Plato's Phaedo - Jay Dyer

level uh philosophy course on Plato. So what I want to do in this talk is make it more bring it down to a more general level where it can be understood for by people that maybe haven't read Plato in depth or are not too familiar with a lot

of the philosophical concepts. So, since Jay's Analysis is growing quite a bit of late, and because my field is philosophy and classics and ancient ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, et cetera, what I want to do is try to try to make things more accessible, so it's not all you know totally on an advanced level. Also, if you would what I'm trying to do is so I'd like to get

to where I can do this full time. And so if you would go ahead and subscribe or donate, and what I do is I give extra lectures, extra talks and information ahead of time to those that have subscribed.

So basically, for four ninety five or a donation, you're going to get something better than university style education where you're paying you know, thousands and thousands of dollars, you know, two thousand dollars per class or whatever, fifteen hundred dollars or credit hour, which is crazy for you know, for a statist Marxist to stand up there and tell you how Plato is gender warfare and class warfare, which is

utterly retarded other than ridiculous. Uh. And I can give you a better education, a better insight into Plato, for a lot cheaper than that. So you could, uh, you know,

you could go this route. You won't have some useless piece of paper, but you'll have the knowledge and the critical thinking and the ability to skill that I've been blessed with, that I could bless you with at least help you with, uh to go in and you know, smash these teachers, if that's who you have you know to you know, use these principles and apply them to whatever fields you're in. You know, if you make music, Pythagoreanism platonism ties in, uh, very well with music. A

lot of it's based on musical theory. If you are in business, you can use you know, logic and critical thinking. And you might have had a basic critical thinking of course in your in your you know, your undergrad or something like that. Maybe that's being phased out as we go into this global technocratic economy. But you know, again critical thinking is very useful for business and thinking in multi dimensional levels, right, so not just us against them, but in three D and four D and five D

chessboard levels of reality. It helps. It can help you to see things from different perspectives, in different angles, getting getting a different viewpoint to help you think strategically, say,

in whatever business endeavor you're in. You know, in religious thinking, it can be advantageous have a lot of theologians, academics and religious affiliated readers and listeners so you can get a better understanding of you know, these ancient texts that can help you in understanding you know, where you're at in your theology. And again, you know, for ninety five.

You can't be that that's a lot better than paying, you know, thousands of dollars for some guy who is an idiot basically and not very well trained in anything, standing up there telling you what the text doesn't mean. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 see more of this, if this is if you're listening to this and this is what you dig, please do subscribe.

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