79 - Plato and KOTOR

that have come to me. Things that I'm working on, things I'm thinking about, things that I'm reading about, and so I've been posting these short videos and I'm going to provide those for you today. That is, I'm going to be dropping the audio from the last four short videos that I put up on YouTube, which gives us something like a normal podcast length episode. And you can see all these videos and be sure to sub to

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here we go. In one of my on campus classes right now, we're studying Plato's dialogue called the Fata, which is it's about Socrates's account of why he's willing to die because see, Socrates was previously accused by the court of Athens for a number of charges, but principally for corrupting the youth as well as denying the gods of the city. Well, Socrates is found guilty and he's sentenced

to execution. Well, as this sentencing starts to become clear during the trial in the apology, Socrates looks down the court of Athens and he tells them that even if you kill me, you cannot do harm to a good man, because he's identifying the value of his life with more than mere self preservation. He's identifying it with the good. He's identifying it with wisdom. And this is something that

cannot be taken away through any external means whatsoever. Socrates's relationship with wisdom, the good, the life that he ought to be living. This can only be severed if he severs it by choosing the path of cowardice. Well, fast forward a little bit, and now he is awaiting his execution. There's a bit of a delay due to i mean, some ritual things going on. That's beside the point. There's

some delay. He's able to spend some time with his friends and they come together and they tell him that pulled our money together, We've made the right connections that we can get you out of here. You don't have to die, however, you have to go into exile, but you'll live. You'll live in exile and soccrate says, no, I can't do that, because there are some fates that are worse than death, such as the fate of the coward.

It would be cowardly for me to run away that the true path of wisdom is to stand firm, to accept the sentencing that was given to me, because I mean, who am I without the city of Athens? I would not be the person I am without the city of Athens.

I owe myself to the city. So even if it's acting against the demands of wisdom in this moment, I still have a civil obligation to fulfill the demands that are placed upon me by the city, and I also have an obligation to maintain fidelity to wisdom, regardless of what those consequences are. And so, through fidelity to his civil duty as well as to his existential duty to wisdom, he decides to stay and says, no, I'm going to go through with death because that is not the worst thing.

And not only it's not the worst thing. Not only do we have reason to endure death, but maybe we actually have reason as philosophers to long for death, to look forward to death. Maybe death is actually the best thing that could happen to you. Now, to break that down a little bit to understand that full argument, Well, I recommend that you read the Phato and or take my upcoming course on Platonism Stoicism until we have faces,

and in that course our Plato text will be the Fato. Well, I actually I'm not going to get into this main argument. I just want to give you some context here for what this dialogue is about. But what I want to highlight here is a statement made by one of his conversation partners here that is a really good job of demonstrating the sharp distinctions between pre modern philosophy and modern or postmodern philosophy in which we know outlive. And so

let me just read this here. It's said that, for surely, no wise man thinks that, when set at liberty, he can take better care of himself than the gods take care of him. A fool may perhaps think this. He may argue that he had better run away from his master, not considering that his duty is to remain to the end and not to run away from the good, and that there is no sense in his running away. What's being said here is that we are part of a story that our life is not our own. Life itself

is a gift. And if we're given a gift, that presupposes that there is a giver. There is that which is above us, that which has authority to give life. And if there is authority over the life that we have, well, then we would do well to pay attention to that authority, to listen to that authority, to listen to that wisdom, to look for that which stands above and beyond us, and which has authority to designate how we ought to

be living our lives. And so for the pre modern world, whether we're talking about the Ancients, whether talking about the Medievals, there's a prevailing idea that we are born into a particular context, a context of what reality is, a context for what humanity is, a context for how we ought to be living our lives and the past to real freedom is found not in creating reality out of nothing, because well, reality has already been created. It doesn't need

us to do that again. What we need to do is not to create reality, but to find our place within the story of reality. We need to find out what duties are placed upon us. And the way that you become an authentic human individual is by executing those

human duties. Well, now, exactly what are those duties? I mean, Well, for Plato, that principally comes down to, we have a duty to love the good, and out of that, well, all of our other duties they spring out of that central duty to love what is good, that which is chiefly lovable. And again the details of that are getting in the course, but for now, I really just want to highlight this distinction that what Plato here through cibis

this discussion partner with Socrates. What Plato says here is that it is the fool who decides to set off on his own, to divorce himself from transcendent wisdom and to establish his own path in life, his own wisdom. It's the fool that does that. It's literally the idiot. I don't just mean to be insulting when I say that, but I mean I don't just mean to be insulting. But when you look at what the word idiot means, it comes from the Greek idios, which means like your own,

something you have of your own. And so imagine that you have a classroom of students and you're one of the students. You're all working on a math problem. And imagine everybody in the room concludes correctly that two plus two equals four, but you insists, no, two plus two

does not equal four. Two plus two equals five. Well, in that conclusion, you have a private understanding of things divorce from not only what everybody else believes, because sometimes a minority opinion can be correct, but most essentially you, your understanding of that topic, of that subject, of that problem, is divorced from reality, the reality that binds us together. And so in your private understanding, you are an idiot.

Now jump forward to postmodernism, Jump forward to the likes of Jean Paul Sart, Look forward to Camu, look forward to these philosophers who argue that there is no such thing as human essence, there is no such thing as human nature. All you have is yourself, and you need to stop relying on transcendent wisdom, supposedly transcendent wisdom. You need to stop relying on the way that things should be, and you need to recognize that all of reality is

up to you. It all comes down to your radical subjectivity. There is no meaning to reality, there's no part that you are supposed to play. All you can do is just create reality. You determine what is valuable, you determine what's right, You determine what it means to be human through the argely arbitrary decisions that you're making. And so this gets to the fundamentally different orientations of the ancient

versus the postmodern world. That you go back to the pre modern world, and there's this idea that we are part of a story, are obligation to fulfill the duties, to play the role that is appointed to us, and so we find rest in the eternal reason that governs the cosmos. Go to the postmodern world, and there is no reason that governs the cosmos. They're not even anything like right reason that governs you. All there is is

you deciding things out of nothing. And so the Sartrean, the postmodern radical subjectivist, would look back to the pre modern and say that someone like Plato is living in bad faith. They're not taking responsibility for their responsibility to define what existence is like, what reality is like, what wisdom is. So he would say that Plato's acting in

bad faith. Plato would then look at Sort and say, you're an idiot, that you are divorcing yourself from the wisdom that you are necessarily related to, but that you are intentionally rejecting. You're intentionally seeking to oppose, and so you are ultimately running away from the good. And there's no sense in running away from the good because goodness

is tied to that which holds reality together. And so there's no real specific point I'm trying to illustrate here other than just helping us to understand it's two very different ways of approaching the world. And it's worth noting that as far as a prevailing viewpoint, the postmodern radically subjectivist approach is relatively new again as a prevailing viewpoint,

you can find these ideas in the ancient world. They just weren't widely accepted because people had a little bit more well, maybe they had a little bit more authenticity in their understanding of what it means to be human. I'll talk to you next time. Today's philosophy class, we're talking about what it means to live a meaningful life. How you go about doing meaningful things, doing meaningful work, engaging in meaningful relationships. You know, how do you, generally speaking,

how do you live a meaningful life? One student really thought that he was onto something when he brought up something that he had read about the twentieth century philosopher Albert Camu dealing with Sissyphis, the Greek myth of Sisyphis, and the student suggested that, well, maybe I should backtrack a little bit here. Well, in case you aren't familiar

with this guy, back here behind me. Sisyphis is said to be an ancient Corinthian king who had cheated death multiple times, and so as punishment for doing so, he was forced for eternity to push this boulder uphill. But he was never actually going to make any progress, and so it was this punishment, was this eternal act of futility. Well, according to Kumu, and according to this student, maybe we

can rework the way that we view Sisyphis. Maybe it's not so much that he's living in a condemned existence of futility, but maybe he actually represents the highest that we can aspire to as humans, and that he had something to devote his attention to. He had some work he could apply his strength to apply his will to, and maybe that's all that we can actually hope for.

And listening to this account of what the meaningful life might be, I mean I was, I was heartbroken, And I'm always heartbroken when I hear these kind of uh, these these assessments, these these philosophies that are set up as providing, you know, a pathway to meaning, set up as being you know, authentically human. But it's it's heartbreaking because the very things that people tend to identify in this postmodern context as meaningful, it's exactly how the ancients

portrayed Hell. References in the last video regarding C. S. Lewis that you know, the the inhabitants of Hell in his The Great Divorce don't really recognize that they are in Hell. They mistake it for freedom, They mistake it for unshackled horizons, for limitless potential, not realizing that even the homes in which they live are nothing more than illusions, or even rather delusions that don't actually hold anything at bay. It all does is provide a sense of comfort amidst

their own subjectivity. But it is only that it's a sense of comfort. It's not real, it's artificial. Therefore it is inauthentic. But to really believe this, that the height of human potential is just running at a hamster wheel, You're not really making any progress. But at least you're doing something like that. That's so sad. It's like all you can hope for is just that you bide your time in your feudal existence until you fall into a feudal death. But in the end it really means nothing.

You can never make actual progress. And that is what makes this a Greek hell, because I mean the Greeks, I mean moving from strictly the mythology to the philosophy, not that they could be entirely disentangled, but there's this idea that we can move toward what is real, we can move toward what is good, that there is a better way to live, and if we're honest with ourselves, no matter what ideology you claim to profess, like, we all believe that, we all believe that some things are

better than other things. Otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this video right now, because what would matter about what I'm saying, Because what new information or what confirmation or even what can you disagree with? You know, it's all meaningless, it's all feutile unless we have something standard, some standard between us, something like the real against which you can weigh my thoughts, weigh my words, you know, I'll ask my students, how many of you want to be better people?

They'll all raise their hand and then in the next breath tell me there's no such thing as better or worse. And that's because there's something so inauthentic about the abolition of the real. We all know some ways of life are better than others. We all know some forms of thinking are better than others. This is why education done in the right way, real education is a good thing, because some ideas are better than other ideas. Knowledge is real,

Knowledge is better than ignorance. And this better or worse language only makes sense if we're weighing ourselves against the norm of what is real, and we are striving to conform our lives accordingly. To really get to this position where we're consistently going to say, there is no up or down, left to right, There's no such thing as

better or worse. There's nothing that's inherently meaningful. There's only whatever it is that we happen to be doing, like we have to so deconstruct our most basic experience as

humans in this world. I mean, it's at this point I'm not getting dogmatic here, I'm just saying that it makes far more sense out of our most basic experience as humans, to presuppose there is something like the real, that there is something like the good that we ought to be orienting our lives toward, and we're honest with ourselves,

we want to orient our lives toward. Despite our many failings, despite our often trading of the greater good for lesser goods, we all know that there are things that we ought to be doing, things we ought to be striving for. And to dismiss that, you have just so deconstruct your most basic human experience, and I just I don't know how we can meaningfully call that authentic. I'll talk to you next time. As recently playing some Knights of the

Older Republic for some upcoming patron chats. If you've not played these games, well you absolutely should. They are some of the best media of any kind that's come out of the Star Wars universe. Now, if you're jumping in for the first time, and these are older games, some of the mechanics a little bit dated, a little bit clunky if you've been there. If you're there at the beginning like I was, it's not a big deal. But even if you're starting in fresh I mean, it's not

too hard to pick up, and you definitely should do that. Well, Like I said, we're going to be discussing these games for some upcoming patron chats for the Mythic Mind podcast, but for now, I want to provide some brief thoughts that I had recently. Now, in parton, I want to discuss one of these brief exchanges that takes place between Basila and Candoris. Now, if you haven't played these games,

you should know something about these characters. And so Basila is this young but very accomplished, very significant, very powerful Jedi. So even though she has some accomplishments, she has the Jedi doctrine down, she does have some pride that really covers up some deep seated insecurities in her life. Which I mean, that's not entirely new when it comes to Star Wars storytelling, but that's the gist of who Basila is now. Candoris is a Mandalorian mercenary. The Mandalorians recently

made famous or made popular again with the show The Mandalorian. Well, the Mandalorians are this warrior people. They were starting to gobble up some planets around them, and eventually they were met with the Republic who tried to push back their war mongering that their rating and fighting with the Republic, and as the Old Republic to be clear, fighting with the Republic who are the Jedi, of course, and of utmost importance in pushing back the Mandalorians and securing their

defeat was Revin, this great Jedi warrior later known as Darthrobin. Well, following their defeat, the Mandalorians were a broken people. Instead of being these great warriors, they really just became guns for hire. There were still warriors, but not for great causes necessarily. They were indeed just guns for hire. And Candas is one such Mandalorian. At the time that we meet him, he's working for Da Davic, who is this

local exchange boss. With the Exchange being this interplanetary organized crime syndicated it is essentially that the mob and Davic is this local mob boss. Well, at this point in the game, when we first start to really meaningful interact with this guy Candoris, he is actually working with the player to steal one of davic ship's so that way he can break through the fifth blockade and get out

of the planet. And so he is actively working against his boss and it's in the midst of this heist that we get this brief exchange I want to talk about between Candoris and Basila, and so, making fun of the fact that Basila was previously captured by one of these under city gangs, Candoris says that, well, the Mandalorians likely would have won the war if they had Jedi

like Basila fighting against them. So then Basila fires back by saying, bold talk from a broken down mercenary who was serving at Davic's heel, I'd call you as pet cathound. But they have enough loyalty not to turn on their masters. So this is where Basila strikes. She says that Candoras is disloyal. Now, this disloyalty might actually seem like a good thing, given that his boss is this wicked crime lord.

But this actually reminds me of a line from Tolkien's Tomarillion, in what she says, in all the deeds of Melchor the morgoth upon Ardam, in his vast works, and in the deceits of his cunning Sauron had a part and was only less evil than his master, and that for long he served another and not himself. So the one good thing that Tolkien has to say about Suron is that for a time he served somebody else. I mean, yeah, it was the great dark Lord, this devil like Morgoth.

But nonetheless he at least serves somebody beyond himself, and that is a good thing. Now, why exactly is this a good thing? In this contact with Saluron, Well, he may have been serving the wrong lord, but in serving someone beyond himself, he recognized something like reality, a broader reality. He had a perceived good, a target, a goal. He recognized that he needed to not only produce meaning, but

he needed to receive meaning. And even though he was receiving it from the wrong place, he nonetheless recognized the importance of doing that, of receiving meaning, discovering meaning, aspiring for some ideal beyond himself. Even a misperceived good means that there's some kind of hope of freedom, of escape from the living hell of radical isolation, isolation from reality,

isolation from the world. You know, it's just like the dwarfs that the end of Narnie, at the end of the last battle, who just can't see the world around them because they're not gonna be taken in by anything, and because they're not gonna be taken in by anything. They can't give themselves over to anything, and so they become just lost in their own delusions, lost in their own minds, in their own psyches. And this really is

the point that Bastila is making. Candoras has no allegiance at this point to anyone beyond himself, and in his own emptiness, he can only find emptiness. Regardless of her motivations, Basila is not merely throwing insults at Candoras, but she is rather exposing the imprisoning, pitiful despair that is rampant in our own age. I'll talk to you next time. As I mentioned in a recent video, I've been replying Knights of the Old Republic in preparation for some upcoming

patron chats with Mythic Mind. And so if you want to make sure that you catch that, then go ahead and subscribe to the Mythic Mind podcast on whatever you prefer platform. Is Well, today, I want to briefly talk about this scene here between Malick and Bastila. Oh, and there will be some spoilers by this game is over twenty years old, since I think that's okay at this point. So Basila is a Jedi and one of the main companions in the game, and Malik is the big bad Sith.

And at this point, Basila has been captured by Malick. And actually, I'm gonna go ahead and play a bit of the scene here.

torture to transform Basila into something. He is inflicting the power of the dark side upon her so that she can taste that power, turn crave that power, and eventually to give herself over to that power. So this is a it's a it's a torture of transformation, and this kind of thing is something that really happens when people encounter the shadow, when people encounter suffering, and people encounter

the dark side of human experience in this world. I mean, it's a probably a little cliche at this point, but I mean it's kind of true that hurt people tend to hurt people if you've been dealt a rough hand or maybe you've encountered some particular human malevolence, and first of all, you have my sympathy, but they're really there are multiple ways that people respond to that, to the

dark side of human existence. One hand, okay, you can just play the victim that you can feel like your agency has been ripped away from you, that things just seem out of your control. So why try why execute your agency? Why be so concerned about what you're doing because things just happen to you and you don't really have any control anyways, and so you surrender your human freedom and you essentially become driftwood floating down the stream of life. That's one way that you can respond to

the darkness that you encounter in this world. Another option is to maintain your human freedom to decide who you are in a world of changing fortunes. Now, notice I said decide, I didn't say create. So I'm not proposing some kind of sarchry and radical subjectivity where you create your own existence out of nothing and that you, by yourself can just define what it means to be human.

That's not suggesting here. But when I say that you have to decide who you are, like you have a real choice to make, and you can get that wrong, you can get that right. But you have to ask yourself the question, regardless of changing fortunes, whether things seem to be going really well for me regarding circumstance, or things seem to be going very poorly for me regarding circumstance, Who am I? Who is the me that endures across time and across different circumstances. Find out what it means

to be you, what it means to be human? And that's going to give you a kind of grounding, a kind of length of will that allows you to survive any particular situation, no matter how malevolent it may be, because whatever external malevolence you may be facing, that doesn't determine who you are. You already know who you are, Like how Socrates can look down the court of Athens that's about to execute him, and so that you cannot do harm to a good man even if you kill me.

That's the kind of grounding that I'm talking about here. That's the kind of exercise of human freedom that you always have available to you, as hopeless as things may seem in an external sense, because well, real life, real goodness is not external. It is something that we approach internally through an exercise of the will, through a reaching

out to the hand that is always reaching down to us. Now, another option, which brings us to the bastless scenario, is to recognize that the present power on your life is real, and it is just that it is powerful, and so you know firsthand the power of the dark side, You know firsthand the power of the shadow, You know firsthand the power that suffering has over a person. And instead

of simply wanting to get rid of the suffering. Instead of simply instead of wanting to rise above the suffering, you instead simply desire the power that is present within suffering. And so instead of desiring the end of suffering, you just want to be on the other side. You want

to be in the position of power. This explains a great deal of political outrage as well as just your run of the mill malevolence that comes from people who really just want to see things broken down because they've been broken down, and so they feel like it's some kind of act of justice now to get their opportunity to pull things down around them, to see the world burn because their own world has been burned. They've been victimized by the dark side of human existence, and so

now they seek justice in being a victimizer. Now, such a person rarely would would articulate things in that way that they rarely have that level of self consciousness. But I think we've all known people like that, maybe at least for sometimes in our lives, like we've been people like that. It's really easy to fall into that kind

of mentality of warped justice. I'm sure even Malik or Vader whoever, like you know, the villains of Star Wars, and that's where we started with this, that they were all they all felt justified in what it is that they were doing. Right, I'm just bringing order to my new empire. And so the dark side definitely sees itself as something real and something justifiable. And of course I've been speaking for the most part in very general terms

regarding suffering, regarding the dark side of human existence. That's because I wanted it to aim for universal applicability with this, and that we've all experienced some kind of suffering, we all experienced something of the dark side of human life. But of course this scenario that I'm presenting to you is really heightened when we are dealing with particular human malevolence aimed against you, aimed against somebody, rather than just the mere nature of human mortality and entropy. The same

basic framing I think definitely applies here. So what do we do with this? Well, you don't give into the dark side, you don't give into bitterness and resentment. You think this is going to bring you some degree of justice, some degree of satisfaction, but it's not. It's just going to leave you radically alone. Not to mention the impact you have on the people around you, and so that is not a pathway to powers, not a pathway to freedom. As we learn from Dostowevsky, the darker the night, the

brighter the stars. If you have been dealt a particularly bad hand, then you should see more clearly than most the need for beauty, the need for light, the need for goodness. I know that in my own suffering that I have seen this, that I have developed a far greater sense of meaning, a purpose of identity through the suffering that I've experienced than if I had never experienced that.

I'm not a big fan of Stephen Colbert, but he does give me this great line in an interview he did with Innerson Cooper, when you're talking about his own suffering, and he says that, you know, I've learned to be grateful for the things that I most wish didn't happen. I think that's good. I think it's a phrase that we ought to hold on to, and so never forget that the shadow is but a brief and passing thing, and that there is light and high beauty forever beyond

its reach. It is with this vision that we gain true freedom and true power. I'll talk to you next time. As always, thank you for listening. If you enjoyed these, welcome you to go ahead and subscribe to my YouTube channel with the link and the show notes. But until next time, God speak. When you go to the roots of the word philosophy, you find the love of wisdom, which unfortunately is not what you find at the roots of all who call themselves philosophers. Now, how do we

get here? What are the ideas that shape our world? And what can the old world tell us in response to the perennial questions of what it means to be human, what is our purpose? And what, if anything, ought we aspire to? In a brief history of ideas, we will navigate major epics of thought and survey some of the most important figures in the Western canon, including Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Nietzsche, Sart and carec. Guard and of course we will consider

even more names. But these are the thinkers that will supply our primary readings. Each week will include primary sources that will be provided as PDFs. Although these are all texts that do belong in your personal library, you will be recommended some secondary texts you'll be provided with some recorded presentations for you to watch at your leisure, ongoing discord chats, and weekly life meetings to discuss their readings.

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