Welcome back to New Thinkery. My name is David Barr. And before we go further, we usually ask that you rate and subscribe and spread the word toward the tail end of the episode, but we're trying to spread this message here at the start. So if you like what you hear, do leave us a review and share with your friends, especially our Valentine's Day episode, which is rated G and meant for as wide and general consumption as possible.
With that, how are you doing Alex? Is rated G because it's gangster? It's only for gangsters and gumas. It's for us.
Wow. It's always good to have a few of those. And how are you doing, Greg? Great.
You know, running a few minutes behind, I didn't realize we'd pushed up the recording time. So I was mid pop-tart when I got the text that we were starting. So here I am. Apparently those can eat in the sitting.
I can eat. I used to eat a couple of times. I was like the chocolate fudge. Okay.
I thought when Greg says I'm having a pop-tart, that was a euphemism. I've been misunderstanding our conversations for years. Today's episode of TNT brought to you by Kellogg's Pop-Tarts. So usually ask people to rate, subscribe, all this stuff at the end.
It's usually after the episode is devolved into shameless vulgarity. And I'm always like, no, no, don't ask them to review. We don't want to review a rating right now. But I think they're just start right before we get into some strong material.
Maybe as you're listening early on and you feel like your mind's being opened and you feel like you were being raised up to the hyperborean beings that you can then subscribe, you know, or rate and all that stuff. You know, a little later, you know, if you lose yourself in our denesian, you know, decadence. No, no, I don't do it that. Yeah.
Oh, always don't need to look at it. I want to thank the people that don't need somebody set up a recurring payment that was at $5 a month. That's really helpful. We do this show for free.
We don't really ask for money too often, but it is helpful for mics and stuff like that. So thank you very much. Yeah. Don't forget some money.
We will take all the money you're willing to send. Yeah. That's the answers. Harry's Razor's, what are the answers?
Yeah, yeah. Well, Greg, I was speaking with Alex the other day. Oh, no. We were trying to come up with a financial model to get this right and show to afford a marketing budget, right?
So you thought that you could sell your ass and ads, ass in Cleveland. What kind of ads? You could sell ass. What do you what?
What are we talking about today? So today we're talking about Jacob Klein's first wild dean and president also, Alex. Yeah. Of St.
John's College. Yes, his wonderful collection. I think his only collection of essays. What's it called, Alex?
So he wrote, he published in his lifetime, three books, I believe, right, the Greek math book, German and then translated by Eva Brand into English, of course for MIT, then for Dover still available, thanks to Dover, which just understands just don't put books out of printed stupid. But then he has a commentary on Plato's, you know, from the 60s. And then right before he died in the 70s, he wrote a book called Plato's trilogy. And so on the sophist, the Aetetus and Statesman, I stated that or because that's the order in which he comments on them.
And very, very little book. This was published after his death. And it is edited by other St. John's tutors, Robert Williamson and the late Elliot Zuckerman.
And it's a bunch of his essays and lectures, some of them published, some of them, unposed, some of them kind of fleshed out from notes. So, and it's basically everything they have, I believe, except for a lecture on the Mina that was published, somebody promised my attention online, but I'll publish an lecture on the Mina. This particular essay, the problem of freedom is from a lecture he gave at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies in 1952. And it was ultimately published in 1969 in the college, which is a magazine published by St.
John's University. It's now known as the St. John's Review. It became that over time, I believe.
I like this essay. This was my choice. It also is sermon. It becomes a sermon.
It's a lecture. He says it degenerates to his stories. So, just so you know, Jacob Klein thinks the religious arts are degenerates. I should say that.
But this is a short essay. It's 10 pages. And in typical, you know, Klein is one of these authors who's really masterful and can go from very commonplace language, which is when we did the idea of liberal education, right, that essay, which I used to teach quite often. I think we noted this as well.
But he's also capable of unbelievably precise scholarly work. I mean, his Greek math work is almost impenetrable, right? So he has, I think... Have you read that?
Yes, yeah. A few times. Actually. I just got very famous on that.
I haven't read it yet. We're working on developing a Euclid class here. So I'm going to try and work through it. But we'll see how that goes.
We should do something hard from that eventually. I love to. It's difficult, though. But this essay, that book is incredibly difficult.
A lot of, you know, it's got, you know, the Greek and it translates into English is always the Greek for whatever he's quoting. And it's very technical. And he doesn't, you know, presume, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't bend much of a knee for the reader, right? He doesn't accommodate you that much.
Here, he's utterly accommodating. Yet he never lets go of that precision and that caring is writing. So often, like you just noted, degenerated to sermon. I didn't notice that, but that's exactly right.
Like, that's a chosen word, right? That has implications that he's certainly intense. So if I thought it was a fantastic essay, I would... And really quick, Alex, for some of our listeners who have heard his name and also are familiar with his close relationship with Wio Strauss, I get invited Strauss to, without the remainder of his years at St.
John's College in Apple's, who were best friends, client isn't a Strausian per se. This is maybe too difficult of a question, but how would you differentiate their approach to philosophy? Because it seems Strausians love clienteences, that seem fair. But yeah, but just a little...
Do they have distinct approaches or is the approach the same with the conclusions different? Same with Plato. So I think the approaches are different, though not as different as other... I mean, so client, I think Strauss credits client with this with discovering us with terrorism.
Like, I mean, so that's, I forget, I think it's in the front door. Yeah, I will show the front door. Does he client, I think is less political in his understanding of terrorism, for sure? Though I think Strauss is interesting because he's both political and kind of metaphysical in his understanding of...
It's based on the things themselves, but also in political circumstances that are related ultimately. Cline and Strauss were both students. I don't think it was... Was it at Marburg?
I should have looked this up. But they were both students together, the Satinan courses, certainly by Husserol and Heidegger. Cline was, I think, quite close with Hesterol. I believe he married Husserol's daughter.
I might be getting this wrong, but I know St. John's soul, at least when I was a student there, and I have a copy of this. Frau Husserol's recipes that had been given to Frau Klein. Klein was in Husserol's fester as well.
So they were quite close, personally and also academically. In fact, I think Bert Hopkins, who's a scholar of Klein's works, one of the few. Another one, if you're interested, is Andrew Remedius, a two-year-old St. John's in a former undergraduate, but he makes the case that Klein's Greek math book is meant to be a sort of appendix or completion or follow-up to Husserol's the decline of the European sciences and transcendental phenomenology, that massive or difficult work.
Anyways, they're both interested in mathematics as a phenomenological study. And so that's a deep commonality. But Klein and Strauss were very close friends along with this sort of amazing brand of people that included people like Gottem er and Arendt and people like that. Both came to the US, Klein ended up settling in St.
John's college, where he then became dean and all the stuff. And we built the new program that was established in the 30s, I want to say, and in the rest of his history, eventually they passed a week in the Deafter Strauss, left Chicago. He went to Claremont and then Klein quickly brought him to Annapolis, where he spent the last years of his life in his period there. So that's a stress dimension.
Yeah. One small point, this worked on math leads me to think I was working on a paper somewhat recently on liberal education. And Klein, as you mentioned, started the program, whatever you want to call the program at St. John's.
I guess he was there in the 30s, but he really didn't go until the late 40s and 50s, I guess, when he started to revamp stuff. But in the program, it's really impressive. But it includes a focus on math and science. And this seems to be the root of a disagreement between Klein and Strauss that I think the Klein is more open to the role of science and math in pursuing liberal education.
And I think Strauss just thinks that the contemporary situation does not allow for philosophy as much through math and science as it wants to. He seems to think that in our time, the history of philosophy is because we're in the cave beneath the cave, that seems to be the necessary first step. Now, we talked as a little before Alex, but math has become sort of removed from the phenomena in some way. And so we think Strauss thinks that contemporary math doesn't necessarily provide a good entry into philosophy in a way that it should, obviously, I think.
Yeah, I mean, Strauss, I think called Klein's Greek math book the greatest work of intellectual history of his generation. Now, the greatest work of intellectual history is not to say it's the Christ's work of philosophy. And you know, there are, I was reading a letter that Strauss wrote to, I forget the name of the scholar, who'd read the book on Plato, and he had sent it to Strauss and Strauss read it and gave comments, and he chastised him for not considering Klein's book. He's also, I believe, Klein's Mino book is the only secondary source, aside from his own work, because Strauss ever signs, so far as I'm at least.
Oh, yeah, he taught a course on it, didn't he? He taught a course on the and also to be fair, his Klein's work on math isn't modern math, it's a book on ancient math. Which on both, it's on the development of, it's how Greek math and medical, I mean, I don't know how in depth we want to go, but it's about how Greek mathematical thought, and specifically the understanding of ratios led to development of fractions and ultimately to algebra. This is why it's called Greek mathematical, and then it eventually gets into, he ever says, he ever says, I have a sense a lot to work with the A to M mathematician and with an ultimately decart and a denial of, and this is where Husserl and Anne, we should do an origin of geometry, it's fantastic, I say it's short, it's really got some powerful movements, but both of them were interested in the recovery of the distinction between discrete and continuous number, like one, two, three, four, five are different from point whatever, three point whatever, which is, we can go on at a different item and the difference is that what we would call these discrete numbers or integers actually refer to unity as a thing, it's like one count, yes, one point five cows does not exist, you get one cow in half of a day, right?
Yeah, that's your maddox, two and a half, yeah. The folks at home, just with folks at home, like you guys really should, we are grateful for the wisdom that Alex Pio brings the show, and it's all the more impressive considering he's literally recording from insane asylum. It's nice that the folks, they reel him out and they, I'm going to explain each other, supposedly with folks because it really is something, it was very generous of the folks who work there to still, you know, like the most impressive minds, you know, they can't be trusted out in society. So, you know, when I was a child, I recall this, I was obsessed with the straight jacket, you know, straight jackets, where they like pull your arms around.
And somehow I admired one, I have no idea where I got this thing, but I remember having one. He doesn't remember where it is. And then it's gone, I have no idea where it went, I remember having one. So, this could be a suppressed memory, kind of, you know, should we jump in the answer?
Let's do it. We're not talking about the client on math or client on who's role or client on a little bitty things, we're talking about client on freedom. You'll kick it off out. Okay, all right, let's go into it.
I'm waiting with baited brass. Yeah, I mean, he talks about about sort of freedom as a contested thing in the public series. Nowadays, right? And this is in the 50s, but it's in the 60s, it obviously gets even more intense in that in those roughly two decades.
But then he says, he says, let us not forget that all these claims and counter claims are merely echoes of more universal conflicts. And so this jumped out to me that every argument we have about freedom, every issue we have about freedom is somehow a pill reflection of a universal conflict, which if you really want to emphasize that terminology, you'd have to say it's something like a fundamental problem, a necessary problem for human beings. And part of what I think he's trying to do is provide a introductory sketch as a title, suggests to the problem of freedom or this this larger question of freedom. And now one of the first things he brings up and that he asks, and this is on the second page, and also by the way, we should say here as always, we'll provide a link on Twitter to the PDF for this essay so that people can download it.
All right, so we were good people. He says, when am I free? When nothing compels me to act in a certain manner, when nothing compels me to do certain things, when nothing compels me to think in a certain way. Now, I'll just know already in that phrasing, this is a sign of clients like Art of Writing act refers to somebody stopping to act that's a social compulsion, to do certain things or to think in a certain way, he's talking about willing and then thinking these are the three forms of thinking he's going to get into.
So he's very careful on this way. But he goes on, he says, that is to say, we cannot consider freedom without considering its opposite compulsion. Note, please, all the symbolism about freedom is about its opposite. In any kind of freedom, the greatest symbols are chains and fetters.
There is no universal and immediately transparent symbol of freedom as such. He's claimed being essentially that any time you think of freedom, you're thinking of freedom from this restraint, which I thought was interesting that there's no- Really called that negative freedom in common parlance. Yeah, but that's the most immediate phenomenon. I don't know, this persuaded me, but I'd be interested to think if you guys see, if you guys have any objections, can you think of any non-negative, at least partially negative, even symbols of freedom?
It is true, like breaking chains, casting off a yoke, something like that, it's always seems to be negative. I could think about it again myself. William Wallace, screaming freedom. He goes to battle.
He's not wearing any pants, I guess that's a certain freedom from. So, great, I thought he's trying to shackle it. Yeah, that's the right, right. I mean, maybe another way to put this is if you're thinking of freedom positively, and the highest freedom for client is about to say, what we're going to say is freedom of thought.
What would it mean to have a positive symbol of freedom of thought? Like, is the guy sitting in a study, doing his own thing? It's very hard to imagine what that would look like. And we even recognize it as freedom is another way, like in the most visceral sense.
Greg, what are the three notions of freedom? Three forms of freedom. Freedom to think. Freedom to think.
Freedom to think is the first and freedom of the bells a second. Think will and political freedom. Does that help? I found freedom to think the most interesting, obviously, because I'm a thinker.
I'm a thinker. And this is the first one to read. Yeah, there we go. Let's talk about the freedom to think.
Yeah. What is it? This is where he's drawn on Plato. Yes.
And he talks about this, where we get this, we get this from the allegory cave. It's sort of the, it's a freedom from the political conventions of the society from which you're reared or raised. Probatically, I suppose you can't think without these shaffles, it seems, but it's the way that you're thought of constrained by the opinions that are sort of shaping for me without you somehow being aware of them. What else do you want us to say about that?
I suppose each of these three freedoms also comes with a corresponding danger, if it's that word they use us. So there's a freedom from, but then there's this corresponding danger. So the freedom from the freedom of thinking binds you potentially to the tyranny. I think he does use that word actually at one point of truth.
And these other two also binds you to different something else. So I don't know. And then how do we resolve this? You sort of, it's the truth that you understand, I don't know, without falling into me chainism.
Like it's not just the truth that I want or something like this. Yeah, I think we'll talk about this. I think in the most general sense, before we get deeper into, yeah, it's helpful that client establishes the conditions under which you can truly be sent to exhibit the each of the freedoms. And so if you wanted to take this as a kind of roadmap to think through one's own life, it's all contained in this essay.
And I think that it's a common place for almost all Americans, I shouldn't say this actually, but most of us consider ourselves free. I know that in our current climate, a lot of people don't feel this way. But in our, I don't know, in strict sense, that there's no slavery and there's obviously economic kind of constraints on all of us, but we're free to pursue our lives as we wish, right? In the most general sense, except for extreme cases.
But if you start looking at things like client is much more closely, and you'll see that you don't hit many of these standards that he's establishing. And if you want to hit the standpoint, so that's interesting. So psychologically, what's going on with us that we consider ourselves free, but we end up not hitting these three standards and if we want to do so, how does one go about doing it? That's what I think is the great benefit of this essay.
The spot on, I mean. Because of this, it's what Alex said at the beginning. So it's philosophic. So it goes rather deep.
But also there's, and it may just be the milieu that he's writing in. There's a certain practical application to it for the every man. I know you're right. I think that's exactly right.
And that's the third kind he talks about, right? Like that's the most common type, this political freedom. In a way, what he's doing is, I mean, it's curious to me, right? Like he's he's assigned to give this lecture on human freedom and machines and slavery, but he's not going to talk about machines.
He's only going to talk about freedom. He doesn't really talk about slavery that much either. So you're right that he's taking this everyday concept and trying to make it try to make it more philosophically, right? He's trying to, when the title of the talk is the problem of freedom.
So he's trying to problematize something. Yeah. Yeah. I think, and this is, I mean, there's so much, but I mean, one of the things he brings out that made this connected to David's point, when he talks about like freedom thinking, for example, ultimately, Greg, you brought this up, right?
But like you have to accept the authority of the truth, right? It's not like you sit down to do math. And you're like, okay, Pythagoras came up with the Pythagorean theorem, A squared plus B squared equals C squared. I'm going to come up with the barian theory, which is A squared plus B squared equals C cubed.
And that's my genius, man. And it's no, you're not free. It's my truth. That's my truth.
That's the prioritize freedom of the will over freedom. Right. And so there's a kind of authority, but even with freedom of the will and willing has to do with the good or with fallen god and reality is involved there. That's the connection to politics.
But there's an interdependence there where you have to make a choice, which is, okay, you get social and political freedom and you're free to live the life that you think is best. Like morally, you can follow the notion of the good that you've rationally arrived at. And then once you rationally thought through anything, I'm going to live philosophically. Thank you.
Now I'm free to do that. And then you sit down and think, you realize, oh, logic forces me to certain conclusions. Freedom starts to slip away, right? And it's very, very, very difficult.
And so what client is doing and mapping out these three kinds of freedom and showing their interdependence, I think is trying to show how prioritizing one freedom over the other or or not acknowledging the compulsions in life. Is going to actually lead to a strain. And I mean, one of the big compulsions in the necessities he underscores is death, right? Like, okay, you're not free in that regard, right?
And you can be free of death per se if God rewards you, but that involves another compulsion. So freedom becomes a very, very slippery goal, right? And I wonder whether the problem of freedom is that it ultimately has to sead away to two authorities, like he outlines, which is in freedom of thinking, it's the truth. And then in freedom of willing, it's the good or God, right?
So that you do have to accept these higher standards, right? Yeah. And he gets the sense that he's leaning in one direction, right? Oh, for sure.
Even calling it a sermon tongue and cheek, I think, gives us a second. Yeah. So can I ask real quick, go just go back a moment. So one of the three kinds of freedom is freedom as a thinking being.
And I think I sketched out that he sees two major obstacles to free thought before you get to this more deep problem of actually your tethering yourself to the truth. But the first is simply other people and the second is external and internal. They're external and internal obstacles to freedom of thought. And the external ones are other people, right?
So others think for us, laws, customs, current opinions, law givers, all those people determine what we think. On the other hand, they're internal impediments to free thought. Our own passions, fears, they tyrannize over us, it seems. So I just have a question for the two of you.
I mean, maybe your own experience. What has been a greater impediment to your free thinking, do you think? Other these external things or internal things? Or even by the way, there's probably an interplay between the two.
But internal passions, what do you think? Pete Sysen for David is the biggest impediment to free thought. It was also the, the source of my emancipation. That's right.
I'm quite serious. I like what do you guys think is I think it's ominous. I think it all, it depends on one's time of like, I think that you have these external constraints are much more at play. I think when you're a young person, there's some people just kind of throw out of it.
And so they're constantly feeling what we would call social pressure, right? To act in one way or another. But if you can break free of that, this is where philosophy and just reading, and if you're uncomfortable with who you are, knowing your place in the world is so wonderful, then it really is just the constraints of your own mind, whether you have the fortitude to stare into the abyss or just have diligent one could be with one's studies. I'm constantly reminded of my monadys beginning of the guide, and he sets these like impossible conditions to, he lays out the kind of reader for whom the truth is available, and you start going through it.
And it's like, I don't know, available to like my monadys himself. And then you know, 1% be 500 years. Like, Alfred, you're very, very lucky. He says, you'll get a glimpse of the truth as if you're in a lightning storm and in a flash for a second.
I'll say in my own name, I think that the internal ones are much greater obstacles. You know, maybe because I grew up in military brat, you sort of, I sort of held them around, and that sort of provides two bulwarks, maybe against others imposing their thought. You begin to see first of all the variety of law codes. So that's the first thing, like moving around.
But the second thing is just like having to move around sort of inoculate you to feeling like you've got to give in to peer pressure. Like, all right, now, whatever. So for me, and that's not to brag, because I actually want to try and say is actually, I think the greater, I think the greater impediment of these internal ones, like my own fears and my own passions, my own longings. Like, I was reading, um, Boletton's book on the air cells physics, and he was sort of outlining air cells argument at one point.
I was like, yeah, that's pretty good. And then he said, yeah, and air cell, this is what air cell wants people who are too quick to have their doubts to believe. I'm like, crap, that was me. Like, I wanted my doubts to.
So for me, I think it's much, it's much more of the second group. I mean, that's such a good point because that is a dialectics works, right? Yeah. It's your love of the good.
You're attempting to reason through things well, so it's actually live happily, like work through your opinions and say, okay, what do I follow? Because I sent some conflicts here and you follow one and you don't know what's actually guiding you your reason or your fear. I mean, one situation that I can't remind David or Greg, when you asked your question was, is how interrelated these two things? Oh, yeah.
Right. Which is, I found myself, when I was struggling on the job market for a number of years, like, I found as I was not getting interviews, I saw people who were not doing as much as I was getting interviews and jobs. I found myself like bitterness, like coming in, right? David just pointed downwards, but you're at the bottom of my screen.
So I don't know, is Greg under you? Is that what you said? No, this actually, that's a total joke. No, no, no, I mean, Greg was working on it.
There's so many way off screen. Yeah. Greg, I mean, look, Greg took a certain obvious path to getting a job that's almost not willing to do. I mean, it involves animal husband, dream and other things, but you know, he's listening right now.
Anybody's listening at any university that with some repute and you're looking, I will do anything. Good job. I really just want to do anything. It's not even about the job.
Anyways, I found a creeping sense of bitterness. Yeah. I remember those years. You were bitter.
I was bitter and I thought you held yourself very well. I tried because I felt the bitter. It helps to have an eye. I saw the social compulsion affecting my thinking, right?
And to me, that was a great lesson in life was to learn that these forces are not just determining your outcomes in life, but and they're not just determining, you know, one of the reasons it's nice to have an academic job is you have a lot of time to think, right? As you're teaching about all this sort of stuff and do your research, it's not just affecting the amount of time you can think. It's affecting how well you think, because you start to breathe these passions that then push you down certain avenues and conclusions because you're not accepting necessity, not accepting the compulsion as it is and understanding the compulsion. And therefore thinking within those confines, right, you're allowing those compulsions, not just to compel your compulsion, compel your situation, but compel your very thought process and your opinions and therefore your views about the world, you know, that it's fundamentally unjust or that it's, you know, whatever.
So that there's a lot of weight carrying in these little situations I think of life. Okay. I know we're going to move on to these other kinds of waving free. So one thing that just occurred to me as we've been talking is that so he talks about these three different ways of being free from compulsion as thinking beings as beings that have will and as social and political beings.
I can't help but think these map pretty nicely onto, I wonder if Klein is trying to get us to think about three main sources of the West. So Greek philosophy on the one hand, pairing up most nicely with thinking beings, beings with a will, which he sort of makes clear parallels to Christianity, especially. And then the third is social and little beings that strikes me as early modern people thought, you have the ancients, the religious and the moderns sort of, and what typifies each one's conception of what, what freedom is. When he talks about the social little beings, really, I mean, I heard that was a lock there.
We have a Greg who's absent, which class of which time period is totally absent, at least from evil, the other medievals. We don't see them. Right. Well, if the medieval, so let me build off what Greg's thing, because I was having similar problem.
Let me know what you think about this. To try to solve the social and political problem without solving the problem of freedom of the will and freedom of thought, he's a moderate approach to the problem of freedom of the will, absent solving the problem of thinking is a Christian slash stoic approach, because he and every. Right. They'll write this up.
To solve the problem of thought and let everything else fall from that is the Greek approach, right? To the high, low and light of the high, right? And this is maybe this is a good time to pivot to the modern thing is he credits the moderns with solving the problem of political freedom, which at first I was like shocked when I read that like, solved it, just like, figure it out, is it even a problem then? Is it just people had bad opinions?
But I think what he means by that? Yeah, they solved it. That's our situation. They've solved it.
It has these effects though on willing and thinking. And that's the kind of there's a really subversive side of this where he's like, Hey, we did it guys. And then by the end, you're like, Oh, no, no, you're actually are in a deeper hole than you've ever been in before, precisely because I've been solving the political. Come on, Greg, you can't hear the word hole and not make a joke.
I was talking about intellectual. What are you talking about? No, we're talking about donuts. You should cut this out, but don't cut it out.
I mean, that's like, I don't know. What? What? I was speaking of this is something I was just looking at my notes and I have thinking and then the page I was then willing and then I have social and political.
I just realized I wrote political. I put an extra O in political. Thanks for that, nugget. Come on, Greg, jeez.
Well, yeah, this is a good time actually since we're on the topic. Greg, why don't you rate subscribe? Greg has the plastic, mold of dog feces that he puts outside his colleagues' doors. I haven't done it yet.
So he doesn't listen to show. So no, it's gonna be a while. Yeah, now I gotta do it. I literally bought a little bit of plastic who off of Amazon to put outside my colleagues office.
I'm very, I'm very classic, right? I'll post the video to Twitter for you guys for our fans to see. So who are the only so back to what we were talking about? The only philosophers that are named checked in this piece are played out at the start and then content.
He eludes to Nietzsche, I assume. I think there's some illusions of a few guys in the background. You were first to certain schools at time. Time's yeah.
Right. And there's also, I mean, there's a strange remark on page 121. He says, the relation of masters leave is one of three possible relations between men, which it took to be male men, like not men who deliver male, but men who have, you know, male, which I'm gonna tell you. And I'll put your by me.
It's a way in a jellings. Well, Greg, these are which things that are wanted by men can be accomplished the other two are friendship and contract. So I thought those strange, when I started reading, I was like, oh, he's gonna get into male female, right? I was not, he was gonna lean on politics like chapter two, right?
Where you have two primary, I was wondering what's the third and friendship would make sense. But I think that that the sense that when she has master's sleeve, friendship, contract, there's lock in the background, maybe even a little higgle operating there, right? He starts just flipping into modern terminology as he gets into these questions. Should we talk about how the modern solve the political problem and how the problem of political freedom is by enlarging the scope of contract, right?
By sort of blending the the wheel part to, right? So they sort of make, so the second way, the second sort of freedom was freedom of the will. And so the third way is the spittle freedom. And so the ways that the modern solve is by bringing together the third way with the second way, is that right?
So that the common opposite extension of our will. Yeah, I think it also affects the first as well. Just the third way that we solve it is by giving ourselves the law. So the way that you have political freedom is by having law and not tyranny, so you're not slaves.
But so the modern is specifically modern response. So this is an old way of solving it. Law, but then the question is what's the source of law? All through history, and here David, you're right, there's no mention of the medievals, but presumably it's lurking in the background because the medieval source of law was God or something external to you.
But for the moderns for social contract theory, law is something that we rationally will. And so insofar as we're positing the law, we are the originators of it, and we contract into it. It's a product of our will. And so it's the attempt to try and swear the circle or circle is where we want to put it.
But yes, we are binding to it, but our will is not bound to something external to us. It's bound to something that we have chosen for ourselves. I think that's what you're saying. Yeah, it's not the rule of the law, capital L, which I take to be in Sharia or what's the Hebrew word for law.
But so to move on to, so the way he puts it is that in, but you solve the problem of political freedom by making free contract, not a part of politics, but the whole in a way, which means that law is essentially a law you give yourself. I agree to do this, an autonomy, which is again, connected to the will. I think the problem is you were connecting it to law capital L as in Sharia. That's what I believe is the law.
But I think also you'd want to connect it to, and this is where I think the ancient Semideevals might get a little more slippery, you would say that the law ought to be, at least according to Aristotle, derivative somehow of nature. At the end of law should be human excellence. What is the best by nature? And so in that view, I think you end up coming to, you start to see, oh, there's a huge price to be paid by solving the problem of political freedom, by making everything autonomy.
You start rejecting what is by nature best, making the good, making the truth really just subordinate to the will or to sort of contract free engagement. And it removes, and what you achieve thereby is an extreme notion of freedom from any authority, authority of good authority of truth. And this is, I think we're trying to say, maybe at a certain point, as you're getting your political freedom, so you have leisure. And from that leisure, you're asking, what ought I to devote my will to?
What is the best? What should I will as my life? And then you decide thinking, you might have to ultimately just accept the authority of what is by nature best, or what is best in truth. And it might be that the notion of political freedom is negative for real reason, right?
Because the positive notion is not free. It actually compels you to live a certain way, right? And to accept that way. And this is where I think Klein's essay is quite clearly subversive, right?
Because it is really undermining our most deep-felt, modern, and frankly, quite American notions of freedom that I'm just going to live however I want. And if you tell me something is true, I'm just going to reject it so as to feel my own freedom and to feel autonomous. Okay, yeah, that's a very modern, very kind of habeasian and lucky notion of freedom, which I'm missing something. You're losing something in the process.
It doesn't only work home. Yeah. It doesn't only work if Kant's right, isn't this way? It says on page 125, about five lines down.
In other words, we can only solve this global problem and remain free. If the willing itself is identified with the self-imposition of what ought to be willed, if the character of the categorical demand is identified with the very freedom of the will. So it seems like, I mean, it's a still problem here. I don't know if- That's where your name is, Scott.
We should be clear for those. Right, right. So- Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Go ahead.
No, but I think this is where Kant is indebted to Hops, right? I mean, this is- Okay. Yeah. I mean, this is self-legislation, contract leading to the categorical character.
Sorry, I just wanted to go out there. No, that's very good. Yeah. I guess one of the- I don't know if this is too far a field as a side bar, but this is on page 124.
This is when he's talking about the modern solution to the problem of freedom and the sort of impact that this has on freedom of thought. I wonder if this is conducive to or occludes for us the freedom of thought. I took it to be- is it implied here that the modern solution actually leads to thinking problem that we're not- we may not be as free intellectually as we think. And by the way, only if we become content.
Because here's- this is on second- Pull paragraph, maybe halfway down the page. He says, it was primarily the questioning of political patterns and habits, which gave rise to an inquiry into the nature of things, gave impulse to philosophical question, led to the idea of a contemplative life. Classical philosophy arose out of the preoccupation with political problems and tried to get guidance to political thought. It's dependence on politics is a the genealogical, not a logical nature.
So if we've solved the political problem, that forecloses for us the genealogical starting point to philosophy, which is real freedom of thought, because we have no longer have the impetus to investigate the various political law codes. Yeah, it's almost like we lose a modernity of the sense. This is something that Strauss says in natural in history and stated beautifully also in an essay by Robert Sacks. But just this notion that the beginning of the search for truth involves realizing that, okay, Muslims don't eat pork and, you know, Greg doesn't sleep with humans.
The ways of Greg are different from the ways of of Muslims. And by the way, if you know this, but that emphasis on the way is he's- Strauss is clearly invoking the language of Genesis, because he also uses the example of the way of women. Yeah, he avoid- he's assiduously avoiding the language of nature, right? Yeah.
But there's one way, right, that's quite universal, which is water flows downstream, right? The trees grow the same and here is an elsewhere, right? And that way, the fact that some ways are always the same and some ways are dependent on groups of people or leads to convention versus nature, right? You have to throw out that language and top something else.
So it's actually the freedom of thought inversions from the compulsion of nature, right? So that necessity is absolutely, you know, it's crucial. It's necessary to this. It's openly the alternative.
And this is on page 125. He lays out pretty clear. This is where I think he moves from Kant and sort of what you did. He says, as far as our freedom as thinking beings is concerned, it seems to be endangered by the compelling nature of truth, right?
We don't like this that, you know, we have to accept A square plus B square equals B square. He continues. But what if truth itself is of our own making? Could not truth be the product of our thinking, a construction of our mind?
Could not the fullness of our thinking be identical with truthfulness? This possibility has not really been envisaged. You have no difficulty in recognizing the prevailing philosophical opinion of today. So I think he's acknowledging Kant, he's acknowledging the constructive notion of truth that comes out of that.
And then finally, this Nietzschean wheeling of truth. And so the modern view, yeah, sorry. No, go ahead. The modern view just to put a bow on us, right?
The modern view is that no, no, the truth should not compel you. You're free to determine it. I think the Greek response client is implicitly laying out here is that no, you've just prioritized political freedom over a free right or philosophic freedom. You're actually still asleep.
You're still oppressed in some way. Right. But you have frequently been trying to encourage me to think about the role that spiritedness or thumos played in the Greek attempt to understand the truth. And so while Nietzschean truth is of our own making seems too quick and too bold, isn't that kind of implicit in what you've been arguing with me that there is some assertion that seems to be required into the define the world according to different categories, or this is x versus that's why.
I thought that's kind of an argument that you haven't had lately. Yeah, I think there's a kind of difference. It's the same. It's kind of the same teaching, but also, I guess, radically different.
The difference that I would see is that in Plato, on some level, when you're thinking dialectically, you have to defend your view, what seems to be right. And that's the kind of love of your own right? That's the honor for the part you really need to push that as far as possible. You need to give it the best possible argument, right?
And really defend it as far as you can, right? Play devil's advocate, right? So the other side is you need to be brutally critical. I would suggest the most as part of but a secondary role in that way.
And I think the problem with the Nietzschean I don't want to confuse this with Nietzsche, because Nietzsche talks about stuff like cruel vivisection of your own thoughts. So there's something very anti- your own about Nietzsche's conception of the truth, yet deeply embedded in your own. I mean, he talks about physiology and stuff. But I do think there's a difference there, which is that I think if you see them, as I understand Plato at least, the thematic part, the defending your own is still secondary, right?
It has to give away. One way to put this simply, and this is in a way the problem for modern human beings, is that it's very difficult to think and know if you're actually thinking, right? Like it's very easy to like you see this with certain cynical why are you not even so vigorously doing it? Now it reminds you of friends in the analytic philosophy that consider this like a serious problem that they think that when you're reading philosophy, you're not really thinking, but when you're doing philosophy, like in the manner of the analytics, that's where real thinking comes into play.
It's like a creative aspect to it. Have you heard of this? I don't know. Yeah, dude.
I mean, the number of times I've heard an analytics philosophy like I found this new problem. I'm like, they've been talking about this for two thousand years. You just think of the history, right? It's just I was at a conference one time with some analytic philosophers, and I swear when I was like, I'm going to play my xyz card against their bcd card.
And I was like, what? And it was like, it was like one of these role playing games where literally they're just, they're like, no, no, you said the non-contradiction thing. So I'm playing that and you're playing this. And I was like, ah, and we'll see how this will respond.
And I'm like, they think philosophy is like a like a board game. And it's all play this or like a chess game. I'll make a move and we'll see what their subsequent responses was kind of nuts to me. I had no idea that was actually a thing.
And then I was glad that I didn't have to attend kind of an philosophy and analytic philosophy I mean, continental philosophy is a little bit. I was sorry. I miss both. Yeah.
I'm like, philosophy, you're exactly right. I mean, it's this weird abstraction from like, Oh, I put my blocker on. You can't play that card right now. I was like, what are you talking about?
So the funniest thing is these analytic philosophers will be like, I am a radical thinker. And then they have the most conventional ordinary opinions and the most conventional hobbies and interests, right? Right. It's not at all like it's a way of life.
It's not ironic at all. So like, I mean, I mean, they're not play all timid, frisbee. You ever notice that? We should have one on each show.
I knew one guy. He left two legs. I don't give a shit anymore. But he's whole.
You know what his hobby was? You cannot guess more pathetic hobby. It was damn collecting. Oh, no, no, no.
It's even worse than that. It's even worse than that. Yeah, slightly more interesting. I guess the question was the triliquism.
No, no, no, come on. Not this. If you like, if you like, say hello to the people, Lloyd, a lot of the people, Lloyd, like that kind of stuff, like you're just like, Oh my God, this guy's always time being like, and then this is what he finds. Wow.
Sorry. I mean, the drill is that guy's not free. Check it. We're talking about I forget.
My parents are visiting. They just and they just got back from France and they leave over the holidays and they brought a bunch of flogrange and pain and all this stuff. So I'm like, hopped up to the to the nines here. Can I still have a fancy new watch too?
Are you wearing my dad gave me his old old Omega? Fancy. So should we wrap this up? Before we got on the analytic philosophy, what was I don't even know.
That's why we should have a run a show. What were we talking about? I was saying one thing I did want to talk about was again, that indication at the end of page 124 that political philosophy is kind of first philosophy. It's the thing that kind of gets you thinking about philosophy.
That philosophy first emerges as a political question, a question about politics. I think that that's probably right. Although I said, I don't know, maybe there's some just looking up at the sky and speculating there might be another alternative, but the right way to live seems like the most obvious thing that most people would ask first, just thinking about the various ways in which political philosophy is the first philosophy. One way this comes up in the essay is he eventually, and this is Klein's irony and sort of didactic intelligence is that I have to talk about the authority of truth, the tyranny of this, not the other of God and the good.
She then suddenly says, hey, did you notice how all that terminology used was so political? In a way, it seems natural, but in a way, it's also drawing. Why are we talking about the tyranny of the good? That seems counterintuitive, where the unwanted authority of the truth.
That makes a certain sense from a passionate perspective. And this is him sort of spelling out the way in which these political categories are deeply embedded, even in our most common sense to go on apparently clear notions of thinking, which seems so separate from politics, but freedom of thought in borrows language of authority and compulsion. It's interesting, the Greek word for necessity, anonke, or dei. It's more than necessity.
I would say no. But it can be used both ways. It can be used both ways. It can be used to logical necessity, dei and cray, and greek can all have, there were desmos in Greek, which means literal funds.
It's what Socrates is wearing in prison. It comes from the Greek word, gay, which means it is necessary. And that can be used logically. Cray as well as a moral, like I ought to do this, but also a logical necessity to it.
And even the Greek word, do it like potential or power has a political sense and then a sort of logical philosophical sense, at least when I get to Harris, right? And it's very difficult to purge these words, if that's even what you're supposed to do, but to understand these words separate from their political origins. Well, speaking of freedom and freedom from tyranny, folks at home are free to purchase some of our swag tomorrow. I'm not going to go ahead and put this on the calendar because tomorrow, folks, we're recording on Wednesday tomorrow, Alex, David and I are meeting with somebody, and we're going to start selling swag.
We're going to sell TNC hats and shirts and coffee mugs and stickers and condoms that are perforated, which is a kind of esoteric joke, but you don't find out about it for a little while. You just give those to your special loved one. I'll tell you what, also folks, since we're going to do this and we're going to get going, let us know what kind of stuff you'd like. We're going to do shirts and caps and mugs and stickers, but if you've got an idea for something that you would like from the new Thinkery, just tweet it at us, send us an email.
Yes, you know what it's like. The difficulty is we have a lot of ideas on things we'd like to sell. Right. But guys, there are things that- These are things that- These are haters.
What? She's haters. Oh, yeah. It's just hard to find a manufacturer for some of these things.
One idea I had is a lot of these podcasts is really popular podcasts and not that popular, but we're trying to be- No, we're not. We want to be- Dressoff is our audience. It's our audience that's too smart and it's just not a lot of super smart people out there. Yeah, it's true.
Yeah, you're brilliant. So tell your stupid friends and see if they can get into it. A lot of my friends and all of David's friends, Texas, that was a great apple syrup. Great friends are like, oh, I don't understand.
I don't want to sell mugs. Yeah, I think there's just something out there. A lot of these popular podcasts, they have like their fans have like a name, like they're known as the something. So I thought- We talked about this before.
I thought we could call our fans the Little Buggers for obvious reasons. It's the thing where you start an activities take place, but what do you guys think? The Little Buggers? No.
The Catamites? Worse. Oh, it's better, but- Worse? I mean, worse.
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