Well, when I was ding dong Diaz, I'm a geeky toast. Welcome back to the new thinkery with me as always as my good friend Alex pre you are doing now. I'm doing good. I'm loving gain.
I'm getting gained using my game to buy islands and fly my home boys out to my island. You guys come into my island? I would love to come to your island. I got one on discount.
Oh, you did? Yeah. It's the same island I wanted to purchase. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So we set up a new thinkery station there. Yeah.
I think you could do it because the basement comes already fixed with some of our favorite kuchumau, our lifestyle kuchumau in the basement. Right. It's our lifestyle. I know we have to buy those stuff.
Ricks are the partially examined life. That's true. Who else is with us? Our good friend Greg McBrayer.
How are you Greg? Don't do this. That'll kiss on you go. Just ask where's the cheese.
Yes. Okay. Are you trying to stack that case? Cléro que cí, yo.
Cléro que cí. So today we are talking of how many dialogues have we done so far. 17, I know we've had 20,000 episodes on this symposium. How's your 15 of those are the symposiums?
I think just only a few, no. Republic symposium. Sit. We did the Gorgias.
We did the Gorgias. We've done symposium Gorgias. We've done the Minos. Right.
We've done several episodes on Republic. But still very few. Let's be out of couple. Let's be honest.
You know what? Email us, tweet us, send us what dialog you want us to do. And if you send us a donation, we will consider it extra hard. But if you're going to request something like the Demeres Aquatus, you better send in at least 10 Gs.
Right? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I mean, thugs.
Like gangsters. Are you saying they need to rough us up? We need to do the youth edemas with the Greg McBrayer translation. That's a great idea.
Yeah. It's an mediocre translation. We're talking about the Haparkus, which I thought that was a work by Xenophon. Is this a work by Xenophon Craig?
There is a work by Xenophon called the Haparkicus. It's another little echo in the middle. That's true. Yeah.
That one that's translated as a skilled cavalry commander. Oh, okay. Haparkicus. This is Haparkus, not Haparkicus.
And there's also, yeah. And there's, yes. This is from the pink book, Estrassians, a call it the roots of political philosophy, 10 forgotten, Socratic dialogues, Tom's Pangle is the editor. There are a number of fine translations with the commentary with each translation.
10, actually. Yeah. And the, it's not a correction. It's late.
This book was recommended. I think it's a good place to in fact start a foray into Plato. So people, everybody has their own opinion, start with the Republic. But there's something to be said about starting with some of the shorter dialogues.
Also by these, for instance, isn't that historically the jumpstart of the medieval? I think there's something, I always thought it might be nice. I've never done this, but that's crossed my mind. But if you're teaching like a course on play, just assign this book, read all these snippets.
I mean, then, you know, push comes to show me like I should really should do like the Republic, the gorgeous, you know, something like that. But these dogs are fantastic. They have so many rich questions that come out of them and they're strange. So it's like, you know, being able to sort of set aside a big masterpiece and say I'm just going to work out something bizarre.
You know, I like the small ones. I mean, I think the small ones can get the job done just as good as the big ones. You don't need all that. It's too much for most people.
Yeah. Your wife was telling me that that's what she tells you. Why you old so and so really quick, Alex on that point. I like to gain on that.
Oh, on that point of strangeness for a number of years and still in the analytic tradition. You guys correct me. Some of these dialogues are considered spurious. No.
Yeah, quite a few of them actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So I don't know about the park is weather and on what basis Greg, you know? No, I don't know. Look at that. Yes.
Today we're doing the Hipparchus and subtitle is or the lover of gain. Yeah. And the conversation is between Socrates and a comrade. So you know, why can't they just give the guys name?
I mean, this is a good point. Greg has a good answer to this, but he's busy googling. So there are too. There are a few dialogues where how many actually they're not too many that it's just like where there's just the conversations, this and the mean us.
And then there's the laws, right? Taggress. Yeah. The laws does it has three names.
It has a stranger, which is, you know, other strangers, right? Then there's two longer dialogues that are narrated to comrades supposing the protectors, which I think Greg was just saying. Yeah, that's right. I mean, Greek, what does comrade mean?
Is it akin to a friend or just a what's a friend with benefits? It's a friend without benefits, even a friendship. Oh, I guess it's really answer here for folks. Tyra is a friend with a lady, a feminine version of the same noun would be a lady you pay money to spend time with on an island, perhaps.
But the male version is someone apparently who's your political ally, but not necessarily your actual friend. I pick up what you're, I don't, I don't think we have a good English translation of it actually. Comrade sounds Soviet to me, but maybe that's because I'm old. Yeah.
And so I don't know that we have a good English word in America, English. How it also sounds a little too partisan, whereas I think yeah, in Greece, I'm just, it means something like fellow citizen. I don't know. Is it, there's this other Greek word, some politics, which means literally, those citizen or fellow citizen.
I wonder if those are interchangeable. I don't know. So it's Socrates and a comrade, right? And we, it appears that the beginning of the conversation, we, they've already been speaking, right?
Because it would be a strange way to be in. So the very first line of the dialogue is from Socrates. So what is the love of game? Just what can it be?
And who are the lovers of game? That would be a strange way to just begin your conversation unless you're Alex or Greg. Right? Right.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's got like a conjunction. There's the word guard, which means like four.
Gar. Gar. Gar. Yeah, which looks like, because it's a game I had a row.
It looks like, yeah, if you look at a catch like, but you look at it in and you look at that and you're like, okay, well, they're obviously picking up on something before me. So, or then, in a way, in a logical way. So this is following from some prior conversation. Greg, you had a thought on what that prior conversation might be.
Well, I, you know, there's no way really to know, but as I try to make clear in my mind what's going on. So as Alex said, there's only two dialogues that began in this way with an unnamed comrade. So in the apology of Socrates, as I was always having these conversations in the marketplace, the Agora. And a few years ago, I was working on this and I thought, I don't know if that's true.
Like we don't actually see Socrates doing this at all. He's always talking to like promising young people or weird old people. And we don't actually have them talking to just run the mill, Joe's, as it were, in the marketplace. But then I thought, well, maybe Hipparchus and you know, those two dialogues.
Maybe this is actually just him talking to some rando in the marketplace. And so one possibility is the possibility you just mentioned David that Plato begins in the middle of things. They've been talking and then actually find out, says, but what is love of gain or and what is the lover of gain or the alternative that I've been conjuring in my mind is that Socrates is just hanging out in the marketplace. And he hears this guy call someone else this lover of gain, like they greedy bastard or something like this.
And then so, he doesn't part of the conversation. He's like, what is love of gain? Which is almost more annoying than just starting in the middle of things. He's like, I was even talking to you.
It's just like that guy, that guy's the love of gain right there. You just use that greedy bastard or something in exchange. So there's something, the word of Greek, fellow, care, it is love of gain is literal, but it's not exactly accurate. Right.
Right. That's kind of why I was trying to capture greedy bastard. I don't really know. I was a bastard.
It's not in the Greek. Bloom uses profiteer, which sounds like it's right, except I would never use that word ever, except describing maybe someone who worked on the Biki Mouse show to make money. I don't, you know, like, I don't know. Gouger, money lover, capitalist, gyp, except that's racist and we don't use that anymore.
So I don't really know. Like, a good translation for it. So Greg, your theory about it, Socrates is being as usual and only a guy for myself. But in the only other theory I had, I don't know the dialogue well, is that it's, um, forces you to think about where it would pick up or another dialogue left off.
So in the same way that the politics and the ethics are almost circular with the way that they end, they lead to one another. It's like, do you know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, yeah, the circle. I don't know if this harkens back to another conversation that was left dangling or if there's an action, I know there's always some natural pair.
Um, but maybe that's a question. I think, I think Greg's, uh, so about the word, so it means it's filo caretous, which means literally love, love of game, lover of gain. But it does, as you see, immediately when he asks him, well, who are the lovers of games, says, um, what are the ones who think it's worthwhile to make a gain from worthless things? Right?
Like they're just trying to make money off of nothing. That makes it immediately makes me think of like a snake oil salesman or, or some kind of, um, con artist or con man, I just thought that, but you know, who's specifically focused on sort of podcast host. Yeah, podcast. I guess, you know, after three years begging for, you know, don't forget to like, read and subscribe, please.
Yeah, please. So does donation. I mean, if you're not going to send money, at least send pics, how long? How, you know, nothing, three years we got one pick from one pick from a man, this is a week still appreciated that pick.
Yeah, we did. We did. But you figure you figure you're hanging out on Epstein's Island. There's plenty of mirrors everywhere.
There are the walls on the ceilings, you know, uh, all over the place. It doesn't cost you any to snap a picture. DM it's just go right, uh, anyways, these stupid lovers of gain in our audience are really making me upset. Yeah, exactly.
So, uh, but I think one way, you know, you're talking about the ethics and the politics. I think that's right. But I think there's also, I think Greg's way of going from an ordinary experience is helpful here because early on in the dialogue, this is a 225 C Socrates after the comments says the lover of gain thinks he ought to make a game from everything, right? As though this person is just doing nothing but thinking about how the food they're about to eat, they should try to sell from money or something.
He goes, don't answer me aimlessly as though you had suffered some injustice from someone, which would be funny because if he's just heard him like cursing and kicking the dirt or something like that, well, then he would be quite convinced he had suffered injustice or so on. Right. So one way to take this, this dialogue is him saying, what have you really lost and what has he really gained? Is one way of thinking about this?
Like, set aside your anger and think a little bit about what you do when you're acting, what he was doing when he's acting and what really your objective is. Now, yes, to start from within the sky's angry worldview and show that he's a little bit confused, but starting from that, I think you start to get a bit of a good profile of the cop. Right. I don't want to, I mean, we talked about this and we've been texting about it in this now or seven, the temperature quarter episodes.
So I kind of burned out all my interesting stuff to say. It's easy for us. I just read this with students and it's easy for us. Don't you mark so aimlessly as though David Barr had done some injustice to you.
Right, right, right. You know, I just read this with students and it's easy for us to sort of think to ourselves, gosh, this stupid comrade, you know, like he can't answer any of these simple questions, but it's kind of like, you know, these guys don't know their own secret dialogue. So I could even, I could just imagine myself being like, that guy just jipped me and somebody coming up and be like, but what is the jipping and who is the jipper? What do you mean the guy just robbed me?
That's the jipper. And, you know, it's like there's a common sense in this to what this guy's saying that sort of, and it's he leads him down all these paths. It's almost like the preface to this dialogue is a false start because of 226 D. He poses the question again.
Right. Then just who do you say are these lovers again? Right. After Socrates has destabilized, I think a pretty common sense opinion held by the combat.
Yeah, that's right. I don't think it's, you know, it's difficult because if you want to say that, you know, the lover of game makes a game from worthless things, it's sort of like when people realize you can, you know, sell a pet rock or something like that. Suddenly the rock's not worth so low, right? Based on the ignorance of people or if you, you know, you find out you stick CBD on a Snickers bar and somebody will pay an extra five bucks for it, right?
Suddenly this, you know, you know, it's you get a lot more from that, right? So there is a real paradox there where his anger leads him to, you know, so I want to put this somebody sells you snake oil and you realize it doesn't work. You can either get pissed or you can sell it to some rub around the corner and get your money back, right? We know what we know which one I also did, folks.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of snakes where I come from.
I put a lot of groups. It comes up out of the basket. You're not a bit of me, Altson. Swirling swords and all that.
That sounds right. That's not. I get my roots. Like he restates the question at 226d, but prior to that, it's a page and a half of dialogue and he gives a number of examples to the comrade to chip away at his understanding of what a lover of gain truly is.
Do you want to go through those examples or what's the best way into this? Should we go give an overview of the dialogue? Oh, yeah. Sorry.
That's great. Yeah, it's we're 15 minutes and we should definitely step back and just give an overview for the folks at home. Great. Why don't you tell me translation?
You're pretty friendly. In the roots of political philosophy, 10 for God, some kind of dialogues. Anybody any guess on how many dialogues are in that? I saw one review of this.
I was like, I didn't forget about these. I was like, I'm scared. It would be time to have forgotten. Okay.
So as I count it, there are basically five arguments. Oh, yeah. First one extends from the beginning to about 226c to D and that one leads to the conclusion that no one is a lover of gain who would try to make a gain from worth those things. Nobody was censored who's an artisan would do such a thing.
The second argument, which picks up from there and. Erbadi is. What's that? Erbadi is.
Erbadi is. It's a 227c connects love of gain, not from trying to make money from worthless things or trying to gain from worthless things, but connects it to the love of the good and at least the opposite conclusion. Everyone is. Erbadi, like I said, Erbadi.
Erbadi. Yeah. Erbadi is a love game. Erbadi is a love game.
They then go into the question, you could say a decency and gain and this one takes a few stabs at it. So our third argument, I would argue, is the most convoluted or underdeveloped of the arguments. The conclusion is not actually fully drawn out and there's some sneaky work and it has to do with Socrates sort of accepting this criterion of decency that the comrade introduces but then sidestepping it. We can talk about that later.
Socrates then for the second time accuses the comrade of trying to deceive him and then this after the more underdeveloped or convoluted argument leads the comrade to accuse him of trying to deceive. He says, I'm not trying to deceive you. Then I'd be disobeying at Hipparchus and we get this weird interlude about Hipparchus. And now he's losing the Parcs for the folks at home.
Yeah, this is a tyrant of Athens of yesterday. Very good. And after whom the dialogue is named and it leads to this discuss of these Herms that are set about Athens. What's Herms for the folks at home?
That's a small statue with a big cock on it. And then also these sayings on the side. One of them is don't deceive a friend. It's like three pages of this just for him to say, I'm listening to how Parcs.
It could have been one second. So obviously that's doing something else. We then get to the fourth argument. Socrates generously lets the comrade change a prior agreements and he says, well, I want to see some gain is good and some is bad and that this bad gain or evil gain as he eventually puts it actually harms you.
But he's again brought back to the conclusion that gain is good. And then we get the fifth argument which introduces gold and silver and spending, getting more than you spent on something. If you spent little or none and talk about gold and silver and then again, decency comes in but it turns out that both the decent and the wicked because they both love the good, equally love gain. So this is not actually a good approach to you.
Everybody's trying to gain. Somebody comrade and this I think is further support for Greg's thesis about the lead up to the dive off. You don't repurge somebody. You should use something else maybe more refined in your repurge or what have you.
So that's of course the argument. I'll say this. The comrade goes from kind of neutral towards Socrates to kind of accusatory. And then Socrates I think generosity and backing off of this kind of tricky argument, the third one leads the comrade to be a bit more accepting and admit that he's maybe doesn't know what he's talking about.
He's a little confused, though he's not persuaded. He's willing to make these agreements sort of open. That's sort of a dramatic sort of rusted. Two important points there that you said in short order.
One is that he is confused and admits it. The comrade does. And the second is the conclusion compels his agreement. He's not persuaded.
He says that at 232b. For my part, Socrates, the argument is compelled me rather than persuaded me. It ends unsuccessfully. Yeah, and so on that point, just sort of emphasize the point, I think he knows he has more to think about and that Socrates wasn't nearly tricky.
And that's kind of a win for Socrates with somebody like this. Yeah. What do you think Socrates is up to here? What's he was so and some of the other dialogues that I've read, many of the other dialogues that you like, okay, he wants to talk to Gorgias.
So Socrates initiates the conversation here, at least as we have it present to us, which could be taken as an indication that Socrates is actually interested in talking to this comrade, whom we know is young. So why would you want to talk to this young guy? So if you want to talk to someone, what is it you hope to gain from a conversation with that person? Are you trying to learn from them?
Are you trying to demonstrate your superiority over them to an audience that's around? Is there any indication that there are people around? So I just, I'm not sure what's going on here. And this is a typically socratic dialogue.
And so far as it raises a what is question, but the question about which what is being raised is not one that I would sort of typically think would be of particular interest to Socrates. What is justice? What is courage? What is one of the virtues?
If anything, this is commonly held to be a vice, but also not necessarily one that, you know, I would have said cowardice or ignorance or something like this. Love of gain is the vice again. So why is I was even talking to this guy? It is a strange question because it goes from what is the love of gain, which is like a passion.
So it's closer to the symposium, right? That sense, right? And there are some illusions to the symposium. Or it goes to who are the lovers of gain?
Now, this doesn't really come out in English, but who and what I guess it does, who and what are the same word in Greek, right? It's just neuter versus masculine form. So immediately goes to individuals, right? And which is strange, right?
It's like a classification of a type or a person rather than the attempt or prior to that, you tend to understand a passion rather than something that we would say has an ADOS or a form, right? It's not like you would say that is the form of the love of gain. No gain would be the thing that would have a form of sex. That's what.
So the thing about the dialogue is though it dances around the good in relation to gain the word for ADOS or form or a day is never used in the dialogue. In fact, yeah, it's not. And in fact, you get close to it at a certain point when they're talking about whether certain things are our gain is on at two 30, E, DDE. When talking about decent and evil game, he says, since both are equally gain and gain full, we have to consider on account of what you call both a liking.
What is the cause of your calling them gain? This is very much the language where you would expect form to come in and then it gets even stronger. What do you see in both of them that is the same? So the same thing that you see in a thing which indicates on account of what it is the kind of thing that it is.
That's the language of Plato's form forms. And yet it's never used. We should suggest that in keeping with what you were saying great, there's something quasi-socratic but also sub-socratic even about the style. Another thing that strikes me is that the question is what is love of gain?
And you rightly pointed out that it seems to presuppose a prior question of what is gain. It also presupposes the question of what is love or the lea in this case. And so two things. One is I'm also now reading the lovers and students and the question there seems to be what is philosophy and what's the philosopher.
Now in English we have no problem with that as a concept. We think that the philosopher is a thing. Even though just like the lover of gain, it's actually comprised of two Greek words, love and wisdom. So ostensibly to know what the philosopher is, you'd have to know what love is and wisdom is.
Although I do wonder if one can't know the compound thing philosopher without knowing it's hand-seeing parts, I don't know. So in other words, we have no... The question of what is the philosopher doesn't strike us as amelie problematic as this. The lover of gain because the English we don't have a single word.
So we see that it's two concepts. I don't think that makes sense. But so my question is wouldn't the question of the lovers be just as problematic on one hand? But on the other hand, why couldn't we speak of lover of gain as a concept?
If the forms really are things presumably there would be a form of love, there would be a form of gain and then there would be a form of love of gain or no? Yeah, I think you're raising a question that points to the fact that whatever this maybe has to do with the fact that it's all contained within this indignation, this reproach, right? Right. So we need to somehow enlarge the psychological perspective in addition to the sort of teleological or end perspective.
Yeah, there's gain. You're trying to make a buck or something like that. Right. But why are you trying to make a buck?
So bad. Why are you so angry when somebody makes a buck? And when they do that and you want to maintain that somehow evil gain is harmful, presumably to the person who does it, how does that even possible? Right?
Because you think of the love of a gain, you're like, oh, that guy just ripped me off. You know, 20 bucks out the pocket. Why is it? Oh, pocket, yeah.
I have my pocket. They just took 20 bucks from me. I'll let me give you an example of what I think is going. And I was a kid.
They had this fair around the corner. Okay. I was in like fifth grade, sixth grade. I went with my buddy Marty and we went to this like, you know, Ferris or whatever.
I didn't go to any of the rocks. I went straight to the sort of, they had one of those like wheel of fortune wheels and he put some money down and it's like, really? You have to say wheel twice. Yeah.
Yeah. Wheel of fortune, wheel of fortune. And they, and I just blew all my money, didn't get to go on a ride, didn't get any cotton candy. And I sadly walked home 15 minutes after my parents dropped me off, half crying in front of my friend.
And, and my parents were pissed. Cause they let, you know, a 12 year old or 10 year old or I don't know, 36 year old. Were you in fifth grade? I don't know.
I hope you're in fifth grade. I don't even know. Not 15. I don't know.
I was, I was 38. The point being that they were pissed off and they were pissed off primarily because this was a church there. Like, what is the church doing? Why do you got to bring in your anti-Christian sentiments?
It's just another, you see what he's doing here. It's another Trojan horse. This is, this story is all my hope. It's just an attempt to run down the good God-fearing people of this country.
I would stand for it. My point being this is that you can get upset. So I got, I got cheated. These are not like kids began with their money.
Not least of the church. But the fact that the church adds something implies that gain ought to be restricted by higher moral principles and even by higher powers. And I think that when we get angry at gain and when he says things like, oh, well, evil gains are harmful, there might be a touch of religiosity involved in this, right? Or a white-to-sync dignity and its invocation of the gods.
And one way of, I think there's at least two details that point to this at right before we get to the Parker section of Socrates says at 227d. We agree in addition that everyone wants the good things and always. It's and there and or even always might be another way of transit, but there's this emphasis to for all time, if not for eternity, right? And then a little later, we get this by Zeus, the deceiving stuff.
In order to say that he's not deceiving him, he invokes the wisdom of Pisa Strah, not Pisa of Hipparchus, who as a tyrant tried to replace divine wisdom with his own. So there's these appeal to a higher authority who's then trying to usurp the gods in some way in trying to monitor and to restrain the thoughts and behavior of human beings and to induce some sort of moderation or restraint in them. I think all of this suggests that that part of the problem with the dialogue is that just as it's going back to Greg's point, but that it's really psychologically not developed, right? Like you have to ask what that love really is or whether it is even a love as it manifests itself in the comma.
Hi. Can I ask a quick question of a dramatic issue I've been thinking through with this dialogue? It's how it's already hinted that it's a complex. There's a lot of logical steps to follow.
So imagine if you're having this conversation with somebody with the Socrates. You guys study philosophy, it would be difficult enough to keep up, but this is an unnamed, this comrade, let's say he's an every man, Athenian, right? That assumption. Usually when one reads the dialogues and you take into the dramatic effect, okay, Socrates is advancing this argument he doesn't believe or believes for the benefit of this other person in the conversation.
We see this a lot in the Republic, right? We see it as a great effect. But here, we don't know if others are around, but this is a strange conversation to have with an everyday kind of fella. So in wonders, well, what is you guys asked us earlier?
Somebody did. What is Socrates up to? It's very opaque for me because it's hard to see what effect he had other than to stun this person is, well, go to think about it. So I have one small point and then two serious alternatives, which are an answer to your question directly.
So if you look at the very end of the dialogue at 232b, my friend Matt Wells has pointed out an alternative translation of Socrates's remarks, which I'll bring out to you. Socrates says, well, perhaps later over you as well. Now, though, whether you're persuaded or however you're supposed, you do at least agree that all gains are good for us, both small and large. That's the translation we have.
Now, the four us in Greek could come off of agree with us, actually, that all gains are good. So an alternative translation could be you do at least agree with us that all gains are good, which could imply that there are people around. And so one alternative that I'll push right now is that Socrates is embarrassing this guy to show others, probably young people, potential students, how confused ordinary people are. That's one possibility.
I'm not entirely satisfied with that, but I think it's a possibility. Let me give two other serious alternatives. Not that that's not a serious one, but the first one is that. So Alex has already pointed to the sort of incomplete character of the arguments.
We've already noted that the comrade is not persuaded at the end. So an interpretation that I have heard, it's not my own, is that this is a youngish Socrates, and he hasn't worked out to his own satisfaction, some of the arguments regarding the psychological status of the good and people's souls. So he's on the right track. He hasn't sort of in his head, but he hasn't worked out the arguments to get there.
And that's why he can't persuade the comrade, if that makes sense. So this is young Socrates. He's just turned to the study of moral and political things, and he hasn't quite figured all out to his own satisfaction. That's one alternative.
Now Greg McBrayer, crazy conspiracy theory, number two. This was, you want the straight dope? I'm fearing. Can you handle it?
I don't know. I don't know. And in my veins. Say show me the money.
Greg, what are you doing? I'm going to hot load into Jada Bar. All right, here's here's here's an alternative. So I'm persuaded by the first interpretation, but it's not my own except that at one point, Socrates notes that the comrade is young and that Socrates himself is older.
This is at 226 A. Now, if it's true that Socrates is young, it would be hard to explain this where he says I'm older. So the credit turn happens when Socrates is what? 35 to 40, Alex.
So I suppose when I was 35, I would tell a very young person that I'm, oh, I'm so old now, but I'd be somewhat ironic. I don't know if that'd be true. So let me take my alternative is based on when he says he's older, he's actually old. And so here's here's my crazy conspiracy theory.
And the apology of Socrates says, I don't know why you guys are so mad. I was always talking in the marketplace. My suspicion is that this was alibi before the fact after he's been charged, before he goes to court. And so he's like, crap, I got to have something to tell people.
I know. I'll tell them I'm always in the marketplace talking. I make them remember that I'll make a scene with some merchant where I just get him really mad at me for no good reason. So one possibility I realize it's a little weird.
What does this teach the reader then? What's Plato's? I mean, I do think that that's a good question. One would be this first thing more seriously about the relationship between love and gain and love with good.
But the second one might be a gradual working out of what Socrates is actually up to in the apology, which would be mainly, many layers deeper. I think to modify your last suggestion, which I think is is is is of all the three that you are like a most interested in or I think is most plausible. The idea is that he is older and he's also older in the mean, which is the other dialogue that's just been talking with the comrade, not relating other. Which seems to be paired with this, by the way.
Yes. In many ways. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that needs to be examined here is obviously the comrades lawful opinions, right?
He needs to think through their basis. So it seems to go with it actually. But in any case, the it does strike me that that him going into the marketplace and asking these finally conventional comrades just been ripped off. One one way to think about a lover of gain is that somebody who capitalizes on the ignorance of others.
And it's not hard to look at Socrates and not see a commonality. Now, so Socrates seems deliberately to be trying to provoke the comrade because early on, he accuses him of trying to deceive him. And he's like, you know what, he doesn't even pay attention to it. After the third argument, which is convoluted and Socrates doesn't spell it out.
So he doesn't give him a chance to really reflect on it. He issues this accusation again. So the first time is at 226 A, the second one is at 228 A. And then the cover says, no, but I see Socrates, you on the contrary, deceiving me.
I know how you're managing to turn everything upside down in the argument, right? At that point, he's then he gives this whole speech about partners, which we'll have to say something about before we're done. Yeah. But then after that, he said he acts generous.
He says, look, I'll let you change whatever you want, like change it if you want. And I think that earns him a bit of goodwill. So he's generous, which I think in clients, the comrade to a man, OK, I guess I was ignorant. I did make a mistake.
And this brings him finally to admit this is at 231 C, pretty translates it as, well, I don't know what to say, but it's really the word, up again. And it's literally I'm at a loss about what to say. And soccer says, not unjustly, are you at a loss? And the Greek word operandi means I have no path or I have no resource.
I have no wealth. I have nothing to draw on here. So far from ripping him off, he in a way shows him his own poverty, right? And so there's a kind of, I think this helps bring out for Socrates, a way in which Socratic dialogue has an element in it that while it is tied to love of the good, is not merely trying to capitalize on others' ignorance or expose their idiocy, but it is a kind of process of education or growing self-awareness.
Is that makes sense that this might be part of working out his rhetorical strategy for the trials. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I was going to say that this is one model of philosophizing versus the model presented in the gorgias. And I understand that's before a much larger audience, but where Socrates purposely ramps up, callocles.
And when we did an episode on that dialogue to go back to your first question, we did the gorgias. You said, OK, so this is just another model, right? I don't know. I'm missing, Greg.
I don't know. You're not missing anything. That's just like it's so dumb. It's gofuddling.
So my question, sorry. It's like a worst call back there. Sorry. So Greg's a little sleepy.
It's late at night. He just got back from his big Jeff's Island. That's right. You guys also recorded an episode earlier.
I didn't have a good answer to your question, I got a question. I don't know if Alex does. No, no, it's not a question. Tell me if the statement's incorrect.
Is this a model of philosophism? This is one path one might use to convince or have a conversation with somebody. I'm just not sure. I'm not sure I'm convinced that Socrates is trying to convince the comrade of anything.
Although maybe he is. Partly he's trying to test what actually somebody like him will find convincing rather than what will convince him. Oh, okay. What kind of line of argument works with him?
So let me try. I don't know if Alex can jump in, but sort of the companion is confused, right? That seems obvious. What's he confused about?
I'm deeply sympathetic because what he wants to do is draw a distinction between sort of decent and indecent gain. So he wants to say the gain is both good and bad, which is already a kind of confused position. And it's a kind of common sense distinction, right? Like selling something honestly versus selling something dishonestly, making money off something that's useful to the person or not useful.
And so part of the problem is he's not drawing a distinction between the use of money for a thing and whether or not money has intrinsic use itself, which probably touches on this silver gold business at the end, it seems to me. But there's a common. So what does he want? So what's the moral thing he wants?
He wants to see self restraint on the part of the lover of gain or the person who's pursuing gain. And he thinks that like a decent human being doesn't simply pursue everything that they hold to be gained. They put some restrictions on it or some limitations on it. What he fails to see is what Socrates has in common with the lover of gain is that Socrates is pursuit of the good seems to be unrestrained.
So there's a way in which this comrade has something in common with Socrates and there's a way in which they disagree. If I had to put my finger on where I think they agree, it would be that the goal of the lover of gain is low money, except that the comrade actually also likes money. So for Socrates, the problem isn't the lack of restraint. It's what is the good that is being pursued.
So I mean, Socrates understood as he as a lover of gain as he outlines it here. He does in fact pursue gain without restraint, I would say. He pursues the good. Everyone does so.
So when Alex is going through the, on the one hand, no one's a lover of gain if you accept these premises, that's the first line of argument. But then the next one is everyone's a lover of gain. It needs to be nuanced and it's not fully worked out, but that seems much more like the Socratic argument that everyone pursues what they believe to be good. Yeah.
I mean, I found myself hitting a wall because at a few times Socrates suggests that not all gain is good or he points to that possibility. Sure. So and the example I gave my students and the converse, right, that all loss is bad, right? And so if I had a cancerous arm and I had to lose it, there's this weird way in which that loss would actually be gained.
I think that something like that is going on. So not everything that you acquire is good. You could acquire a bad friend, for example, from grad school who just did drinking and drugs and all the other bad things all the time. And like you gained a friend, but did you really gain a friend?
It's one thing to talk about a gain rate of slim, right? Right. Which did you say cancers are, I've never heard of arm kids. I don't really know.
It's one thing that just, what about money? Gagarin, I like getting money. Okay, money go. Why is it bad to make a million dollars off off of, you know, selling some little old lady, you know, a bogus life insurance plan?
Off, daddy, doesn't think it's bad. No, he does not think it's bad. Do you know what I mean? You chose that example, but it's clear that one of the things they have in mind is really money.
And it's interesting. It's so long to get to money. Socrates has to introduce the word spend and then the comrade introduced the silver and gold reveals he knows exchange rates. So clearly he's been in the marketplace and sort of spends his time around there.
But it seems strange to sort of, I don't know. And then maybe that's the problem. Money is like potential good. And so you can, if you shore up a lot of money, if you get quite wealthy, it doesn't seem like you have to bad thing, right?
It certainly makes you feel secure. But why is that bad? How could that be bad? A game that's bad.
Well, I mean, this goes to some other places where what Socrates talks about is those things that you have are good. Well, only those things that you know how to use are good for you. So it's possible one could gain something that one doesn't know how to use well and it could be bad for one. So for example, if someone gave me a nuclear bomb and I didn't know how to use it well, it could be bad for me to have it.
And the same could obviously be said for money. I could use my money poorly to buy things like if you gave me like the one thing that's when I was younger and I was joke about the one thing that keeps me healthy is that I'm poor. That if you gave me a bunch of money, I'd probably kill myself because I just wasted on all the things that will hurt you. And there's all this research on people who win the lottery and then go like it ruins their life.
So there is some way in which the reason we think money is good simply is because it's the neutral thing and it's a sort of means. It's a future means for me to satisfy my desires. And so it's because I know that my desires will be somewhat limitless. More money is a means to satisfy more desires in the future.
Now whether or not that in itself is a good thing is of course a question. But I think that most and by the way Conrad is a very typical human being maybe the most typical kind of human being. Who thinks that money is very good but who thinks that people who gain it by dishonest means are bad. They like money.
It's not a common type of human type that dislikes money. It seems to me. Yeah. So I wonder I think this gets that last point you made is helpful in thinking about what our hopes are when they're tied up.
What we were all truly. Yeah. So let's talk about the section on Hipparchus. Okay, sure.
Yeah. Because love of gain is tied in the Republic. Michael Davis has an essay on the Hipparchus. I started reading I don't have time to get through it.
He points out that it's really not talked about much in Plato's corpus. Most of it is out of gain. Yeah, it's mostly in this dialogue. And then the place you find it the next most is and I think it's used under two dozen times in all the playlists.
But the next time is in the discussion of tyranny I believe in the Republic. So there's a connection between wanting money wealth and tyranny which suggests that the love of gain is not just a desire for a neutral good money. But it has some sort of higher ambitions involved. What's going on in that little aggression?
So first of all, I want to kind of set the stage here because and this actually I think feeds into my interpretation that Socrates is just intentionally pissing people off. Because what happens now is we get a defense of a kind of love of gain by defending a guy who overthrew the government, installed a tier like overthrew democratic Athens installed a tyrannical empire empire is not a very tyrannical regime. And so we as this bad I was trying to think like what would be analogous to the United States of America right now. I just can't think of like if Jefferson Davis if they had won briefly and then like immediately then thrown it back out and reestablished the Republic and then Socrates is talking people like how great Jefferson Davis is.
This is just this is really roughly better. So all right fine. Anyway, so the digression is well you're trying to see me. Sarti says and then the Congress says no you're trying to see me and then they just you know it's like a Laurel and Hardy act about who's deceiving whom.
And then Socrates finally is like no, no, you're trying to see me and you shouldn't deceive a friend which is one of the sayings of the wise of Marcus the tyrant who is so wise. And we get this very long digression about how a parkist wanted to sort of educate the citizens of Athens and he wanted to do so by putting two sayings on statues for one of the gods as you leave the town of Athens. So apparently the rustic folks were specifically the target. But the idea was I mean if you've known the oracle at Delphi, they're the two sayings know thyself and know thyself and what is everything in moderation.
What's the second one? Nothing in excess. Nothing in excess. Yeah, good.
And so at parkist replaces those with walk thinking just thoughts and the second one is don't just see the friends that right? Yeah. So he's rivaling. I think one of the serious things going on here and Alex kind of already alluded to this and talking about what Socrates is up to is a kind of lover of gain himself and is whether or not Socrates is presenting a park is a kind of image of him because a park is setting up his own sayings to rival those of an oracle.
And so therefore he's trying a sort of religiously a ridges a revolution in religious education seems to me. He's trying to he's rivaling the God of Delphi, which is Apollo the same God Socrates rivals. Yeah. I mean, so when you look at the Delphi conscriptions know thyself points to something like self knowledge but coming from a God means really know that you are human and not a god.
Know your place. Yeah, therefore restricted. Restricted yourself. Which means it's a caution against people like the partners.
Okay. Who gets killed? Yeah. Yeah.
The others by it. Right. So it seems like the God was right in this case like you shouldn't. So it's a kind of a moderate things.
He also replaces this. The statements that should get you to reflect on what it means to be human. How ignorant you are and how limited you are. Right.
With very, I don't know. He calls these right. He calls these bits of wisdom. Right.
And they talk thinking just things. It's not even thought. It's just the just things. Right.
And he says, there are many other beautiful pieces of his poetry. The other one being don't deceive a friend. It's better than the original Greek. Is it?
No, just look it is not. It's like very of all the like when you think of this is a guy by the way who among his positive credits were bringing Homer's poems and having them edited. In fact, the versions of Homer we have come from the versions edited under the piece of Stratotearon Pirates. Right.
This guy who you know, all these beautiful similes and plots and fundamental questions, his beautiful pieces of poetry that lead him to vie for wisdom against God himself or walk thinking just things don't deceive a friend. It's so absurd. Right. I have a serious point in the silly point.
Okay. So if I had to sort of label the virtues that the Delphic Oracle exhorts us to, I would say wisdom and moderation know they self and nothing excess. But both of the park is his point to justice. It seems to me.
Yeah. The funny point, the non-series point is again, this is my buddy Matt Wells who's got me to justice, but get up and walk 10 paces for me. Just do it. And while you do it, think just things.
Like what does it mean? What do you, like, what do you, what do you, what do you picture in your, like, walk thinking just things like taxes, pay my taxes. Okay. Like what does it, I don't know, it just sounds silly to me.
What's going on with you and this Matt Wells guy, you guys got a little harmonious and aristokayton situation? I mean, that's just, that's what the people think, but they've misread their Thucydides. That's right. Yeah.
That's another layer. I don't think we have time or I really don't have any thoughts on it to how to get into that. But it is very strange. Yeah.
Walking just things like to, how do you keep unjust thoughts out of your head? How do you keep from deceiving it? Right. How do you walk thinking just things?
How do you walk with all that mass? Sounds like a bunch of numa, pum, pillios, bullsh**. Does this mean if you're thinking unjust thoughts, you should sit down? Yeah, you got to work in there.
Yeah. But I guess we got here. Maybe that's a way to sort of think about this, that a parkus thinks an unjust thought from the perspective of like, you know, a pious Greek who thinks, you know, the oracles related to God, right? And that this is a great sacrilege.
There is a tendency of human beings to think outside of what's conventionally acceptable. And Socrates has recently been accused of this. This is accepting that he is actually older here and maybe or he has his accusation. But he's been accused of this and certainly accused by our staff and he's right.
There's something to be said for trying to clarify for others and for yourself how you're, you know, unlawful gains fit or do not fit these reproaches. Right. I do think there is a kind of open the openness of socratic philosophy, which is here portrayed as a kind of generosity. I'll let you change it, right?