or Socrates things.
So when we are asleep, you know, we're out of
the body, and we're experiencing things in that psychical realm.
And the early on statement here in the dialogue is
that he says, very well, then let me try to
make a more convincing defense to you than I made
at my trial. If I did not expect to enter
the company first of otherwise and good gods, and secondly
of men now dead, who are better than those who
are in the world. Now, it is true that I
should be wrong and not grieving at death as it is,
you can be assured that I expect to find myself
among good men. I would not insist particular on this point,
but now on the other I assure you that I
shall now insist most strongly that I shall find their
divine masters, who are supremely good. That is why I'm
not so much distress as I might be talking about
his death. So he has an assurance that in the
next life he's going to be with the blessed, with
the good, the good gods, the men that have gone
on to the afterlife, to Valhalla, I'm kidding, to the
Eligian fields. And he says that philosophy is the preparation
for death, so not fearing what happens to the body
in this life is preparation for a passage into the
next life. But because the body in the Platonic view
is ever changing and its material and it's in flux,
it has to be derided. So he talks about not
giving into the pleasures of the body and the passions
of the body, and to flee them and to instead
acquire gnosis. So the later gnostic traditions of Batristic era
would definitely derive a lot of their impetus from platonic
thinking and platonic dialogues. So the philosopher is the one who,
as we know it, lives the examined life of the
one who is interested in thinking through matters. But unfortunately,
we have at this point an erection of the premissy
of reason, of ideas of rational thought over against anything else,
and this will be, in my view, the chief dialectical
problem at work here. Nevertheless, we're going to plumb this
for any insights and good that we can. So the
dialogue then transfers to discussions of absolute beauty, absolute goodness,
absolute uprightness. Man sees by his soul, not by bodily sight.
So the site that Plato is concerned with is enter
the inner eye, the inner man, the soul, the psyche,
seeing the true forms of things, and not the variegated,
variant changing objects for his perception presented to his senses
that must be transcended, gone over and against, and rejected
for the ultimate eternal truths of things. So there's an
anti physicalism here. And like I said, this is key
to understanding the rest of the track of Western dialectics,
because from Plato and Aristotle on reason and rationality will
be given premissy over other modes of thought, other approaches
to existence, other approaches to moral ethics, whatever. It's all
based around the functioning of reason. Where the noose in Plato,
which is identified with intellect and rationality, is also identified
with the soul. So there's a soul body dialectic here
that will of course re emerge with Descartes, most notably
in the scientific But as James Kelly pointed out in
my interview with him, the intellect this you can almost
call it a third eye perhaps even though it's actually
identified with the soul. At the same time, throughout life
is seeing a bunch of images that passed before him.
You know, as you lived your life, you see the
phenomena of experience, and these are all transient passing. But
the goal what you should be doing is seeing through
these to the eternal forms. And there's going to be
an awesome argument that will be presented that I think
is philosophically one of the best arguments ever for how
we know that truth is eternal and how we can
actually have certainty about objective essences or forms or existing
objective metaphysical principles that are not purely dependent upon our
individual minds. That's really going to be the crucial positive
argument that we can derive from Plato in this dialogue.
So he says that the quest that the philosopher on
is for reality, the quest for truth. And this is good,
This is the approach that we should take to life,
because life is full of con men, con artists, deceptions,
rigged games all around us, from money, to relationships, to
all sorts of things, jobs, meaning the future history all
bound up with multitudes of psyops and deceptions and marketing
scams and pitches. And so the philosopher can make practical
use use of this in seeing through all the scams,
seeing through the mirage to the reality. So the first step,
he says, is not being a slave to your passions.
A man is a slave to lust or to alcohol,
or to greed or whatever vice. He's going to be
consumed with that, and he's not going to be able
to critically think or reason, not going to be able
to live well or come to truth just common sense,
because he's going to be obsessed with something that's fleeting,
a fleeting pleasure and the eternal truths. Plato argues, which
is this is true, the eternal truths of God, of
truth itself, absolute beauty, absolute goodness, uprightness. These pleasures are
actually better. They will give you a higher level of satisfaction, pleasure,
of fulfillment than any of the baser passions and delights
of a fleshly nature. So the philosopher has to kind
of undergo a purification to be prepared for death. And
that's the goal of the philosopher, because if you don't
see through the mirage and the deceptions to the truth,
then when you go into the next life, you won't
be prepared. And that's really the crux of what we're
getting at here. That's we might call it the Gospel
of Plato, if you will, the evangelion of Socrates. So
the profession of the philosopher is death, not a morbid
obsession on death, but a noble courage facing death. So
detachment and apatheia, and in Eastern thought, particularly Eastern Orthodox theology,
apatheia is the idea of becoming passionless, not in the
sense of having a love or something like that, but
in the sense of not being dictated by base or passions,
not allowing you know, selfishness and lust and greed and
addiction or whatever, to dominate the way that we live,
in the way which we'll again cloud our thinking and
our judgment. So through, according to Plato, through thought, critical thinking,
and rationality, apatheia can be achieved. But to be fair, here,
it's not just through thought. It's not purely irrationalistic endeavor,
because you also have to practice the virtues. You have
to have courage, and you have to have justice, and
so forth. Love truth, Love wasdom to attain apatheia, and
thereby excuse me, thereby attaining wisdom. Now, there's an interesting
mention in section sixty nine C and D about ritual initiation.
He talks about the allegory of the priests of the
different religions, particularly I'm guessing of the religion of Apollo
that he mentioned earlier, and he speaks of it allegorically
as a message about passing over into the next life,
and he reads it as the gnosis of the philosopher.
So there's a kind of a death that one goes
through in this life where he's resurrected that anticipates the
death and intellectual resurrection, not bodily resurrection in the next life.
For Plato, resurrection in the next life appears to be reincarnation,
not a bodily resurrection. So dialectical dualities, and what we
mean by that is, you know, think of if you're
familiar at all with Far Eastern Thought, it looks at
in my analysis, it over time looked at operant principles
in nature, so you would have night and day, male
and female, black, white, things like that, and these these dialectics,
these contraries, these oppositional forces seem to at the same
time the intention, but also work together in a in
unison for a balance. So I don't want to unfairly
paint Eastern thought as believing that there is no true harmony.
They do believe that these oppositional forces need to be
in harmony. Where I would disagree with Far Eastern Thought,
whether you know Buddhist or Taoist or whatever Confucian. Where
I would disagree with him is the means or way
by which the harmony is achieved. So we'll get into
that later.
Speaker 3: But when he Plato discusses the soul in the body
in God.
Speaker 1: It's important to understand the medieval chain of being well
in the ancient world too. The medieval chain of being
that we see in medieval Catholic theologians like aquietness, people
like that. That goes back to Aristotle and Plato in
the Greeks and ultimately probably to Egypt, where you have
this scale, this continuum kind of changed, maybe like a pyramid,
where everything that exists is structured on this pyramid. So
you have at the bottom you have non being, which
is the heaviest kind of being, things that are less mobile, rocks, well,
you know, non being, and then maybe rocks or the dead,
you know, because they're the wicked dead are placed in
an immobile state of being for their crimes in this life.
And then you would have, like I said, inanimate things
like rocks, and then you would have vegetative life, which
does have a kind of moving principle in a way,
although still very limited. Then you would have animals, and
then men, and then above men gods celestial intelligences or beings,
and then above you would have the most fought like entity,
God or something like that. And so when we place
all of them, though, on the same chain of being,
this is the problem that we have in Western dialectics
because they're all they're all essentially on the same chain
of being. They just share in different degrees. So it's
flattened out, if you will. It's isomorphic. It's all the
same stuff. It's all the same stuff of reality, it's
just different degrees of it, if you will. So God
is the lightest of stuff, and then all the way
down to Hell or rocks or whatever, that's the heaviest,
most compact stuff. And because everything is on the continuum being,
that's why you would have a cyclical view of history.
Nothing ever, ultimately gets out of that cycle. Even though
Plato does believe that, I think inconsistently. You know, you
do pass on to the realm of forms. Well, if
you pass on to the realm of forms, why would
you come back to this life, you know, unless unless
there's a dialectical problem that's fundamental at work here. He
talks about permanence and flux and the immortality of the soul,
And that's where I'm That's what I'm getting at with this,
this coming back, this reincarnation transmigration idea, is that the cycle.
In other words, this this Greek view of time and
of reality requires a cyclical view of history. I do
not believe in a cyclical view. I think that a
linear view is actually what makes sense. I know it's
very much in vogue to believe in a cyclical view,
largely due to the influence of Far Eastern thought in
the West. This does not, of course, mean that I'm
advocating every aspect of Western thought. It's just that I
believe that these two views are probably reconciled in some way,
which we don't understand because we're finite. But the problem
with cyclical views is that you never it ultimately becomes
irrational to the point of the world that we experience
in this life not making any sense, okay, nothing being
the case. So, for example, if you were to posit
this view, if you were to say, well, you know,
I believe Platonism or I believe, you know, some far
Eastern view, and you know, I've realized the grain enlightenment
that all reality is illusion and so forth. Well, the
realization that all reality is illusion is unfortunately part of
your experience in this life of illusion, and so therefore
the realization that all reality is illusion is also illusory. Right,
So you can't have that as your great lynch pin
upon which to build your philosophical system of thought. And again,
What it shows is rather that Plato's borrowing older ancient
ideas of Far Eastern cyclical views. But because he thinks
this life is one of illusory flux, we must pierce
the veil and see through to the eternal truths. And
since the body doesn't do that and the soul does,
the soul has to be more like forms. The soul
is more like eternal truths, more like God, more like
you know, absolute justice and so forth. And because it's
more like that, it can't be composite. It has to
be absolutely simple. Okay. Now, in Pythagorean, Platonic and all
and Aristotelian two thinking, the belief about God is that
he's absolutely simple. You know, whatever he is, whatever kind
of stuff he is, he's on the same continuum of being.
The God stuff is the absolutely simple stuff. It admits
of no composition, no division, no partition, no varying multivariate
aspects to it. It's absolutely simple. And the reasoning behind
that is because one numerically has to be perfectly one
to be one. It can't have any any separate, any
aspect of it, cannot be oppositional to itself. Okay, So
if the one had some other aspect that was, you know,
equal to it or next to it, or part of it,
that would in Greek thought be in opposition. It would
be in contradistinction to it. And anything separate or in
contradistinction is by necessity in a dialectical opposition to it.
So if we think about the one and the many,
and that's going to be the crucial philosophical concept to
understand that I mentioned earlier from this dialogue the problem
of the one in the many, which is also the
most important good aspect, right. The bad part of the
problem of the one in many and one in many,
for Plato is that the many is in contrary opposition
to the one. The one has a little bit of
a higher premissy, right, So the one is the goal
where we're shooting for. We want to get to that,
And so any thing that's particular or many is in
somehow or some way a lesser status of being. Because
the idea here is that ultimately God, God or the
Source or the absolute was at one point one, and
for some unknown reason there was a schism or a
fall or a division that brought about particularity and brought
about multi multiple forms, multiple emanations from the One, and
the idea here being that when you look at Egyptian
mythology and you know Ra and Osiris and all that,
and him losing his dick and all that, and that
that's an allegorical telling of the original division that had
happened from the monad from the One, and then the
particular aspects or emanations that came from it, which then
sort of fractured like a fractal into potentially infinite variations,
you know, all the way down to you know, the
Solar system and the planets and the galaxy planet solar system,
down to our reality, all the way down to you know, minuscule,
you know, atoms, molecules, so forth. This big big bang
fracturing from the one, if you will, is an eternal
emanation that our goal is to transcend by leaving body
and then returning to the One ultimately if we've lived well.
So you can clearly see that, you know, the close
parallels to Far Eastern thought, Hindu thought, the wheel of
time that has to be escaped to return to the source.
All the same idea here very clearly, and that's what
I meant in my article. That's what we're getting at
here with the idea of escaping the realm of flux,
escaping the realm of time, escaping the body, because all
these things are viewed as bad. And why is that
because of a fundamental presubposition that particularity or the many
or distinction is either bad or lesser. And that's just
simply not a belief we have to have. It's not true.
We don't have to believe that somehow ultimate absolute unity
has premiscy over against particularity. And interestingly, if you read
say Rushed in his book The One in the Many,
he makes a great point in there about how political
systems throughout history have had the same idea that developed
into all consuming absolutist empires or tyrannies on the basis
of ultimately this philosophical presubposition. That and I'm not saying
that the monarchy's bad or having a single ruler is bad. No, Rather,
what I'm saying is just that the idea that absolute
monatic unity is our operant basic philosophical presubosition then informs
the whole practice of how we would live or how
a society or an empire or civilization would be structured.
And it has a tendency to exclude legitimate distinctions and particularities. Right,
So if we look at something like MAO or a
communist international, it's a great idea, or it's a great
version of this, because what does it seek to do well?
It seeks to make everything uniform. Why? Well, because distinction
in particularity have to be the source of what's bad. Right,
You being distinct from me has to be the source
of the bad. No, this is all based on a
wrong philosophical presubposition. There's nothing there's no reason to believe
that variance or difference is bad. In fact, it's good.
So that's a very fundamental presubpositional flaw in Platonic thought
that I would definitely take issue with. And it's not
the view that I believe or support. Rather, we have
to have a balanced view of the one and the many. Uh.
And we'll get into where I think that is later,
But again back to Plato and the dialogue. What we
want to look at now is the central awesome argument
from the One and the Many that Plato gives. That
is that is crucial that in my own life, when
I learned this a long time ago, really revolutionized the
way I think and the way I approach the world,
and it's very It's been a even though I've grown
a lot since my early twenties and you know, change
views on different things, this aspect of my thought has
never changed, and I don't think it ever will, cause
I think it's true and it makes sense, and it's
the only it's the only view that makes sense about
about how metaphysics works, about how epistemology and thinking works,
and about how we approach meaning and in the world
in our lives. So let's get into that in terms
of unity and distinction, and the one in the many,
so the one in the many unity and difference for
those who are less instructed. In Plato, this central question
for philosophy is about it's a metaphysical and an epistemological question,
so being and knowledge that revolves around linking objects in
our experience. So when we talk about an object a tree, book, whatever,
an earthworm, we link this object to other similar objects
that we've seen in the past or that we will see.
So when we think of a book, we classify it
as a member of category of other objects that are
the same, that are in the same although they're not
the same, right, So books are all similar in that
they're the same type of object. They often have for
the most part, the same shape, the same function and structure,
so forth. Form. Yet they all differ, right, because they're
not all the same book. So there are many books,
but there seems to be some principle that they all
share between them. We'll call bookness. This is a universal
This is the form of a thing. Might also be
the essence of a thing, depending on which philosophical system
you're working with me. So this is central to Platonism,
it's central to realist philosophy in the Middle Ages Middle Ages,
the idea of realism, and it's set over against Aristotle
and all other philosophical systems that come out of empiricism,
because those systems will locate this unifying characteristic in the mind. Okay,
it's not anything objectively out there in the world or
in the thing, or in the realm of form somewhere.
It's only a human token term or a socially constructed
symbolic form or term that we've given to these objects.
There's nothing actually in the book that links it to
another book to share that property of being a book
other than what humans have conceptually created. Because, for example,
in the Aristotelian system, the book has as it's unifying
characteristic prema material prime matter, the stuff that everything's made of,
and it is then later given form into the shape
of book, and might have other qualitya or central characteristics
of it being a book. But the substance itself is
is no different than another book. Right, So they're both,
They're both just In other words, the linking essence between
them is not something that is linked outside of human
conceptual reality. In other words, it never pierces the veil
into the external world. Objects themselves out there in the
world do not participate in any sort of unifying objective
characteristic of bookness, other than I mean, in other words,
in aerosol system. Yes, they do have objects do have form,
they do have substance and essence, but the essence is
all contained within that object. Okay, So there's nothing outside
of that, outside of the temporal that links these things.
And this has drastic and dramatic implications for our epistemology.
And so Plato's answer is that what links these things
is the form, and the form transcends the realm that
we're in. It transcends time and space, and the flux
that we experience in this life to give objects an
eternal grounding, okay, the being of an object, that the
existence of these objects is grounded not in the temporal
but in the eternal form of the thing. So there's
a form of book that way, by which all existing
books share in or participate in. So the idea of
Plato that's very distinct from Aristotle is that objects can
have a substantial form. That it that, in other words,
multiple objects, multiple substances can inhere in an object, and
the objects still retain its unity without destroying any of
the variants or multiplicity. So a book might share in
redness and in score, awareness, in solidity, so forth, all
of which would be universal, and these distinctions are all
real in the object, in the object that is participating
in multiple forms at once. For Aristotle, that's not really so,
and of course for straight up empiricism it's absolutely not so.
For Aristotle. In later empiricism, the object can only have
one substantial unity, and then all of the other aspects
of the thing, the redness and so forth, those are
quality of those are secondary characteristics, and the form would
be the structure given to prima materia, prima material prime
matter that it exists in before us. So the book
has this squareness to it that's a secondary quality, or
it's equality, but it's a substantial unity as as identified
as the matter as it is okay, what's before us
is what there, that's what is okay. There's not another
level of reality or another level of being that makes
it so. And so this will have a lot of implication,
tremendous implications for you know, the soul in Aristotle's thought,
because the soul is the form of the body and
Aristotelian thought, and there's a big debate in Aristotle as
to how that can be since aristotol would seem to
believe in the soul existing beyond the death of the body.
But if the soul is the form of the body,
once the body is gone, how could there be a soul.
The soul would have to be annihilated as well, would seem,
although Aristotle does try to to There are Aristotelian explanations
of this, but anyway, we're not getting into ariostotl We're
getting into Plato, and Plato thinks that the one in
the many is the central argument against the the sophists
and the naturalists of his day, and the naturalists would
be comparable to the empiricists or the person who believes
in scientism. The sophist would be comparable to the relativist,
who believes that nothing is true, everything is opinion. Both
of these kind of go together because once you adopt empiricism,
you're pretty much at skepticism and relativism. Relativism is, of
course the great enemy of Platonism and truth and everything
that I've ever leave. And that's that's the dominant perspective
of the modern world. Pretty much everybody is a relativist, uh,
and they are trapped in that matrix because they don't
they don't know the truth. They're not they're not willing
to or they willingly want to stay in that matrix
of relativism, you know, for various reasons. But for Plato,
he gives us a great ultimately a trance, no argument, uh,
doorway out of that trap, a doorway through which we
can exit the matrix if you, if you will, to
use the pop analogy and step into absolute truth and
objective truth. And what he does is he says, uh,
their house to be basically some unity between objects that
cannot be merely mental Uh, that that unit that unifies
both objects and the experience and objects in our understanding
and the and that is the form for him the universal.
So when we look at objects and we compare book
to book and look for that unifying whatever it is
between them, that essence, Ah, what we come to is
that it's a transcendental category. Now, this is obviously an
argument that would be used later by Kant in the
wrong way, and Aristotle also uses transcendental arguments first, as
I've pointed out many times, But the the unity that
Plato's talking about here in the question of the one
of the many is a unifying something that is what
connects these objects booked to book, tree to tree, even
though they're distinct. Okay, A great example that I had
him on one on one class was when the professor
drew the number seven on the chalkboard, erased it and said,
have I gotten rid of the number seven? And of
course debate ensued in the class, and we came to
the conclusion that no, obviously he had not destroyed the
number seven, because the number seven still seems to be
so we intuitively know somehow that this is the case,
even though we may not understand numbers, we intuitively have
this sense that sevenness still seems to be the case. Well,
how can that be given that we're not immediately looking
at sevens or we're not drawing sevens. We just erased
the seven from the chalkboard or the particular example of seven.
And that's because Plato would say, there is something beyond
a mirror, since experience and it's numbers are a really
really great example of how we can figure this out
even better than essences and objects. Numbers seem to present
this truth even more clearly. So when he looks at objects,
he says, there's no we don't have a direct experience
of the unity between a one tree and an oak
tree and a you know, pine tree. They're both trees,
but they're both different. So this classification that we've given,
you know, it can't just be based in the matter itself,
with the material of the object, because we don't do
there's something that transcends that the mere matter of the object,
or the or the mere human naming of the object,
that links these two things. And we know that because
we never have a direct experience of that. We have
an experience of a tree, we have an experience of
another tree a sensory experience, but we never have a
sensory experience of the unifying essence or principle that links them.
I Now, you might say in response to this, well,
yes we do. You look at one tree and you
see the color and shape that it has, and then
you look at another tree and you see the color
and shape that it has, and that's what links the
two They have similar colors and shapes. No, again, you're
simply pointing out secondary characteristics that link or make the
two trees similar. But the color and shape that's found
in one tree is a particular instantiation and the color
and shape that's found another tree is another particular instantiation. Right,
So what it's there are two different trees. In other words,
that's kind of begging the question.
Speaker 4: What what is Where is the mysterious thing, substance, essence,
whatever form logoi that links these Where's the archetypal pattern.
Speaker 1: That links these things? Because it cannot be merely something
that we've created mentally. And you say, welcome that. Well
maybe maybe not, maybe maybe it is just something we
mentally create. No, because again, think of the example of numbers.
Numbers are not a human invention. It's not like if
I erase the number seven from the chalkboard, there's no
more number seven. Or if everybody in the world suddenly
puts the number seven out of their mind, then seven
ceases to be Well, that's preposterous. It's just utterly retarded.
No seven seems to have this eternality about it. This
not just seven to mean any number, any mathematical idea
or principle.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, all of our experience is constantly bound up
with number and shape, form, geometry, et cetera. Right, and
these things don't disappear when we close our eyes or
forget about them. Now, that's that's completely an egoistic, you know, narcissistic,
fallen view of reality that you know will the mind
and it's not. You know, some guy in a chat
room said this one time. You know, my mind emits numbers. Right. Well,
another way that we can show that that's not true
is by numbers that are beyond the ability for humans
to conceive. And we know infinity is real, we know
there are multiple infinities according to Cantor, so the human
mind can't encapsulate those. No finite mind is able to
literally think of an infinite string of numbers or an
infinite set, and then that set raised to the power too.
And since that's the case, then obviously there are principles
about mathematics. As an example, that extend beyond sense experience.
Another good example is a chiliagon, a thousand sided figure.
A thousand sided figure is impossible to see by the
human eye or in human conception all at once. We
can talk about this object. We know that you can
you diagram one out if you wanted to have the time.
You're that board. But when you look at it, you're
only going to see you know, either if you look
at it up close, you're going to see very minute
little angles, or if you look at it far away,
you're going to see a circle. See, you're not going
to be able to see every vertice or whatever at
every every point, uh in a chiliagon, in a thousand
sided figure. And because you can't see that, that that
and we know that that object exists, we know that
obviously bare empiricism is false. Okay, Aristotle, I don't think
knew about a chiliagon. So these these things are devastating
arguments to to empiricism. Again, any any infinite set of numbers,
any idea of any any irrational numbers that extend in
crazy directions pi whatever. These also are are very devastating
to empiricism because ultimately an empiricism unless you have I mean,
there are some rare cases of people who are empiricist
idealists unless you have an empiricist idealist view, which wouldn't
work anyway, that has serious problems. But the majority of
impeiricists are not this view. They think that the external
world is a bunch of matter, and that we are
the camp in our minds of other camquarders that record
just centory experience. You know, we're just biological computers. You know,
ninety nine percent of empiricists believe that.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: We have no direct experience of a chiliagon. I mean,
you have experiences of aspects of a chiliagon, and you
have an experience of one far away that appears to
be a circle, But you have no direct experience of
a thousand sided figure all at once. Okay, you have
no direct experience of an infinite set of numbers. You
have no experience of an infant negative set of numbers.
So I mean, there's tons of different ways to configure
this to demonstrate the point that knowledge that we have
is ultimately not grounded in sensory experience. Okay, do we
learn by the senses, of course, absolutely, even Plato would
not deny that. But the point is that the correct
and right point is that what we are, what's going
on in the process of learning by sense experience, is
something that is a real interaction with eternal principles. That's
the point. Okay, they're not merely Again, think from a
third eye perspective about the empiricist perspective of how man
operates in the world. Okay, he's a biologically evolved animal
that has a mind that's a camcorder that takes in
these sense impressions and the mind kind of orders them somehow.
So he's like a little bot that spits out and
repeats like a you know, a parrot or something like that,
and that Darwinian view that materialists, biological flux view, that
reductionist view. Over time, he develops into the social, socially
constructed definition of a quote person as a child, and
then reason develops whatever that is. We have no idea
what that is, but reason develops, and then we maybe
consciousness develops you know, and then he then he's able
to become a quote scientific individual, all of which is
completely retardedly nonsensical, total philosophical nonsense, but is the predominant
view of most people in the world in general, right,
And there are a lot of variations. People might have
different ideas about things, but they don't have they don't
generally tend to challenge this dominant grounding narrative. This is
kind of the bedrock of what everybody falls back on.
You know, they go about their lives and do this
and that, and if somebody comes up, say me, and
challenges their predispositions and presuppositions, well they can still fall
back on science. They saw somewhere on Discovery challenge that
science has proven that men's mind is a little biological
computer that processes information, and it's just merely matter, it's
merely chemical reactions. Okay, so again the mind. Let's let's
use this view. The mind is a chemical reaction computer
that processes impulses and incoming sensory input. At no point
in this view is anything objective or metaphysically. The case
ever obtained, that's all that you ever obtain in this
view is sensory input. See, so you don't really ever
know if you are interacting with the things out there
in the world. All you know is that you're interacting
with sensory input. Okay. In the Enlightenment, this would come
to be called indirect real. Okay, you don't have a
direct experience of real substances, qualities, essences in the world,
or if you do, we don't know. What you have
an experience of is phenomena. You have an experience of
sensory input what human would call impressions. So imagine a
guy with his eyes open staring at a TV screen,
and the TV screen for all of his life is
just you know, beaming different images at him. Okay, he
never interacts with a real you know, world or whatever.
It's just TV screen images coming at him. And maybe
there is a real world you don't know, Maybe there
are real objects that you can interact with. Who knows.
Now you might be a little weirded out there because
you're thinking, well, no, wait a minute, that sounds kind
of like Plato. Yeah. I don't want to get too
in depth here, because you could make the case that
an empiricist idealist is pretty close to Platonism. In a way.
But that's not really where we're wanting to go. We're
not wanting to get into modern philosophy per se and
the small branch of Berkeley and empiricist idealism that has existed.
But I suffice to say that the central point that
we do want to get across here is that the
argument for objective, invariant metaphysical principles that are operant in
the world is given its strongest argument from the One
and the Many in Plato's dialogue viatom here. And it's great, great,
great argument. You know, it's it's that's what I was
getting at that, you know, something that has stuck with
me since my early twenties. You know, this is thankfully
I did encounter this in philosophy one on one at
the State School.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is great because once you grasp this, when
this when your mind is you know, awakened to this,
this revolutionizes everything about how you look at the world.
Because we're taught and we're kind of born with this
sort of silly, rebellious motivation and empathus to think that
we can make meaning and reality what it is like.
You know, we're all born kind of little you know,
we think the world re bawls are on us, and
so we are afraid of I mean, towards objective truth
and the idea of eternal truth, because we think that
that's gonna shake our foundations and challenge us to give
up the petty, little sand castle empire that we've built
in our minds and our psyches that we are the
center of the universe. But again, as I said in
the last talk, the real paradox here is that it's
only by moving out of that little mental prison of
deception that we buy into towards what's objectively true, that
we can actually be free. So this central central argument
cannot be overstressed. And this is the antidote to the
modern world. It's also the basis of hidden metaphysics, because
it means that the external world is rational, and it
is designed and is created, and it is highly structured
and highly formalized. And that doesn't mean that like, there's
no freedom. I'm not saying that. I don't mean that's
not what I mean by structure or formalized. What I
mean is that it has inherent design and telos Okay,
it does have purpose. Everything has all the way down
to you know, the nucleus and the electron has this
perfectly ordered symmetry to it. Uh. And you know this
is really how you how you escape the matrix. So
this part of Plato and leaving the matrix is great.
This is what we want to we do want to
keep this. Another another way we can look at this
later on in the development of Western philosophy, the question
of what it's what kind called a transcendental unity of apperception. Uh.
And this is also related to the idea of identity
over time and objects. So two different, two different ideas
or terms that relate to the same thing, one of
them relating to the inner the inner world of the psyche,
and the other one relating to the substance or essence
of things in the external world. And so when we
talked about that one in a mini question, if we
look in the inner realm of the psyche, talked about
the transcendental unity of apperception. And this is a good
point because if you think about it, why does the
human mind link that tree, that tree and the tree
y I saw yesterday as having some connection, right, Well,
it can't just be because they kind of look the same.
Because sometimes things kind of look the same, and they
aren't the same. And even if you just say, well,
because they look the same, that kind of begs the question,
because why does the mind link things that kind of
look the same? Why we're not asking what does it do?
We're asking why does it do that? And so compt
positive that there's not a direct empirical argument for why
the mind does this. The mind just does it, and
all of our experience is conditioned or or i'm sorry,
is built around the precondition of the mind doing that.
And that's an awesome argument. As a philosopher and as
somebody who revels in transmittal arguments, that's such a killer
argument because if you're an empiricist's this is this is
the point Hugh made, right As as an empiricist trying
to be consistent, you can never explain why the mind
links similarly appearing objects. You can give statements about you can.
All you can do is restate that it does it. Okay,
So if I say why do I why do you
make a connection between that dog and the big dog
you saw yesterday? Well because they look like dogs, because
they have fur. Because right, none of these answers explains why.
They only explain what is that's such a that's so
devastating to empiricism, and I love it. Right, And again
I'm not Kant has serious, ultimately empirical, devastating flaws, because
Kant ultimately is still an empiricis. But when we are
looking at the inner realm of the psyche and we
are looking at transmittal arguments, these are killer arguments. These
are great. So as long as we don't adopt Quant's
divorce between the internal world and external world, you can
go through through these transtal arguments and they're awesome. I mean,
these are the strongest arguments you can make. So the
only in other words, CONT's reply consistent with Plato here
in the fight. And by the way, Plato makes this
very argument. So that's kind of a secret here is
that as you read these dialogues, you start noticing, Hey
de Cart says that, Hey Con says that, Hey Hume
says that right, which is natural. I mean, that's what
happens in philosophy. So but Plato actually says, when I
was a young man, I followed the natural scientists in
their scientistic empiricism. He's not using those terms, but that's
what he's saying right, he says, and it really I
realized one day that when I ask them why, all
they do is restate what is so? Again, So if
we apply that to another ord, this is kind of
a version of the transcendent unity of a perception. The
mind is so structured that it links objects and it
just does it. We don't know why, and if you
try to explain why, you can never explain why apart
from experience. See, so you're in a loop there, and
that's why Conn says, Well, the only way out of
that loop is to posit that it's just a transcendental truth,
something that transcends experience. That's a presupposition for all perception, period. Okay,
so if you were to say, well, how do we
know that that's true, Kant would say with Plato, because
if we denied that perception would be impossible. That is
an awesome argument. Transtal arguments generally are arguments from the
impossibility of the contrary, but they're not mirror reductio or
impossibility the contrary arguments because sometimes they are so strong
that they are actually the ground of all experience. I
don't period. And this is one example. Extending this then
to the external world, we can talk about the identity
of objects over time. This also comes up again in
human and this is just simply the transcendental unity of
that perception that spoke about in the inner world applied
to the external realm. Why do we believe that over
time that object is the same object that we thought
it was, Because say a boy grows into a man
and his body changes, and so if we take a
radical empiricist route, we have no empirical reason to believe
or link that old guy to the young guy, or
the fat guy to the previously skinny guy, because the
substance and the qualities have changed. Right. I mean, unless
you're in a rescitilian and you thought that the soul
is the form of the body, you would say, well,
it's still the same soul. But if you're a rank empiricist,
this problem is tremendous because we have no reason to
believe that objects actually possess some identity or special quality
or essence about them that makes them that thing over time,
because the material makeup the object is always changing. I mean,
the book that you have is shedding pages molecules over time,
is it the same book? Well, if we're an empiricist. No,
and we don't have any reason to believe purely based
on empirical sensory data that it's the same book. And
so there must be some transcendent quality or essence about
the thing that makes it that thing over time again
referred to in philosophy as the problem of identity over time.
And if an object does have that, then that means
that all of our metaphysics is very different than what
empiricism says. So that's why this is so good. We
have the roots of empiricism annihilated in Plato, and we
see that this is an ancient battle. This goes all
the way back, you know, to ancient Greek times between
the softists and the relativists and the people who are
arguing for objective truth. And that's the chief use of Plato.
Even though we wouldn't I don't agree with all the
far eastern trappings of Playo that become problematic when we
look at things like this. This is a tremendous argument.
And if you get this down in your philosophical life
and thinking and thought, this is a platform to go
on to become an excellent philosopher. This is a platform
to go on to I mean, this is the kind
of stuff that makes the world meaningful and wondrous, and
this is how you'll go on. And if you're a
scientist with this basis, I mean, there's the potential for
what you could discover is limitless because you're actually understanding
the real makeup of the world and not chaotic flux,
big bang, nonsensical reductionist materialism. All right. Following upon the
discussion of absolutes and one of the many, he discusses
the soul. And like I said earlier, the soul is
not composite, so it's more like the one monad. It's
more like the forms and the realm of the eternal,
and so he reasons that they're in a dialectical tension.
As I said at the beginning, dialectical arguments. Dialectical tensions
are what we want to avoid. And the chief difference
that I would have with Far Eastern thought in solving
or harmonizing that is not through dissolution from this realm
into the absolute or into non being or nirvana or
you know, eternal cyclical reincarnation process somewhat what we find
in say Eastern Orthodox theology, where you have instead of
dialectical tensions. You have harmonization through divine energies, and so
body and soul are not intension. The soul is submitted
to or should be submitted to, the heart or the noose.
In Eastern Orthodox theology, the news is the heart. It
is not the intellect, but rather the heart submitted to
divine law and then has reason placed in its proper arena,
not as primary. So rationality is great. It's an amazing
tool that God has given us to work in the
world and deal with the world. But it is not
the primary God that we find the history of Western
philosophy making it. And when we see reason raised to
that premissy of godhood, we end up with French Revolution,
we end up with nihilism. That's where it goes. That's
where we are today. Techno nihilism. The height of reason
embodied in machines that could potentially destroy us, then turns
around and gives us complete nihilism. So we've created these
advanced technologies that are amazing for the not just in
what they do, but in the philosophical underpinnings behind how
it's even possible to make such machines advanced computers. So forth,
the philosophical interpinnings in the worldview required for those things
to be, as I've argued many times, is completely opposite
of what we're all indoctrinated into in the dominant system,
the empiricist nihilistic in game where we are today techno nihilism.
It's so bizarre given the fact that for such creations
to be, they're actually a mirror of how intricately detailed
and designed the universe as a whole is. In other words,
to be able to bring together you know, electronics and electricity,
or matter and circuits and chips and crystals in all
these different ways to create a computer. What that says
about the world is the world as a whole is
just so fabulously and wondrousy designed in order as to
be able to create the conditions or possibilities for such
an entity to exist. Because, as I've said before, what
advanced labs like DARPA and places like CERN, everything that
they're doing is actually modeled on principles in nature. So
like the advanced tech that they do, say with drones
mapping things with light, well that's modeled on light itself,
something that exists in nature. If you look at something
like the battle gear that they're developing in for super
soldiers to be able to scale a surface, a vertical
glass surface that came about from studying frogs and the
ability that frogs have in their little fingers to scale glass. So,
in other words, modeling the technology on the secrets of
nature means that nature, in the world, in the universe
as a whole can creates the conditions because of a
lot of different metaphysical truths that are the case that
do not make sense or comport with the dominant worldview
that the system teaches. Darwinian flux, AONs of cyclical time,
you know, reductionist materialism, scientism, all of these dogmas and
propaganda of the system do not make sense with the
things that the system actually does. And that suggests then
a Platonic metaphysic roughly speaking, but again not endorsing all
platinisms roughly speaking, that kind of view Pythagorean type views
of how the world is. But back to Plato, I
don't mean to get all often to that, but he
goes on to then discuss different arguments about the immortality
of the soul and reincarnation. One reason we don't want
to adopt reincarnation is that it doesn't make sense to
when we consider the fact that new souls, in other words,
we would have to have like a fixed amount of
souls that are continually being reborn. But unfortunately, the population
is growing, so you know that we have six to
eight billion people now, whereas previously there were not near
as many people just you know, one hundred ton years ago.
So if reincarnation is the case, where are all these
people coming from? Is it just animals? And every animal
is reincarnated by the way, Why animals and bugs? I mean,
what about you know, going down to Amba's or germs
or germs reincarnated people all. I mean, it doesn't It's
just it doesn't make sense. There's not really any reason
to believe in it unless you had the presupposition of
cyclical dialectical views of history. But I think the biblical
presentation of linear history makes much more sense. Later philosophy
was good in developing different analyzes of how the mind
is structured to understand things in a temporal way from beginning,
middle to end. There's some really good philosophy that was
done by Alistair McIntyre or Albani in his book on Perception,
action and perception and McIntyre on how conversation is structured
to have a beginning, middle, and end. That suggests that
there's a transcendental category or quality to the way we
are so constituted to experience things in time. Okay, so yeah,
you might have a story that is told from the
ending to the beginning, but even still, the way that
the mind is going to construct it is from beginning
to end. So this chronological aspect of how we're constituted,
how the mind works is something universally the case for
humans and when we experiments that have been done that know,
he talks about in his book where these sensory the
sensory experiments where these things were reversed or misconstrued or obstructed.
For example, people that spent a long time, you know,
wearing say a kaleidoscope mask or goggles or something like that,
or people that were blind for many years that first
gained sight that there have been cases of this that
you know, they have to actually learn depth perception over time.
These things suggest both empirical knowledge and pre empirical presensory
a priori intuitive platonic type category. Ocal knowledge is central knowledge.
So both of these things are the case, I believe,
So we wanna avoid dialectics because dialectics leave us in
dead ends philosophically and morally. If we think that dialectical
tensions are resolved through flight from the world soma sema
bodies the prison h central Platonic dogma, then we are
caught in a dialectic where the world becomes a source
of bad and that ultimately is you know, a Buddhist
type idea, the world's not bad. Uh, the world is good.
In Genesis one, God created all things and he said
they were good. So we don't believe that creation is bad.
And I think that's a much more positive way to
enjoy the world to live is to not view the
created substance of things as evil. So we also don't
want to adopt, you know, dualistic or Manichean or Zoroastrian
ideas that you know, there's two eternal principles of good
and evil, so we don't give evil any kind of
substantial existence. And unfortunately, even though Platonic tradition would eventually
develop an idea that the Eastern Church fathers the Patristic
era would would would liken evil too, that evil as negation.
There still is this lurking tendency to think that existence
in this world is somehow evil. There's still something kind
of bad about you know, matter and created existence, and
that's that's a that's locating the source of evil in
the wrong direction. Evil is the negation, has no substantial being,
and it is simply a move of the will away
from the good. It's the best approximation that we can give,
or we can think about negative numbers. Negative numbers seem
to in some way have a categter a conceptual existence,
but not a real existence. You know, I can't if
you have seven things and I take away three, you
haven't gained anything. You've lost. Okay, So these are analogies
for evil, like darkness is an analogy, But we don't
say darkness is somehow, you know, an evil substance, right don't.
You don't walk into a dark room and literally believe
that the darkness in the room is evil, And that's stupid.
So analogies for evil can be helpful from neoplatonic thought.
But unfortunately we must not accept the notion that particularity,
this world, et cetera, are in themselves evil, And that's
a crucial philosophical distinction, and most unfortunately a lot of
say Protestantism and Evangelicalism, actually sides with gnosticism on this point.
They would locate Calvinism as a great example, tend to
locate evil, giving it a substantial ontological existence. So he
goes on to talk about how uh arguments in logic
are valid contrary to the sinus synesis, the cynicism that
one encounters, contrary to the sophist and the relatives. Argument
and logic are are crucial to obtaining truth, and that
should be your guiding goal in philosophy, is to obtaining truth,
and you have to have a love for the truth
and want it otherwise you know that it's just this
is all waste of time. Then it gets into some
interesting discussions of mythology and Homer Uh, the crowning aspect
of which is the mention of the higher realms. So
the after life is presented in a very traditionally Greek
way with tartaras Hades, the four rivers of the world,
and this is all located inside the earth. So there's
a hollow earth where inside the dead go and the
four rivers of Hades flow. You know, from one in
one side of the sphere of Earth to the other
side of the sphere. Very very fascinating cosmogeny. Here he
mentions ether as I talked about in my articles. He
says that the higher dimension above ours is directly associated
with crystals and crystalline structure. He says that we only
know a few colors. Interesting, the color spectrum extends far
beyond what we know, and modern science has actually proven this.
We know that birds can see more colors than we can't. Amazing,
amazing stuff. The how in the world would Plato have
known that unless there was some truth to traditionalism and
ancient mysteries. So he talks about Homer discussing the hollow Earth,
and he gives an elaborate account of how things happen
when you pass over to the realm of the dead
and where you go on all these different levels. Definitely
definitely showing up later in Virgil. I'm sorry, well not
just Virgil, but excuse me, Dante in the Inferno and
in Pergascio. So there's an amazing tradition about what goes
on after death here that Dante is clearly borrowing from.
You know, in my personal opinion, I think there's a
probably something to this. You know, none of us knows
exactly the logistics of what goes on after you pass on.
Eastern Orthodox tradition has the idea of the toll houses,
which could be comparable to what Plato's talking about here,
But just a literary note here, and possibly an esoteric
chrometic note the idea of the soul's catabasis, the the
trek to the underworld and then the return. In literary theory,
this is standard where your central character undergoes the dark
night of the soul, you know, to before he reaches
a climax of his quest. And for Plato in the Fayido,
the reaching of the higher dimensions, uh that closeness to
the forms of heaven. If you will is where you
go if you're good, if you're righteous, if you're a
philosopher or true philosopher, not asophist, and the other lesser
realms comparable to Dante's Inferno. It's where you go if
you need to be purged. So it's kind of a
purgatory here. But the catabasis, that's it's called in Greek terminology,
the descent to the underworld of the return. We see
this in Homer, we see it in the Odyssey, we
see it in Fido, we see it in virtuals and iid.
Book six, and we see it in Dante. So the
great pinnacles of the Western literary and philosophical tradition have
this theme. And interestingly, in Christianity we have the doctrine
of Christ's herowing of Hell. This is also central to
I mean, even Roman Catholic theology has the idea of
Christ's descent in us sent to death. In return, Orthodox
hesa has a little more fleshed out with the idea
of the harrowing of Hell. Christ's descends to the realm
of the to where the fathers of the Old Testament
were bringing them up to enter into the heavenly abode,
which had previously been barred due to sin. So death, burial, resurrection,
and ascension of Christ is very comparable to the catabasis
of the Greek tradition. We also see this in the
film two thousand and one Space Odyssey. That's the narrative
that Kubrick is borrowing from the Odyssey, the journey that
ultimately takes one to the realm of the dead and
then to return and again, and the Greek tradition, the
return is cyclical reincarnation. In Christianity and the Egyptian tradition,
the return is erection. So fascinating, fascinating stuff here, crazy
esoteric stuff, just you know, wild. The dialogue concludes with
the recall recounting of Socrates taking the hemlock and dying
and he offers a sacrifice to a Slepias, the god
of health, the god with the rod and the snake,
so that hearkening to that interesting tendency of Socrates to
speak both of the gods and the myths as allegorical,
the ancient religious mysteries as allegorical, and at the same
time following them literally. He's literally sacrificing to a Sleippias.
He literally talked about guardian angels taking you to your
taking you to your everlasting abode in the afterlife, assuming
that you don't reincarninate, something also very very close to
what we see in Dante's Inferno. So that concludes this
in depth discussion here and again, if you want to
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