Welcome back to the new thingery on David Barr with me as always is my good friend Greg or Samsa. How are you Greg? Oh, okay. Pasa.
Do you recognize that name Greg? No, no, I'm Dandel. You do. You just you just can't recall Greg or Samsa is the character and Kafka's metamorphosis.
He wakes up as a big bug and that's different kind of from the way you wake up every morning. Well, the bug is really old bug. And you wake up feeling old. Yeah, yeah.
And you're that big zero kinds. Yeah, it's my pandemic period. It'll come off once I get the, once I get the vaccine. Yeah, he walks around his house.
He's got that little long cap. He's got one of those candles with his fingers through it and beer drags on the floor as he goes around his nightgown. So I think you're Greg at home. I just bought an icon.
I'm very happy with it. Have you guys never worn a nightgown? No. How are you Alex?
I'm doing all right. How are you David? Good classes done for you. You were busy today.
You didn't answer any of my texts. Yeah, they're all so vulgar and frankly insulting many times. What were you up to today? It's a lot of work and just stuff around the house.
You know, I got my daughter coming. I got to put furniture together. I've been doing it because of classes. And then I submit grades one day.
My wife puts me to work building. Oh, it's the worst. Today. They, you know, you help me put together my son's crib.
Yeah. Yeah, putting together creams is terrible. Take that long, but you know, there's a lot of little things. This is really interesting for the listeners.
No, no, no, he's driving. He's driving. Sorry. Greg also sleeps in the crib and drinks out of a bottle, but for entirely different reasons.
It's something he's into. And so that's what I wanted to drive at. And so you can donate at the New Thinkery to buy Greg a new nappy and bottle. Follow us at the New Thinkery and write us emails if you like what you hear.
And we should tell folks what the episode is about David. The episode is about love love. Love love. So this is one thing.
Is this part four of our series? Yeah. Yeah. Plato's symposium for slow read of the dialogue.
And today we're discussing Rixamakis, the good doctor. Just a reminder listeners, we use the University of Chicago edition. So it's translated by Seth Benardetti and it's two good commentaries by Alan Bloom and Seth Benardetti. Do you want to kick us off?
Yeah. But it might be good to get a bit of a summary, but I thought more in lieu of a summary we would. I want to go back to something I said during the Phaedrus episode where I mentioned that Phaedrus's speech reveals more than Phaedrus really realizes. I think we're now after having read Azane's speech and now Eric Simicus's speech.
We're in a position to see how that might be the case. Now I'll mention just a couple of points from Phaedrus's speech. First, heiress is transformative. It makes this approximate virtue, right?
The beloved doesn't love you. You love the beloved. In order to make the beloved love you have to transform yourself into something that is more relovable and that means getting the sort of virtue. I think the primary virtue is talking about his courage.
For that reason, it's the second point, heiress is of great interest to the political community, right? It's able to adopt it or co-opt it towards the end of the common good. But also, Thirred, and this was a subtler point that Greg, I thought, really spelled that nicely because the virtue of courage and particular risk death and perhaps even necessarily culminates if you really want to prove you're risking your life, you probably have to tie. Heiress also needs some sort of theological support.
I thought Greg had some good comments on laying that out. So, now the final version of this, I think, is not Phaedra's an individual but the city that becomes the beloved. I mentioned this also because it does come up in Sucker's speech. Specifically, it becomes beloved because it promises to love you back to glorify you, right?
For risking your life, for sacrificing your life. So, I think Phaedra's reveals inadvertently something more. He notices this and he wonders at it, or at least he sees through the veneer of this function of Eros in the political community. And he seems to be somewhat disenchanted a bit.
Now this theological political role, I think because of this disenchantment, turns out to be a little bit poetic, right? Crafted or made. Invented, one of the sources that Phaedra cites is Hesiod, a poet, and with Homer, one of the founders of Greek culture. Now, because Eros is transformative, I think we can see how it's poetic, right?
You try to make yourself better, right? In order to be loved by the beloved. And the importance of all this is that it shows that in certain cases Eros sees political, theological, even cosmic support, so that Eros splits into a kind of moral and immoral form. And that's really reflected, I think, well in Pazanias and Eryximicus of speech.
Pazanias wants there to be a kind of legal form of Eros of panoraste, right? That's morally supported in the schonst and good law. Pazanias, Eryximicus, likewise, wants it to have a kind of cosmic support in the very nature of the being, says he puts it. Now, beyond this, because there is this kind of poetical or this possible disenchantment with this function, he also sets the stage not just for the next two speeches, Pazanias and Eryximicus, but also for the two poets that come in, Eros often is an Agathon.
But also because there's a disenchantment, I kind of wonder at the way this work, I think he's looking forward to the, you know, the sole philosopher who speaks Socrates. And I think what ends up coming out, the fundamental question that Phaedra says is touching on, again, I don't think he's altogether aware of this, is a question of whether Eros in mind can ever be completely reconciled, right? Eros inclines us to believe that certain courses of action, certain ways of life are towards our good, and usually you perceive your good through a kind of intelligent assessment of your interests and circumstances and so on, which would be more a function of mind than it is of some sort of erotic longing, right? Again, to go back to Hesiod, the line that Phaedra's quotes talks about how Eros deceives us, right?
Deceives us as to our good. Now, how does this all have to do with Eryximicus? Well, Eryximicus, I think, tries to reconcile Eros in mind by presenting science as a sort of matchmaking that preserves or restores the holes in nature by guiding the erotic longing of their parts. That is, the world is full of beings that are opposed to one another that have sort of erotic longings in them, and what science does is it discerns them, patches them together, and as with medicine creates a kind of harmonic or natural hole.
That's the idea, at least. That we can say, as I think we'll see, as we work through it, ultimately fails, mostly because if we look at the medical art, which is Eryximicus's art, and it's also his primary example, medicine is just gross, it's disgusting, it's not beautiful, right? It's not something that we're erotically inclined to or that we find to be beautiful. The way that this shows up in Eryximicus, the speech is not partially subtly in the way he speaks, but also the fact that in the background, Eryxophanes has the hiccups, right?
He's told by Eryximicus that his art says that he should hold his breath, he should gargle, he should sneeze, do all these things. So throughout the speech, you have these various bodily functions. So the whole time Eryximicus is speaking in this exalted way about science and Eros and how they belong together, Eryxophanes is next to him acting like this sort of one-man band of bodily functions, right? Just all these sort of disgusting noises.
So this is obviously funny, but I think it's also insightful. Eryxophanes literally says to wonder at Eryximicus the standard of orderly decency, right? When what produces order is, you know, to all opinions, so indecent. So that after Eryximicus's speech, I would suggest you can't return to these kind of moral readings of Eros.
You have to understand this indecent side or the funny side, which has greater support, I think in mind or in science or in discernment than does the orderly and decent, right? The serious and the scientific. I think Eryximicus's seriousness ends up being part of his downfall. So as far as background or how we got here, that's sort of my two cents on the matter.
Greg wants to jump in here for that. Really quick. I can't recall, but Eryximicus is the one that proposes this theme in the first place, right? I mean, do you have any thoughts about, um, dramatically, Alex, that his proposal of the theme and then the argument he lays out, can you connect those two at all?
Well, back then when we were talking about this, maybe Greg has a more concrete thought on this, but I always find it funny. Eryximicus says, Eryximicus is the father of the speech, right? But we only find out that he fathered the speech because Eryximicus, you know, udders this and says, oh, Phaedra says to me, which implies that he's been impregnated by Phaedra, and that he's the mother of the speech. So there's a kind of, there's, I think there's an interesting play here because there's male female, which are opposites, right?
Which according to Eryximicus, we used to be the proper, right? Long, but then there's also obviously a peterastic relationship between Eryximicus or Phaedra. So an anticipated one that Eryximicus also needs to justify. And Strauss's commentary, which I don't have in front of me, but he makes a lot of this and it's really quite interesting.
I suggest everybody get it's a publication of his lectures on the supposed, I think, from the 50s, is that right? Are 56 or 60? I don't know. Yeah, it was early on.
Yeah. But he talks about this a lot. And I think, so maybe that's one way in which it's looking forward to it. I think maybe Eryximicus thinks he can give a speech eventually that will make it all look beautiful and maybe this is a kind of attempt to woo Phaedra.
That would make sense, be interesting because in the dialogue, the Phaedra's Phaedra is carrying a speech that one of his lovers has written that is supposed to be, it's pretty clear, is attempting to woo him, right, to win him over to seduce him. And it would be fitting if both of them write these sort of subtly, because it's not very clear that the speech in the Phaedra is actually, right, it's praising the non-lover and that you should gratify the non-lover. This guy who's in love with him, retends to not be in love with him so that he'll gratify him. Eryximicus does something similar where he seems to be talking about the cosmos and everything, but he might be trying to win over Phaedra's.
That would be maybe two ways in which I might try to connect his speech to the proposal of the topic. That's a good question. Oh, and Greg, so sorry, I apologize. I think so that Alex, Greg, you were going to kind of, is it's not a real guy Alex?
Eric Simicke, any luck, Greg? Yeah, I think so. I think so. We sort of, I can connect this a little bit to your question to Alex that, you know, I, my own, I'll say my own name, I think that his speech is the most boring or seems to be the most boring of the various speeches we could on love.
And so there's a tendency, at least my teacher sort of skip over and do it very quickly and to give it a short shrift. And, but then you've got to remember, as you rightly pointed out, that Eric Simicke is in many ways the person who's responsible for the speeches in the first place. He brought the issue up. I think you guys already addressed them the questions as to perhaps why.
I can just give a few more points about him. He seems to be older. We know that he's not a big drinker. He's not the reason he wants to get these speeches, at least in part, is because he doesn't want to have a big drinking party like there had been in the previous night.
So he's somehow a valetutinarian to use a big fancy ACT word. He seems to be overly concerned with the pleasure of the, or the human health of the body. He's older. He's in love with Phaedrus, who's also present.
He's a non drinker. He's a doctor. I guess Alex mentioned that just a moment ago. So he's a, like a scientist or I think the Greek talks about him possessing an art consistently, but I think from our perspective, we might close more closely identify him with a contemporary medical doctor or a scientist.
I guess, is he kind of a quack though? This doesn't air stock. I can't remember this. I didn't know medicine was probably quackery up until about a hundred years ago, but it still is.
He didn't, uh, definitely. There's an off-meade to hiccups and he's like, you saw a bit like this and then he keeps having the hiccups or something. Yeah. So in, in, in Plato, most often medicine is equated with two sorts of procedures, cutting and burning.
So basically they would lock things off and then they would cauterize it. That's about the extent of it. And this is, this is before the age of sophisticated techniques like leashes and, and, and, love letting, yeah. We're the scientific procedure by which we determined Greg is a witch, right?
For those of you who have listened to him. We had to kill him to do that. That was good. That was a good time.
Yeah, I don't know where we're going to. He was a, he was a scientist. So I think as we get these various different accounts of love, I think we'll probably get through this when Alex leads us through the speech, but we're getting a sort of what a scientist might tell us about love, what we might learn from somebody who thinks that's and therefore, somebody who thinks that love can be explained, I'll exaggerate because I don't think this is simply Eric Simikis' view, but just a natural scientific explanation of, of love, which we'll see is defective. But I'll just ask this question.
You guys, before we run, I have one more point about his life. Eric Simikis was accused of the crime of sacrilege. So much like Alsibites later in the dialogue, we have another guy here who may have been implicated in the crime of religious impieties. But as we move to the speech, one of the questions I was on that point, Greg, run me correctly from incorrect, but from what I remember from things I've read over the years, isn't everybody, but Socrates and Aristophanes accused of the...
Socrates is accused. No, no, no, of the coronation of the mysteries, right? Oh, yeah. I think there's some, I did look this up actually.
There's some question as to whether or not Eric Simikis was apparently definitely charged with sacrilege. There's some question about whether or not it was the one that it was the same one that else is why he's got trouble for. Yeah. So you guys are telling me that he's some boring doctor.
This is the most boring segment of the symposium. Yeah. At midnight, at night falls, he goes around and... Alex Holissi, Gus O'Pinai, off the Hermai.
Is that really what's going on? I'm stuck to believe this. Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Haid. Sounds about right. I mean, I accept that history. Dr.
Kiel and Mr. Haid? Oh, geez. I'm not even going to touch that.
Oh, man, I got to touch that. But I think Eric Simikis is the type of census on that kind of thing. No, no, no, come on. Is it worth explaining taking a step back from the dialogue for listeners who aren't necessarily in the play-doh and asking, isn't there something to this?
I mean, don't we think that scientists or doctors are precisely those who we return to when we have problems with love? I mean, I know that Alex in a couple years is going to be going to his doctor for love help, right? And there's physical love help, right? You can go get prescriptions or things to recapture arrows.
But there's also, I mean, psychiatrists or psychologists. I mean, don't we... This isn't my view, but I at least think it's worth putting on the table. Don't we actually...
I mean, as Americans, as modernists, whatever. Don't we put some stock in the idea that these scientists actually do have some knowledge about these things that is somehow above or superior to the knowledge that ordinary folks have about this stuff? I agree with you, Greg. I think that's a spot on.
And also their language, not much has changed, that they still talk about love and compartmentalize love in the same, like, a septic rhetoric that we read now with Eric Simikis. It's the same kind of language. It's just kind of transposed a few thousand years. But it leaves you feeling in the same cold way.
But the market is there. You're right. And the biggest convinced that they somehow know more than like a soul doctor. Alex goes around bolder claiming that he's a soul doctor.
People just try to get to something weird. Around here, that would work. I mean, the local leaders are gullible to any kind of snake oil-witched doctor. Yeah.
But is it fair to say that you guys, I mean, that Plato... Look, clearly, he's not putting Eric Simikis up as the guy who knows these things the most. And he's clearly making fun of him. But even by raising him as a possible type, is he pointing to the fact that the scientific or the medical view of this actually does latch on to a partial truth or is in some way...
No speech here is simply false, right? They have to capture some aspect of love in some way. It is bodily. I mean, I don't want to get too...
I mean, don't the scientists tell us that when certain odors hit your nose or certain sights hit your eyes or round shapes apparently are really helpful and colors, red is a color this way? Isn't there something to this or am I? Why are you laughing? I think there's something to it.
I mean, one thing that I think is important, I mean, we see that there's kind of contemporary correlatives of this figure, right? That we see a kind of version of this, right? And there's a sense that if you can understand scientifically, if you can really pursue the knowledge that would somehow make us at home in the world, right? Or bring us into harmony is a word that he likes with the world.
That would be really powerful. And we do want that. So if you think of something like evolutionary biology, right? People love these kind of explanations because they make it say, oh, no, you're supposed to be acting this way.
It's a rational thing. It actually makes a lot of sense given the way that we've evolved to be at home in our world. And so it's supposed to be kind of normative in that sense. So I think there's something serious to that longing that Plato wants to diswire.
Often when there's somebody who's ridiculous, I usually think they're... Like ion. Like ion. Like as ridiculous as ion is.
Yeah. So many figures like this. I would even say... I'll say this sort of preliminarily.
The more ridiculous the interlocutor, the more serious the problem raised by that person. Yeah. I mean, Validus is a great example, right? They're anatists, right?
They're through the most ridiculous characters. I mean, they're idiots. They can't think their way out of a wet paper bag and yet, you know, they end up getting Socrates killed. So I think that's a fair point.
Yeah. Another thing just on this is that we are looking at... We look at him and we say, okay, well, we do like to rely on expertise to some extent. We also, I think most judicious people realize there's a limit to how much they can satisfy.
You're giving people are just idiosyncratic and you don't have particular needs that can't necessarily be answered by general science. But where's the limit really? Right? We also since this sometimes we oppose science against our own good, right?
So presuming that you push science to its limits, where does it actually break? I think that's really interesting too. When you see Eric's image is try to make this science of erotics or whatever you want to call it, you know, what he wants to push it to the whole of existence. It doesn't actually end up working.
So... I think we should transition to this point. So it's clear by the way, we're getting a speech by a man who is a scientist or a medical doctor who thinks that his own understanding of love is superior insofar as he's viewing it from the scientific viewpoint. So we're going to get an overly...
Does it? Go ahead, go on. No, no, no. What does it...
He, at least at the beginning of his speech, doesn't he still observe the categories imposed by the former speaker? Pausanias is doubling of eros? Yeah, he does. No question.
So he's not totally... I don't know what I'm trying to say. Well, they're both more or less, right? I think he likes this distinction.
It works for him. Yeah, so I'm wondering if he accepts it. He's not striking out on his own. Well, it's first of all...
A lot of problems arise. It's an expansion of what's a more political distinction, right, to the cosmic realm, right? So this isn't a problem for Pausanias because we all have erotic longings. They need to be cultivated by law in the right direction, right?
And so it's very much a matter of politics and law, right, and custom. But then you go to Eryxisticus and he maintains the same distinction, but he magnifies it to the realm of nature. It's not blurring of nature and convention that he needs to somehow figure out. Doesn't really work.
And then also... I'm sure you say that he had... I mean, the tension maybe to put a point on it is that he admires convention and nature, but doesn't recognize that his admiration of each is in some tension with the other. Because medicine doesn't exist by nature, right?
Medicine is a convention or an art or something that humans have made. So he's very proud of his status as someone who's a scientist. But on the other hand, he seems to be very much driven, as Alex just mentioned. He's impressed by nature and he's drawn to nature.
And by the way, once therefore, to justify his erotic longings on the basis of nature, right? So his own longings are natural. And by the way, we should point out that again, that Eryxisticus's erotic longings are homosexual or even petarastic. So his argument there is that the natural human longing is this petarastic longing, which is really...
But maybe listeners don't have problems with it. But that heterosexual love is therefore less natural. That seems a little bit bizarre, I would say. Yeah, well, he really flounders on this.
I mean, it's a very difficult for him. Because on the one hand, there's the contrary. Right? So if you take somebody who's in a sick condition, you know, if you're rejecting your new liver or something like that, right?
You need to undergo some kind of procedure that will reconcile these contours, these things that are opposed to each other, right? And medical or recousels contours. Well, what would the sexual contours be about male and female, right? This is a point Strauss makes.
So then what place is there for petarastic? Well, he brings this up in... Where is it? I think it's at 186, I think it's B.
He says the nature of bodies has this double arrows for the health and the sins of the body or by agreements to be different and dissimilar. The dissimilar desires and loves, dissimilar things. I know what you're doing, heres stuff and he's like, you have to gargle. Sorry.
What do you do? Gargling all the time is he's hiccuping all the time. He's doing all he's told, he said he's hiccuping and then he said, you need to hold your breath. So you have to puffing up his cheeks and everything.
And then he's told also to gargle and to sneeze. And then at the end he says, oh, it's the sneezing that works. So at the end one big final at you. So as it progresses, he's trying things.
He's just sneezing. So he's got like a feather raised nose. And then, you know, so does this indicate that he's Eric Simicus is kind of the the weak man of the weak man of the group. The Aristophanes instinctually knows that, you know, I think so.
I mean, the beautiful part about this. So first off, it's the one side of bachelor party where there was a weak man of the evening. You were there talking about look, I had to lock myself in a closet to make sure you guys would stop me. I'm not talking about you.
It wasn't you. It was a different. Okay. So I'll just say that as I mentioned earlier, I think this seems to be the most boring speech.
But if you read the text closely, it shows you that Aristophanes is making these variety of silly bodily noises the entire time that Eric Simicus is what he's making, which makes it kind of comical. But it also shows you the incongruity at the heart of Eric Simicus's speech because the speech is all about the oriliness of the body. Meanwhile the comic poet is showing before our eyes how it's the body is not so neatly controlled a little bit. Anyway, I'll say about because this is I try to figure out what Eric Simicus name means.
Now, Macos means some kind of battle. Now I looked in the, you know, the standard Dagenarian lexicon and there's a word eruxes. Okay. It's an equivalent to the word eruxes, right?
Oh, which comes from the verb erogomai. Oh, actually. Which means the belch, which means the belch. So the best is the battle of the belch.
It's the best I can come up with. But that would be hilarious if he has this belch. And it would be interesting to see what the word comes up at all in the text. In fact, I can look that up as we're speaking.
But so yeah, I mean, he says, so there's this double arrows, the health and sickness of the body or by agreement different and dissimilar, similar desires and loves the dissimilar desires and loves to some of things. But there's one love that presides over the healthy state and another over the sickly. Just as Pusanius was saying, is a fine thing to gratify those who are good among human beings and disgraceful to gratify the intemperate. So too, in the case of men's bodies taken by the sounds that is a fine and needful thing to gratify the good and healthy things of each body.
This is what has the name of the medical, but is shameful to gratify the bad and sickly things. And one has to abstain from favoring them if one is to be skilled. So it looks like on his account, Pederasty would be intemperate, right? He talks a little bit about this, right, about granting it, but in moderate amounts, right?
So he's, he's not just moderate, I think, with trick, but maybe he's also sexually moderate as well, which would be interesting because then this, this great master of heros would be fairly unerotic, generally. But he also sent away the dancing girls, right? I mean, the beginning. So there, and he doesn't, yeah, yeah, right?
Isn't he the one? It's interesting. I don't remember. I'm pretty sure it was him.
I thought the boys get sent, but the women are retained. Eric Simica says this is 176 E. He dismisses the flu girl. Let her go flu for herself if she wants.
Yeah. Oh, all right. Yeah, jeez. Jake, blast that out.
He can't the Lord's name in vain. We're a pious group here. Unbelievable. Should we talk more substantively about some of the, I mean, I want to jump to divination automatically, but maybe we should, we should wait a bit and maybe there's something Greg you want to, you want to cover first.
No, go ahead. I mean, I'd suggest that maybe just reading, this is one of the shortest speeches. So I was suggesting maybe we could read some out loud, but maybe that's not a good idea. You already talked about the opposite.
I think that's extremely important. I think this nature convention thing is extremely important. He has this list of three arts. This is at 187 A that are captain, he says, by, by arrows.
So love somehow there's this arc that brings him into being. So food is this right? Not only medicine, but also gymnastics and farming. So medicine, gymnastics and farming are all the product of arrows.
It's weird to think about in some ways. Why that would be the case. So art brings about food and the health of the child. That makes a little sense, right?
Medicine might even make some, they all make sense in some way, I suppose. Well, is that why you're so buff? So you look good to the ladies in that grandpa's cheese barn? Yes, the cheese is the power of the cheese.
It's the power of the cheese. Yeah. But I guess what I'm, I guess, I suppose, but in all three of those cases, nature also seems like it would play a part, right? Yeah, and I mean, to understand art, it's difficult because art is a human activity, right?
And many arts are conventional, right? There was no art of computer science in political time and now it's very, you know, popular and important art, yet art also is supposed to understand the beings, right? The way things are. And so there, you know, I think within art itself, you have this peculiar admixture.
It would be less problematic if it were not so moral and political, right? So much of what he's trying to do is find a kind of, he's trying to find a basis in reality to exalt medicine and to exalt pederasty, which are just his inclinations, his chosen way of life. And he wants to be the same thing. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. Yeah. It's like, unlike us, I mean, he's very concerned with grounding his erotic inclinations in nature, like to say that his inclinations are unnatural would be deeply insulting to himself. Yeah.
But then he has to reconcile, you know, his desire to follow his inclinations with, you know, the claims he makes about art, or maybe the one, maybe I've got that backwards, his inclinations lead him to make claims about art that are not the case. So maybe this is the way to get to the divination part. So on the one hand, we have medicine, which reconciles opposites, but you also need music, right? You need a proper education that makes you be tempered so that you can lead a healthful life.
That's what I have, Eric, so basically saying so you have a restorative and then a preservative art or something like that, or something that ensures your continued health, right? But then he goes beyond that and he says, well, when it comes to the cosmos and not just human bodies, the core layer to medicine is astronomy, right? That allows you to understand, am I right, Greg? There's a 180-h-c.
I think so, yeah. He says, when I read it and then you collect your thoughts and give us the interpretation, this is just above, this 180-h-c, just above 180-h-c. So Eric Semicas says, furthermore, all the sacrifices and things over which divination presides, these are concerned with the communing of gods and human beings with one another, involve almost nothing else but the protection and healing of arrows. For impiety as a whole is wants to arise if one does not gratify the decent arrows and honor and venerate him in every deed, but instead gratifies and honors the other one.
It matters that concern parents, both living and dead and gods. And so it is accordingly that divination is charged with the overseeing and healing of lovers. Divination in turn is the craftsmanship of friendship between gods and human beings, since it has expert knowledge of human erotics, which are just to do with sacred law and piety. You maybe want to elaborate on that thought.
I'm sorry. We only have him on the show because he's the money man. He's been floating the whole bill for this. He's like the cradle of this thinkery.
Yeah, I could not pay attention because David was making all those vulgar noises. You were the one that was going to gurgling a little bit first place. Gurgling, I got to get started. Gurgling.
Shall I read again? Would that help? No, I think just break the bullet and try to just read through this thing. I really am sure this is strong in business.
I don't think I paid enough attention to it. If it was wise to divination stuff because it jumped out to both you and Alex. So I think the so when we're talking about astronomy, right, we're trying to understand the order of things, right? How the universe works.
Now you also need a way to treat this through an art, right? It's not enough to just understand how things actually function, right? If this is an art, it should be able to have an effect, right? It's a change thing, right?
Like medicine, right, brings our irony. Oh, I see. Okay. But let's be honest, right?
You know, Descartes talks about becoming a master of nature and he says, oh, we can control the heavens, right? And all this sort of stuff. I'm still working on that, right? I mean, that still hasn't happened as sophisticated as we are.
So, you know, if he's pressed and he wants science to have this sort of cosmic support and this cosmic power to preserve the whole, well, we can't do that. The gods do that. So what would be the human art that has an effect on these things can be nothing more than divination, right? Following secret law that have to be piety.
And also, we're very much outside the realm of science, right? We're now just in a, you know, pure piety where, you know, we pray to gods and we burn, you know, thigh bones on an altar towards the gods and hope that they give us good things in turn, but the seasons are harmonious with our lives, right? So we have a good crop and everything like that. And so I think this is a sign that Eric Simic is this principle, right, that art is somehow the key to the harmony of man and also the whole, that there's this sort of cosmic principle of arrows supporting all of it, which he needs.
He needs it to be natural, right? And he needs it to essentially therefore extend across the whole of nature. It ends up meaning that that really the true art of the whole is divination and following secret law, which is not at all that he intended. And this, I think, points to the fact that as conducive as the whole might be towards art, it's not wholly conducive to it, right?
It doesn't simply support all art. There is something about the whole that resists a sort of technical or technological understanding that therefore, you know, rejects this human attempt to order the whole or find a, you know, perfect place in the whole, such as Eric Simic is describes. Nice. The whole is not moral.
It's more on support morality. Sorry, just the combination of that is divine law, right? Yeah, I think so. I'm actually struck by the end here trying to make sense of this because the thing that makes more immediate sense to me is how arrows is related to transgression of law and impiety.
But here, but I think that he might be honest, I think some of the later speeches are going to develop that. But what I just said that arrows or love in a way is trying to overcome pious or divine sanctions or rules or something like this. But there's a way in which love can be understood as being in harmony with the law, the divine law and with piety. I think I'd like to think more about this.
Maybe you guys can help me do it, but I'm not sure if I can even make sense of it. Well, it's completely, maybe I'll try one step out of this is very helpful, but it's very, at the very least, it's very, it's clear to me that love is bound up with the law and with the gods in some way. Obviously with divine law in particular, divine law, because I mean, it would be weird to be erotically, I think it's to quote to prefer James Caesar's comment, right? It's weird to be erotically inclined towards the New Jersey State Constitution.
But there might be something fundamentally like deeply fulfilling about a law that comes from God to help govern us. Good. Good. So the law or the divine is somehow harmonizing our erotic longings.
That's what you'd like to do. Yeah. Yeah. So aiming therefore to make complete to fulfill the longings.
That would be the maybe I mean, it's it's hard because you want to say, well, isn't a lot more about pheumos than arrows, right? The other platonic psychological passion, right? Which is what you're minding anger or spiritiness, right? Yeah.
This desire that you see justice not no matter how ugly it might be, whereas arrows is inclined some level towards the beautiful. But I think one way to reconcile this is that perhaps yes, but perhaps that would be enough for just law for divine law. It's the reason it's so powerful is that it does make the whole into a beautifully ordered whole, right? So that would be it's not without an erotic appeal or an appeal to arrows, which is why it may be so deep of a challenge.
Do we want to go from here fellows? I mean, so I think this is great because this right after this, it's like, wow, what a high end, right? And then I'd say, and then I'd say, there's, there's, there's been like, you know, sneezing and burping and stuff. And what I think is really interesting is as he's doing all that, which is kind of funny, especially as we, you know, dramatize it at the same time, it's a really powerful counterpoint, right?
Like, if this is what your art requires, cutting, burning, gargling, sneezing, is, is orderliness equivalent to decency? Right? Is it moral or is it actually rather disgusting? Right?
Um, this is, so this is actually you and I read the economics with some folks. And this actually, uh, this is actually very helpful. So because the idea that imposing order is thought to make the world more beautiful, but it might actually require doing a certain kind of violence to the world. And therefore to make the world beautiful, my required doing some very un-beautiful things to it.
Oh, it's very good. I like it. And it might be, and it might be, I think this sets the stage for Aristophanes speech where we are talking about arrows as two people coming together as a whole. And one of the ugly implications of that, which we'll talk about then is that it requires the negation of the individual.
That's not a very beautiful thing. And so there's a kind of tragic element to it. But what I really like about this is as he's doing all this, he's obviously been paying attention, right? And it's led him to a state of wonder.
So I think, and this is essentially a sense that as much as he wants to have this beautiful account, the mind wonders at this orderliness. Notice this account or example. And it turns out that this perfect whole, including this sort of reconciliation of law and nature, or technically of law and nature and of science and piety, it doesn't stand up to something as common as the sneeze, right? The, the helpful sneeze.
And this means that that somehow mind has to be given a place and the self, the extent to which these holes that arrows strives for, this completeness might be poetic or fictitious, right? So the poets have to come in. I think that's the, my, my take on the end of this. So it's a fair to say.
So if I were to press you, then Alex on, so we're trying to get full voice to what Eric Simic has figured out, but it seems like he's missing something then. What is he missing that the whole, the whole is not orderly? Yeah. And that therefore sometimes truth is funny, right?
I see. I think that's what the sneeze is. It's funny, but it's true. It induces wonder.
And that the sneeze itself is funny because it reminds us that we are not orderly beings. Yeah, or that our order is gross. That that would be what keeps us healthy. It can be gross, right?
I see. Okay. Have you ever laughed at a sneeze? Yeah.
I once made a girl, a maid or drink out of her nose. Nice. Is that sneeze? Can you sneeze water?
I don't know. It seems like close enough. I was thought so. So you know, well, oh yeah, she started laughing at herself outdoors.
So we were out at a restaurant. We were like in one of the tables in the middle of the room with like people around us. We weren't like in a corner. And I, you know, you think something's funny.
People laugh and gas comes out their nose, right? Air. Then something's really funny. Liquid like their drink will come out their nose.
Super funny solids come out. Yeah. So like a carrot, like a carrot flies out their nostril or something like that. I think that's the, you know, David just grimaced because I think he thinks it's disgusting.
But it's true, right? This is science. So can I ask you about why it's funny? Why is it funny when someone sneezes?
I mean, it's fun. Her barks are farts. I mean, it's funny when somebody sneezes in the middle of a speech about how beautiful medicine is. What makes it just the incongruity?
Yeah. It's not that we prescribe and yet it's. I thought at some point he stopped. I thought that right at the end.
Is he stopped? Right at the end. Yeah. Yeah.
And that's what in his, his pausing or the termination of his bodily functions also leads rixymicus to terminate his speech to I guess it was the natural conclusion. Does law presuppose congruity? It's not even saying that. It's not saying that quite right.
Does the law presuppose that the world is orderly, which would mean there's no incongruities between what the law requires and the way that things are. And the incongruities that we see in the world make us laugh because they're momentary reminders that the order is broken. But we laugh because they're quickly healed. Like the guy, you know, the sneeze stops.
Whereas if three of us were out drinking and David sneezed and sort of burped up a little bit, we'd laugh. If he didn't die, eventually we'd stop laughing. Right. And so there's, I don't know if I'm saying this as clearly as I want to say it, but I wonder if Eric, Eric, Eric, this is just conjecture based on our reading.
And the way that strikes me as a serious kind of guy and the seriousness seems to go along with his being a scientist, being a doctor and viewing the world in his very orderly harmonious way. But if that's not the way the world is, then I guess that for me that would call into question the law as a guaranty, a guarantor of the order in the universe. And in fact, things are actually much more hickory than they might have seen. I don't know if that's helpful.
So let me, so let's put it like this, right? So we have medicine and then we have divination, right? As sort of human and a cosmophersion. That would therefore be the cosmic equivalent for divination or sacred law of airstoffany sneezes and gargles and things.
Plagues. Plagues. Yeah. I think generally the problem is with him tonight.
I'm just trying to go to him into coming back. He's not adding off. Yeah. It's been a long day.
Yeah. And I think he resigned today bar from the official design. I mean, the book of Job is right. Mm hmm.
It's got a lot of ugly things that happen to it. It's not the problem of the Odyssey. So I think it's medically disgusting. Yeah.
It's literally not. It's cosically ugly. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Both of those things. Yeah. Very good.
Everybody's happy that their kid becomes a doctor until they tell their parents that I'm just really fascinated with proctology. Just all I want to do for the rest of my life. All of a sudden it doesn't look so noble does it? What does a proctologist do?
I need to let me just look at them. Oh. I don't know. David could probably tell you he's an amateur sort of finite back alley.
Put doctor before my name friends. Is that it? Are we done? We didn't ask for questions.
Oh, yeah. I really don't like this dialogue. We're in and I don't know why we've done nothing to persuade you otherwise. I guess it's just sounds stupid.
But it's not because it explain everything. I find it exactly. Like this is an exhausting, I find it supposedly exhausting. Because there's so many accounts, it saps the arrow side of the love question for me.
If that makes sense at all. It's just erotic man. So you're just talking about it. Wrestling.
Sorry. Maybe we're about to answer that. Yeah. Yeah.
Right. You still, but I, uh, I'm serious. I just, I don't see like the, this isn't as appealing to me and it doesn't keep me quite as engaged as other dialogues. I don't, I don't know.
Is the Republic fire you up about justice? Yeah. Well, it makes it interesting for me. It makes it interesting for me.
With this, this arrows, uh, it, it, it slackens my interest in the question of arrows. That's the best way I can put it. But I know I'm alone in this. Half of my students have always had the same feeling.
Yeah. Half as generous. Like 90%. I mean, they're like, we'll see the next recording.
Airsofthenes account is right. Like that's, it's riveting. Yeah. It's more than beautiful.
Yeah. And I will say it might not be true. Maybe. I mean, but I think it's true.
If we mean, I think the Airsofthenes speech has been a capture of the human, um, I think it captures most clearly what most people mean by love. It's the best portrayal of what ordinary folks, myself included, anybody, what we all mean by it. I think that's Airsofthenes' speech. And your other half.
You're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, uh, you're the, uh, German choir. But the, uh, I think the most interesting thing, we can save this for the very, very end of the dialogue. Maybe last. The ad, hello.
The last episode is, uh, I think like the darker implications of what it means to be clear-sided about arrows, uh, in what life, you know what I mean? What, I mean, when you sell this out in front of your wife, you know, like that kind of stuff. Shh. I mean, first of all, my wife doesn't even listen to me around the house.
There's no way she's listening to podcast. No, no, no, no. But, uh, but I mean, we, maybe we haven't done a good job of selling this and we can start this next episode. Maybe I can say a couple of things about this.
But what they have to say is, look, arrows is that human passion that seems to promise the most rewarding, fulfilling life. Literally fulfilling, very, you complete, right? And yet everybody's kind of different conception of it in this dialogue, right? And in life, people have very conceptions of what will make them complete.
And it turns out arrows has a wide variety of meanings, that's just love of another person, right? Socrates connects it to creativity or we'll call creativity, connects it to political ambition, right? Um, to, uh, discovery, right? Uh, of, of new, uh, all right, right?
There's a kind of erotic longing there. And then he eventually tries to equate it with philosophy, right? And so it turns out there are a number of activities. And the question is, well, what is this longing really that we all seem to have on some level to have a complete or happy or perfect life?
And why is it so hard to satisfy? Can it be satisfied? Can we know whether it can be satisfied or not in principle for that practice? And I think that's, that ends up being a really big question.
And looking at people who have these different opinions and different accounts of arrows is on a certain level, I think quite, quite important, um, to assessing that desire. I mean, maybe that doesn't convince David because he's got it all figured out. He's had all these children. This is that that was a fabulous, those fabulous, the way you just put it Alex.
Uh, that was, this, that's intriguing. I think that was good. I don't know how long to do this. Thank you.
So it's been like at least 40 minutes. I think Greg, you said you had some lightning round questions. You wanted to do. Um, no, for the next week, I have some lightning rounds.
I could mix them up real quick. Do you believe in love? Alex? Yes.
Good. David? Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure.
We're right. You know, of course, of course. I believe in love that people love is lightning round. Uh, it was the name of the first girl you're in love with Alex.
Oh, give me a second. David, you answer this. David. Oh, no, no, no, no, I'm not.
Uh, it's not playing that game. High school, it was high school. High school? No, but you never like in like preschool and you just have like a crush on a girl?
No. Okay. I forget this girl. I need to, I need to look this up because I need to find her and cuss her out because she told me she had a crush on me, right?
And I resisted. And then finally I turned around and she had a crush on another girl. And this was now another dude. And then she, uh, she, uh, we filled up these Valentine's Day things like, Oh, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then one of them was, who do you like in the class? And I wrote her and she wrote, I think it was this kid Jimmy. Did you take him out? Did you take him out on the playground after that?