Episode 203: Gorgias, Tell Me Something I Don't Know (with Agnes Callard)

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] That is crazy. It's what that is. I'm the victim. Me. I'm a very good man. Good. They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Great. Anybody can have a brain? You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.

[00:01:10] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, the live streaming service Twitch has banned the use of the word simp. Is this going to affect the launch of your new channel, Peas Talks Politics?

[00:01:25] I had not seen that and probably like only because I haven't been on Twitter for a couple of days just because of work stuff but because I think this is something

[00:01:33] it would totally have come across my feed. But wow, is it that insulting to be called, you know? I think people use it as an insult. They also banned incel and virgin. That is such a squarely homogenous group of people who are getting offended.

[00:01:56] So I think simp, you got to leave alone because it's a great word. I have issues with this word. The word simp has been around for super long and I must have learned it through hip hop.

[00:02:08] One of my favorite songs from the late 80s, early 90s says he's talking about unrequited love and he says, damn I wish I wasn't such a simp. That's what I always thought. You're kind of a sucker for love but now it's just hateful.

[00:02:26] Well now it's I think but it does describe a certain kind of guy, like a certain kind of maybe white guy that is performatively going out of their way to support feminist causes and complain about harassment.

[00:02:43] I think it to be the kinds of guys who are paying money for like buying their favorite girl Twitch streamers like the new PS5 because they're just suckers.

[00:02:59] It's also that it's also somebody who is like what we used to call in our day like pussy whipped or and then also like I remember someone was describing the queen's gambit as the you know a chest genius in her simps or something.

[00:03:15] So like these guys you could sort of tag along and but I like it also like it's just a good word. It's new to me.

[00:03:26] So I you know and now it's being just as soon as I'm getting used to it. It's just being taken away from me because I'm constantly watching Twitch. I'm constantly on Twitch.

[00:03:36] Yeah, yeah. By the way, I feel the need to correct my previous quoting of my favorite one of my favorite false line. He says I simp damn I wish I wasn't such a wimp.

[00:03:45] So that shows you like that he's reflecting on his own like whack like inability to catch the attention of one. I feel like you weren't listening to what I was just saying.

[00:03:55] I was just ruminating on the pop lyrics. No, but I feel like if you had a there should be a scale of simpness and it would be how many only fans accounts do you support?

[00:04:11] That's a good construct that we could come up with like as far as I know. Can somebody simp for us? I think it's got to be for a woman right?

[00:04:20] So speaking of people who might be offended by the use of the word simp and who might have complained to Twitch, there is a new paper out a new construct called the tendency towards interpersonal victimhood. This was done by some Israeli researchers.

[00:04:41] And we thought we'd talk about it, but we're not going to do the thing where we complain about the scale and we complain about the study.

[00:04:48] I just thought it would be fun to talk about this idea of you know of tendency of interpersonal victimhood as a construct and then also to maybe list some people we think might if it is a trait they might be high in that trait.

[00:05:03] Yeah. I mean we should read some of the items on the scale because without reading some of them, I feel like it just sounds like we'd be insulting people by saying that they're too sensitive. But maybe that's what you had in mind.

[00:05:18] Well, I was thinking that if you're... I don't think this is a good trait to have. Yeah. The way they describe it and then you'll go into the nitty-gritty as usual.

[00:05:29] An initial three studies established TIV, that's the acronym as a consistent and stable trait that involves four dimensions, moral, elitism, a lack of empathy, the need for recognition and rumination.

[00:05:43] I like that word too in addition to simp, rumination. Those are the two words for today. Very bad words are the words of the day.

[00:05:50] A follow-up study found that this tendency for victimhood is linked to anxious attachment also and it may be rooted in early relationships with caregivers. So not given the tit enough as a kid. Well, I already have my first answer. I mean it's almost just a segue.

[00:06:09] Oh, before we get into this, we should say what we're talking about in part two. Oh, yes. We have a great, exciting guest, a dream guest, Agnes Calard.

[00:06:18] It is going to come on to talk about the gorgeous, the Plato's dialogue, the gorgeous and also this op-ed she wrote for The New York Times. That was a nice discussion. We already had it. I haven't edited it. I haven't heard it, but it was a nice discussion.

[00:06:31] So are you going to kick us off? Well, do you want to go through the scale first? Yeah, yeah. Let's do it. So this is, let's see, 22? Something like that? Items?

[00:06:45] I'll read off some of them. So these are the need for recognition items, the dimension for need for recognition. It is important to me that people who hurt me acknowledge that an injustice has been done to me.

[00:06:57] It is important to me that the person who offended me admits that his or her behavior was wrong. It makes me angry when people don't believe that I was hurt. It is important for me to receive an apology from people who offended me.

[00:07:09] It is important to me that the person who offended me feels guilty for what he or she did. I feel angry when people ignore my feeling of being hurt. So those are the need for recognition.

[00:07:19] I like to think I'm not too off the charts in those, but I mean, I feel like a lot of those things are kind of important to me.

[00:07:29] I was going to say the same thing. Yeah, I feel like that the, of the dimensions, these, like I'm sensitive that way. Like I really, really like an apology. But I give them too. I like giving them too. But I feel like...

[00:07:47] Yeah, if it's a great load off when you give it, even though it's hard to give, I think we've talked about apologies. I don't think we have. That would be a good topic. Yeah, sorry audience. Yeah, we apologize. I love it. I feel so much better.

[00:08:01] And my parents, when I was a kid used to call me an injustice collector. Because I think I was higher on the scales when I was a child. The only child, you know, because I was until I was 14, you're going to score high on these things. Yeah.

[00:08:20] I can't believe you didn't get me the dream cast for Christmas. Yeah. No, no. I'm... This would be mine as well. I just think that just being recognized, there's a really bad feeling that I don't like when somebody did something bad,

[00:08:40] but they don't even seem to acknowledge that they did anything. I just want it. Just acknowledge. But they'll be like, my wife does this sometimes, like they will acknowledge it, but they won't feel it. They won't believe that they did anything wrong.

[00:08:54] It's almost like the I apologize if you were offended kind of thing. That's the worst kind of apology. We really should talk about apologies because that is just the hands down and insult. I will say though, this says nothing about how long you hold on to it.

[00:09:09] And I don't hold on for long. So I'm not a grudge keeper, but I have members of my family who are both sensitive and grudge keepers. And so they'll like, in 1989 somebody said something and then they've never ever been willing to let it go.

[00:09:23] And it's like that to me is like that bitterness can't... Yeah. My dad was like that. I'm not like that at all. I forget about him. And I'm actually only sensitive in the short term to a certain group of people.

[00:09:38] Like other people can do it and I don't give a shit. But there are people who, and I don't know, it's maybe a circle of respect or something that then I can... Right. Okay. So the next dimension is moral elitism. And these are the six items.

[00:09:55] I remain considerate of other people even when they don't deserve it. I think I am much more conscientious and moral in my relations with other people compared to their treatment of me. Can you hear my dog barking? No. Okay. Oh, now I just did.

[00:10:11] That's all right. I mean this is very bad wizards. Shut the fuck up Ozzy! People often take advantage of my kindness. There's that one right there is probably the load to the highest. All of these are like you don't want to score high in these.

[00:10:29] They're all ugly characters. Yeah. I give others much more than I receive from them. That's like a sex question. Other people don't hesitate to take advantage of my weakness. People demand a lot of me without expressing gratitude. Yeah. I would not score high in those at all.

[00:10:47] Partly it's because like it's not true of me. Like those things are probably true. Right. So there are times when I re... Like I take a step back and think that people must be taking advantage of my kindness. But I actually...

[00:11:00] It's not a feeling that I feel driven by. Like so I actually like doing favors for people. I enjoy and you could in some objective way say like these people are taking advantage of you. And I'm sure I've been taking advantage of that way.

[00:11:13] But I'm sure I've taken advantage of people as well. It just doesn't bother me that much. Yeah. And it's just like it might suck to feel that way that you're constantly the better person in all of your relationships. That's right.

[00:11:22] Okay. So lack of empathy, which is the Paul Bloom subscale. When people are close to me feel hurt by my actions. It is very important for me to clarify that justice is on my side. Oh, this is getting into like a real ugly territory. Oh God.

[00:11:40] I hate this person. This is a... Yeah, this one right here. People who are offended by me are only thinking of themselves. That was weird. Yeah. People who claim that I behaved wrongly want me to admit it so they can take advantage of the situation.

[00:11:58] People claim that I have hurt them because they cannot see that they are the ones hurting me. The main reason that people are offended by me is that they cannot see things from my perspective.

[00:12:11] It is very important to me that people who are offended by me realize that they are also in the wrong. This is just ugly. Yeah. And you know, there are people popping into my head right now.

[00:12:27] You know what's amazing about some of these scales is that you know there's social desirability, right? There's like answering the way you... The mixer self either look in a better light or you know, what you think experimenters might want.

[00:12:41] The fact that people are probably honest for a lot of these really says something about the inability to self-reflect. It's interesting that that's lack of empathy because it seems more like an assumption that others lack empathy more than it is that you lack empathy.

[00:12:59] Maybe those two things are related but... Right. But yeah, it is capturing something and you're right. The fact that people would actually admit it if they were high on these scales is even more chilling.

[00:13:12] Right. And here is the part when you get say like that first one, need for recognition combined with this lack of empathy. So such that whenever you hurt me, you are in the bad but whenever I hurt you, you didn't understand that I'm the right one.

[00:13:29] Like that asymmetry is like the worst kind of person to get along with. Exactly. Yeah. You're the one who's offended even when you have been the offensive one. Yeah, exactly. Turning it on you, right? All right. The last one is rumination.

[00:13:47] It is very hard for me to stop thinking about the injustice others have done to me. Days after the offense, I am very preoccupied by the injustice done to me. I am flooded by more anger than I would like every time I remember people who hurt me.

[00:14:02] I am flooded by negative feelings every time I remember people who hurt me. So those four items. This one I found tough for me to answer because it feels like I will ruminate.

[00:14:16] Like if somebody hurt me, like I will think about it for a couple of days and it bothers me. But I don't think that that's a lot compared to other people. So it feels like a more comparative question.

[00:14:28] Yeah, I agree. I think this is you find this in academics. You find some academics who are still pissed off at their rejection or not getting this job offer in 1987. And they'll never get over it and it drives them to publish more

[00:14:46] and to show them and to prove it to them and to make more money than these fucks who snubbed them at an APA smoker or something 25 years ago. And then there is like, I think what you're talking about, which is if somebody says something offensive and insulting,

[00:15:05] you might just think about it a lot for a couple of days, two or three days. And then either that person will apologize or you'll just move on. Right. Exactly. And sometimes it just helps to bring it up because you realize that somebody,

[00:15:20] they would never have thought that they were saying something hurtful and they're immediately, and that takes away all of the, you know, a lot of the strength of it. Do you think though that these people, sometimes I think that the people who like,

[00:15:32] you know, 20 years later or like you snubbed me, you know, when I asked you for your autograph or whatever, the Benny Blanco from the Bronx is always bring up. Yeah. Those people seem to have a drive that I don't. Yes. No, totally.

[00:15:46] It's a huge like motivator, I think, for a kind of success. And the tragic aspect of that is they're still not happy. Like I don't think when they get that because there's still always going to be

[00:15:58] somebody ahead of them that they don't think should be ahead of them. And maybe somebody who, you know, isn't noticing the fact how wrong they were when they offered the job to somebody else or, you know, whatever. They're not, they're not fully aware.

[00:16:11] This is what the skill capture is pretty well. Yeah. Speaking of things I didn't ruminate about, but I got reminded of, did you, like if you were off Twitter, you may have missed, blessedly, this whole thing about Dr. Jill Biden. Oh, no, I caught that.

[00:16:28] That's like, that's the day that I went off. Oh my God. Who's the trigger? It was one of them. Yeah. So this like old, crudgety man. Talk about sour grapes, man. Yeah. He just wrote a column saying like she should drop the doctor for her name

[00:16:45] because like her dissertation was bad or something. Like I didn't read it. It was, oh, you didn't read it. It was like, it was so condescending and it wasn't even that. It was that people who aren't MDs shouldn't call themselves doctors anyway.

[00:16:58] Because listen, kiddo, like he actually called her kiddo. Yeah. But he's telling the readership like I know when getting a PhD used to be super hard, like they would test you on Latin and blah, blah, blah, blah. And nowadays it's not.

[00:17:15] So like stop fronting like this is some great achievement. And meanwhile, this guy is not even, he doesn't have any advanced degree to this college. So this motherfucker, he wrote for the Wall Street Journal a review, just a lazy ass piece of shit review of why honor matters.

[00:17:31] And I was totally forgotten about it and I knew I knew that name because everybody's all of a sudden talking about Joseph Epstein. And then yeah, he is, it's that same motherfucker, this old piece of shit. He just wrote a review that was just totally inaccurate.

[00:17:45] It wasn't even a bad review. It was just a shitty ass review that kind of pissed me. That was a good example of something that pissed me off for like two days. I think I remember totally forgot about it until now. That's funny. Yeah. No, you're right.

[00:18:00] It's not funny. In fact, when I was reading it, my main thought was why would the Wall Street Journal care to publish something like this? It was just bad. It was like, what's your point? We should only call.

[00:18:09] He's like, oh yeah, you don't want to be looking for an MD and find out that somebody is a doctor in musicology or something. That would be disappointing to me. Which is hilarious. I know. Having said that, the people took the bait on Twitter.

[00:18:26] I mean, we're taking it. And not, that wasn't really fun either. There were some injustice collectors that decided to devote three days of their life to combating this. Yeah. I just can't, like what you were saying, I think is the right point to make,

[00:18:45] which is that, because sometimes I wonder if only I had this more of this, then I would actually be motivated to do more. And it's true. I just wouldn't be happy. You can feed this and feed this and feed this, and it will never actually go away.

[00:19:02] Yeah, like the productivity that you would gain is so not worth the level of just unhappiness and just dissatisfaction with life, unease in your own body constant. People who, it's not a pleasant way. I honestly feel really sorry for these people,

[00:19:21] even when they're people who are, they affect me at work. And it's very frustrating to deal with them, but I also still feel bad for them. Like I don't feel angry at them, like some colleagues.

[00:19:36] So I didn't read this article, the full article where they developed a scale, but I have to think that what they're probably arguing is this a bad thing. And I, like I would agree.

[00:19:49] I think that there is a fine line, you know, when thinking of raising a kid, you want them to be able to speak up for themselves. You want them to notice when they have been wronged and do something about it.

[00:20:00] But there really is a fetishization of victimhood now to the point where I think that people of my daughter's generation like to make up social groups that are oppressed and join them just so that they can be part of the oppressed.

[00:20:16] And it's just like embrace your privileged daughter. It's funny though, like I don't know if it's probably less true down here than it is up where you are that, but they all have, you know, they all have the opinions.

[00:20:31] But I think what this trait, if it exists, at least as I understand it, it's really tied to your emotions and your vis, and in a way that I don't know like how I would raise a child to not be like that.

[00:20:46] You almost have to hope that your child is not like that naturally because like I don't know how to, you don't talk people out of these kinds of things. You don't reason with them. They're not, they're too effective at twisting the reasoning in their favor.

[00:21:04] So like it's almost like there's nothing you can do, at least unless you're like a psychiatrist or something. Yeah, so maybe I think I disagree a little bit because there's part that I, where I agree.

[00:21:15] And so again, I didn't read this full thing, but they make some theoretical draw bridge between this and attachment style. So, you know, like how securely attached you are with your character early on.

[00:21:31] And that I agree, that's the sort of thing that is either genetic or happens so early on that there's nothing much to do about it. And then they talk about rejection sensitivity, which is another scale that's been developed like a long time ago.

[00:21:44] But when they talk about forgiveness, that's the thing that I think we can teach our kids. Like being willing to forgive people and being just by example, like I always wanted to say I was sorry to my daughter whenever I thought I had hurt her.

[00:21:59] And just so that she would see that it was normal because my dad, I love my daddy's a great man, but he never fucking says sorry. Like I think he said it twice in my life. Yeah, but that's different.

[00:22:08] You're not, I don't think you're teaching her not to be like this person. You're teaching her to be somebody who, you know, who doesn't hurt others and is willing to admit that they were wrong when they are. I guess so in that sense.

[00:22:25] Yeah, I wanted to be able to let it go. And I think that being, being not stingy with saying you're sorry, I think is an important lesson, but you, but what you say reminds me that there is a way in which you can say that you're full

[00:22:36] of forgiveness and go around forgiving people without, you know, forgiveness entails an accusation of wrongdoing. So like imagine if I just came up to you and I was like, Tamla, forgive you for, you know, like the first two years that we did this.

[00:22:50] It might be like wait, what do you mean? Like it sounds like there's an accusation there. So there's fake forgiveness, but I don't know. I like, I hope that, but of course I have no idea whether this is just genetic or not.

[00:23:03] But I like to hope that we can teach our kids not to do this. All right. I guess we're not, we were going to talk about it in different articles, but we'll save that. Yeah. Yeah, I think we should.

[00:23:14] And we can get to our interview with Agnes Calard. We will be right back. Today's episode is brought to you by Give Well. Well, it's that time of year folks. It is literally that time of year, Christmas a few days away.

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[00:30:20] and happy holidays to each and every one of you. Yeah, happy holidays. Okay, so we are about to welcome Agnes Calard. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Somehow we forgot to check. Agnes is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

[00:30:38] Agnes is the author of the book, Aspiration. And also many articles on Plato, on Aristotle and topics like anger, transformative experience. And she's also that rare thing, a public philosopher. She has a regular column at the point, the magazine, the point

[00:30:58] and plenty of op-eds and columns including one recently in the New York Times that we talk about at the beginning of the interview. So you might want to check that out before you listen so you know what we're talking about.

[00:31:09] The main topic of our discussion is Plato's dialogue, the Gorgias or the Gorgias. And the way the conversation went, we just kind of dove into it and to the sort of mechanics and the craft of how it was written without summarizing it at all.

[00:31:30] So I just want to take a quick moment to do that here. The Gorgias is a early to mid-Plato dialogue that tackles many topics. It's all over the place from the nature of rhetoric to the philosophical versus the philosophical or dialectical method versus the method used by orators

[00:31:53] to justice, tyranny and pleasure and shame. So the dialogue starts out with Socrates questioning Gorgias, who was a real person and a famous sophist and rhetorician about what the art of rhetoric is exactly. And Gorgias says that it's the art of persuasion through speech about various topics

[00:32:17] but especially persuading people in legal settings about what is just and unjust. And at first Gorgias says that rhetoricians aren't experts in the topic they're persuading people about, but then later Socrates gets Gorgias to admit that rhetoricians must have knowledge about justice to teach their students about justice

[00:32:37] so he contradicts himself. He is refuted in that sense. And at this point another character, Paulus, steps in and says that Gorgias was just ashamed to admit that a good rhetorician doesn't have

[00:32:51] or doesn't need knowledge of justice to teach people how to persuade others on matters of justice. And so now Socrates aims his dialectical laser at Paulus and soon they're talking about whether tyrants can be happy and whether it's better

[00:33:08] and also less shameful to do wrong than to suffer wrong. And also whether it's better to do wrong and get away with it or do wrong and be punished. Socrates says it's better to be punished if you're going to do wrong

[00:33:23] and it's also better to suffer wrong than to do wrong to others. And Socrates gets Paulus to contradict himself when Paulus concedes that it's more shameful to do wrong than to suffer wrong. And now Calakles steps in the third interlocutor in the dialogue.

[00:33:42] Calakles is one of Plato's best characters. He's got some charisma. He can be kind of funny in an insulting way. He gets in some good digs at Socrates and Phosphite too, some of which I agree with. It's surprisingly modern, the aspect of digging.

[00:34:03] Absolutely. Yeah, they rip on each other. And Calakles then defends a kind of proto-Nichian position that's almost shocking to see in this early. But he says that morality and justice, they're just artifacts, the constructions that weak people came up with because they're weak.

[00:34:29] It's like the slave morality kind of idea. And they wanted to protect themselves against people with real power. So morality and justice and giving everybody things equally, that's all just pure convention invented by the weak. But by nature, the best and most admirable thing to do

[00:34:48] is to satisfy as many desires as possible for a powerful person. So he defends a kind of morality-free hedonism and also egoism. Socrates kind of trips him up. And the way he trips him up is by getting him to say that,

[00:35:08] number one, the pleasure that a passive partner in homosexual intercourse, a bottom, that that pleasure isn't good, even though he always says that pleasure is good. And also that the pleasure cowards feel on the battlefield when enemies retreat isn't good.

[00:35:31] And now Calakles, feeling like he's been tricked and pulled into something he didn't even want to get involved with, he turns sullen and pissed off because he feels like Socrates is kind of playing word games with all of them. And really none of them are convinced by Socrates.

[00:35:48] And the dialogue ends with Socrates giving a long speech about a myth of justice in the afterlife, even though he started out saying that nobody should give long speeches in this discussion. This is something we talk about with Agnes. Okay, so that's the quick summary,

[00:36:07] but no summary can do Plato justice. That's for sure you have to read it and talk about it. And that's what we did with Agnes Calard. So let's get to the interview. All right, welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. We're pleased to welcome Agnes Calard to the podcast

[00:36:23] to talk primarily about Plato and his dialogue, the Gorgias or Gorgas. God, I don't know which way I'm going to say it. Welcome to the podcast, Agnes. Thank you. Wait, did you tell... I think that we need to get this out of the way.

[00:36:37] You were Tamla's, we had an episode where we were listing our dream guests, our top guests, and Tamla listed you. So I just wanted to get out there that Tamla had you at the top of his list. This is a dream come true. I'm very honored.

[00:36:52] You recently are in the public eye even more than you normally are because you wrote an op-ed that... And we get the Sunday Times, and I saw that it was in the print edition of the Sunday Review called, I don't want you to believe me.

[00:37:06] I want you to listen. So I'm wondering how people are responding to it first and then I guess I have at least one question about it. Yeah, so I would say the response can be divided pretty neatly into like some territories. I've gotten hundreds of emails about it.

[00:37:22] So I guess the main thing is there's a lot of response. A lot of people are reading it and it's kind of hitting people hard. So I would say there's like a good proportion of the response is like amazingly to me because I didn't anticipate this at all.

[00:37:35] I'm in exactly the same shoes as you, and I didn't think that anyone else was in this position. So like that's amazing to me. Like I didn't write this thinking like this is going to speak to other people who were going to say me too,

[00:37:47] but there were a lot of people who said that. Then there are just a lot of people who wrote to me very kindly being like, I'm willing to listen to you, which was like extremely sweet and generous. And some of those people are like, I'm like you,

[00:38:00] but most of them are not. Most of them are just like, if you want someone to talk to you. So that was kind of amazing. And then a small group of people who are almost all men but not all men were extremely angered by it

[00:38:12] and wrote me just very angry messages. And then I guess there's like, the fourth group is like people who know me, but are maybe, who know me even kind of well, but are not super, super close to me for whom these were both kind of shocking revelations

[00:38:29] and who very much felt like I was personally addressing them and in some cases blaming them. Oh wow. Like I didn't realize how much people would read this as like this is addressed to you in particular, but it definitely had that effect. And so that was like,

[00:38:45] there were a lot of upsetting conversations in which I realized that I had like inadvertently accused a bunch of people that I really wanted to accuse at all. And in which I was forced to eventually acknowledge that in a lot of cases, like my not talking to people

[00:39:03] was more a product of my own cowardice than anything else. That's super interesting because you wrote this and we'll put a link to this for our listeners. You wrote this in very, like without much detail, you spoke of a couple of things in your life

[00:39:17] on an event and a fact about your life. And my first response was I want to be a listener. I want to be able to listen to you, but I didn't believe that you would believe me. But you wrote like a Rorschach test.

[00:39:29] You're like, people are reading into what you're saying, I'm sure both personally and autobiographically, but also I'm sure that like the people who write you and say like I'm in the same position, you don't exactly say what your position is. So they're reading something into it.

[00:39:43] So it's like reading it must be therapeutic to them. Yes, I think that that's true. I also think that there's something in the spirit of it where they might be, it might maybe not even be that important whether they're giving a correct interpretation

[00:39:57] of like what are the events and what is the fact, but that there's something. So like here's a thing that I only realized after writing it by talking to people. Like I spent like the whole week basically talking to people about it.

[00:40:08] It's that like a lot of people responded, a lot of the people who were sort of in the, not my innermost circle, but by saying like why did you make assumptions about us? Like why did you presuppose that we'd react in a certain way?

[00:40:19] Like you're getting angry at people because you think they're going to make assumptions about you, but you're making assumptions about us. And that was true. And what it revealed to me is that like fear has a kind of blanketing power.

[00:40:32] Like you can think of it like snow, right? Where there are these fine grain differentiations that we make all the time as to who can we trust and how much can we trust them and what can we reveal, right? But fear like shuts down those like fine-grained distinctions

[00:40:46] and essentially there's just like the reaction that you fear becomes the reaction that you assume everyone's going to have. And I think that's one of the things that the piece sort of expresses is the frustration over having that fear and over being in some sense as much possessed

[00:41:02] by bias and assumption as the person that I'm speaking to. What made you decide to frame it like that as a fact and an event without specifying what they were? Although kind of giving a lot of clues and hints as to what they were.

[00:41:21] Was there a draft of it where you just straight up said what they were and then you chose to frame it this way or yeah, what was the thought process behind crafting it that way? There was never a draft that specified

[00:41:33] which in a way is weird when I think about it because the way this came about was like I wasn't writing an op-ed. I was just kind of upset and like writing this sort of to myself and I sent it to, like I hadn't even really thought about

[00:41:47] like publishing it and I sent it to a friend of mine who shares the fact and he was like you should send this to The New York Times and I'm like are you kidding me? The New York Times is never going to publish this.

[00:41:58] This is not like anything else I've written for them. This doesn't belong in a newspaper and he's like just send it to them and I think that I was so sure that they would be like no, that made it easier for me to send it

[00:42:10] but the point is I didn't write this thinking this is going to be in The New York Times at all. So you might think yeah, then that would make sense if I had a story where some version of it specified but I don't

[00:42:21] and I think part of it is that the frustration that the piece is coming out of is this stuff there's this stuff that I can't say. I'm not specifying it because I can't say it. I could say a certain word

[00:42:31] but if I know that that word is going to be misinterpreted then I haven't said the word that I tried to say and so that's like they're not saying it really is it sort of performs a certain fact that I take to be the case which is like

[00:42:45] there's something I can't express and I could use a certain form of language that might seem to my reader to disambiguate and to precisify but it would just be an illusion of precision. That's so interesting. That is a really good point

[00:42:59] and I think one that's so broadly relevant about any time we try to communicate anything. When you said that people were angry were they angry at what you said earlier that you were making assumptions about them, these men, these angry men

[00:43:14] and you were making assumptions about how they would react or what was the source of their anger? No, not at all. They were angry that I was making demands of them to listen to me. Why do you deserve to be listened to?

[00:43:29] You're a child, you should grow up. They were pattern matching it with something like I think something like women are always complaining or something like that that's sort of the level on which it was heard and it was heard I think in a way

[00:43:46] as a request for deference in effect they were seeing it as part of what I called the sort of pain Olympics. I was like look, even though I was saying don't do this what they were hearing me as saying is

[00:44:00] I am somehow in a less privileged position than you therefore you owe me something and I can demand that from you and they're like who are you to say that I owe you this? I don't owe you anything. So it was that, that was the dynamic

[00:44:15] that emerged with that set of interlocutors. That's very much more the opposite of what you were saying than what you were saying. Yes, but I think that here's an interesting thing that I've found to be the case with public writing.

[00:44:28] So like I wrote this op-ed, my previous op-ed was on it was called Should We Cancel Aristotle? And that got a lot of attention to you and a pretty large percent, not like not 50, not even 20, but maybe 10% of readers took away from that piece

[00:44:46] that I thought we should cancel Aristotle. Even though the answer I gave is no, we should not cancel Aristotle. I say that very clearly and the piece is an explanation of why we should not, right? So that's weird, right? That is it was a question

[00:44:59] and I give the answer and I'm extremely explicit about the answer, right? Why would they miss hear that? And I think the answer is that on certain topics people expect you to signal your position in a really extreme way so that if I were really against cancelling Aristotle

[00:45:17] then what I would do would be my whole piece would be indignation over, you know, the people who think we should cancel Aristotle. Whereas my piece is like, there's a pretty good case you made for cancelling Aristotle but often consider we shouldn't do it for these reasons, right?

[00:45:31] And so they're pattern matching that to people who want to cancel Aristotle because I'm not sufficiently over on their side. So I think people when they read newspapers there's already a set of categories into which they're placing people.

[00:45:44] And so if you make yourself a little bit difficult to place then you become a Rorschach test basically. Yeah, and that's so interesting because there is a genre of that as a you'd be quoting people on Twitter. Exactly. You'd be doing all that stuff

[00:45:57] like being so indignant about all the people not recognizing the different culture and the different time. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. That's a perfect diagnosis. And somewhat relevant if we can bridge to, you know, the problems with language and using language to express positions

[00:46:14] I think is part of what's at stake in the Gorgias. But before we get to Gorgias maybe let's talk about Plato more generally. The reason you were my dream guest was that I'm really interested in Plato and the way he wrote and the form that he wrote.

[00:46:33] And I taught a seminar recently in the spring on philosophical genres. So I was introduced to a lot of the literature on why Plato wrote dialogues and how to interpret Plato given that he wrote dialogues. So I guess at the most basic level

[00:46:49] I'm wondering what you think about just that question why you think Plato wrote dialogues and what it allows him to do that he wouldn't be able to do had he written in a more traditional form. One thing to keep in mind is that

[00:47:03] there was no other traditional form that was associated with philosophy at the time. So we call it traditional like if we think of what Kant is doing I don't even say Aristotle because if Aristotle's texts really are originally lecture notes then they get worked up into texts

[00:47:18] it's not even clear that those are being produced in accordance with a traditional text. It's not clear that Plato had available to him some other model that would be the traditional model. So I think in a way Plato it was the Wild West, right?

[00:47:31] He could just kind of do what he wanted. But suppose that you're Plato, right? And you want to present arguments so you want your texts to present arguments and it's not that perminities is texts and an exagerus is texts and whatever we don't have all of these

[00:47:46] it's not that they don't present arguments but they're not optimized for the presentation of arguments. One way you could optimize for the presentation of arguments is to have premises be separated from one another because it's really easy to much easier to follow an argument

[00:47:59] if the premises are separated like here's one premise here's another premise. Dialogue is like an obvious way to do that. So it's like go read Kant and tell me what the premises of the arguments are. It is not easy. You read Plato, it's a lot easier

[00:48:09] because it's like one sentence and Socrates is like, so do you agree with this? Yes, do you agree with this? Yes, but then, right? So one thing about that one thing you have to give the dialogue form is that it kind of is apart from

[00:48:19] the formal ways of representing arguments that become available later or we can put P1, P2 this is like pretty close to P1, P2 so that's one thing about the dialogue form is that it is kind of optimized for the presentation of arguments as far as I can see.

[00:48:35] As I understand it though philosophical treatises were contemporaneous with Plato and that there were philosophers am I wrong about that? That was my reading understanding from the second. Like who are you thinking of? I don't know now that I'm thinking of it I don't know, Democratus, Epicura,

[00:48:52] but I don't know. Yeah, I'm going by like secondhand what the sec people in the secondary literature were saying about this. Yeah, so maybe not and certainly even if there were it wasn't the standard it wasn't the traditional way because there was no traditional way of presenting

[00:49:09] so yeah. Yeah good I mean we don't have Democratus so that's part of the we don't know, you know we do have I mean we have fragments we have fragments of parmenides and I mean one thing that's interesting is that the dialogue form allows you for instance

[00:49:27] which also to kind of seems to be connected to the turn towards ethics and away from like cosmology right and you know one thing that's said about Socrates where Socrates is resistant to it and then pushes back against it is like the he inquires

[00:49:43] above the heaven and below the earth right so that's in Aristophanes' clouds and then Socrates says yeah that's a big part of the animus against me in the apology and so the kind of ancient physics and cosmology where there is something like a kind of

[00:49:57] treatise there is also interestingly sort of at odds with the Socratic ethical project and he makes that point really explicit in the FEDA where he's like yeah I used to be into this stuff so yes I think you're right that in some sense

[00:50:11] there could have been something like a continuous text right. There's a question of what we mean by treatise where in effect what I'm asking myself in terms of treatise is like to what extent is the text a series of arguments or attempting to present arguments

[00:50:24] or attempting to present an argumentative system. But presumably what this dialogue is about is the orators and their method part of what it's about and so you had as a unit of persuasive philosophy a speech and one would think one would be tempted to just write those down

[00:50:44] so it seems like he's taking some sort of stand against it by using the form of the dialogue. There are a lot of reasons I think you can give in a way my first answer to why did Play-Doh write a dialogue was sort of like

[00:50:56] well it's kind of the best choice for the goals that he had but I'm not saying that that's not so much an attempt to get at his motivations it's almost an attempt to get at what else would we have liked him to do but I think that

[00:51:10] the other thing to note is that other people wrote Socratic Dialogues too and so writing Socratic Dialogues was a thing and we have Play-Dohs and Xenophones but we also know that Xenophones was like a thing people did and a big part of it was something like

[00:51:26] the desire to preserve Socrates and the philosophical legacy of Socrates and the thought that the best way to do that would be to sort of write some kind of versions of the sorts of conversations that he had This episode of Very Bad Wizards

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[00:53:48] for the two year plan it's less than a price of a coffee per month go to NordVPN.com slash VBW and use the coupon VBW at checkout our thanks to NordVPN for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards If you think it's an ideal form

[00:54:06] or a very good way of presenting arguments why has it fallen out of favor and why do we have the manuscript the article and why haven't we returned to dialogues as a way of presenting arguments Yeah good so I think it hasn't at all fallen out of favor

[00:54:28] in terms of readership because we're still reading Play-Doh's dialogues and we're reading them in intro philosophy classes and we're not reading those articles and there's a reason for that and I think it's because they present arguments really well

[00:54:42] but you might be like yeah okay but if this is the way to present arguments well why aren't we presenting arguments this way and I think that it's interesting that when you look at of course Play-Doh isn't the only philosopher in the history who wrote dialogues

[00:54:52] so Augustine, Barclay, Hobbes to jump temporarily so what I find when I read dialogues written by somebody who's not Play-Doh is that it tends to me that if you read those somebody took one point of view and spread it over two characters like it's a fake dialogue

[00:55:10] like there's actually a non-dialogic version that they put some dialogue clothing on and Play-Doh's dialogues don't read like that like Calakley is a guy and you can hear his voice, you can feel him right and so I think the fact that Play-Doh's dialogues

[00:55:24] are based in some way on actual conversations that involve actual people is part of what makes them gripping and if you want to know what else are we doing this now we are doing it all the time on podcasts podcasts or dialogues

[00:55:38] and in a way one way to think about it is like the Plotong Dialogues were just kind of the original podcasts and people are into like they kind of it turns out they really like hearing different voices engaging with one another rather than reading a continuous text

[00:55:50] that's expressed from one point of view we are like Play-Doh Dave yeah exactly well no no you guys are like Calakley's and Polis I always thought we were like the tortoise and Achilles from Lewis Carroll oh yeah those are nice those are pretty fun do you associate Play-Doh's

[00:56:08] views with Socrates or do you think he is giving a voice to different arguments that he finds have force without wanting either to give the game away about what he believes or that he's genuinely conflicted and this is his way of working it out himself

[00:56:28] sometimes I'm just very puzzled by that question because in a way suppose that the Dialogue has a bunch of views in it right and it's going to have the views of Socrates and the views of Calakles and you know Polis and Gorgias and then we want to know

[00:56:44] well what was Play-Doh's view did he agree with Socrates did he sort of have a modified version of Socrates right and it's like why would we care like he was just some other guy who might have had an opinion about this conversation in a way right

[00:56:58] so there's something funny about wanting to know what Play-Doh's views were given that he doesn't tell them to us right and chooses not to right and it's like maybe that was important to him like to not have a view I think that one thing that does

[00:57:14] you know that I tend to sort of roughly go along with is that when you move towards the later what are called the later Dialogues the character of Socrates is probably closer to a mouthpiece for Play-Doh than the character of Socrates in the earlier Dialogues

[00:57:32] so that would then suggest if you're reading Theotidas or something like that then you there's more of a chance that you can look to the character of Socrates to figure out what Play-Doh thought say right that's conventionally believed because there does seem to be a kind of shift

[00:57:50] and I see no reason not to think something like that right given that there's the shift who's he going to shift Socrates to but himself right to be weird if Socrates became the mouthpiece for some other guy but you know when we're looking at

[00:58:00] the Gorgias which is like an early-mid Dialogue and then we just want to know sort of like what did Play-Doh think like I feel like I just don't have any basis for making that judgment and I'm not sure why it would matter yeah I wasn't suggesting

[00:58:14] that it matters just that I do think some scholars interpret it that way or if they don't they attribute it just to him capturing the historical Socrates and I guess what's interesting to me about the form of the Dialogue is that it allows you to leave the reader

[00:58:34] to tease out you know the arguments and what's going on for themselves without having any real sense of where the author stands on it and in that way there's an artistic quality that I love about the Dialogues Yeah I mean I wouldn't even call that artistic

[00:58:52] like I think it's obvious that Play-Doh found all of the arguments being given in this Dialogue pretty compelling that he found Socrates' arguments compelling and that in particular Calakles' position he found compelling but I think he even finds Polis' frustration with the fact

[00:59:08] that Socrates always gets to call the shots pretty compelling right what he wants to do is kind of showcase that a bunch of these compelling positions that in some sense that were with one another in a way I guess I think that the desire

[00:59:20] like okay what did Play-Doh think it's almost like a desire to not get embroiled in those battles like to be able to step back and be like okay but at the end of the day after we've fought these battles that we don't want to fight

[00:59:30] and don't want to get involved in right at the end of the day what am I supposed to think so that I can like almost like bypass right and I think what Socrates, what Play-Doh if I can attribute anything to Play-Doh it's like

[00:59:38] the desire to not have you do that to not have you look for a jump to an end of the day like he wants you to find Calakles really compelling and he wants you to find Socrates really compelling and he wants you to feel

[00:59:48] forced to get into that dispute you know so again I'm a psychologist I read Play-Doh maybe when I was in high school or early college and I come back to this and I'm struck by what this form allows for like the dirtiest of tricks of like getting characters

[01:00:06] to grant positions when the reader might not and Socrates moves on and there is like oh it's a win for Socrates so I find that to be exactly the sort of persuasive tactic that Socrates seems to be arguing against here

[01:00:22] or it's like you know maybe these really were people and maybe Socrates was systematically dismantling them in such a like you know fashion but like it seems like a cheap way of winning an argument to create a second character who just grants your most damning of conclusions

[01:00:42] or the premises that lead to those conclusions. I say that loving this but yeah So here's what's going to happen like I'm going to give you a response right now and my response is going to be like defending Play-Doh right and defending

[01:00:54] Socrates and saying these are good arguments and I'll give a little piece of that I don't think anyone's supposed to be winning the arguments that is as I just said I think that you know I do think that something that happens

[01:01:06] in the Gorgias and it's quite distinctive about the Gorgias is that the set of positions is vindicated but they're vindicated because people push back against them as hard as possible and you have like no I won't accept it I won't accept that doing

[01:01:16] injustice is worse than suffering it and they fight and they try to come up with opposing positions and they find themselves unable to say anything but these things that are then described as being tied down with iron and adamant

[01:01:26] it's actually distinctive of the Gorgias that it ends up like that a lot of the dialogues are just like the protagonist we switched positions somehow that's weird at the end right but the Gorgias is it does kind of land somewhere but it lands somewhere

[01:01:36] back super hard okay so I said that right now people are listening right to this conversation that we're having and they're like why is he saying I just came up with a great argument against her why did he just let her get away with that right

[01:01:48] so the thing about a conversation is you can't say every possible thing in response to the thing that somebody just said and the fact that you can't do that doesn't mean that we're not taking each other seriously and having a real conversation

[01:02:00] and trying to have an argument and trying to persuade each other it just means we have limited minds right and of course the first thing that's going to happen when somebody hears this conversation is they're going to hear all this like negative space

[01:02:10] that we didn't cover right and that's part of Plato's point is like that's but that's not like that's not like a trick that we're doing where you're letting me get away with stuff or I'm letting you get away with stuff we're not being tricky we're just being limited

[01:02:24] yeah but if I wanted to commit my arguments to sort of a record and I wanted to do my best to persuade future generations it seems as if I wouldn't, it's not like you had to write down conversations right that it's true that that's how conversations go but

[01:02:40] it seems as if taking care of you know like not going to defend modern philosophy too much but the one thing about it is that you have to think of all of the possible objections in order to have said to have been have really proved

[01:02:54] your point or argued favorably for your position and so when you have just the one character who might have been distracted or wanting to nod because they're you know like they like to please like a podcast host doesn't want to interrupt the guest it seems as if

[01:03:10] that's not the most efficient way of communicating the power of your philosophical arguments well there's a question what's your goal right so the way you just put your goal is persuading people of your arguments but the Gorgias says there's two kinds of persuasion

[01:03:24] right the kind with and the kind without teaching and notice that your response to the lacuni in the dialogues where somebody you know says oh yeah okay and they shouldn't have your responses immediately to be like wait a minute there's a problem here

[01:03:38] so you don't do the thing that the character does right in fact you don't do it partly because the character does it so you know one way to think about this would be suppose that instead of just wanting people to believe the conclusions of my

[01:03:50] arguments what I actually wanted to do is real persuading the kind that includes teaching that would only be possible if my you know the person who's receiving this does it in a particular spirit namely by challenging it in all sorts

[01:04:02] of ways and in some sense reasoning it through on their own such that they really understand why they're not just repeating some words that I said and it's pretty plausible that putting it in the form of a conversation with roads not taken left

[01:04:14] for the reader to feel compelled that they have to explore is a good way to do that I often have the response that Dave has to dialogues like the Republic where it seems like Glaucon and Atamanthus are like yes men in like too much

[01:04:30] they're not challenging anything there's like clear leaps that they're not even catching in this one though they are trying to push back as as much as they can and and it's really interesting the way they sort of end up like they were tricked or they were

[01:04:48] they were refuted technically like you might be if you were being cross-examined on a witness stand but you are trying to tell the truth but not but they don't feel like they were really refuted and they say that repeatedly I think everybody kind of says that

[01:05:02] and there is a palpable sense of failure at the end of this dialogue where it's not that just that Socrates hasn't convinced them he's angered them he's turned them antagonistic they were very cheerful and affable and hospitable at first and now he Calakles has become sullen

[01:05:20] the most striking thing is that Socrates has reduced to giving speeches speeches that invoke these myths that is the very thing that he are I take him to be criticizing at first and so it feels like at the end of this dialogue there are no winners now

[01:05:38] I think that's what's fascinating about the dialogue but I don't know if what's fascinating about it is that I was presented really powerful arguments or positions I think Plato must have consciously chosen to give this sense of failure the sense of Socrates as someone who has

[01:06:00] made his interlocutors like worse people at least temporarily because they started out happy and now they're and generous and now they're sullen and withdrawn I'm not sure that's making anyone worse you know there are moments in the dialogues where that is theorized for instance in the mino where

[01:06:18] mino is like you screwed me up I used to be able to give many fine speeches about virtue and now I run into you and I'm like numb right and Socrates is like you know I haven't actually hurt you

[01:06:28] it might feel to you as though I have and that's why you're upset with me but what I've shown you is that like this kind of grand theory of yourself that you have and then this thought

[01:06:36] that you have this capacity like it's not actually there and I think he's shown that precisely to Calakles because Calakles had this idea I am kind of cynical demystifier so I can see that there is like the truth about ethics that ethics

[01:06:52] is basically a lie believed by the sheep and like you know I adopt the path of the real man who can get power and can can be better than everybody else partly through my understanding that of like

[01:07:10] the fact that I'm not drinking the Koolaid that everybody else has and Socrates is like awesome so tell me what's the special theory of yours and it turns out to be underwritten by a kind of unrestrained hedonism that actually just doesn't make sense right and Socrates I think

[01:07:22] the climax of the dialogues is these these two arguments they're sort of tend to be overlooked that Socrates gives against Calakles and hedonism where Calakles has to admit that his kind of whole ideological or sort of counter ideological edifice does not work

[01:07:38] and I think and those arguments by the way are such good arguments they're still you can still hear echoes of those arguments in contemporary discussions of hedonism right so I don't see that as a failure I don't see it as a failure philosophically or

[01:07:52] argumentatively and I don't see it as a failure with reference to Calakles it does piss Calakles off I think it's okay to piss people off what is it going to improve them in the long term we have some reason to believe that the answer to that is no

[01:08:04] because of some of Socrates' other associates right so that's your point but that'll take to be in a way outside the scope of the dialogue but is it because they say that you know Pericles can't complain that they almost put him to death and convicted

[01:08:18] him because his job was to make them better and Socrates says my job is to make you better and so it is in the scope of the dialogue if the thing that you're doing as a philosopher or a rhetorician or an orator is to

[01:08:34] make people better or to make them worse that's what marks you as a virtuous leader that's only if you think you have the technique and Socrates doesn't think he has it so his point is that Calakles and Polis and Gorgias and Pericles all think they know something

[01:08:50] and they all think that they have this ability to achieve certain results and they don't have it Socrates knows he doesn't have it so he doesn't think he can make people better I don't know he says something at the end

[01:09:00] I mean look you've taught us whole seminar on this so you're almost certainly right but I remember that there's a line at the end where he says you might be right they might put me to death because I actually don't flatter them I don't do the thing that

[01:09:14] absolutely you're right he says that and I actually try to make them better people and in the apology that's his thing I've tried to bring out the best in the Athenian people and so there is something at least maybe tragic or ironic about the fact that he didn't

[01:09:32] and would continue not to as you said right So he says what he says is that he exhorts people to take care for their souls I'm not sure whether he says that in the Gorgias or the apology certainly he says it

[01:09:44] so he doesn't claim to be able to make people better right and that's connected to his claim that he's not a teacher I think he thinks that he can help people but not in the manner of teaching

[01:09:56] he can help people in the sense that they could inquire with him and to the extent that they're willing to inquire with him I think that he thinks that both parties are going to be improved by that and in fact I think he thinks that

[01:10:06] the one refuted is more benefited than the other one but the question that we're you know so in effect there's a question intradiologically is what Calakles undergoes a good thing or a bad thing and I want to say it's a good thing Calakles was in fact benefited

[01:10:22] this is a happy thing that he wasn't happy about it but he did undergo a good thing and if he kept interacting with Socrates right he would get more and more of that good thing but if he goes away then you know that kind of

[01:10:36] viewing what happened from the outside perspective he might say oh you harmed me Socrates etc and then want to kill Socrates or whatever and Socrates doesn't feel like he has instilled in Calakles some kind of knowledge that would be proof against that kind of change of mind

[01:10:52] Yeah I don't know I've been asking a lot of questions but I guess I have an alternate way of Well go ahead tell me your alternate way Calakles starts out the dialogue this is something I always forget whenever

[01:11:04] I go back to it and he seems like the nicest guy and you know very hospitable he's very welcoming to Socrates and it's almost like after what Socrates does with Paulus which I don't know if it's fair play there's I know there's a lot of contention over whether

[01:11:24] Socrates wins that argument through an equivocation it seems like Calakles almost is impelled to take a more extreme position than he already has just because he's pissed off to see at what Socrates has done to Paulus and Gorgias almost taking advantage of them then he kind of paints

[01:11:44] himself into this corner giving this Nietzschean slave morality account of you know what and yes he's refuted and he's refuted well I don't know that he would have you know it seems like what Socrates was doing in the first part of the dialogue

[01:12:00] led to that in the first place I think that there's something right in the way that you're framing the dialogue I definitely think there's a kind of escalation that is motivated by the earlier things but I think it's something quite specific namely each interlocutor feels

[01:12:14] that the previous interlocutor held back because of shame so they feel like Socrates the guy who came before me only because he wouldn't say what he really thought because he was ashamed to say what he really thought right and so by the time we hit

[01:12:28] Calakles what we're hitting is a guy who's like I'm gonna go all out and there's something very it's almost like this is Plato pushing a certain line of thought as hard as possible and in a way like at this moment I want to say

[01:12:40] forget Calakles forget these people right Plato's interested in his idea and when he's in particular I think interested in is this idea that that it's possible to sort of view the let's say almost like to use a Freudian term manifest morality

[01:12:54] Freud talks about the manifest content of your dream like just that the surface content of it right and there's like the deep stuff below it so there's a kind of manifest morality where we say things like it's bad to like kill people

[01:13:04] and you should be just and you should you know that all of the interlocutors in some way think that that's kind of verbal and that we have to pay homage to it but like we can have our secret beliefs right and what Plato is doing

[01:13:16] is like pushing harder and harder to be like look tell us what the secret beliefs are and the thing is when you get the secret beliefs they're garbage right they're not a theory they're not an ideology they're nothing and so there's

[01:13:26] this illusion that people have and I think the illusion is present in Nietzsche and it's present in all the demystifiers that we can sort of cut through the crap of morality and get to like the secret view and then the secret

[01:13:38] view is going to somehow be coherent and it's going to be a theory and the gorgias is this I take the the profundity of the text is that it is this argument that you can't do that because the thing the secret

[01:13:50] theory you think you have in a way precisely because it's been protected from interaction by having had to be kept secret like it's just really low quality as a theory it's not even at the basic level coherent. Plato

[01:14:02] thought this point was so important he just made it again in Republic one right so you have Thrasymachus saying really similar things to Calakles and Socrates being like okay so let me just buy your like anti-morality morality let's see how this works

[01:14:14] and it doesn't work it turns out right and it's like the person who produces this morality is sure that the only reason people don't accept it is because they don't want to be cynical and Plato is like no the reason we don't accept it is that it's illogical

[01:14:26] right yeah although even in Republic one his two friends are not convinced refuted they just think Thrasymachus missed up right and that they can present a better challenge just like the Gorgias right so there's this sense that the cynical

[01:14:44] view if we just did a better job saying the cynical view so there's this almost illusion that there's a perfect version of the cynical view that would not be would not just collapse under logical pressure but I think it's a principle of Socratic ethics that

[01:14:58] any ethics that we can really believe in has to in a pretty important and robust way be assertible. What do you make then of the fact that he concludes this and I know he concludes the Republic also with the myth but in this case

[01:15:10] there's a double irony of concluding this dialogue with like a long speech that invokes you know some sort of supernatural judgment which we have reason to believe Socrates didn't fully buy into that myth and he's using it as a kind of image it seems

[01:15:28] like he's using it as a form of persuasion to get them to see what he sees and that seems illegitimate maybe and I'm not saying Plato isn't aware of it I think he probably is aware of it but to end on that note where you know like a

[01:15:45] three to four page long speech where he's been asking everybody not to give speeches and to invoke these myths that can you know they're not subject to refutation or not you know they're just

[01:15:57] I don't want to say dogma because they don't think he presents it as dogma but they're certainly unfalsifiable in the way that dialectic is supposed to be something that you can clearly either refute or hold strong so

[01:16:11] yeah what do you make of Plato ending the gorgeous that way so one way to think about it is what would we prefer Plato to do okay so here's a thing no dialogue is going to end with the characters having exhaustively come

[01:16:25] to complete knowledge of all things right so all the every episode every episode that we do that way we're almost there so every dialogue is going to end in some sense you know in media ray like just

[01:16:41] in the middle of things are not complete right and then it just ends right and now some of the dialogues just end like that you know you look at the protagonist the youth of right a lot of the dialogues are just like okay by Socrates

[01:16:53] okay what do people say about those dialogues oh well they didn't get anywhere and they never made any progress and the dialogue ends in just operia and confusion like what is even the point of having both times dialogues if they're going to end like that okay

[01:17:03] then you get a bunch of other dialogues like the Gorgias and the Fido and the Republican they end with a myth right and people are like oh well I'm just like a fake bunch of lies and like why did he end with that right and one

[01:17:13] thing we have to think about is like okay well how what should he have done right which a play to have done so I think that what he's doing in his myth dialogues is he's trying to say something like we have to stop here class

[01:17:23] and we haven't finished anything and I want you to but it's not true that we haven't gotten anywhere and I want you to have almost like a mnemonic like a way of taking with you some of the things where I do think we've gotten

[01:17:39] gotten somewhere here and people tend to really like images for that so I'm going to give you some images and you know he's pretty clear in a like in a couple of different context that the images don't constitute an argument that these stories don't constitute an argument

[01:17:55] but that they are a way of they're like a way of holding on to a bunch of ideas right and in fact in the Gorgias he's really clear like I'm going to tell you what the ideas are let me list them first right and there are things

[01:18:07] about doing injustice about it instead of there's like a list of them and then he's like now I'll tell you the story that helps you remember those ideas and then he tells you the story right so he's like it's very explicit about what he's doing so

[01:18:17] I think giving people this mnemonic you could think of it as a kind of antidote to the fact that the dialogue has to end before they've really come to the conclusions that they need to and so Plato tries it both ways

[01:18:27] he tries it without that and with it and like both are unsatisfying and they're unsatisfying because what we would really like is for it to go on forever and I think that that complaint is not illegitimate it's just like there was

[01:18:37] nothing Plato could do about that. To be clear I wasn't complaining I wasn't complaining about it ending that way I think Plato makes a very specific choice to end at that way and I think that the choice is very aware of the irony of ending

[01:18:53] a critique of oratory and rhetoric with a speech that employs those techniques so I guess Mike this is not how else would you want him to end it I want him to end it this way it's just what I go back and forth on is

[01:19:13] how to interpret that and one way I think you interpret that as this was a failure on Socrates' part and Plato is presenting a failure here even with all not that the arguments in there are failures but there's something that Socrates does that is a failure

[01:19:29] and that's what Plato felt like presenting and you know and if you interpret it that way then it's interesting to for me at least what are his reasons for presenting what it seems like or at least can be interpreted as a failure so I wanted to respond

[01:19:45] to this thing that you said which is a good point that Socrates makes a lot of long speeches at the end of the Gorgias not only the myth but a lot of stuff earlier than that too and then at the beginning of the Gorgias

[01:19:55] he says he doesn't want his interlocutors to make long speeches so and Socrates draws attention to his own long speech earlier in right so I think Plato wants us to notice this so I think that Socrates is not opposed to long speeches per se

[01:20:09] I think what he is opposed to is that most of the people that he talks to can't make a long speech without wavering over the course of the speech so the speech will itself occupy multiple positions and he points that out about Gorgias

[01:20:23] he's like Gorgias you said this and then you said this and I'm going to show you that actually you change your position midstream and because Socrates wants to investigate a given point he just can't let people make long speeches but he Socrates

[01:20:35] is really good at saying the same thing over and over again and it's very clear in the long speeches that he's making towards the end that they're kind of just one point of the home over and over again he's being consistency is definitely there even if

[01:20:47] there are other problems with it and so I don't actually think that it's a problem that he is making long speeches that is I don't actually think Socrates has any hard and fast rules about how you have to talk all of his so-called

[01:21:01] rules like say what you believe don't make long speeches etc are also broken in other places he wants to do whatever is going to be best for the argument and I think that by the way Calacly's has reached this level of recalcitrance

[01:21:13] the best thing for the argument is the thing that he in fact does but I I guess I don't necessarily think that Socrates that the fact that Calacly's has reached that level over Calcitrance is a sign of Socrates' failure This episode

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[01:23:29] I have like the broadest of questions actually probably for both of you since you guys do a lot more of this reading than I do but there's this view that I think is a familiar one to anybody who's read just a little bit of philosophy

[01:23:45] that the Greeks somehow these Greeks somehow had like this achievement unlocked moment where there was there were people and then they came along and showed because you see the roots of obviously of modern analytic philosophy in these dialogues and there is this view that something happened there

[01:24:09] that kind of changed the way human beings thought for the rest of history is that true and if so what got unlocked here because there is thousands of years of myth and no attempts like in the Bible for instance attempts at really presenting anything like a scrutinized

[01:24:31] rational argument seemingly a thought that what you were saying Agnes the manifest content has to be assertible and defended it just does it really just pop up in this one pocket of the world and is that how we are to understand the contribution of the lasting

[01:24:51] contribution of these philosophers it's such I know it's a broad question I'm happy to answer it and I think that maybe I'm someone who has a kind of like almost cartoonishly idealistic answer to it which is just like yes like that and in particular that Socrates now I

[01:25:09] want to say I think Socrates was living in a kind of intellectual culture that was special in a lot of different ways but let me just not worry about that for the moment just talk about what he did so I think

[01:25:19] that if you just think about the fact that we have background conversational norms for truth seeking and inquiry like don't straw man your interlocutor when somebody is showing you that you're wrong they're actually kind of doing you a favor listen to arguments try to cup of objections

[01:25:37] admit when you're wrong like all this stuff you don't have to say it it's so obvious right it's so obvious that it is what it is to have an intellectual conversation I think that Socrates just kind of came up with those that just didn't exist before him basically

[01:25:49] and that speaking was about getting people to believe something where that could be a matter of conveying information to someone like a messenger so there's conveying information and then there's a kind of entrenched battle of speeches that you see for instance in Greek tragedy

[01:26:09] like Antigone versus Creon there is no sense that anyone's ever going to persuade anyone and they're not speaking in any mode that is designed for that result and so but you get these Socratic conversations that just it's like they follow a new set of rules and sometimes Socrates

[01:26:25] people are so confused by this is quite often Socrates has to make the rules explicit he has to say no I want you to like respond to the thing I just said no don't just go on talking for an hour let's just like examine

[01:26:37] it bit by bit no I'm not trying to hurt you we're actually trying to do something together here right stuff that's like we would not need to say because of Socrates he established that right so it's like a new game that he figured out how to play

[01:26:47] but yet people were pulled by consistency you know or at least it's written that way so there was something there that makes it seem inevitable this was gonna happen and I'm just sort of fascinated by how it did happen that these you know where that these were

[01:27:01] presumably tacit rules of logic there are at least at least at the minimum a desire for consistency that is at the heart of the very impulse to do this I mean sometimes I actually think maybe we overestimate the degree to which in the Socratic texts there is

[01:27:19] already this sense of something like logical entailment like that is you might say oh people before Socrates must have had that and I'm like I'm not sure Socrates had it that is it's not an accident that Socrates and Plato don't come up with logic

[01:27:33] we have to wait till Aristotle for that and you look at a dialogue like the Euthydemus which is basically a bunch of just word games is how we would put it right it's like you know oh you beat your dog well your dog has puppies

[01:27:47] and it's a male dog and it's hired these puppies and so your dog is a father and therefore you beat your father because it's your dog and it's a father okay so like that's an example of an argument from the Euthydemus

[01:27:57] and we're reading this and we're just like come on this is like a joke right and it's just one thing like that and Socrates at the end of it calls those two guys who were giving those arguments philosophers right he doesn't think he's not like oh

[01:28:07] they're just playing word tricks you know we're at a point in the history of thought where the clarity of that distinction hasn't been made yet right we have Socrates hearing these different ways of using words and having a lot of faith in that power of words to like

[01:28:21] lead us to the truth right and being like well we're just gonna have to figure out how to you know what does it mean to say he's a father and he's mine but he's not my father and you know Aristotle then was gonna write the Sophistic refutations

[01:28:33] which is about like trying to systematize these various ways in which we can have fallacies and reasoning and then he's like he's gonna write logic and be like look let's come with a general way to formulate it and now that's all part of our minds

[01:28:43] and how we think we think in Aristotelian terms in a lot of ways so we're like well there's logical entailment and logical compulsion right and being compelled but that's Aristotle's logical necessity that we have learned right so you know I think part of the key is not retrojecting

[01:28:59] too much into the Socratic texts to bring it back to the gorgeous but to stay on this point of consistency that is the exact thing that Socrates is pressing over and over again I want to get Paulus to agree with Paulus I wanna get Calakles

[01:29:17] I can show you that Calakles doesn't agree with Calakles and so and the way he draws, he refutes them is by showing that there is that they're committed to something that is inconsistent with another thing they're saying so in that sense even if it's not

[01:29:33] strict entailment and there's no formalized system yet there is this sense of this is what Socrates method is all about it is this is what dialectic is all about it is making the person to have ordered beliefs coherent beliefs yes but I think it

[01:29:53] the way that it's characterized in the dialogues is more specific than that it's about coherence over time so over and over and over again you'll see in the dialogues what it means Paulus at T1 agreeing with Paulus at T2 so his interlocutors are always wavering

[01:30:09] and complaining about how they're wavering right I think at T2fro you're making my speeches move around Socrates is like I'm not doing it you're just changing your mind all the time so the situation that people find themselves in is that they keep changing their minds

[01:30:25] so they keep saying one thing and then they say another thing and what Socrates is trying to do is in effect to say the same thing over and over again and when he says these conclusions are bound down with chains of iron and adamant

[01:30:35] you could say that against me like well isn't that compulsion right I think what he means is that I always keep saying them like in every context I come back and I say this over and over again so there's a kind of I think there's a very strong

[01:30:49] association in the Socratic text between knowledge on the one hand and stability over time cognitive stability over time including like in the Meno where you have like knowledge versus true beliefs right that's sort of what's the ground of that distinction as well and I think that

[01:31:05] the temporal element can be erased once you get to Aristotle The temporal element can be erased when you get to Aristotle because it's eternal Yeah it's logical entamament and so you can sort of hang in on something else

[01:31:19] other than the fact that you're always saying the same thing but every time you try to speak you land in the same place for Socrates there's no separating of his thought from that activity I'm wondering if you think you know even

[01:31:31] like I guess maybe to go out on this question of Plato's maybe more artistic side or way of interpreting him something like symposium do you think symposium would you also say that's just a way of presenting arguments I know you probably are familiar with Martha Nussbaum's

[01:31:51] article the speech of alcibides which I love and I probably was influenced by to some degree that the dramatic structure of that because I kind of think this is true of a lot of them including the gorgeous dramatic structure of it has philosophical significance do you

[01:32:09] buy that way of reading Plato or not I don't have an imprincipal objection to it but I never find that the philosophical significance given to the dramatic structure is especially philosophically interesting I've never found that it's more interesting than the actual just philosophical content of the speeches right

[01:32:31] and so there's this idea that we're like almost I feel like there's this promise that people have been making me that we're going to get all this interesting stuff out of like you know the dialogue form and the patterns and the myths and whatever and I'm like what's

[01:32:43] the wonderful big theory that's come out of it because I can tell you some of the theories that come out of just a straight up argument we're still arguing those arguments they're fascinating and interesting there's a theory of forms we can get the

[01:32:53] theory of forms by looking at like how Plato uses images right we got it by just reading the republic so I guess part it's not it's not I'm not objecting to it I just get less out of that than out of looking at the arguments

[01:33:05] and like the symposium for me I sort of agree it's hard to it's hard to think that the sort of dramatic aspects of the symposium are not important because a lot of the speeches are kind of boring so in order

[01:33:17] to sort of validate their interest you have to somehow give them a dramatic importance but for me what is interesting about the symposium it's the connection between Socrates' speech and Alziabaiides' speech and then you know maybe bring in Erisophonies' too and this question

[01:33:29] of what is it to love another person and how much do you cling to that particular person when you love them and the symposium is an exploration of that question through the content of what these people say more than anything else as I read it. Fair enough

[01:33:43] alright well thank you so much this was a dream come true and there are so much else that we could have talked about that I want to talk to you about but I really appreciate your time it was my pleasure a poria a poria yeah

[01:34:01] we're not ending with a myth so I guess we're ending an up a ria there's two choices alright thank you so much and join us next time on Very Bad Wizards

[01:34:48] Very Good Man Just a Very Bad Wizard