Flagg Taylor on Jan Patočka's The Spiritual Person & the Intellectual

Welcome to Enduring Interest. I'm your host, Flag Taylor, and this is a special episode that yeah, yes. No, no, no, no, no. This is the new thingery.

I thought we had this worked out for sure. Shoot some respect. So that's a friendly cooperation crossover. It's like what the kids are talking about these days on the TikTok all the time, the crossovers.

So you can listen to it at the new thingery or you can listen to it sometime after January 2025. That's an interesting place on a permanent hiatus because he's not so bad. So most about it. Yeah.

So welcome to both of our podcasts. Yeah. This is our guest flag, Taylor, or we're his guest, Greg and Alex, I don't know, depending on which podcast you listen to. So welcome.

We're going to do an essay today, right? Yes, sure. Do an essay lecture by a Czech philosopher called Jan Patochka, who I will tell you more about in a bit, but talk about the significance of the essay and the context for it. But yeah, lots of rich themes in the essay about kind of responsibility and justice and the life of philosophy.

So I thought it would be in your wheelhouse, in the new thingery's wheelhouse. Last time you were on, you were one of our early guests, Walker Percy essay. Yeah. I want to clarify because I confused some people last time.

I claimed that Walker Percy was one of Leo Strassett's favorite American philosophers and that he even considered writing a book about him called Percy Cushion and the Art of Writing. And somebody missed the joke. It was like, wow, I didn't realize that. I repeated this on Twitter.

Just to be clear, it was a bad joke. Okay. I mean, I liked it the second time or it was actually better this time than the first time. Yeah.

Can I tell you guys a story about, you know, I know Flag has always been interested in check thinkers and this sort of thing. We've had some discussion about it. I also mentioned Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. I met a bunch of guys out in, I was on a hiking trip in Montana.

I can't believe I told you guys a story before. I came on a hiking trip out west to Poland, excuse me, to Montana. I met a bunch of guys who were back back in from Europe. And it's actually one of the most terrifying moments of my life.

There's some guys from Germany and Poland and this other. And we actually got, we came up upon a family of bears. Like, it was kind of terrifying. And like luckily, I mean two or three other guys escaped, but honestly, they killed like three of them got mauled to death by these bears.

Like, it's kind of terrifying. Yeah, it's oh my gosh. Yeah, isn't it terrible? Like we had to be a part of the party when the Rangers came back to the center.

They actually killed the bears. And we thought that the she bear was sort of attacked them all killed them all. But when they did the dissection, it turns out the check was in the mail. That's a long lead off.

But we thought. You have another. She can eat checkers before you wrap yourself. You got to get the producer to edit that out.

That's really that's great. Anyway, you probably use his my eyes started wondering because like here we go. It's a stupid setup for a bad joke. He's like giggling himself about human beings being Ian.

I thought I was going to be like a porridge. No, I thought it was a real story. I was on board. That's great.

I hope the folks at home are on board for that too. And that really terrible payoff. But speaking of actual check people, who is this guy Jan? But Tochka.

Yeah, so interesting fascinating life. He was born in 1907 and died in 1977. And the circumstances of his death are important, but I'll postpone that for later. He first met Edmund Husserl in Paris in 1928 and 29.

Then he went to Freiburg and studied with Husserl in Heidegger in 1933 while doing his doctoral work at Charles University in Prague. And in 1935 he actually organized a Husserl's lectures in Prague that would become the book that might be known to some of your more philosophically inclined listeners of the crisis of the European Sciences. I became a professor at Charles University late of 1936, I think, memory service. Charles Zavakki is an occupy by the Nazis for six years during World War II.

The Communists come to power in 1948 in a coup in Czechoslovakia. And a year later, Petochka is forced out of his professorship because he refused to join the Communist Party. In the 50s and 60s, he's employed as a kind of researcher, archivist, and in different academies and institutions in Prague. In 1968, he gets to come back to Charles University as a result of what's called the Prague Spring.

This was a kind of reform movement within the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia and it resulted in some loosening of censorship laws and people coming back into jobs that they had been kicked out of. And so for a very brief period of 68 to 72, he's back as a professor at Charles University. But then of course, the Soviets sent tanks into the country in 68 and there's this kind of crackdown massive purge to the party was called the normalization regime where they wanted to return to normal communism. And in 1972, Petochka was sent into early retirement as a result of that coming back into power of the hardline Communists.

He does some underground education, underground seminars in the 1970s, and this is the circumstances for the lecture that we're going to talk about today. And then in the fall of 1976, he meets, I don't know if Matt for the first time, but he was connected with Vassal Pavel and some other Czech intellectuals that were considering forming an organization called Charter 77 to protest the injustices of the Communist regime. And he agrees to become one of the first three spokespersons of Charter 77. He writes a couple of very short, the Samis.

essays kind of about what the charter is and what it's supposed to be, what it means that are published very early in 1977. And those essays become very influential and meaningful for lots of checks. But in March of 77, he is interrogated basically for eight hours a day, I think for about seven or eight days, and eventually dies of a brain hemorrhage, I think partially as a result of these brutal interrogations. And so he becomes obviously an important kind of figure in this dissonant movement, not only because of the substance of his thought, but because of his sacrifice and what that sacrifice kind of represented.

So a lot of people kind of call him the Socrates of Czechoslovakia at that point. And he dies at the same age even as Socrates, right? He says we're in 07 and he's he's killed in 77. Yeah, yeah, I don't actually I don't know his birthday, but yeah, yeah, 70 ish.

Yeah, and so and then his lots of his writings are circulated in Samis dot in the 70s and explain the folks that is not everyone knows what that means. Oh, Samis dot is just it's a Russian word that just means self publishing. And so, you know, anyone who wrote anything that was not approved by the party, would have to basically have a kind of underground publisher where it would be typed in secret and circulated in secret. And so yeah, lots of his writings became influential.

Some of them were shuttled out of the country and then translated into different languages. And so I'm sure in the 70s and 80s, there were already German and French translations of some of his philosophic work. And he's become, you know, since his death, he's also become an important kind of philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, you know, we're working in the vein of Husserl and Heidegger and others. So that's a kind of basic overview of his life and work.

What's his what was his what was his you mentioned, some of these essays have been very influential. What is his legacy been what are some of his main contributions that people still talk about today or take away from it today? Well, I think probably his most influential book in English is called the Herraticl Essays in the Philosophy of History, which were given started out as underground lectures in the 70s. And actually, the lecture we're giving we're looking at today was given after one of the lectures that was given as the I think the third Herraticl essay.

And so his conception of history has to do with was trying to think of a parallel, but it's his understanding of history is that history begins when people problematize their life and think about it reflectively. It's something I think what he means is something like what Strauss discusses in natural right history when he talks about understanding the good is the ancestral, but then moving towards well, what's natural, what's you know, what's beyond the ancestral. I think something like that is what the tauchka means by living historically, living in living in history. And so that those essays have become, I think, influential in English.

And then the second book that you'll hear about is called Plato in Europe, which are his discussions, mostly a Plato in Aristotle. So those two books, I think, but there are others. I mean, in German and French that, you know, more phenomenologically inclined scholars, I think of have mind. We should jump into this essay.

What are we reading from 1975? But were we reading what's the context of this specific essay? This was one of the underground. Yeah, this is so he was at this point, he's not allowed to publish or teach.

And so his some of the students that he had had at Charles University and even new students who maybe he had never met at Charles University started to flock to his underground seminars. I mean, imagine someone like, I mean, your recent guests, Michael Davis, Mary Nichols, right, not being allowed to work in an actual university. But the word went out that Michael Davis is giving a seminar in a kind of private apartment in New York City or something, right? You can imagine given that his reputation, people would flock to it.

So I imagine, you know, this isn't someone's flat. They're probably, I would guess 30 to 35 people in attendance. And so this was a kind of impromptu lecture that was given after this formal presentation of this third, uh, heretical essay. And he's clearly trying to think through and communicate to his, to his students here, the difference between someone who lives the life as an intellectual meaning, someone who publishes things who makes their living writing and thinking, but someone who is genuinely devoted to writing and thinking, right, for the purpose of, of pursuing meaning and finding an answer to life's deepest questions.

So he's, he's trying to draw distinction. I think people were kind of in the intellectual life in the same way that you would find any other vocations that you would be a woodworker or whatever and draw the things between that and people who are in it for, um, for the right reasons to find to find meaning. And so that's the, the kind of beginning of the of the theme of the lecture is how do you tell the difference between those two people, the people who just are kind of cultural arbiters because they, they write for living, but between those people and then the people who really write and think because they can try to find, because they're interested in finding the truth about things. And obviously this, this question matters a lot just from the standpoint of thinking about an atmosphere in which the Communist Party controls the official cultural world from publishing to teaching and all, and all of that.

So I don't want to trivialize this because, I mean, clearly, as you mentioned, he's, he's killed all from the Communist, uh, ender interrogation. And so, but on the other hand, this sounds kind of exciting. I mean, it, it, I mean, it sounds, I mean, like, you know, uh, like you said, imagine one of these big name professors that we all know and love isn't allowed to teach what we sort of get to be an intimate of his. And you can see the stakes.

I sort of read this in my first time. I just wasn't in that frame of mind of thinking about him as a check, this and I knew it, but I wasn't sort of intellectualizing thinking about it. And he's like, okay, he's running between this intellectual guy and the spiritualist. And I was like, okay, fine.

You know, but then like, no, he's like, no, there's, there's deep meaning here and that some people just make their living trading and writing and thinking and talking and he has, I'm a little, not 100% sold on this word spiritual, but like there's, it just seems like there's more personally at stake and that strikes me as something that I can get behind. So one question, one first question I would have, and this is probably not a super substantive one, but to what degree is he talking about these intellectuals as people have cosied up to the party and therefore have nice joke, is that, is that at all partly in the background here? People sort of like, well, as long as I put my green groceries sign up, I can make my little living, I can make my little lectures and as long as I don't rock about it's fine. Does he have those kinds of people in mind?

I think so, but I would also say, I mean, this, this also connects to the end of the essay where he talks about nihilism, right? I mean, we have to also remember that the danger, you could say of the Communist Party and the intellectuals attached to it during this time is not so much people who are true believers, who people who really think they found meaning in this Marxist, long as conception of history, but people who don't even take that seriously and think, you know, this Marxist, long as it was kind of ridiculous, people in the party, for the most part, don't, don't believe it. And so I think Potoska thinks the real danger is people have become convinced that the pursuit of meaning is, is fruitless, right? That, that everything is power and that the idea would be, well, I can, I can make a living as a, as a writer, a thinker and do it because it's entertaining and interesting, but I don't really think I'm doing it because I'm taking this pursuit seriously, right?

I've already decided that this, you know, meaning is sort of beside the point, you know, the party is, the party is in control, but even the party hacks don't take themselves that seriously. And so I think the real danger is, is a kind of trivialization of, of any intellectual pursuit at all. So that's just one possibility. I don't know if we want to go out of order.

We have kind of run a show here, but one of the things that struck me, especially now, being reminded that he's so involved, like clearly there's meaning for Potoska, right? Like he thinks, for Potoska, he thinks there's something important, right? And he sort of opposed to nihilism. But one could be forgiven for thinking that there's a kind of nihilism that is sort of lurking in the background of his thought as well.

I mean, I'd like to hear you, maybe Alistair, I'd like to hear you talk about problem, problem, etc. What does he say that? Yeah, yeah. Because because the idea seem, I'm not doing him justice, but I'll just say it anyway.

It seems like what, what tracks into philosophy is finding problems and he seems to suggest that finding the answers to problems is unfilicophic, or that's not a spiritual sort of take on things. He's really drawn by wonder, for example. Here, I'll read just, this is on page 55 of the, what you've given us. He says, I named this is the third paragraph on the right-hand side on page 55.

I named the kind of life experiences that no one can avoid and that everyone seeks at first to somehow evade. But under these surface experiences, there are, I would say, experiences that are in a certain sense deep. These are experiences that show something like the peculiarity, the strange wonderment of our situation, that we are all, that we are at all, and that the world is, that this is not self-evident, that there is something like an amazing wonder, that things appear to us and that we ourselves are among them. This wonderment, this is divine, this word contains wonder.

We wonder. To wonder means not to accept anything as self-evident, to stand still, to stop oneself, not to go further in one's quest, to stop functioning and obstacle. Such an immense obstacle never, actually, means such an immense obstacle over which we may stumble so that we will never turn and truly to stumble over this thing means never to return. It seems like, maybe I'm wrong, it seems like he wants to remain in this state of wonder.

At least on my reckoning for the Socratic, and he talks a lot about Socrates, wonders the beginning of philosophy, but it's not clear that the goal is to stay there. Here I just have in mind the beginning of the number of Zenfins work began, something like, I used to wonder about this, I think implied, implied, and I stopped at some point because I figured it out. I'm reminded of chapter two of the metaphysics of Aristotle where, any time Cleveland helped me see that Aristotle sort of drawn distinction between the mythologizers on the one hand and the philosophers on the other, how both are drawn to wonder, but the philosophers want to destroy it, that wonder. I don't know if I have a question, but I'm going to try to connect this back to nihilism, but if all there is is wonder, and there's no hope of actually solving those puzzles or wonders, how does that not retreat again to a kind of nihilism?

And again, I'll just say, Aristotle, as I mentioned, pointed to the mythologizers of the poets on one hand and the philosophers on the other, but Toccha gives a lot of examples of poets as positive examples. That would seem to be in line with what I'm saying. I realize that I'm a lowercase, maybe so much of a rescue me from this wondering. No, I think that's a good, I mean, I don't have a good answer to that.

I mean, your articulation of the problem is somewhat to one that I've had in reading to Toccha, but I guess I would say it's, I mean, one answer is that he does want, he's not only taught, like you just mentioned at the last part of what you said, Greg, he's not only talking about philosophy as people who wonder. So he mentions Dante and Rilca and these other figures. And so I guess I'm not sure that he only means wonder in the sense of what Aristotle says in the metaphysics or even different moments in the Potonic or the Santa Fantic Corpus. But I think he does want to say that living a life spiritually or meaningfully means never being too confident that meaning is settled in any deep and final sense in the sense that, okay, now you know, now you know how to live your life and ask no more questions about anything.

He seems to me to be to be regarding that danger as worse than the danger of kind of unsettledness and nihilism, at least in his context. So that seems very, you know, he says, you know, he's, I mean, he recognizes what you're talking about because he says that the, I forget near the end of the lecture, he says something about Plato where he says Plato is steering this course between nihilism and dogmatism. And I think it's actually an answer to one of the questions during the discussion, right? He says Plato doesn't have a doctrine.

So, you know, so that's important, I think. Do you have any thoughts? Yeah. Yeah.

So I was wrestling with this whether Wonder disappears for him because he says Wonder does lead to a discovery. So on page 55, for example, on the bottom, he says, he says, well, when I wonder in this way, it is strange, isn't it? Materially, the world is completely the same as before. There are the same things, the same surroundings, the same chairs and tables, etc.

But nevertheless, there's something here completely changed. No new thing was discovered, no new reality, but something was discovered that is not anything, not a reality, namely, not a reality, namely that this everything is, but that everything is is is not any kind of thing. So he's talking about a discovery. And later, he talks about Plato setting up this ground to this life.

So you live in a world of experience and of like context, which is kind of historical. And then you realize, oh, my opinions don't make sense. They're not consistent. And then so that's discovering problem aticity, which is just to say that you can negate these opinions.

And there's a kind of negativity to the world that leads to a wonder, that leads to the discovery that something is. And I think what he's trying to do is similar to Strauss rescue something like Socratic philosophy in the wake of the collapse of metaphysics. So he's responding to Heidegger in that way, though it doesn't seem to me as simply his stoicism. And so he understands.

So this is like on the bottom of 50, 70, then says the following, he says, the path in the end leads to a certain discovery, but not to what philosophy had expected at the beginning, but philosophy found in the end was not new ground to stand on, or rather only a new way of dealing with the old ground. And then finally, sorry, so I think there's a progression in the progression, I think ends on page 60 to 61 where he says the following, when he talks about to talk about the risk of analysis, he says, whenever we are struck by a strange sense of wonder about everything that surrounds us of that in which we are in which we act and react, there is in reality, no new thing that is revealed to us, no new reality, yet still something is revealed, which is not an absolute nothing, or which is or which is mere nothing only from the point of view of the reality of things. Does this not suggest that there belongs to the nature of reality, if we take it as a whole, something that is in itself problematic, that is in itself question, that is darkness. Now, this is where it's difficult, because it is just darkness, right?

Greg, I'm inclined to go with you, and that's not as if it's in itself probleming question, then you've got something like the mystery of the whole, right? And so I wonder whether he's not altogether clear on the character of problematicity or the character of, or the character of socratic refutation. But he says this is what grounds it. And in a really, I think, remarkable passage, I won't read it because I've read enough on the bottom of 60 to 61, he describes how all philosophers despite their different doctrines or whatever they're doing, they have a kind of unified impulse, a consistency of character, that is precisely what was lacking in the historical progression.

I don't know, I think it's really difficult to tease out whether wonder ends up going away, and there's some kind of resolution and understanding of the problems, which seems to be the more socratic position, in my opinion, or whether there's a kind of fundamental darkness that you just stand in a kind of, you know, reposed awe, before or something. Right. Well, even I guess I would respond, even just the awareness of this background of the whole, he seemed to be saying that that awareness is an accomplishment, and that awareness leads you to a kind of wonder. And I think hopefully in the direction of what you were suggesting at the end of your remarks, Alex, that at least you'd have a kind of initial articulation of the problems, right?

How is this? Okay, now that I know that there is this whole, how is it that this whole is manifest to me? Right? What does it mean that the phenomenology is the term that Potochka uses, and I think others is that human beings are the datives of manifestation, right?

That in itself is a kind of accomplishment for him. But I understand Greg, your initial frustration because okay, fine, but then we want answers. Right, right. And maybe they aren't there, but you know, can I take one step back real quick and just ask you, who translated this?

And I don't know how you studied some check. I don't you're not claiming to be an expert on check, but the spirituality sound like the right word on what you know of the language or, and we should tell folks don't because they might want to find this. Where could they find this lecture? Yes, there's a new, relatively new collection called the Selective Writings of Jan Potochka Care for the Soul published by Bloomsbury Press, I think it's 2022.

Yeah. And so that's a really good book in terms of giving you an overview of Potochka's writings from lots of different eras and different chapters from different different books. I actually hadn't found out about it till recently, so this was a new discovery. But the translator is Eric Mantone.

I've not heard that anyone has found a better translation for spiritual. Okay, I'll take Mantone's word for it. Yeah, or no. I mean, he does seem to be a somewhat apologetic in a couple of places and distinguishing it from how we might ordinarily speak of spiritual.

And so that'd be something that we could address as well. But yeah, yeah. I mean, I think he's trying to, Potochka seems to be obviously to be after something somewhat different from just saying philosophy or philosophic, because maybe that would have sounded to academic or discipline specific for his listeners, for his students. I sort of, yeah, we've talked about this on the show a bunch of times, but whatever this activity in a way, I think this is similar to how Strauss talks about philosophy, it's a wave life.

And that's kind of what it seems like Potochka's getting it at to me. Like this isn't just an academic discipline, it's not just vocations, not just something you make money off of, it's your, it's your wave life. And we've talked on the show about how the word philosopher became problematic for so. And so he sort of eschewed the word.

And if it does have this academic connotation, I can see why he would choose spiritualist. But maybe you can just for a little bit then tell us how the spiritual person is similar to a philosopher, as we might understand the term, even if it is different from the academic philosopher. Well, so I mean, this, my initial answer to your question, Greg, is someone who takes the possibility of truth of finding one's place in the whole, you know, seriously, that that someone is not satisfied by being, you know, given meaning by a party or whatever. You know, and I think he wants to, you know, his students to take the possibility of this, of this life seriously.

I guess one question I had for you guys that struck me on rereading this is we've talked about this, Alex, you mentioned it, this, and Greg, you mentioned it too, but the, you know, the experience of wonder can come about through reflecting on kind of the ordinary experiences of one's daily life. I think Alex, you mentioned just different, you know, people having different opinions about X or Y. But in another place, a lecture, Potochka mentions the importance of these kind of crisis experiences, borderline experiences, you know, he mentions the experience of the collapse of an entire society, you know, there he's talking about probably the Nazi occupation, the coming of the communist power, the, you know, if you're in Prague in 19 August of 1968, what was it like to see Soviet tanks coming coming down the street, right? I mean, these, these are not ordinary experiences, these are experiences that would, you know, shock you.

And so in part, Potochka seems to be wondering, well, are those the kind of experiences that are necessary to kind of smack you in the face and get you to realize sort of what's at stake in human life? And so is he trying to say those are more important than just ordinary wonder at ordinary life? Do you need to have, you know, for the possibility of philosophy and wonder to occur to you, do you need to be occupied by the Nazis, right? So I don't know, I'm just wondering about that.

I think that's a great question. There's, and I want to have this scholar on, I'm not going to remember her name off top my head, but Alex and I talked about her. There's someone who wrote a book about Socrates and his work experiences. And the argument, I think there is that this was a fundamental part of his turning.

I don't know if this is correct or not, but it's at least worth thinking about that. I'll just say my grandfather was a POW in World War II. And like you could tell, I could tell anecdotally, and you know, what you read about folks who've gone through these kinds of things that it just smacks the walls of reality that they built up for themselves, right? So to see, like, it strikes me that, yeah, that would, that would encourage a thoughtful person, perhaps to rethink a lot of things that they think they understand about the war.

Like seeing Soviet tanks come down the street, Main Street in the National Ohio, would definitely go up smack me and make me think about things in a different light. And so I do think there's something like, like, you know, having to be forced to confront something that you follow through about the world is not true. But yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I did like that part of the essay.

And we should mention by the way, we've been alluding to it, but not without making explicit. I mean, but Todjka, it's seen, I mean, he mentions Plato and Socrates more than any other thinker in this talk. And very positively. I mean, he sees himself, I mean, as Alex, maybe alluded to this a little while ago, I would even go so far as that.

He does seem like he considers himself in that tradition of Plato and Socrates. Like, he's on the side of them as opposed to what he calls the sophists, and then also the intellectuals. Yeah. And keeping with that, so I think he takes a kind of turn at the end of the essay.

I don't know if you want to jump there, but this was in your run of show notes, which comes to me as well. He suddenly, he suddenly comes to this, this point about, and he references the Republic here, right, where he says, this is on the bottom of 63, to pretend to be a spiritual person, by saying that politics is something unworthy of one's own spiritual activity, that it destroys infustrates the spiritual activity. This is the worst sophistry imaginable, which is a remarkable statement, and one sure to bristle the feathers of many astros, he's going to stress that. But I don't know, do you, he and then the essay comes to a kind of abrupt conclusion, just a book, I want to talk about.

It's like, you can make it five more minutes to just say a little bit more about that. But I don't know what do you think about that? What do you think about that? What do you think about that?

Right. Yeah. So that, I mean, this is, I've actually asked, I've interviewed a couple of Patochka's students, and asked them about Patochka's decision to join this charter 77 movement, and I mean, that's becoming political in an explicit way. And they've said, and I think there's evidence in this lecture, that his decision to do that sort of flowed from the premises of his, from his thought, I mean, the passage that you just read.

But it's not obvious that that's the right thing. I mean, one might say, politics to become involved in politics and to ally oneself with the political movement, that might lead to sophistry as well, right? But kind of committing oneself to political action and ceasing one's wonderment and activity devoted to philosophy. And so, yeah, I mean, I think there's a real question about why he ends the, I mean, I think he ends the essay this way, because he wants to inspire his students to a kind of public spirit in this of a kind of socratic kind.

Like, I don't think he's necessarily saying, you know, you don't have to start a competing political party to the communists and, you know, go to jail for no good reason, because that would be stupid. On the other hand, don't think that politics and the broadest sense and having some concern for justice and a way out of our present, present, present predicament, doing that, right, is not the trying philosophy that's trying to actually live in accordance with your philosophy. So I guess that's why I would take that Greg. Yeah, I think this is in the Q&A, and you should maybe discuss who this questioner is.

And there's a discussion of he sees himself, again, he sees himself as doing what Plato did. He says, yes, you can withdraw from politics, but Plato and Plato withdrew from Athenian politics. But he didn't withdraw from, I don't know what you call big politics, politics with a big P or something like this. Right.

And his argument is that he says, well, he wrote the Republic. That's a very political kind of thing. And also he went to Sicily, which is more problematic. But so there's this, it seems like he's, you don't have to join the party, you don't have to do this on the other, or you don't have to join the opposition either.

But there he does seem to look down on someone who's going to entirely pull out of politics. And I don't know what that means for somebody in a communist occupied Czechoslovakia, because on the one hand, I could see a socratic type saying, we should withdraw. And in fact, we should probably flee if we get the chance to go to the coast and then go somewhere else. But it's just like Plato and Socrates withdrew from Athenian politics and focus on something bigger.

But that tension is sort of curious to me. I'm partly persuaded that I'm at least intrigued by the notion. Yeah. Well, so what's interesting, and this maybe connects to the, I was curious about your guys reaction to his invocation of this parallelism between Socrates and the Sophists, between that and spiritual person and intellectual.

But surely the regime, I don't know this, I should probably find the style. But I think Petotchka could have emigrated if he wanted to. They would have been happy to be rid of him. And a lot of writers and thinkers, Mick Milan-Tundra emigrated, they went to Paris.

And so that would be perfectly understandable. And I guess defensible, along the lines you were suggesting, Greg, I want to actually do philosophy. I don't have to do it in Prague in these conditions. Won't I be more effective doing it somewhere else?

But what bumped into my head is, wouldn't that be the attitude of a Sophist in Plato's conception? Someone like Gorgias, Protagoras, they can go to any city and fly their trade. And there's something, there's something, I don't know, Plato wants to suggest there's a kind of intellectual for higher vibe. They use the word that the kids use today, right?

I don't know. And the suggestion, of course, is that these guys don't realize the extent to which they actually are dependent upon the regime in some way. So they seem to be insufficiently aware of, they don't understand politics fully, it seems like. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. They don't, I think some of them, some of them understand their fragility of what they're doing, but they don't understand their political preconditions that make the way up possible. Yeah, there's something kind of nicely so chronic about seeing in how home refuting anything, getting tortured and dying at 70.

I mean, it's pretty interesting. And then holding these little private gatherings, though there is a kind of degree of political engagement that seems very foreign, like stress refers to what Socrates does is philosophic politics, right? Like, he's not concerned with like greater well-being. But another way to put this is, right?

Philosophy for Potostoica begins from the world of like ordinary understanding and it problematizes it and then it is in a kind of search. And yet he wants to say you need to go back to politics, which I suppose means, is it just a problematize the world, the political world, or is it to improve it, right? Are you admitted to some sort of non-problematic view of the world that you're trying to propose? Because on one level, and you read the exchange and I think he's kind of a servic a little bit, like he's, and he's not altogether clear.

He's like, no, and it's not clear he's understood. And you get a sense, there's like a Socratic spirit to this guy, right, where he's ready to like hash it out. And yet if he's a political actor, on some level, he needs to be engaged in a kind of legislative or morally edifying doctrine that's strictly speaking would hide the probability of things or hide its own properties. Is this making sense as a question?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He, one detail, I know that too, that he recommended that some of the students not sign the charter because you could help the movement without signing. So I don't think he meant involvement in politics in any kind of sort of dogmatic, you got to get on board kind of way. There are different ways to kind of manifest that.

But one, so one passage I thought of when you were asking your question, Alex, he's responding to a question, this is on page 66, and he says, I did not explicitly mention this aspect. The spiritual life is not just meditation or the creation of artistic works. The spiritual life is precisely also action based on the reality on the insight that reality is not rigid on recognizing plasticity of reality. And then here's the interesting part, he says, there are people who see a certain situation as hopeless, while assuming that they are being absolutely objective.

Edvard Benesch in 1938, for example. So this is the Czechoslovak president that didn't protest the Munich agreement, which allowed Hitler to take the Sudan land. And they do not realize that where they see no way out is where in reality their greatest chance lies. And so I guess what strikes me is that Potocca seems to be saying something like, however grim Athenian politics would have been for Socrates, he never he never decided to forsake the possible improvement of the fellow citizens and didn't emigrate.

So there's a kind of devotion to the possibility of a better politics, even if it doesn't come in the form of some sort of dogmatic program, that would force one to forsake questioning whether it's the right way to go. And I shift gears just a little bit. This interview ends with a discussion of Christianity. And I could see that there was an intellectual preparation for it, but I was still kind of taken back by it or surprised by it.

But Tocca's account of Christianity seems to be that it is spiritual in the sense that he's discussed in this lecture, because it sort of remains in this problematicity. Do you have any thoughts? I don't really speak about the religions, I suppose he says Christianity is not alone, there are others. But that's sort of curious to me, just in some words, I mean, I would say that Christianity, well, I don't know, that it would actually try to actually give sort of answers to people, but he's saying that no, Christianity is a very good example of what I mean by spirituality as a motive life that remains, that it remains open to the problematicity of the world.

Yeah. Well, I think what he means is, and I don't know the extent to it, Potocca was a kind of orthodox adherent of anything. But I think what he means is Christianity right wants people to live, there's a tension between the city of God and the city of man, and negotiating that tension is always going to be difficult and the work is never done. Now, but I was struck by that same part of the question and answer, Greg, because I thought the interesting question from one of the students was, isn't there a yearning today or a kind of rudeness?

The students as the rudeness of the medieval person and the rudeness of peasant life, and is that yearning for a kind of rudeness, isn't that a legitimate response to the craziness and problematic collapse of society type of experiences? And so I think he betocca's response to that as well, that would be too dogmatic, that would be to kind of rest in dogmatism. But yeah, I think it was interesting that some of the students wanted to understand, well, how does Christianity fit into this? That's interesting.

I reminds a bit of Heidegger, the peasant life thing, right? Like he does kind of yearning for something particular historically and culturally, but also simpler, as far as technology etcetera, etcetera. But it's good that he pushes back against that because it's anti-cocratic, right? Yeah.

What did you guys think about this line at the end? He says, Petoshik says on 68, what Plato authentically wrote and what he wanted to leave behind is exclusively problematic and apparatic in character. But can we read the next lines? Metaphysics is, he clarifies, he discovers metaphysics, right?

Metaphysics is of course, a searching that stops somewhere, but its fate lies and that it starts again. And the turning point, which is perhaps necessary to carry out face to face with metaphysics catastrophes, is that it's necessary to remind metaphysics, not of what it sees in the thunderbolt, but rather of that thunderbolt. In the thunderbolt, it's a reference to Heraclitus's fragment, thunderbolt, steers all things. In the thunderbolt, metaphysics catches a glimpse of something, a glimpse of an idea or something like Aristotle's amazing D, the noiseless, noisios, thinking thought thinking itself, which is an eternal actually, but it is possible to catch a glimpse of something only when the lightning flashes and tears through the darkness.

And the darkness is precisely this problematicity, which I did not event, which is a condition for anything to appear to be at all. So he pretty strongly situates metaphysics within the context of the apparatic, apparatic and problematic. That's part of what Plato was up to. Yeah.

Yeah. So he's kind of continuity between Plato and Aristotle. I think there's a one difficulty with his articulation of this, which you could compare to something that's just as fundamental problems is that it's a mere assertion of problematicity. The point then is to articulate the problems, right?

The alternatives, their limits, and their breaking points. And right, so I mean, the classic one we always do within the United States is freedom inequality, right? And you can analyze how extreme freedom leads to extreme inequality. And therefore, lack of freedom or extreme equality leads to a complete lack of freedom, and therefore some degree of inequality, because there's always the people of power.

And so you can analyze those problems. And you don't get a resolution to that difficulty, but it's completely intelligible. It contains within a demonstration. This is where I think the wonder goes away.

And you're just like, yeah, of course, this is what happens. This is the problem. But I don't see him doing that. Maybe he does it in other writings.

This seems more yeah, it's good proselytizing in a way. But yeah, yeah, I guess I'm sympathetic. I think that what most maybe this will not be controversial to our audience, that what most folks take to be Plato's doctrine is not his actual thought. So there I'm an agreement, but that he didn't figure something to offer himself that I think is wrong.

I think he does have I think Plato thinks that he's figured out some very important things about justice, for example, that it's a problem. That is, that will be around as long as humans are around. And I think that he's discovered something about the human longing for there's an interesting way in which, but Tochka moves from he didn't have a doctrine to then talking about Aristotle's deity. I think Socrates and Plato think that they figured some things out about even that, it seems to me.

And when you were saying earlier that you remain open, that I think is true that Socrates, he meets Euthathorrow on his way to go to court basically, right? So he's still open to the possibility that somebody like Euthathorrow might know something that Socrates was wrong about. But I think he quickly confirms for himself, no, no, I was right. This guy's a moron.

And so there's, I don't think that Socrates is dogmatic or Plato's dogmatic. But I do think that look in the apologies, actually says, I think what's commonly skipped over is a very bragging point. He says, I'm humanly wise. I think that's, I think we have to take that claim seriously.

In other words, that I possess, I'm actually pretty smart. I know some stuff. Yeah, it's not just I know that I know nothing. Right.

Right. Right. Right. Yeah.

Now he's very cryptic about what that knowledge might consist of. And we don't play as stingy as heck. He doesn't give it to us. But I was out there getting a drink of friends and my mom, just reading the apology.

Oh, no. She's like, is any air again? I was like, yeah, well, he also says, he also seems to think everybody else is arrogant because they claim to know more than him and they don't, but then he knows more than that as a result. But also what he knows is not not what you would hope to know.

And so it's somewhat home. And she's like, she's like, no, is he going to see us like, not that easy? It's kind of complicated. But it's interesting.

It comes in again and again, where she's like, there's it's edifying of the search for sure, Socrates articulation of this. But it's not like, it's not everything you want. But there's like a great exposure of how many people are ignorant. And man, that that comes off this airship when you get there.

I can't tell you without students walking away, I think he's an enormous jerk. And I know friends who teach it and they'll be like, oh, students love Socrates at the end. He's this apostle of freedom and human spirit. And like, man, I'm teaching him wrong.

Because all my students are like, this guy's a jerk. He's just going around pointing out how people don't know anything. You know, I think it is Greg is like, you're, you're a nice guy and like a generous teacher. And they're like, that's my, that's my philosophy, because he's like, and then that you're like, here's this guy's Socrates, he's great.

And he's just a prick. And so why can't he be more like Greg? And the reason is because that would mean he would not be a philosopher. It's exactly right.

That's like a pretty good answer. Yeah. Well, most students aren't kind of given to engagement with arguments these days, right? They want to affirm everyone, right?

You know, what's the most common way that a student will preface a comment that they make, at least in my experience, it's going off that. Yeah. You know, he said going off of that, you know, so it's always like, I'm gonna affirm what the other guy said, but yeah, it's already a firm, a firm thing ever. Yeah.

No, I've seen this with job interviews where you have more aggressive candidates in the class, which I like and they're just like, no, you have to meet students and make them feel good about themselves. You have to pretend that their opinions are worthwhile or pretend you can actually spell their name with two Gs. And that's not like a weird thing, right? Listen, I affirm my students all the time.

They are good. I value their opinions. They're all precious, rays of sunshine and rainbows. And I've never encountered a single student whose opinions weren't very important and theirs.

What's that song you're holding up? I love the green groser. I love my green groser. Have you taught this with actist?

I've taught this essay maybe once. And it was pretty tough, I think, going for them. Yeah. So I think I abandoned it.

Are you doing anything with her to talk? Are you doing anything with her to talk? Coming up, I'm teaching a course on Solzhenitsyn in October, November. They're in spaces available.

If we had new thinkers and or during interest listeners who thought that I sure would have more flag applications or do presently, I don't know when the deadline is, but it's probably coming up. So I will give a ringing endorsement of flag in the classroom. I've seen several summers we talked together. He's excellent.

If you're interested in learning about Solzhenitsyn, they're fairly generous. Aren't they? They're her side folks, not just a faculty with students. Yeah, yeah, they'll send you send you books.

I don't know about that. If there's a stipend included in the online course, or at least the book is really, you'll get a free book. You'll get a free copy of a very nice edition of Gulag Archipelago, a hardback edition recently published by Vintage. Yeah, and flags wisdom.

That would be attractive. The final deadline is August 26th. Well, this has been helpful. I did enjoy the essay a great deal.

If folks can find it if they Google it online or if they email us, maybe we could provide them with a copy. It was fun. I enjoyed it. I was surprised.

I was also interested to see another former student of Heidegger pressing the interest in Socrates and Socratic philosophy. I like that. I'm actually inclined to go read some more, but I'll just get this point. So thanks, Flag.

Or I guess maybe we should thank you for having us as guests on your show. Thanks for having us. It's been my pleasure for having you on your own show. Thank you very much.

You guys, you guys, you guys, listeners, I have to do this on front. Now that you've listened to it, whether you're listening to him during interest fat chance or the new thinker, just think about who contributed. Flag or being Greg, right? And you wait.

Now, there's two of us versus one of them, right? Right. But he's also an expert. Right.

So I don't know. Yeah. Choose why. Don't forget to like, rate, and subscribe to both podcasts.

Send a nice little remark. And we'll see you next week or next time as the case may be. Tell them to see Bar. We didn't miss you.

He's often the coast of Spain enjoying. I don't know. New beaches. Yeah.

He's got pictures and we're like, stop sending those. So if you're listening, nice, we miss you. He went to the new beach in Spain and he was only out there for five minutes before the locals tried walling him back in the water. It seems like a good note on which to end.

See you next week, folks.