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