Well, Buenas, Ding Dong, Diaz, and welcome back to the New Thinkery. My name is David Barr, and with me is always my good friend Alex, how are you doing, Alex? I'm doing well, how are you doing? I'm well.
And how are you, Greg? I'm just doing... Why are you smiling like that? I'm great, I'm fine.
Well, Nick, because I was just trying to channel ZanaFon, I always call Alex my good friend. I know what you do, and then you just say, here's Greg. Okay, yeah, I'm aware of how you do this. You were doing the Buckeye today, and he's just rearing to just give his little joke about the Buckeye title.
Do you want to just do it now? Can you go over with it? What's the title of this? The Buckeye.
No, we're doing a Euripides Buckeye with a friend of ours and returning guest Spencer Glaven. How are you, Spencer? I'm doing great, man. Good to see you guys.
I've been looking forward to this. Spencer is my colleague at the Claremont Institute. He's the assistant editor at the Claremont Review of Books. He has a nerd book that came out a few years ago called Music in Ancient Greece, Melody Rhythm in Life.
It's accomplished. Thanks for working just for nerds. A more accessible and recent title is his, and of course this is getting attraction everywhere, how to save the West, ancient wisdom for five modern crises. Spencer also has big news.
The podcast world, he's moving over. I don't know. Is this public to the daily wire? Yeah.
I saw the picture of you guys hanging out on some steps. That's right. Yeah. Well, was that a doctorate?
Or was you guys just launched a podcast and go to Greece? Or what was that? That actually is a project that will drop soon. That's not my podcast.
It's part of a group project. But yes, somebody leaked is a really pretentious way. John and Pajou, who's a friend of mine and one of the other guests posted a pic of me and Baron and JP and he never knew some stuff on Western. Where are you?
Oh, I'll still have a T-button in Rome. It's like the port city outside of the main city of Rome. That's what they got to be a champion. And your podcast, it's obviously a massive platform now, but generally speaking, the topics will still be focused on the Western classics.
Yeah, it's very much still the Western world in fact. So the way it'll unfold is rather than a weekly show, which is why I'm here at the fullest. It's going to be a seasonal show where they drop every quarter of a year. And the first two were going to be out of Athens in Jerusalem.
So we'll actually start with Jerusalem and do Athens. And then after that, we'll sort of go into more specific topics. You know, I've got one queued up on friendship. What's the issue?
A friendship. There's one Christmas. There's just a bunch of different stuff. But yeah, very much Westerns of the Western world at AWS.
Wonderful. Wonderful. And so today we're talking about Euripides, the Bakakai. I know in Airsoft, I know in Airsoft, I know in Airsoft, I know in Airsoft, I know in Airsoft, in the US, what was it?
What was it? The Bakakai. And in Airsoft, in these frogs, does Euripides win? I can't recall.
No, he loses. No. He loses. But in the constellation, he's my tailor's favorite Greek true jediem.
There you go. Because he's every humanities. There you go. No, but Dionysus goes down.
I want to pause and just, I love how quickly you just took the wind out of Greg's. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, puff off for your liberties, but then escalists wins, because it's Aristophanes and you gotta get the traditional, the venerable, yeah. So I don't think- You're featured in another play, which I think is very relevant to this, which is the best one for you is do-side.
That's right. And which is, I think remarkably similar, because in both, a man has to dress and drag. One thing I think is very interesting about the Bakai, which I only really got an appreciation for after we rereading Aristophanes lately, is just how, how closely he treads towards comedy in this. He's gotta get a king to get in drag and not make it ridiculous.
And any kind of avoids it by having like the conviction turn off stage, but you look at it here, like how did this not just produce laughter? You know? Yeah. I think he really- I think he's supposed to have it there.
Yeah, I think he's supposed to be humiliated. And that's very close, kind of, you know, for me, ball-bounder to those two things. Isn't it also, isn't it also fiddities? Am I wrong?
Is he reciting Euripides's poetry that gets him ultimately troubled his father in the clouds? Yeah, well, because Euripides is the softest, which you're reading in the softest part of his mind. So I'm trying to remember that as I say, I'm sure. Okay, good.
Yeah, just- What was relevant from the Aristophanes perspective to display is the idea that he was a theological innovator, right? In all those, so they're Stophanes, he's kind of rejecting the old gods. And here we get to play with the very new god at his moment of introduction to the city from which his mother hails and the immense resistance there. So you get a sense that it's a kind of traditional fool for what he himself is doing.
So it's, yeah, it's all related. There's extremely complicated relationship between piety and innovation here, because on the one hand, right, Dionysus is the new god. He's the challenging kind of horse chaos. And on the other hand, Tyreseus presents an argument for his worship on the basis of what sounds very much like traditional piety, actually, but sort of a rejection on those with the sophistic kind of atheist.
Maybe continue this theme, but maybe I'll ask Alex to maybe give a plot somewhere here in just a moment, but Spencer, before we were recording, you mentioned that Ngarvete is kind of your guy. And it sounds like we were kind of shredding on that direction, but maybe most of our audience will have heard of Euripides, but what are some main things that someone who hasn't heard of them should know? And why is he, or it sounds like he's your favorite trigidian? Why is that the case?
Yeah, I'm way too late about Euripides. Well, it's interesting because I don't know if he's necessarily the best trigidian of the, more kind of free economic role. So again, for listeners that are maybe not pre-tragedy devotees, we have Eselis, who is in some sense the original poet as it comes down to us. He's the traditionalist, he's usually represented as the older, he is older and he's definitely the older.
Sophocles E. Rippie, Rippie's contemporary, Sophocles younger, Euripides is very much the kind of avant-garde new wave poet who comes down in their solvies, for example, as we were discussing, the caricature within is that he's a kind of firebrand and a weirdo, he's not appreciated in his own day, but eventually becomes much like many of visionary artists, he fancies himself, kind of this new innovator, the sander, still eventually will be. And in the Bernard Noxes, we'll talk about today as well, he's compared with Santal and all these kind of innovative artists that aren't appreciated in their own day, but know that they will be appreciated. I mean, you might do something like Picasso here, right?
He's doing very weird things with it. Sorry, going. And he also has the virtue of, or the good fortune of, he plays more of his place surviving the other two, most combined or, I guess, three times as many, so 19 survive, which is almost three times as many as, the seven, I think of that's what looks right. And so, on the one hand, Essel is very large, because if you come first, you are inevitably going to be the standard answer to others you're compared.
On the other hand, as Noxes says, and it says, I think this is true, we know you're released in some weirdly intimate web, because we have so much of his output, at least relative to the others. And he's very difficult, I find him very difficult, for me, since we've already begun to touch on that, even as you attempt to identify and categorize and describe him, there's always, when you go back to the plays, and this is what I love about going back to Bage, as we got ready to do this podcast, there's always something that actually totally contradicts your frustrates, which you decided about, like the fact that Tyreseus in this play, has this very traditionalist, heitistic note that he sounds, that at the same time has real overtones of subversive, sophisticated, so there's just something really wonderfully devious about him in that respect. And in my particular talk, Field, which was music theory and music in the ancient world, he's notable, and he's almost a trope, he's sort of put alongside Timotheus of my leadis, or his innovation with musical forms, there are many kind of metrical anomalies in Euripides that don't just boil down to manuscripts, errors, or mistakes of transmission, they're really national, and there are long, for instance, in the arrestings, these longs or songs that don't really fit into classic, Aristotelian breakdown of how poetry goes. So I love him for that, and I love him also, because in spite of all of that, he's not maybe what we really go and talk about our own card, which is he really deconstructions, he's actually trying to say something, it's sort of like a choice, let's say, something you come to the end of an art form, and he uses the art form, but also subversed the art form to say something new and interesting.
So that's just fun. There's something about his lyrical quality, that's sometimes the structures break down, and that's what you mean by the reference to Aristotle, but you start reading him, and it's got this kind of pitter-patter beat to it, and then it almost falls into like a beat poet, like feel, it's just in moments, not like an extended, but you read it and you're like, and it feels real, like you feel the passion of the person who ever is speaking, and where sometimes when you're reading like escalists, especially, but even with Sophocles, like in Antigone, the chorus, and that's a very peculiar chorus, but the chorus is kind of reflective of the moment, but it's kind of a kind of the way I think about it, and it's like a first interpretation of what you've just witnessed, and they're kind of fleeting from moment to moment and changing their mind, so they're not reliable, but it's got a kind of impressionistic quality, but it's very structured, and it's very much follows the order of things, whereas when you read your epinees, sometimes it feels like it just breaks out of that, and you just get a very genuine kind of passionate and individualistic moment for the chorus that you would get. Right, I mean, he has an advantage, which artists have when they come late to an art form that has had time to really establish its roles, which is that his choices to break the rules are profoundly meaningful, because they've been set in stone over many repetitions and iterations, I mean, Bachai is just four or five, it's actually produced posthumously, which is very unusual from the tragedy, and so it's his last play, it means first place, which only four of his tetralgies did during his lifetime, so in keeping with this idea of him as sort of a maverick, he was not hugely popular in his day. When I went alive, Bachai on the other hand is cited repurposed, reused, prime and again, not only by classical object, by Christian authors, but for instance, of Byzantine Passion of Christ, which takes shards from his play and from others to, oh, Jesus, so to Dionysus becomes, gee, the words of Dionysus, but a Jesus mouth and that, that's, and so it certainly, it was prophetic in that sense, that it definitely became important, and one reason why we have it is because it's each have been among the kind of tent and not the kind of place that we're taught in schools and so forth, but yes, but the moments where people break out, Alex, and where the Dachme Acts kind of dissolve, Dachme Acts being the kind of classic tragic meter of the chorus, they then dissolve into these free-flowing lyrical passages and so forth, those have meaning in the same way that, like a Shakespearean break from the sonnet has meaning, because Shakespeare is working with a form that already exists, like you can't have the Shakespearean sonnet, that kind of apotheosis of the form without, Petra, without the people, I mean, of course, Patrick Ritz-Ritz too, but just you have to have like, a certain amount of buildup of the form where people know what to expect, and then some version of that application just takes on the significant.
All right, should we jump in? Yeah, let's do a quick summary of the play. So this play is called Bachai, not like David, the King's Bachai, which is speaking of which, especially you're learning Japanese, but we'll leave that aside. But how can you explain to the folks, Alex, what is the Bachai?
It's literally titled The Female Worshipers of Bach, right, guy next to you. Who's Bachai? I mean, people might have heard this, this is the, so what did you say? A minat is a word that people might have heard that sometimes you, right, sort of quickly, Bachai.
The Contis, minads, yeah, so there's all sorts of titles. It's a very strange play because as you read it, there's a clear sort of arc to the story, which is, all right, Dionysus is coming to town. He seems to have already converted all or most of the women of thieves to becoming his worshipers and they're out in the fields and mountains. This is like, you know, by those of you at least actually kind of opaque, whether they're just sucking a f***ing it, or maybe they're just dancing and hanging out in a community with nature.
It's not very good. There's a lot of doublespeak, but he's a pantheus, the king, who is the grandson of the founder of these, Cadmus, who's filled with these dragon seeds and all that, and then you've got the first generation. She's dealing with a kind of political crisis. And the stranger comes into town, who is apparently Bachus or Dionysus.
You know that, doesn't seem like he knows that. And it's basically, the plot is pantheus wrestling with this kind of theological innovation in town, figuring out what to do, whether to kill him and whether to kill the stranger. He decides to imprisonment one point, but then the stranger escapes because Dionysus did all this focus and there's a lot of confusing dramatic bits there and we can go into that. But eventually, a pantheus is kind of persuaded that, maybe I'll go check this out and see what's going on, rather than attack with my army.
He wants to go in there with shields and Dionysus is like, no, I don't think that's a good idea. There's all the stories about how these women avoided the spheres and arrows of these assailants and then kill them with their like wands, basically. And it turns out they have like crazy, like superhuman power, like when a woman sees their baby under a color or something like that, right? They just like keep it over and you have the stories.
Anyway, so. That's a very comparison. Yeah, yeah, they have the kind of power of media and the beauty of what the fuck they're doing up there is really important because pantheus is convinced that they're doing all sorts of crazy shit. And yet, whenever we get a firsthand report, it turns out they're just gonna have a vitamin, you know, they're just like hanging out.
Well, they also are like sucking wolves and shit. I'm totally totally, totally, totally. They're doing bizarre shit. So anyways, he goes up there and he's like, he's trying to look and see what they're doing.
Heidi is dressed in drag, by the way, which is where the tragedy almost evolves, right? Which is, I think it's interesting that in the play that features Dionysus, we get, who's the god of the theater, not just tragedy, but comedy. You get this strong comic element that you're stopping his exploits to know, small degree. And as he goes up there, he's hiding up on the hill, he climbs in a tree, the women's see him, the tear him was under specifically his mother.
And mother comes back with his head, Katynus comes into town and is like. She thinks it's a lion, she thinks it's a lion. Yeah, she thinks it's a lion. Yeah, she has a hallucination that he's a lion.
Yeah, so I got a lion's head and he's like, yeah, so Katynus comes down to the sky. He's been out in the hills with Tiresias doing Dionysus and stuff, kind of. It's not clear exactly what they're up to, but they come back, he's like, oh, you made a big mistake. If he comes to a moment of realization, and then it's all over and then Dionysus kind of punishes everybody and says, Katynus, you got it.
Now, one of the problems here, the big problem with the play, and I'll just throw this out there and see if it tickles or taint. But one of the problems with the play is that happiness gets a big runt of the punishment. And it's not clear why. Pentius gets destroyed and it's very clear why, because he's denied Dionysus's divinity.
And one of the things that seems really important to this is the backstory. So that's the plot of the play. We throw out a couple of things just about it. I don't think that piece deserves it either.
You're fine. Yeah, I mean, here's the sum, but yeah, we'll get into that. So, Addness shows these teeth of a dragon into thieves. And from that you get the smart toy, the original first generation of thieves.
Among his daughters is Semenli. And Semenli gets down with Zeus and says, hey, Zeus, let me see who you are. And Zeus is like, here I am. And then with a thunderbolt, she's burnt to a crisp.
Zeus takes Dionysus, who's in her womb, and puts those into his thigh. He's eventually born. And now this is Dionysus's big homecoming. And nobody believes Semenli.
In fact, the first speech of the play is Dionysus. And one of the things he points out is, no, I'm here to redeem my mother effectively. And so one of the difficulties with the play is it seems like, I wonder if the dismissal of Semenli, sorry, my dog is whining. I wonder if one of the dismissals of Semenli has to deal with a problem in Cadness's founding order that then Cadness is being, that Pentheus is a kind of proxy, or the original sin you could say of Cadness.
That's just like a weird, kind of hazy question I have. But that's the plot. How much you will? Yeah, incredibly rich question and set of issues.
I mean, one thing to bear in mind here is this is, this is our only extant play, which features Dionysus, which is kind of bonkers if you think about it, because as you say, Dionysus got a theater event. So I should say, it's only actually tragedy. Of course, you have frogs, right? But which feature Dionysus is quite prominently.
But there's our only extra tragedy. Now we know that there were others, a number of others, which shared a range of features in common, including sort of the epimidicity elements of, you know, to do with Dionysus and the stranger pretending not to be Dionysus and so forth. But one thing that I think must be unique to Euripides is the nature of Tyreusius, who gives us at the very beginning two very important speeches, one of which is with Camus whom you've already mentioned, and one of which is to Pentheus himself. And both are in favor of worshiping Dionys, especially with Pentheus, who's dead set against.
But Tyreusius says to Pentheus, even the story about the thigh isn't actually true. You have heard that Dionysus was shown into the thigh of Zeus, but in fact, this was the conflation of the word, thigh, maywas, with the name Hera, and what really happened is that Zeus gave Hera a chunk of air that he shaped into the form of Dionysus, so that she wouldn't kill his actual son because Hera always famously came. So there's this very labyrinth, kind of convoluted explanation that takes the form of a lot of sort of philosophical treatments of myth, I mean, the Stoics come to mind, but in general, there was a mode of interpretation of myth that was like, this is a kind of, just a cover, an artistic cover for observation about natural philosophy or just the way of the world that usually comes along with some kind of play on words, as they do here. Tyreusius says something like there, they are soon to then test logon, they are putting together a word and account, or they're conflating different words.
And so there's obviously something going on here that to do with misdirection, right? That like, as you suggest, Alex, why is it that Catherine's, Catherine's seems actually to be doing everything basically right, I mean, if the cardinal sin is to deny the truth of what's happening with Dionysus, and the first, the sort of primary sinner is Agave and Persistus, some other of Centhius and Persistus, who have denied that their sister, Semmel, he was really impregnated by Zeus, because they don't want to admit that that that happened, they think this was all a comfort for whatever sexuality or something. And then Pentius himself, who also insists that this is not a god, that this god has no power, that we should worship him. And in each case, Dionysus himself says, your blasphemy has made you blind, you cannot see because of your blasphemy.
And being able to see or not see is sort of a recurrent motif throughout the text. Horace Hamede, the Ukaras Hamdae, a day Huron, like you don't see what you should see, you see the things that you shouldn't see, I want to look at. Pentius is obsessed with looking at the Dionysian, the Vakai themselves, that's why he consents to wear. The clothing, the women's clothing, is because that will let him get close enough to see what they're doing.
He's obsessed with them, he wants to see them. And so the ability to see what's really going on is kind of the thing that makes or breaks you in this play. I would suggest that if you can see what's going on, then you'll be okay, you won't suffer the right of Dionysus. And if you can't see or refuse to see what's happening, then Dionysus will sneak up behind you and the person is trying to rip you to shreds.
So it's maybe that is why both Camus and Pentius, it's less to do with any kind of moral failing on their part and more to do with their insistence on kind of mythologizing away something essential about reality. They both do that in different ways. I think. Let me draw on that, because I think that's, in a way what you're getting at is that the play is being the only extant play, which obviously if it's only extant, it just means what we have.
But it also means it's the most definitive, maybe like the thing that people saw most of the person. I just say it quickly became the definitive account of this man. Yeah, it's just canonical. But a couple of things on that account, the very problem of seeing the miraculous or having evidentiary proof, like visible proof, adoculous of the gods is the central problem of some of the way.
So assembly was doubted. He said, okay, I'm gonna go check with the guy who just slept with me, make sure he's this. And then she just burnt to a crest. She's just up here.
And then Dionysus also needs to show himself in his power, but he also has to present himself as a priest. So there's this constant play on the visibility of the gods versus the invisibility. And that's the problem with faith in a way, right? Is how do you assess whether the god is actually real?
And to go back to your point about the Thigh, the Maros. And this is, I'm standing this from Michael Davis, who, for a teacher of mine, and he has a couple of lectures on the back, that's fantastic. But he talks about this at length, where Homeros is also a homophone for Homeros. It's just Homer's name, right?
And so you think about it, and the whole thing is pointing to the poet, right? It points to the miracle, but then it points back to the poet. And so to go back to Cadmus, I wonder whether the problem of Thebes is that it's founded on a myth that people take literally. Cadmus is so dragon steep, and then people popped up.
And everyone's like, yeah, that happened. And then one of the daughters was like, I slept with Zeus, they're like, no, no, no, no, no. We're all from a dragon team. That's already a group, we know.
Like, you gotta show us, because I know we all came out of the ground. Like I was there when they cut our snams or whatever that happened, right? And I wonder whether there's something, I think Thebes, this is just a kind of weird thought I have. But I think Thebes might be, if the founding myths were absolutely obvious and absolutely literally credible, what would the people be like?
I think Pentius is that way, right? He doesn't leave anything. He doesn't doubt, he doesn't believe in Dionysus at any point, despite all the stuff he sees. It seems just, yeah, it seems like he's got this weird mental block nobody has, because he is actually the child of a miracle.
And the guy is still there, Cadmus is too alive. Oh, I love this, I love this. And it's like hyper-modern concern in some ways, or it's a set of concerns that we identify with modernity, but very obviously at play in Euripides corpus, because one of the things that Euripides is known for inventiguity and that is this association with this office, as we've kind of already touched on. And the like, Logus classic is for talking about this and for associating in this office, is this passage in the Hecuba, where Zeus is kind of identified with natural law, essentially, and with Vusus.
And there are fragments also from other places that don't survive, which touch on the same theme. That when we talk about Zeus, when we talk about the divine, we're really just, we would say, anthropomorphizing the forces of nature. And if that's the case, then this problem of the evidential basis of the supernatural becomes incredibly acute. I mean, Euripides, I think no poet should ever be held to anything that a character in his place says on us, it's just screaming obvious that this character stands in for the poet, but it's inevitable that poets will unfairly be yoked to the claims made in their place, especially in the excepting species, like this one that I'm making reference to.
And in Baca, which is one of the latest plays that you composed, we have this kind of rejection of that idea that everything can be kind of reduced all mythology, all references to the supernatural can be ultimately reduced to a kind of deterministic natural law, description of the universe. And one of the things that Tyree C says is that we're not gonna solidify a way, one of these great big kind of Greek compounds for, we're not going to quibble away, the existence of this divine being whose very nature is kind of to thwart our compartmentalization and structure and organization of the world. And I think that the inability or the refusal to see that in Antheus is like, yeah, what if everything were just hyper literal, right? What would it look like if the myths were just descriptions of the natural world?
And there are two extremes of that. One is the myths are falsified, abstracted, personified versions of what just goes on every day in our lives. And this is sort of David Hume, it's even Francis Bacon, does a lot of this in some of his work. The other extreme of that is the myths are literal descriptions of what actually happens.
They are like, if you had a GoPro camera, you would wash the teeth getting sewn into the ground. And Euripides is sort of insisting you reduce simply, I think in this last statement on like something in between those two things like a supernatural, which might be metaphorical and something which is nevertheless irreducibly real. And like, if you can't see that, then yeah, you will become either a high bound Pantheus or a kind of dithering catamist and neither of those is really the way. Maybe you can persuade me that Spencer, I'm struggling when I read this, I have trouble, I don't see why Pantheus's lack of belief in a new goddess and sort of entirely understandable and they're excusable, like it's a novel God, like why should he believe?
I mean, the Dionysus appears in human form, his mother is someone we all know, right? Like why should I believe? And then there's this curious line, I've spoken by Cadmus, I think it's line for online 330 or so, something like this. Cadmus says, even if he's not a God, just pretend like he is, because it would be a noble fiction.
Yes. Like what, like okay, like okay, I should just go along with it, it's a nice story. It's just, I mean, I guess maybe it's modern in me, that's just, if David gave me his, actually my mom is like, my dad's actually Zeus, I'd be like okay, simmer it down now. I, you know.
Right, that's obviously- Unsatisfying the catamist option, I think. And it's supposed to be, I think that the catamist line is supposed to be visibly unsatisfying. But also, but apparently, but also Pantheus is not supposed to not, like that's not what you're gonna use as a sporty guy either, right, so the sort of skepticism is also not. I'm not supposed to, I'm not what I want to persuade you.
That Pantheus deserves his punishment, because I think part of the point of any really devastating tragedy is that sort of the punishment that I'm gonna say coming to you anyway, like you might not be able to escape it because of the struggle of reality. I mean, if I had something to argue for it, I would say, yes, catamist and sort is unsatisfying, but Pantheus is somehow closed off in some fundamental way to a domain of reality that we are supposed to be able somehow to access these sort of the more things in heaven and earth than our dream of your philosophy domain. And none of us, I think could survive if we were to be punished by dismemberment over that level of like, right, it's a lot of fail-and-failing, but I do think that's what's being shown. I mean, I like the line in the Knox essay, which we haven't talked about yet, but I like the line in his essay about your views, but he offers no action because the situation is past action and he offers no, there's some other thing that he doesn't offer, like he offers no condemnation because it's beyond moral condemnation, he just offers sympathy.
And I sort of think that's kind of what's, what's not what's in the USM sorry, I'm sorry, the culpability or whatever you want to call it about the word of it is one ought to remain open to these kinds of possibilities. Yeah, that's the problem of, okay, all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you want to, I think that is an ought, if there's an ought, okay, is that.
So let me read the lines that you have in mind, Greg, because I think there's some interesting stuff here. He goes, that is this, even if this Dionysus is no God, so you assert, just wait yourself that he is, the fiction is a noble one, which by the way, for all the people who've read the birth of tragedy, you just were the tragedy that your remedies was, was like Socrates' right-hand man, like to hear that there's a noble fiction about the gods, just keep that in mind, right? But for some reason, for some of you will seem to be the mother of a God, and this confers no small distinction of your family. I almost took this as Cadmus' sort of confession, sort of what you confession to the Pentius, like, dude, you're in charge now.
Like, you know the dragonteats, which is bullshit, right? Yeah. So here's where I would say, maybe Cadmus is a philosopher king. He got a bunch of children, brought them in, and he's like, yeah, I need you from dragon's teeth.
And they're like, oh, okay. And then like, some of you, like whatever tries to reproduce it, he's like, just, you gotta go with the flow, man, you gotta accept the intervention of the divine and use it to your advantage. So I wonder whether, again, this is me going back to this weird thought, but maybe Pentius takes the myths to literally, but it might be that the Cadmus... Hold on a little bit, that would be there for the Cadmus is saying, if that's right, Cadmus is saying that this Dionysus person is not actually the divine being, but for all purposes, for all prequel purposes, it's fine to pretend that he is.
Yeah, who cares? It consolidates power, right? It gives a lot of distinction to our family, and it keeps us empowered. That's exactly the aim.
And that would be a good reason if he had lied about the beginnings, about the dragonteats, why he deserves punishment, as to become a sneak, a serpent, essentially just like the, the animal he claimed to slay. Another way to put this is that maybe Dionysus is Zeus's revenge, right? Oh, you want to make new gods? Here's a new god, right?
But to go back to Penthes' culpability or is deserving of the punishment, she already seems like, he doesn't really deserve it, but there's a strange thing. After he watches the palace get ruptured and burst into flames, after he assaults a phantom and it dissipates, after he goes up and he sees the mountain moving, apparently, like dancing and shifting and bakkir revelry. And this is both a characterological question and both a sort of moral question. The moral question is why doesn't he change his mind then?
The first of all those questions, why isn't he convinced? Like if I saw a mountain dance, I live by the mountain, so if I saw them dancing with like bare-breasted, women suckling wolves, I'd be like, okay, maybe the gods exist. Maybe this is what is going on here. Oh, come on, come on.
You don't think your initial reaction would be, I must be, it must have been that sweet, sweet Colorado hash that I put down last night. Or there must be a rational explanation. Yeah, there must be a rational explanation. I'm hot.
I have some undigested beef, some weird mustard. Why do you man of the worldly mind, why do you touch your senses? Because a little thing affects them. You might be an undigested beef.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Absolutely.
I mean, I think that Alex, you answered your own question in the earlier part of what you were saying, because this is like a famous epistemological conundrum of faith that we go into these questions with a set of presuppositions. But those presuppositions are in some sense the answers to the question we're trying to determine. Like if we are trying to decide whether supernatural events occur, I mean, this is one reason why David Hume is both really right, but also infuriating about the question of miracles, right? Because he says our whole body of knowledge has never provided evidence of, nobody's ever reported.
Basically most report gives us a nature that follows laws. And so any report of a break in the law of nature has to be weighed against the entire sum of human experience. Yeah. But this is like a time problem.
It's not a report. He sees that. He's at first a report from the messenger. He then sees it.
And that to me is a different ball game. Like now if you're Greg McBrayer and you're used to seeing women do strange things with different animals, then that's like, that's all one thing. Is that what your dog started winbering earlier, Alex's TV. So there we go.
Yeah, I was checking his prostate. I'd go five times a day. But do you know what we see some pretty intense stuff? And you wonder.
Well, so there's sorry. Greg, I know it's fair enough. That's all I'm saying. Let me throw one more detail here.
That better daddy brings up. I think it's really interesting, which is that when when Hentius says, yeah, I'd like to go see that. He says, I'd pay a good price to see that. And then Dionysus responds, oh, and that would make something like that would make your pleasure, your pain into pleasure or something like that.
And then he points out, like, this is like a Michael Davis spells this out at great length. But this is basically a formula for the theater. And then Michael Davis points out that he's actually sitting on a carved outside of a hill. Right?
Well, basically, so there's all these theatrical references. So you wonder whether there's a weird way in which Hentius is like a theater girl who's like, oh, yeah, that's a god. The guy who's got a rope out of his back. And he's like, oh, he's like, oh, I'm dying.
Nice to us. And then the palace ruptures. But it's like this tiny, rinky, dinky thing. And you can see the hinges and everything.
And you're kind of like, yeah, he's in a way is unable. He's unable to suspend disbelief. Right? He takes the, he sees it as a theatrical production, perhaps.
I don't know. He's just a joke. Yeah. I mean, I think that's definitely the dimension of them.
Sort of met a theatrical aspect is always pretty strong in your grippities. And you even leaving aside, sort of more developed rituals of the city guy and is even kind of more earthy primal versions of Greek religion. Like so and on, right? Like, oh, this wooden statue, like that's a god.
And that's the present. It strikes at the heart of so much of the early ritual, not just Greek, but in general, it's the basic line of how people tend to worship gods. I think it has this kind of theatrical component to it. And it might not be so much suspension of disbelief as like a mode of thought that you're either able to engage in or not.
And this is why like the epistemological problem does really bother me at a deeper level than I mean, what Raj is saying, I think, is urgently true. Like if you believe in witches, then the same in which trials are extremely persuasive. If you don't believe in witches, even a thoroughly documented White House press briefing on the existence of witches isn't enough to persuade you. And the evidence of your own eyes, like this is what the kind of errors of bacon in the royal society eventually came up against is that like, yes, this empirical data is very valuable, but it always comes threaded through with at least a set of baseline assumptions that are built into the experience itself.
And Antheus' experience of the dancing in the mountain and whatever and escape and all of that is finally going to be subject to a set of interpretations about what truths underlie those experiences. And he's just not ready to not prepare to attribute them to the existence of this. God, so what evidence could there be to whatever sort of thing? Yeah.
Yeah. At this point, were the gods and Athens on their way out? Or was that kind of people linking at the Pantheon? Or I guess the question I have is just how radical of a reception could we imagine this play would have had, especially the deeper teachings?
Well, I mean, we are. I'll take that and just say, this is a great connection to the article you recommended, Stux, or Knox, the poet as prophet, where it seems like he would answer yes, but also like, he's foreshadowing this. So maybe if you could leave that into the stuff about Knox, because I found the article very provocative and interesting. Cool.
I mean, I'm glad you did because I am obsessed with this. Very short piece, not scholarly in the sort of professional sense, although very erudite about your abilities. The poet as prophet, it has haunted me ever since I read it as an undergraduate. Because the thesis here is that the idea that the poet is a watte is a seer, is not actually dependent on any supernatural idea you might have about the ability to see the future, but dependent on a very pedestrian notion that artists are distinguished by their hyper-accurate perception of the present and in seeing the presence they're able then to articulate what's really going on, which will only be made manifest to people in general 40 years down the line.
And so you're a bit easily the poet of social crap of the center not holding, of sort of loss of faith. And these things will all become quite manifest over the course of his career since he lives and works through the Peloponian War into the end of the even golden age. But at the outset, sort of in the mid-Dia, let's say, they are radical and sort of untested ideas. And let's remember that we are still, you know, five years out, six years out from Socrates being condemned for introducing particulate in the gods of the city.
So even though I think by the time he had to back up to the sky, we're pretty close to a general recognition or to these ideas getting mainstream, let's say, we're still not in a place where the poet could happily emerge from behind his cloak of misdirection and esotericism. Like that's not happened. And so certainly if the refugees were understood to be saying, there are no gods, there is only fuses, right? Which is sort of what would be the extreme softest position, right?
There's nothing outside this set of spontaneous rules or laws that I think would have been very dangerous for him to say, but luckily I don't actually think he is saying. I think he's presenting that as an option. But what I think is so great about Bachai is that after a career of presenting that as an option, he then turns around and says, if you have faith in fuses, that too is the kind of doggicism that will be thwarted by reality that ultimately, like you won't be able to boil it all down into kind of Euclidean geometry or laws of motion or whatever else, it's gonna be more fuzzy around the edges than that. But all of this is just a- And that's the obvious?
And that's the obvious in your view? Yeah, I think, well, yeah, I think that when Tyrese says the penthius, like, you can't logistify him away, he's saying that all of the pretty tricks, verbal tricks, even if the softest aren't enough to erase kind of certain fundamental realities about the universal human nature. And I think one reason why in that passage that you read Alex, Cadmus, Invokes, Acton, which is sort of a weird thing to invoke, except that he's really acting on this related to this family, Acton who looks upon Diana and is changed into a stag to be killed by his own hounds, this is an example of pride, right, of penetration into certain divine realities where humans are not supposed to look. And the idea, I think, that's being repeatedly invoked is that like the mind of man is proposing at this point in Athenian history to strip naked the bare bones of the cosmos.
And so in the same way that the softest and natural philosophers might want to get a kind of objective God's eye view of reality, penthius might think that everything is reducible to that. But remember, acting on that when he tried to look, he was subjected to a total rupture in the laws of nature and died as a result. And that's what's gonna happen to you as I think was basically being said. Yeah, that's a big thing about our modern moment too.
Yeah, it's been precisely what I think is, we're into an endanger happening right now. Really, yeah, I mean, we're talking now about sense perception is evidence, right? We've been talking all day today about this, about like, Emparia and the idea that that is the route. The truth and that idea comes along with this very 17th century notion of primary and secondary qualities, right?
That underlying the qualitative experience of the world. There is, I mean, this is Galileo, basically invents distinction from Adernity, but not and take what it's also democratist distinction, right? Sweet is by convention, the surface of things is by convention, colors by convention. What really exists is quantitative.
And that is precisely the faith of not science, but scientism, right? That you can strip away those merely subjective experiences of the world and arrive at the third person, purely objective, God's eye view of what it is. Can I throw a little, I don't know, curly Q in your gear is not a wrench, but let me challenge you on a little bit, which is. A little bit.
A little bit. Yeah, curly fry. What is it? I would welcome a wrench.
David, David, bar here is curly fry and he goes crazy. He's moist in his interior. Like that. Certainly.
I mean, I want to draw a stronger link between Pentheus and the regime. I do think there's something strange about being the grandson of the founder who slayed a dragon that creates a certain view of things. But maybe a more fruitful path would be to compare Pentheus to Euripides, which is that Pentheus seems utterly literal. And Euripides is obviously not literally.
He's a poet, right? He makes holes that somehow image the reality of things. And it seems like one caution to a Pentheus type as you've described him that Euripides would be outlining is do not underestimate the power of the Dionysus, of this intoxicating, that the cadmus recognizes it. But yet, cadmus is still punished, which is a strange fact.
I can't really still wrap my head around. But to get to the point, Euripides kind of shows you the power of poetry, right? He shows you this Dionysusus who's incredibly elusive as he presents himself as a stranger, as a phantom, who appears as he is, but not as he is, who draws, again, Pentheus up into this theatrical position to view the bach. He kind of shows us what you need to do is put the passions on display, right?
And put them on the theater, but not try to completely contain them or eradicate them. So there is a kind of, I think there's a caution against this anti-pietistic or anti- this irreligiosity of Pentheus on the one hand. On the other hand, I do think there is a humanistic kind of bird's-eye view represented by Euripides himself, who as the poet can create a god from the type of Zeus in effect, right, and get this display on. And maybe that's the deeper meaning of this pun on the Phi Haar Miras in Hona Ross, the poet, right?
Is that there is this sort of other bird's-eye view, but you have to proceed through the poetic and not in willful sort of antagonism to it, right? You have to accept the tales of the poets and try to think them through to this maybe super religious perspective that Euripides himself about, and not just sort of willfully suppress it the way that Pentheus does. I don't know if that makes sense. Well, this is, yeah, I mean, so I know that I am kind of obsessing over this one line that Dionysus says to Pentheus, but it's so profound.
He says, your blasphemy has made you unable to see. And in that moment, Pentheus is looking right at the god that he will not recognize and cannot recognize. So in some sense, like, there is your answer to the question of how can he look at this miracle, the shaking, the mountain, the supernatural, and not come to the leave? And that's the same question, really, of kind of how can you look at this play or this performance and not be moved?
Well, if you are kind of preconditioned or you've predetermined that you won't buy into the fiction, that you won't accept this physical object as a medium of something more than physical, then you won't, you'll be blinded to it. Like you'll be looking right at it, but you won't actually see what's going on. So I definitely think that the atrical Euripides himself as a kind of conduit or as a presenter of conduits is really important here. And theater, I mean, not to get too woo about it, but theater certainly is proposing to do something like that.
All art is proposing to put things in front of you that are manifestly not. Or, yeah. It reminds me so much of Shakespeare's type is in this respect. Yes.
Certain, certain, parallel, sorry, Greg. It's the second time I've got you up. It's OK. I know my place, sir.
Is there much to do with tapas? I'm not going to take your bake, Greg. Go ahead. No, I want to know how to measure tapas.
I actually also like to know what however much it is. I just see the insertion of and Prospero's use to feel like a employer on something I maybe shouldn't be allowed to say. They go on. Prospero's use of images, which we're all of course, right into.
But at the same time, Prospero's parallel to Shakespeare's poet. And I think you're seeing some of the same little tricks being played here by Euripides. OK. Yeah.
I have to tell you guys something I think you will both be like, it is not. Oh, my, my, my. But that I just need to insert it here because so there's a lot of assertions. Is this like, yeah, you guys should have a little button that you press this?
I've been arguing with you that buttons. You should definitely have buttons. We had a lot on the round. Thank you.
At the American mind for a while, we had a goat screen button, the screaming of goats, which was in interrupt. Yeah. Now I just do it myself. But the OK, so you're a natural use of Taylor Swift screen, which means trouble.
Trouble. Yeah. Yeah. So you know how in early printed editions, there's the big S and then anywhere, you know, the tall S, which goes anywhere except the end of a word or before an F.
And one of the problems is it kind of looks like an F. And eventually this drops out for a number of reasons, especially to do with the fact that it's confused with F. But one major sort of myth, or I think this is an apocryphal story that it said that one printer read Shakespeare's Where the B sucks, their suck eye from the Tempest and was appalled at the appearance when you thought you confused the S for F you get where the B fuck their fuck eye and therefore dropped out using the long S. That's why we don't have it.
Yeah. Word was in use then. Yeah. F is pretty old.
I hear it goes back all the way to mankind's origins. F is old. No, I hear it. It's an old edition of some scientific book where it's talking about sucking his heart.
It knows Harvey's on Pablette. And it was like, talk the two. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
The circulation of blood. Yeah, slightly more serious, although only slightly. Yeah. I don't know.
My type of thing was too much of a stretch. It's not actually. No, I don't think so because Prospero's magic is the magic of the theater. He throws away his book at the end of the play because the play is over, right?
You know, I'm not going to be able to recite that. Speech he makes at the end, but it's a dream that this is all that we've all been, but visions here, we pass it across your site. And this is what makes it a tragedy of grace as compared to Lear, which is sort of its partner. Play where everything is very, very real.
Contillances are ultimately quite final. But yeah, I think like art, I mean, I know it for a person to propose this, although there's many of the things you could say to define art. But for me, like what is art? It is like this object, this set of things that are manifestly physical and as physical things manifesting not what they claim to be, this set of syllables, this person on the stage, this like paint on canvas, like none of this is what it's supposed to be, which is the battle of Vienna or like a magician or a fairy or whatever.
And yet like those things exist and also are inaccessible to us through any other means, except by the kind of misdirection and symbolism that art is. And that's also like, if you can't access that, then you also can't access proof of the divine if there is such a thing. I just reread the Norm McDonald's fake memoir. And one of my favorite portions is that when he talks about looking at a painting and trying to see it as just a painting.
Yeah, yeah. And how he's incapable of doing it. So I'll just read this quote. I sort of find it kind of beautiful.
He's just, I think he's trying to see between being and becoming actually or being an appearance, excuse me. He says, I stared at this thing long and hard trying only to see the paint, but it was no use. All my eyes would allow me to see was the lie. In fact, the longer I gazed at the paint, the more false detail I began to imagine the boy was crying in the painting.
As if afraid and the woman was weaker than I'd first believed, I finally gave up. I understand, I understand, I understood that it takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is. So there's this, he's doing that. He can't see it as other than the object of art.
So I think he's not. That's so sharp because like the cynical view would be like, you see a triptych and it's like the Virgin Mother with Jesus and then the crucifixion here you go. And this, the cynic says, that's just painting on a piece of wood, right? Why are you?
Why are you? But I think the credible response is somebody to say, no, no, no, that's you can't see the painting. Yeah, yeah. You're not actually seeing on wood.
You're seeing a person and there's an incredibly powerful effect that that art has on us, that the ability to take stuff from the earth, some wood, some like, I don't know how they make paint, whatever, some oil and stuff. And then you put it together and you can no longer see the material reality. All you see is this representational force. So powerfully that you actually forget it's even a representation, which you're thinking about.
Here's the boy, the motivations that, you know, all the things that come in. And that's, I think that gets down to what the Buckeyes in a way really about, right? Because it's a play that involves Pantheus, if this is right, that he's sitting on a mountain side, much as a theater would be, and he's paid a price to see this. And he's viewing this display and he's not moved by the miracles, which means he somehow sees them as performed in some way.
They're not, isn't really dancing right there. They're not really, you know, this isn't really a God. Maybe this is in a way a kind of, and it gets to Knox, I think, in a way, and we haven't talked enough about him. But the idea that he's predicting the time, perhaps what everybody's is saying is that the theater has lost its magic, right?
We see everything just as the actual, we see the painting for just the paint and not for the representation. And perhaps what he's drawn attention to is that, while this is something lamentable, there is something quite powerful about this in that it draws attention to the poet, it draws attention to the meaning, rather than to the mirror sort of immediate religious experience. Yes, we're certainly not right. Reactions.
Those are written through and behind too much. And yet, perhaps that might be, I mean, it didn't, I don't think, hang out this way in historical fact, but the potential that you identify is there. I mean, just to return briefly to what Dave was saying about scientism and sort of modern science, it's like, what's the real philosophical epistemological turn of the scientific revolution? Like, I think it is this transition from concerned primarily with the idea of tough phenomena, those things which appear, right?
And moving from the idea that tough phenomena are what we're concerned, that essentially human experience does derive from something outside of us. And yet, only ever is accessible through how it strikes us, which Playa basically says about astronomical phenomena in Republic 4. Like, these things are points of light on a screen, essentially stars that we're looking at. And we sort of imagine the telescope is invented, Galileo writes Sudereios and Eosynum Cus, like Galileo can see these things much closer up.
And so we imagine that that whole thing is over. And now what we're going to do is we're going to penetrate past tough phenomena. And we're going to get to the stuff, the things. And like, this whole conceit, which is, I think, a conceit, like false, is sort of the debunking attitude.
It's like, well, we're really just on the hillside, really just looking at a block of work, really just seeing people. And I guess, Alex, what you're saying is like, there might be even more power in acknowledging it. Like, there is a, there is a people behind it. And yet, like in the people or through the people, we're actually getting access to something essentially more real.
Like the problem is imagining that by piercing tough phenomena, you've gotten something more real rather than a component of the real, which is ultimately in things that appear, I don't know. I've got a question that's going to take us away from this, but, and we can ditch it if you guys want. But it's a question that you guys are going to think I'm joking, but I'm quite serious. The sex stuff, the orgies, and the fact that so many of Dionysus's first followers are all women, even a mother who's willing to rip apart her children.
Is there something serious going on there? I mean, even I listened to Cass talk about the some of the concessions that are made in the penituc or this kind of block of revelry, even the Hebrew people made some allowance for it in this place in these confines. But I'm just wondering, I mean, is there some, I don't know how to ask this question, but is there something connected to the erotic and maybe even the female nature that opens? Why is this there other than just to make a play kind of fun?
Or is there something more serious that like there actually is connected to these kinds of more erotic longings or that? I don't know. You guys want to add to that question, make it more intelligible for you to do so. Can I throw something out there on that?
Which is, I think this connects back to Cadmus. I do think it's serious, by the way. I don't know. Yeah.
Yeah. This, I think this gets back to assimilate to Cadmus, the whole idea. There are other families in themes in the traditional sense, like how do you learn how to be a family? You learn from when you were a kid and your parents learn from when they were kids, but that doesn't occur in themes, right?
They've all been so dragon teeth. They're all born and then they're all brothers and sisters, right, essentially. And that language occurs throughout the play. And so then you start to wonder like, OK, is part of the straining of the women and the sort of orgiastic part of it, that there is no concrete sense within themes of the purpose of reproduction.
Yeah, there's a third generation that Pentheus represents. He doesn't really have his beard. He seems to be pretty young. Like, is there a sense in which there's this?
The themes is on the one hand founded, but arrows hasn't been tied to the family in the concrete sense. And this is a right place where Dionysus would both be born and then have trouble returning because you have to return to be worshipped. And I don't know. But there's something very strange to learn out there with sex, I agree.
Wow. I mean, female sexuality. A subject with which I can aim is they have absolutely no experience on which I have no information on. You better excuse an ideal.
I don't know what you guys are. I was cracked up to these. But he writes the most about I mean, the titles of these books. Sorry, I mean, I catch up.
No, no, go ahead. When it's your election and an electorate. Yes. I was at least one of the things in frogs.
Escaluses like you put these women on stage, they were so porn. They get written temples, they get all this stuff. And he's like, not wrong, but that like of all the caricatures of your rippities that obtain an antiquity. This is one that strikes pretty close to home.
His fixation on women's sexual desire. And you know, part of this might just be a cultural context. It might be, you know, I think you make all the allowances you want to make for, you know, Athens keeps winning under pretty tight sort of surveillance, whatever. He's maybe exploring this region of, you know, all artists are attracted to sort of regions of inquiry that don't get a lot of play or shut off by the dominant regime.
You can say all those things and still think there's something essential about women's desire that he's trying to get at, I think. I think. And it is a it's an uncontrolled. I mean, it's it's like a kind of, you know, women have this power, this insane power that is in some sense a purely passive power because it rests on how much men desire them, right?
Like if all men were gay, then women wouldn't have the power that they have. And yet, like most of the vast women aren't gay and therefore women have this enormous power that is not symmetrical, but like men don't have this kind of power over women. And in fact, like all of the things that have an excuse, men of doing to insert power over women in many ways, it's like those are that's compensation, like it's cope. Like the thing where good and bad versions of like male power are all just kind of covert, it's just natural force, the sheer natural force of like a woman's attractedness.
Don't get any started. I see rich and power, these ugly like, go out with men, they get rich and powerful. Like, now I can sleep with whoever want. And then like five years later, they're penniless.
And yes, yes, yes, yes. And it was so powerful. It's like 100%. It's like, because it's all like you were to, oh, my gosh, you guys are kind of bleeding out, but you like, you got to get struck, right?
Like that's the reason that's a phrase. Like, and I honestly like, you never heard of it. Yeah, well, so honestly, I've never heard that either. It's been, we have to believe all that.
I've never heard that. I'm going to get like, reasonable hurt, just because I say behind your back. Yeah. No, well, I think it's I'm married now and that that whatever that phenomenon is, it's going to be in a long past, but honestly, like sometimes, sometimes, and so now, now I've mentioned this incredibly like explosive territory.
I'm just going to go whole hog. Like, there are so many moments in my life where I'm like, why, why did this do do this? Completely rational thing. And then I'll be like, oh, right.
The like, I forgot the power that's because I don't affect me. So I forgot the power of the like, you know, and so there is something. And to be less vulgar about it, right? If we are spiritual people, we believe that this is not like merely like a kind of based physical fact about the world, but expressive of something inherent in like womanhood, femininity, whatever.
And that thing is like, Kiphonic, it's, it's, you know, deeply urgent and generative and powerful and ineffable and like beyond the kind of fundamentally male impulse to like categorize and give order and all these things. It's like, you know, the reason for all this is because like, you know, women are like the human embodiment of a whole half of reality that expands far beyond our ability to do any of those things. And like the poet, there's a reason why artists and philosophers are famously like associated with certain like a feminist. It's because like these people, yes, like poets, philosophers, whatever, like have a crang dut affinity for this that they are insisting on over and against the Aristotelian and Athenian impulse to reduce the world.
And I just think like, I love, I love your videos for this, you know, I just, I, he has my heart for that reason. One of the things that I have some thoughts on, but they're not, I'm not working on myself, but connecting this to the religiosity of women is something that I don't quite understand. Because the way they're awesome. Yeah, sorry.
Because in just a few, just a few, it's like the man. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. In Rose Caramazoff, right? Al Yosha has a loss to mother and his only memory is her weeping over and like weeping uncontrollably.
And that is like the guy being that's like the kind of fundamental pillar of his whole life, which makes him a better person. All-an-ask conversion is how much of that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Totally. I mean, yeah, we can get into a question of why it is that if it's, if it is the case, why would it be the case that women are more open to religious, I mean, if you're going back to Pentecis, right? Pentecis is just not open to seeing this. Is he, is he, my question is I haven't gone through it, but like tears, tears, tears, it's not young anymore.
Cadness is old. And so is there something about being man in the prime of life almost having to be heard of it as Alexa? It's part of why you're closed off of these things. So the elderly women, they may be more open to seeing the reality as your identity seems to present it.
But there's a kind of duality here about women, which is all the way in, it seems like what we're saying is that women are in a way more cynical because they are in control of the beautiful, right? So they put on some makeup, right? If you ever seen these makeup things on Instagram, they're like grotesque, they take this like, this like ancient, like horrific hag and then they turn it into like this, you're like, Oh my God, this is sinful. I didn't join Peterson to have like some like online, like, we as all like this every day.
We had all I fit about some AI generated one. But in case there's a way in which women are in control to be able to, but there's also a way in which women are also more in touch with the mystery of the world to jump into, right? So on the one hand, in their relationship to men, they could be quite cynical and manipulative. On the other hand, the end that it serves for them, which traditionally is childbearing, is a kind of ineffable, like generative forces that operates through them and that.
And so it's interesting. They're breastfeeding on the side of the mountain. They're engaged in sex. It's like there's this sex for them is a means towards this higher experience.
I see this with my own wife, like, which is like really frustrating. There's this kind of a mountainside doing what? She'll just be like, she'll just be like, I want another baby. I'm like, this is coming from enough.
But, you know, there's this like, in a way, gets down to the philosophic representation, I think this duality gets the strongest and most sort of direct expression of the Republic, the two accounts of poetry. On the one hand, there's the kind of poetry that is all consuming. That's what you get in books, two to three. It's the poetry that tells you how to be a person that gives you models that you try to follow.
And then you become a character. And that's like one way to sort of be moved by poetry. And then there's this other side of poetry that recognizes, no, this is just a representation of something deeper. And that's the account of book 10, where I think you see is just an image of this deeper thing.
Both, I think, are prone. And this is the Republic, I think, backs us up. Both, I think, are prone to religious experience. One is the God rewards the heroes.
The other is that the poetry you're seeing speaks to this deeper order of things that the gods have set together. The one is more is less overtly theological in the sense of this is what the gods are doing and the count of the gods. The latter is more overtly theological, which you say, yeah, there you have this poetic representation, but here's the real thing that's getting on. And I think poetry has this, this twofold religious experience that brings out the sort of infatuating on the one hand and then the articulating of this deeper theological order of things.
100%. I mean, the thing about women being in control of the beautiful, right? I mean, by the way, just as I know, I think sometimes those TikToks where they go from desiccated hag to transcendent, instagirl are like, I think they make them up to look worse at the beginning so that the contrast is more extreme. That's my, my deep cut take, but they won't have to do me.
They, I, like, you know, this, this sort of like, a religious imaginary. It's like, yes, it is true that if women exert even a, an ayoda, like a moderate amount of control over themselves, then they have, they can move the world, right? But the force that they're tapping into when they do that control isn't actually cynical or exploitative. Like that thing is something they're in connection to.
And it's why sometimes they sound so completely insane and irrational. And like, you know, this is something even not being married to a woman. Like I can, nevertheless, like, you know, my people, friends, like one thing that I value about them that also drives me absolutely insane is like, sometimes they'll say things to you and like, that's the most bachelor thing I've ever heard. That's completely saying why we did that.
Also, you're completely right. We never thought about that. Like that's true, you know, and, and this is because like that whole side of reality is, is actually real. And, you know, they're, they're sort of presenting it to you, like against a screen.
And I love Alex, this way of, this was a major, a piece of mine or obsession with mine. Was like, what happens to poetry in between books three and 10 of the Republic. And I love what you've proposed about it, which is that being in the poem versus contemplating the poem are two fundamentally different experiences in books, three Socrates is manifestly concerned with what's going to happen to the elite young men who perform at the city dynasty. Like he's got a very particular issue in mind.
And therefore his concern is to do with like what happens when you speak certain words, when certain characterological gestures make their way into the motions of the soul. But later on, like in 10, yeah, I think he's much more concerned with the consumer, the observer poetry, like what are we accessing through these hands, which aren't going to be gone from the Calculus, right? Like there's going to be him to the gods. He says there's going to be philosophy, which is a kind of poetry, which is kind of like height of artistic endeavor.
And in all of this, the key is whether the observer has learned how to really see, like if the problem in two and three is whether the performer has learned to keep an appropriate critical distance from their performance, the problem of 10 is the much deeper problem of whether the spectator has achieved the appropriate frame of mind for viewing. And cultivating good citizens does mean we're seeing, I mean, we could introduce a million examples of how we're seeing this right now. Like the problem of citizenship does fundamentally come down up with the problem of the ability to receive messages and the right mode in which to receive the given message. It's why the Bible is so frequently misread is because like it contains 10, 20 different registers of communication that are received, automatically, originally in only one register.
And, you know, this is like a real problem. It's why floss for kings are so important. Anyway, this is very much on topic. I want to one last question follow up is if we think that your bideys is sort of exhorting folks to be open to this kind of possibility.
One of the things I keep coming back to in my own head is that these poets of the gods, makers of the gods can't themselves be believers, I think, right? If you're self consciously fashioning stories, you yourself aren't a believer in the stories that you're making. And so I mean, there's still there does still seem to be this, I don't know, rational, maybe I'm wrong. Well, there's this sort of rational basement that he's still coming back to.
I maybe I'm getting this wrong because I'm talking about my habit. There is a passage in there about what will happen to the belief state of those who impose the myth of the metals, the noble lie, right? In Republic. Really?
In question, Mark, that, again, in Republic three, there's a generation that has to install that myth. And if they kind of have to persuade themselves or something, like there's a weird, reflexive act of self-propagantization that happens, which like so many passages does seem a little bit fuzzy. Like it's sort of like, it's just gonna, I mean, it's not supposed to be a, this is kind of a personal, it's not supposed to be a real regime. Like that's why you guys are like, you know, so like the, but there is a moment that is fuzzy in the same way that like it's fuzzy.
How anybody ever gets out of the cave, right? If some god ever did come and really, if some of them like whatever, but like, there is a moment where those founders have to persuade even themselves. Of the myth and, you know, search me how that has, I'm not the one that tried to sell you a calculus, you know what I mean? Like later, so it's his problem.
We should hold off on the Calibolas thing is that's just open a whole can of forms. I know, I know. I'm sorry. This has been great.