Welcome back to New Thinkery. If you're hearing my voice that can only mean one thing, Alex. He's dead? Again?
I just thought he was eating. I just always just need to eat himself with death. David Barr is not with us right now. He's shovel off his mortal quill.
But thankfully he's been replaced by two superiors. I think that's fair to say. I think that's more than fair to say. Yeah.
The period is needing a waste of time but not in growth. No. I mean, together they might equal him. Yeah.
No, not even them. Okay. Well, this evening, today we have part two of our series on Leo Strauss on Play Those Youth of the World, the 1948 notebook with lectures in critical writings, edited by Hana Skerber and Svetazar Minkoff. And those two gentlemen are with us again for the second episode.
Welcome back, gentlemen. And thank you so much. Of course. We're happy to have you back this whole week later.
I'm just nice to meet you guys. I hope you cover these travel costs as well. Yes, of course. Just included with receipts.
You also do this. Do you always do this in Cuba? I mean, I find that slightly excessive. But we just wanted to be reminded of childhood.
That's all. Oh, geez. So before we get into it, so we did a first episode on this book, this wonderful new book that these gentlemen have produced for us, which is basically Leo Strauss's notebook that he wrote in preparation for a class, in preparation for a lecture, in preparation for a publication that never came to be. And in the previous episode, we more or less kind of went over logistics details.
How they find the book, how they find the notebooks with Strauss's handwriting cryptic and esoterically intentionally. So we're not. We decided, Hana said no, but of course, that's what you say if it's esoterically written. We talked about how they found the notebook, a lot of logistical things, but things that still remain to be worked on, including a work on apparently notebook on Descartes's method.
Also a notebook on the entirety of my monodies, God of the plex, among others, Plato's statement. But for this episode, the plan was we were going to talk about the dialogue itself on which Strauss writes, and then we're going to talk about Strauss's interpretation of the Uthefro. And then we're going to talk about the other sort of things that are included in this volume, including pieces by Zarko, Hana's, as well as Wayne Ambler, and there's a translation even of the Uthefro by Seth Nener-Daddy. So I think that's enough by way of introduction unless there's anything you want us to add.
No, I think we've covered it more information just go with in the last weeks. Yeah, listen to the last episode. You should, as a refresher, just listen to it again. So the place to begin, I thought, would be with just what is this dialogue?
I mentioned almost every time I read it, but in any event, Alex, can you give me a brief summary of this dialogue? So our guests don't have to do it. Yes, it's commonly read dialogue, the Uthefro, and commonly means also poorly, typically, but commonly read dialogue commonly taught as an introduction. I think one of the things we'll get into, I know, Hana's, at Lexa Emposites' point is that Strauss has a very original take on this, specifically as focus on the first definition, but it's just kind of brief overview of the dialogue.
And it's a brief dialogue, so it's going to be pretty quick. Socrates is on the porch of the king to receive an indictment, unclear whether he's just received it or is about to go in and receive it. But he bumps into this guy, Uthefro, they evidently kind of know each other. Uthefro is a sort of religious innovator of a kind, though not taken very seriously.
Though he seems on the custody taken seriously, because he's there to prosecute his father for murder. And this novelty and shocking quality of this situation pulls Socrates into this conversation, where they eventually share details of their respective cases. Socrates having been indicted by Melitus. And after sharing those details, they're eventually brought to the question of what is Heidi?
Uthefro claims to be a kind of expert in these things to have knowledge, kind of hard knowledge at the same age, about piety and so Socrates, as this is once, wants to check his claim to expertise and big look through three definitions. The first one is formally inadequate, as many people, everybody notices, right, which is, oh, Heidi's doing what I'm doing now. And he goes through this case. Socrates points out that really he wants a definition about piety as a whole, about the form or the idea of piety.
This leads to the second definition, according to which piety or the whole of piety is doing what is dear to the gods, or what is loved by the gods, steal philes in Greek. After this is shown to be adequate on the basis of the famous or infamous utefro problem, which we can get into, they get to the third definition of piety. And that definition is that piety involves a kind of service to the gods. A lot of details here about service to gods, which is human beings, the relationship between justice and piety, which I'm sure we can go into.
But at that point, it gets much closer to what we call a Orthodox view of piety, sacrifice, worship of the gods as customary. And one of the interesting things about the dialogue is that it moves from a rather unconventional view of piety, which involves prosecuting your father, to finally, to a rather more Orthodox. Whereas typically, if you take the example of, say, Plato's Cpius major, where they're trying to define the beautiful, it starts with some rather conventional definitions. What's beautiful?
The beautiful is a beautiful maiden or gold, and it ends up becoming these strange, more ontological definitions. So that's another sort of peculiarity. It ends with a kind of cautionary note and utefro seems, it's a question, I think, but somewhat shaken or unshaken, who knows, but he seems not particularly moved too much by his conversation with Socrates. And so it's really getting a definition of piety, at least on the level of the argument, perhaps in the drama we do.
And we're kind of left with that. And Socrates goes off, has his trial gets killed. So there's a lot of things hanging in the background of the stuff as well. Yeah.
Yeah. I think that's pretty good. It's a very short dialogue. If you mention that, it's like super short, like 10 pages, something like that.
Not as short as the cli- the cli- the cli- the fun. Yeah. Right. Nothing is short as the cli- very good.
So, all right. So that's a nice thing by the dialogue. So maybe, um, I don't know, Zarko, can you tell me why, why the utefro was important for Strop's? Right.
Well, we, we think it's a, well, it can one, kind of, kind of plural we think. It's, uh, part of a, or somehow adjacent to a trilogy about the problem of knowledge, about which our venerable host has written a book. One reason is he connects it with the the theta, which is about the problem of knowledge, which is about the possibility of the philosophers on the same, same day. Right.
So he, Strauss was preoccupied with the possibility of knowledge, possibility of science, uh, when justifying the philosophical life. So he turned to this dialogue because in order to, to confront these various claims about knowledge and possibility of knowledge and religious wisdom, that that was one, that was one reason perhaps that's a little too, too detailed. Yeah. Can I, I'll just back up for just a moment then because, you know, I read this, I mentioned it's read in a lot of Russian classes in true philosophy.
You throw his, I guess Alex said this, comes across as an idiot. Stupid. Ridiculous, doesn't know much of anything. Um, it's, it's a curious dialogue, you know, a real, a real David Barf people.
But, um, you know, it's curious, and I'm sure you guys can defend this, but it seems curious that Strauss would devote so much attention, or maybe it's curious that Plato would devote this dialogue and such an important question to, the dialogue doesn't seem important. The dialogue seems kind of silly or throw away. Like, oh, here's this guy, he's got these silly notions of piety. So short dialogue, you can, I think it's, it seems falsely to give the impression that one could understand it easily.
Like, oh, well, here's this not Java who just wants to kill his dad. Um, and what it seems like what you're saying is that for Strauss, and I guess they're poor for Plato, this seemingly short, seemingly not very serious dialogue actually gets very close to the heart of things. It's actually much more radical than it might come across at first blush. It might actually sort of go ahead, sorry, please.
Yeah, I think, I think, I think we'll take this up. I would just, I don't know if it needs sharpening, but I would just restate it or not that it needs restating either. Uh, but, you know, if you, if you want to confront religious orthodoxy or heterodoxy religious claims, you would want to go to the sharpest and most eloquent defender. And that's not him.
And that does not appear to be with a girl. Is it something like Calvin? So Strauss had gone himself to someone like Calvin in his first book, it's been also religion. And, uh, though elsewhere, he says the best defense of the Bible is the Bible.
He'll go to the Bible itself. Yes. So, so that's, so that's right. So that's, I think that's the next question is still on the table.
And there are ways to, to, there's several different ways to respond to it. But no, honestly, you want to, uh, present because you have one, one really main thesis which helps answer this question. So yeah, you have the first question. And this question is because he's popularly perceived as a fool.
So I have one footnote in which I tried to bring together all the denunciations of, of You the Fruit. And he's not really treated very kindly by the secondary literature. And it seems to make sense. Right.
He, um, as Alex mentioned in his first attempt to answer the question, what is piety? This self-proclaimed expert in piety fails miserably, not only to live up to the definitional standards set by Socrates. So he's not only epistemically that is totally inadequate to what should be his convictions, namely, the Orthodox theology of Athenians generally. There are a couple of reasons why Strauss, why, excuse me, common mistake, why Socrates might engage with Yuthafro.
Strauss suggests a number of them. And one that I particularly like in his line-by-line commentary in his commentary on line 15 B7 in our book, that's page 59, he says, Socrates finds Yuthafro much more wonderful than his stories. The root of all wonderful stories is the soul of man. So I think this is, in some respects, an act of psychology, he's trying, Socrates is clearly trying to understand different types of human beings and trying to understand the products of different types of souls or different deformations of soul.
And another sort of another possibility that is very much in the air and that Rana Berger, whom we've mentioned in the last episode, also toys with is that Yuthafro is kind of a caricature of Socrates. So Rana, a few years ago, in a brilliant little book she published on the Yuthafro, suggested that the Yuthafro shows what happens if Socratic philosophy is in the air in essence. It's someone who has digested Socratic philosophy and especially the tools of Socratic philosophy that provides us with. And Strauss, in general, suggests, I would say, or suggests explicitly that Yuthafro is halfway house of a philosophical, he's somewhere in between a more than X figure and Socrates.
And therefore, there's the question whether Socrates pushes him more into the direction of philosophy or back to the Orthodox view. And this very curious structure of the dialogue that Strauss uncovers is that Socrates pushes the somewhat heredic, somewhat heterodox prophet, who's supposed to be an Orthodox expert in what the Athenians consider piety, not towards the, not towards philosophy, but towards a more Orthodox view. So, Alex, I think, mentioned this. And my suggestion is in my essay on Strauss's notebook is that Strauss engages with this expert on piety, who appears to be a fool because he got something right, because he's an ad hoc answer, this first definition that Alex mentioned, piety is what I'm doing now, conveys a truly original and new idea about what the relationship between humans and gods can be like.
You mentioned something in passing that I just wanted to highlight. You say he's a prophet. I mean, so I mean, obviously, I'm trying to have a conversation here and I was revamping up how ridiculous he is, how unserious he is, but there is this very serious claim that he makes on his own behalf, that he actually has received something like a relationship. And to that degree, I mean, he won't have to take this very seriously, because there's no reason on the face of things, on the face of things, why the gods couldn't speak through it an idiot or something like this.
That's right. So he claims the Greek word is mantis. This is what I translated when I said prophet. Strauss prefers the translation diviner or seer, someone sort of who has direct access, super sensible access to the word of God, or the word of gods.
And Yuthafar clearly seems to think that this is something he shares with Socrates. So he says, he speaks about us, he uses we, we, the seers, we, the prophets are in trouble because the holy puloi, the many, the people of Athens don't share this gift that we have, you have your demonion, you're sort of inner genius that speaks to you, your divine voice that speaks to you. And I, Yuthafar, have these wonderful experiences about the gods, the wonderful stories that only I can tell you about. And the curious thing is that he offers some of that knowledge that Socrates doesn't take the bait.
He rather wants to talk about this court case that Yuthafar is engaged in because he's prosecuting his father and Socrates is certain that anyone who has knowledge certain enough to prosecute his own father. And that's the curiosity that we should highlight here. I mean, Socrates is not interested in the revelation for say, he's not interested in the, right? He's interested in this human thing somehow.
I was just trying to open myself. Yeah, first of all, I'm a little worried. The second we started recording, it was torrential downpour and thunder here in Boulder. So I'm a little worried that Zeus has caught wind of what I'm about to say, which is, so we have early in the Yuthafar, and this is maybe gets at the point of what he finds interesting about Yuthafar, this Socrates twice wears an oath.
The first is when he hears that he's prosecuting his father. So Socrates is kind of shocked or expressed as some kind of shock at Yuthafar's heterodoxy or his lack of orthodoxy. But then, about a page or so later, Socrates then swears an oath, wait, you actually believe the tale's told by the poets. So there's a kind of shock at his orthodoxy.
And so there's, I think what makes him interesting is precisely because he has it maybe overly refined things like a Calvin, but he's kind of noticed something or maybe he's soaked something in from the Socratic ether that's kind of around Athens, but he's somehow taken one step out and yet he's still hanging on to the traditional tales while also applying this new principle in the first definition. I mean, we should get to this first definition specifically and hammer out this idea of, right, so the first definition is doing what I'm doing now, but it relies on this principle. Just a small point of clarification is that, just a small point of clarification. I mean, Yuthafar doesn't define it that way, right?
It sort of, he just says, well, this is what I'm doing. We're calling it loosely speaking a definition. It's explicitly called, it's not so called, it's not so called as an in explicit or implicit definition. Right, right.
No, so he has it the principle on which it relies on which he is not articulated for himself. Is that piety consists in assimilating yourself to the God or imitating the God? And then of course you have to choose a God and that's all this question, but he has that implicit definition. That's the novel part, right?
Which when he explains it though, he takes recourse to the traditional stories and that Socrates doesn't understand. So Socrates Strauss suggests if you might agree with the principle, but he doesn't agree with the grounding of the principle. So that's kind of the funniness about it. So now, how does you point out right, that this is the uniqueness?
He distills this opinion and then he uses it as a way to understand the two definitions that come, sorry, this is still a simple principle. So why don't we talk about the importance of that principle for interpretation as a whole? Yeah. That's significant.
So I am to understand the theological novelty of this so-called first definition. We need to remind ourselves that traditional Athenian piety would say very simply, and this is a formulation that Strauss also uses in the notebook, is that to be pious means to do what the gods tell you to do. So the gods tell you to sacrifice in a certain way in the manner of ancient tradition, and they tell you to pray to the gods, certain specific gods that the tradition tells you. What Euthofo suggests unwittingly and somewhat sort of formally inadequately is that piety means not doing what the gods tell you to do, but doing what the gods themselves do.
It has sort of a, to use a more fancy word, a mimetic or an imitative quality to it. For us, I think in hindsight, after Christianity or with more Christianity and more, yeah, with more Christianity in our bloodstream, we have, we see this not as as radical an idea as it probably was at the time, because we are so used to the idea that pious people want to imitate Christ. And this idea of imitatio Christi is deeply deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. Whereas for Greek piety overall, this was something completely new.
And Euthofo on the one hand, divines this idea, and on the other hand, as soon as he realizes the consequences, he's deeply shocked. The way Shaus teases out this consequence in his notebook is that as a consequence of this thought that to be pious means to do what the gods do, traditional piety, so praying and sacrificing, is not pious, because the gods themselves of course do not pray and do not sacrifice, right? So it is really a deeply heterodox statement, and that is something that he assigns to Euthofo. And I think this, just to sort of go to a slightly higher level for one second, this is something that Shaus really brings to the table of Plato studies, is there's a big debate with it among Plato scholars whether Euthofo should be understood as a traditional orthodox thinker, as many say, or as someone who goes astray, and Shaus makes very clear in what way he goes astray.
And I think it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's a, it's, it's, it's, it's very clear. And on the other hand, he also suggests, in the 1950 lecture, he has a brilliant formulation. He says on page 117, he says, Euthofo's heresy consistently followed up leads to Socrates's heresy, right? So this is what I mean when I say he's halfway there, he's somewhere, he's somewhat closer to the, to what Shaus seems to suggest is the socratic theology.
And that's, I mean, yeah. So this part, I mean, there's a kind of extension to monotheism, which we're going to notice maybe later, as anyway, Strauss mentions it, just for the sake of getting the kind of force of the argument, if this idea of imitating the gods is something that's very good or hard for the course in Christianity, why would this be so radical? If it's, if it's radical for the Greeks, but not for Christians, what Strauss is, we spoke about why Strauss is interested in Euthofo and why this has relevance in theology we've already thrown around the name Calvin, would then the Christian say, well, so what, yes, of course, we take the gods. I don't see anything radical.
So can you guide us from, think together from this, the first definition to a kind of radical consideration of even monotheistic religion? Yeah. I mean, each of you here, because I want to add something on this exact point, right? Which is that there's a, it's not, it's not just that, he's also forced to choose the principle on the basis of which to select the God, which is Zeus on the implicit other principle that he's most just.
So even when he homes in on one God, who's not the oldest God, which Strauss also comments on, it's also on the basis of this other criteria. So that's where I think there's a second move. So there's one of the things that's interesting about this notebook and about Strauss's lecture, and that I think it's really helpful to start thinking through is that though it moves backward, you do get a kind of reverse genealogy of socratic true piety, it says or socratic concern with the good, he kind of equates the two in the essay, but you get a kind of reverse theology of which the principle of, from what he always says today, right, imitation of the God or resemblance to the God is one of multiple steps. So it seems like Christianity makes the one move away from something like civic law or something like law to this second move.
So let's go to the, yeah, so I just wanna introduce the ideas as a second element. Yes, no, no, absolutely. So in Strauss suggests that Yuthafrow's original mistake lies not so much or not primarily in this mimetic and imitative move, but also in the fact that he, as you say, chooses his own principle. On the one hand, in under polytheism, this is kind of necessary, right, when you want to imitate the gods and there's more than one God, you need to pick one of the gods.
And Strauss says, this shows Yuthafrow's disobedience. He chooses Zeus and why does he choose Zeus because he's the best and the most just God. But this suggests that he already knows what justice is. So if piety consists in the imitation of the justice God, because or the most just God, because Zeus is as close a model for what true justice looks like as we can get, why not just, as Strauss puts it, imitate the idea of justice, imitate the principle by which you chose Zeus originally?
And this brings up what I see as the fundamental alternative of that Strauss brings out of the Yuthafrow. And that is the alternative of a world in which the highest beings are ideas or to phrase it somewhat differently, which is governed by necessity, by an intelligible necessity, or a world in which the gods are the highest beings or to rephrase that, a world in which all standards, norms, ideas, and so on are subject to the volition, the will of the God or the gods. And I mean, just to tease this out for a moment longer, the second step that we discussed now here, Yuthafrow really would have had, if he had a more orthodox character or habit, there would have been a different way of going forward. If he had to choose one God among the many gods in the Athenian pantheon, he could have picked the oldest God.
That's an idea or a thought experiment that Strauss goes through in the, what we call the first lecture, the 1950 lecture. So on page 117, he says, if Yuthafrow would have chosen the oldest gods, no problem arises. And then he goes into this idea a little bit further, sort of halfway down the page. The oldest God is Uranus.
There's probably a difference in our situation. So anyway, Dash. I just thought of Shlomo Pines. I don't know why, but anyways.
Piety equals imitating the heaven. And this reminds Strauss of the time years. Uranus? It's okay, Hines.
We're a tolerant tribe here. But that's good. Uranus eats his own children. I feel like my head is, throws them up, whatever.
He destroys the young ones. Yuthafrow is the main, Tousnius corrupting the young. And then this is Strauss's sort of half serious point, maybe, even on the level of mythology. So even if you stay within the logic of mythology, Socrates is more consistent than Yuthafrow, because he corrupts the young and thereby imitates the oldest of all gods, Uranus.
But yeah, as we discussed earlier, I think sort of his attachment to justice, which shows an attachment to a version of the doctrine of ideas or the idea that there is a standard about which the gods can be judged or by which divine perfection can be articulated is the crucial mistake that he makes. Not the first mistake, but the crucial mistake that he makes in his break away from orthodoxy. And that, again, I would say, leads to a more philosophic theology. Let me speak.
It's a correct mistake. So you're saying that the attachment to justice, the punitive justice of the core of piety is what leads you to philosophy, embracing that punitiveness, leads you to philosophy. Is that what you're, because that- I wouldn't go quite that far. I mean, for one thing, it doesn't lead you to philosophy, right?
But yeah, it's a mistake in the sense of- Oh, yeah, I was just- Yeah, I was- Someone just called on to Arthur Epstein. Yes, no, no, no, I don't wanna. It's a mistake for you to throw in so far as he wants to remain within orthodox theology. Yeah, so what we can avoid it is, so if there was a way for you to throw out to not make that mistake, and it seems conceivable for someone not to make that mistake, then the dialogue, again, lapses into becoming a kind of idiosyncratic conversation with someone who happens to assert something, but doesn't have to assert something.
Is it impossible for a believer, say Greek believer to keep it safe, to stick to the position that Uranus is the highest God, because he's the oldest God, and then you won't get into any trouble. And Socrates won't have the entering wedge for his investigation. It is difficult for Greek theology because Uranus gets replaced, and it zoos who's the God of justice. So if you're gonna choose Uranus, I'm gonna choose the safe pronunciation.
If you can choose Uranus, you're gonna have to choose against justice. So whereas it's clear that- But I think that's what Zerco's saying, that that's the more problematic divinity, the one that's not constrained by justice. Yeah, and so this wouldn't be, you would have to get rid of worship and sacrifice, right? So well, because that's to Zeus.
Sacrifice and worship only comes in in the traditional texts until you get to Zeus, right? And that's when you get the thigh bones and stuff. So this is all easy to see, which I think we're gonna do an episode on this summer, which we are. But Uranus is to be worshiped primarily, it looks like in Hesia at least, from the perspective of the fact that he's the seed of, he's called Star Uranus.
So when you're a farmer, you look to the stars and depending on where different constellations are, you know, when to begin your work in these different times. So from within, now this is highly particular to Greek theology. So I'm not sure this gets us very far, but at least in that situation, you would be eating your own children, corrupting youth, and stuff like that. It's not clear that this would be basic for political or civic piety, right?
But it does, I think it's right, that it points to the more problematic. I mean, I think that it wasn't a little bit of a hub about the Leibwitz book that, okay, fine, if there's a certain kind of believer who subordinates God to questions of justice, and that can be interrogated one way. But the believer who says God's not constrained in these ways, I don't know if that's position that can be consistently held or not. But the one who sort of says that God is mysterious and we don't know his ways, that seems much more problematic from a Socratic point of view, right?
Yeah. So do you say, what is the necessity for youth to throw it to? Right. To a to a to a to a to a to a to a to a to a justice.
It's this. I mean, why does he do it? I would assume that well, not assume it seems like what's going on is there's a kind of moral psychology, like for him, justice is primary, it seems. Yeah.
So this, I mean, one of the connect something with the first, so why is it why is justice primary is that the question? Yeah, why does it primary or something? You know, because what was read in a way, cut against what we noticed in our episode from several weeks ago about the absence of soul in the earth of a friend that is a kind of advance, but in the notebook, right? You're reading from the notebook, Strauss has the most interesting thing about the youth of roys his soul and you can say that's the same as the definition, but then you have to explain why he saw yields that definition, not that he just blunders into a definition which happens to require philosophical investigation or philosophical justification and thereby points to philosophy, but why he saw hungers for or I don't know what it would be.
So there was some listeners questions that Greg forwarded to us that about dialectical examination of soul versus natural theology where you raise the question of standards. One of them seems cold and bloodless and analysis of criteria. The other one seems erotic and exciting and it seems like this comment combines the two that the rest of us is coming to the youth of our soul is the most interesting thing and he saw in clients and to choose. It still seems somewhat arbitrary.
Why would he so he's so inclined to choose justice? Maybe there are other believers who saw this, not in going to choose justice. This was a question I had about you diverse soul because there's a kind of difference between the lecture and the notebook on the question of youth diverse psychology. In the notebook, Strauss makes it seem like, and it's not clear if he's just trying this out.
So I don't know how we want to square this, but it seems to be two different interpretations. The notebook, he makes it sound like you diverse primarily motivated by fear. He's not courageous, courageous enough to think through his insight to the bottom. And you can say this is kind of related to his concern with pollution, right, of the murder.
And he makes it sound like the way that Socrates gets you to throw back to orthodoxy is by playing on this fear, shocking him at the radical implications of his own sort of action and therefore bringing him back to. So let me just stick by the book down and not go. But now you go to the lecture and he makes it sound like Socrates doesn't budge him at all. And it's almost extreme.
The way he sounds like you defer was just unmoved. And I wasn't sure whether he had changed his mind. Maybe you guys have opinions on this. His mind or whether he just thought that maybe bringing out the fear would emphasize too much Socrates own radical or his own sort of.
Because some of their comments make it sound like he's speaking to an audience that will take justice and put for granted or something like that. So I know this is kind of a vague question, but on the question of universal, what makes it interesting? Is it the fear? Is that part of it?
Or is that secondary or something? Or what's his psychological, strategies, psychological profile of youth of roadies, specifically that makes him interesting to Socrates? That's not exactly an easy question to answer. But I would say, I mean, I would say this.
One question among many questions regarding youth of first character is why not turn him into a more philosophic mind? As we discussed, he's already halfway there. Why not push him further into that direction and sort of make him benefit from purifying his wrongful ideas? And it seems that one thing that Socrates has found out through his conversation with the youth of road, according to Strauss, is that his lack of courage is what makes it impossible for him to become a philosopher.
So, and I think this is something that I see as a point shared by the Strauss makes clear in the notebook, but also makes very clear in the lecture. So in the lecture on page 86, he says, youth of road shrinks from admitting to himself the implications of his views. And on the next page, page 87, he explains this. One must have the courage of holding the view that one cannot please the gods, except by being impious in the sense in which the city understands impide.
Right. So whatever this means, it means that philosophy, according to Socrates, implies facing the consequences of your insights, facing the consequences of your thoughts. And that is something that youth of road is unwilling to do. I mean, overall, one point where that becomes very clear is that he chooses the wrong horn of the youth of road dilemma.
I mean, he could have remained much more consistent in the course of this very short conversation. But when things get extreme, when the alternative is put to him, whether something is just because the gods wanted to be just or is it due to the gods wanted because it's just, so is the standard independent of the gods or do the gods themselves set the standard? He chooses the wrong quote unquote wrong horn in order to remain consistent. So what would it be?
I mean, I'm trying to make sense now. What's the psychological source of his lack of, maybe this answers itself, he doesn't have courage. But what's going on? I mean, Strauss talks about the sources of the enduring source of piety for human beings.
And you guys draw this out in your interpretations as being related to the concern for justice, the insufficiency of justice to sort of meet itself out in the world and then also trying to control for chance. I see evidence for the former, especially, right? He doesn't think that his father, like the gods need his help punishing his father. So is that the source of the psychological problem in youth of road?
Like his lack of courage connected to his, what he's, and he's connected right, justice and the problem of chance. Like in other words, justice will be needed out if actually bad things just by chance happen to the people or something like this. And so is this evidence, like him trying to meet out justice is kind of evidence of his psychological softness. I mean, like in the very beginning, it says you, you'd never do this.
You'd never prosecute somebody for a crime. This would be a logical point. This would be that it's impossible to have, for example, liberal democracy, a notion of justice without the gods. And then you say, well, play with things, that's just impossible.
Depose on one of these reasons to throw this around. But that's nothing to do with the soul of youth. I mean, everything has something to do with it. That's just because, as you say, because of the problem of chance, there's never anything near perfect justice.
Not in people's lives if you know what it is, but it's just thwarted or damaged by chance occurrences. Whereas I think the more important points that justice, the kind of justice which breaks your heart is not the correct understanding of justice. Kind of justice which people bemoaned that doesn't, is not implemented fully enough in the world. He's actually a mistaken understanding of justice.
No, of course. And Youth for Has This. I mean, Youth for Has a key or its character, right? So I mean, as Greg suggested earlier, he could he have not made a challenge to Socrates that is much more profound and just rejected all attempts to justify his piety, right?
Wouldn't that be an option sort of insist? What I'm doing now is, Pies because the gods want it to be. And there's no explanation. The ways of the gods are mysterious.
Just a pied is mere action. And this is again something that the trous, I think, thinks through, this challenge is one that trous attempts to think through. So there's one note among these additional notes that we published, the loose notes in the Youth for All folder that were probably interspersed in the notebook. It's our note 12, but the numbering of these notes is ours, of course.
So note 12 reads, add, so this is Latin for it, toward or to regarding. At Pied, Pied is threatened by its justification. And then in brackets, the myths equals explanation why sacrifices and prayers are pleasing to the gods. Pied must be divorced from its justification, right?
This is the idea. It's sort of Pied without theology. It's sort of, don't explain why your Pies or what Pied means or what sort of the consistency of Pied is. It becomes mere action.
And this is an idea, I think, that we see in the notebook this radical idea that the Pies has no other reason for his Pied than the inscrutable will of the gods. And what would be philosophy's response to that? If someone would consistently refer only to his own obedience and would say that this obedience means precisely not to ask the question why I'm obedient. Is that a real challenge?
Is this sort of stubborn, obedient, pious man a challenge to Socrates? That Socrates can't respond to with philosophical means, with questions, because there's nothing to be discussed, right? If someone refusing to discuss and to justify his own way of life or I think so. I'm sorry, by the time we get about soul, is it there?
Is it not there? I think to make it interesting we say what is the first moral of psychology. But Strauss is even in the lecture, the later lecture 52, which he intended to publish in some form in 68, is that the dialogue is still centered around this half-truth. The Pied is superfluous.
Half-truth ignores the existence of the soul. And instead in the lecture, not in the notebook, that later would have justified this anyway by saying that the ideas or necessity, the logical reasoning is higher than the soul, anyhow. So you need to add this. It's irritating if you don't have the dialectical refugations that the guest, the center, supplied.
But even then, it's not the soul that's the core of the matter. So the ideas would be the, I mean, it's probably artificial dichotomy, as we say, but that's a misquoting from the lecture that Plato probably would have justified the half-truth. Even the half-truth means ignoring the soul by saying that the ideas are at any rate superior, more important to Alex. I mean, the dialogue that comes right after the youth of art, you have the sophists and statesmen.
And the sophists is concerned with two kinds of speeches, one directed toward being and the other directed towards soul. And it turns out that this distinction is inadequate, for instance, to go to your point about the false dichotomy. It's inadequate for understanding socratic philosophy, which is somehow the understanding of soul coming to understand something about being or about the beings that you're enquiring into. And then in the statesmen, this is then, this account of images or imageistic speech or spoken images is then incorporated into an understanding of law.
So you get the sense that Socrates is starting from the youth of Freud moving. So you can see how maybe the irritating half-truth gets followed up upon in the dialogues that Socrates has immediately after. This gives you a point that I just want to emphasize something that I thought that Wayne Hembert and his essay that's on this forum says that I think is really a helpful reflection, which is about trying, what's that, this is towards the end of his, I mean, he has this discussion of paragraphs nine to 10, which is of the Strauss's essay, in which Strauss situates the youth of Freud in the larger cosmos of the botanic dialogues. But then he returns to this notion in his last sections of trying to find the age.
So it's just one 80, one 81, so what you looking at? Something around there, he suggests that the positions laid out in the youth of Freud, whether the ideas are independent, right? And all the different views laid out, you might want to turn to the laws, you might want to turn to the Fido or to the Republic or any other place where these, for that fuller examination, but you get the sense that the youth of Freud takes you up out of orthodoxy to a range of positions or which all have their problems and assumptions, and it doesn't take you further, but it does at least show the need. And perhaps this is where the youth of Freud really sheds light on the whole course.
It's just sure they need to go read beyond it, but it also shows the spirit in which one needs to approach the Republic. So after reading Star Wars Notes, for example, and I've been working on the Republic lately, if you just start to see how much heveless is departure, while it allows them to engage in that inquiry, when you look here, you start to see all the stuff embedded in the theology, right? In aspects of the refutation of Paul and Marcus, right? You start to see how there's echoes of the concerns here, even in glaucomy psychology, the relationship between fear and shame and glaucomy, is very interesting and recalls.
You start to see that, okay, you can look at the Republic as the laying out of Platonism in a kind of political context, or you can see it as articulating the one possibility and the problems of that possibility light of the Yoot-The-Frost. So that was a little longer than I intended, but I do think if you read the Yoot-The-Frost and you turn to the rest of the Platonic corpus, it does kind of bring a certain groundedness in this far more fundamental problem, you can say, that then casts its kind of shadow over those dialogues. I mean, just to, it's not clear how far you can go with the Yoot-The-Frost. I know there's debates that Greg mentioned, maybe David Lee-Bewitz, David Lee-Bewitz, about what the Yoot-The-Frost can accomplish, but that's kind of the territory debate, of course.
But Straus himself speaks of the end of the road in the lecture that it's indicated. And there's another phrase that is much of a phrase, but the fallacy of skepticism, that it's not simply a problem, but that you know already quite a bit, quite a bit is presupposed. And it might be sufficient to prove, and say that's adding maybe too much the necessity of ignorance or ignorance about some things, for example, ignorance about justice or the notion of justice that underlies piety that might be enough to get to the end of the road. So yeah, I don't know, we can hash it out a bit more, then instead of just say perhaps the end of the road is indicated, then you can say what end of the road are we talking about the end of the road for?
You can throw it at the end of the road for philosophy or what? But sometimes if you can show ignorance, that doesn't leave you at a stalemate if the other position requires knowledge, even without realizing. So yeah, so it's right, if you say this is a problem, that could be a refutation. So yeah, we have to go through movies, but there's no money or something, that's a problem.
And that doesn't mean we go through movies. Well, the problem remains, and therefore, the conclusion is no movies. So it seems like a big part of Socrates, it seems that the first straw, so big part of Socrates is, I'll say a refutation, but pointing out of Euthofo's confusion is that Euthofo unwittingly appeals to the ideas and that he unwittingly posits something that exists, potentially eternally, is a standard by which we can judge the gods. So I was wondering how important you think it is for Socrates or Strauss, that there be ideas in the way that the ideas are conventionally understood.
Because Strauss famously says somewhere that no one's ever given a satisfactory count of the ideas. And I'll also say in my own name, having worked through some other works, lately, mostly Aristotle. But I've always been suspicious, right? That Plato doesn't actually believe in some self-substance, right?
I mean, species would have to be eternal in some way. They'd have to be an independent knower. So what extent does knowledge sort of go evil with the beings themselves? So to what extent does it depend upon a necessity of the ideas?
Or do the ideas exist by necessity? I don't know if that's a sort of an all over the place, attempt to ask that question. Yeah, I mean, that's a great, I've thought about these questions quite a bit. So I think you put it very well, even though.
I mean, this is a bit all over the place because the question, the topic is all over the place, right? But I think the notebook is unusually helpful and also the lecture is unusually helpful to clarify this, right? So Strauss is very emphatic that knowledge in the strict sense seems to be knowledge of ideas. And so if there is to be knowledge, there must be ideas.
And he somehow seems to suggest that there must be ideas. But that argument can't be the argument at the end of the day because that's a silly argument, right? When someone tells you, well, there is to be satisfaction of your hunger, there must be food. That doesn't mean that that's actually a little bit.
I wouldn't recommend not worrying about food based on that argument. So I think the notebook is kind of helpful because it breaks down these big questions in a variety of ways. On the one hand, it doesn't, as far as I can tell, Strauss here doesn't engage with something like the platonic doctrine of ideas in an emphatic sense, right? With when he talks about ideas and uses this term, he does not refer, as far as I can tell, to a transcendent reality, like beings or entities in some reality beyond our reality.
And it is for him, as far as I can tell, a synonym for fundamental necessity or the fundamental reason of everything. And this is because he breaks down the problem that Greg, you and I are thinking about and into this alternative is must God be thought as a being that is fundamentally determined by ideas, norms, necessity? Or is God in some respect above this necessity? And a maker God.
As is now a maker God. And this dilemma or this question, he answers repeatedly and he says the latter way. And we can look at if you want that some of the specific attempts to go through this. But he clearly makes an argument to absurdity, right?
He says if you try to articulate, you run into problems. You can't really articulate what you're trying to say. Or absurd consequences. Your view has absurd consequences.
I give an example. I mean, it's not an exact example. But the lecture series became a problem of Socrates. And at the end, he speaks about the way in which Plato was opposed to the problem of his own 98.
There's a manuscript with a number of paragraphs that would also be re-edited and published. And it ends with a remark that the Permanities is the, he's not an accident, the Permanities is the one philosopher who was honored by a dialogue and the title of a dialogue. The fundamental reality is unmade, unmaking and unmade. It has to be unmade.
But then you have to say, okay, that's just alternative to Plato, Plato like for amenities, and then there's the Bible, which likes Moses. So what's an absurdity? And there is one example that, it's one of these paragraphs that's in the essay on Locke, the Doctor of the Metro law. And there's a paragraph heading that by Strauss omnipotence is incompatible with wisdom.
So the way to get to the other, so do you get to clarify the alternative to Plato, is to say I'm an immigrant god. God suffers from Heisenberg like inability to know anything, but knowledge means knowledge and necessity. No, I can say why you're so confident in this same right, right, right, is definition. That's one kind of absurd.
I think the other absurdities, I mean, does the God commit suicide? He does get into these. Yes. He goes into it, but just because he mentioned Parmenides and because we have Alex here, I wanna, there are two passages in the notebook and then one of the plans that I have really puzzled me and Alex, I want you as my authoritative reader of this.
So on page 36, Charles raises this question, why is Plato so certain that there are ideas, that there is intelligible necessity? And then he goes on to a tour de force of things that only Alex can explain to us. That on, that's Greek for being equals noiton, that's intelligible, question mark, C F Parmenides, the impossibility of the being of nothing, arrow the necessity of being, but to be equals to be something equals what equals to be a part, dash the Parmenides and n, one is beyond being. And then in the plans on page 128, so these are the plans that Charles wrote, and written plans that he wrote in preparation for the second lecture, we think.
He again talks about the Parmenides and the only presopratic philosopher mentioned in the title of platonic dialogue, as our co-appointed author. So what is Parmenides' discovery and his disagreement with Plato? So Parmenides says, and it quotes Charles, there might be nothing, I can think there is nothing, I can think nothing and I can think being. Both equally, but I cannot think nothing.
To think means to think something, nothing is impossible. Dash something with a capital S, or being with a capital B is necessary. The being which I think and which apparently, I merely think is and is necessary. And then it goes a bit further, but he basically says, quote, this is Plato's starting point, his disagreement with Parmenides.
And now Alex. You missed the best line, by a miracle which no one has ever fathomed, and has capable to grasp or reach the outer rims of everything possible, the whole. That's a miracle, yeah. Yeah.
I mean, in the context of the Parmenides, the dialogue, you see Parmenides' thesis that always one just get obliterated. Right. And so the way that it occurs is you get the doctrine of ideas in a very dogmatic form in the Parmenides. And then Parmenides kind of do the problem of, I don't want to get too much, but you have to explain how the form of the just comes to be present in any particular just action.
This is called participation. But the main problem there is, if there are precise beings, first are their precise beings, and second even if they are, do you have access to them? And this is a version for each form, justice, whatever. You can do the same thing as you do with the Parmenides and unity.
And so the hypothesis, unity is, Parmenides spells out the implications of precision, right? Pure precision, something is just one as a whole, no admixture of plurality. It turns out you can't know it, you can't speak of it. It cannot even be, because that's to give it a second attribute.
So justice has to be, it has to do, and in the context of the ideas, it has to not be other things, right? Now, it turns out then that justice has to be comprised of various other elements, and it's going to be complex in contradiction with itself. This is going to give rise to differences of opinion. But then the question is, how do we know that difference of opinion points beyond itself?
And this is at the very end of the Parmenides, probably the most difficult part, is you get this assertion that if there are opinions, it seems like they need to be about something. And whether that's the phenomenon, the experience, it's very hard to say, but there is a kind of claim of unity in opinion, all opinion, I think Plato would go so far as to say, that's there, that's sort of necessary. There's the Parmenides as a dialogue where Parmenides is closer to Socrates, and I think you can see traces of this in Parmenides' poem, but it does point you in that direction toward a kind of heterogeneity and a necessary contradiction in our experience of that heterogeneity. And therefore, conflicts of opinion, you could say that what the Parmenides shows is that to know anything is to know and as a kind of problem with complexity, right?
Or it's knowledge of ignorance, even if it's just the problems inherent in opinion. And that would, I think, get to this problem to go back to the utifro, where if you're going to say, God is just, you're going to run into the problem of justice, right? You're going to say the God is at all, you're going to have all sorts of questions that come out of that. And so, in a way, establishes philosophy insofar as it claims to know less, right?
Anyways, you could go further and further with the Parmenides, but I mean, that's a special. I think I think it's very much because there are these presuppositions that he points out and he thinks they're not suitable throughout this, so there's a kind of analytical, what's called, he doesn't even have an analytical very much, but some people refer to it as an electrical, but they go does. Does the highest care about justice? Also, does the highest care about the low, right?
The lower, that's, those are presuppositions. You can say that's not enough to, to refute anything because presuppositions can be, can remain presuppositions and they may be justifiable in some way or maybe they're a required justification, but just faith. Is there a guest question or someone called GMC McBray? That's me.
This is on page four. You guys alluded to the possibility that this might contain a radical reputation of revelation. Is it worth spelling any of that out for the folks at home? Let's see, does it too much on the top on page four?
The reconsideration eventually leads to the conclusion indicated in a lecture in 1946 that a quote, philosophy which believes that it can refute the possibility of revelation and the philosophy which does not believe that. This is the real meaning of the horrible days on C.A.D. Smell down, the core between the ancient and the moderns, end quote. Strauss implies that it may have been the ancient so believed that such a radical refutation was possible.
It's hard to imagine a better way to explore this provocative possibility than by studying closely Strauss's commentary on Eudifro. And there's a footnote that has the answer, I suppose, which quotes Strauss saying that it is modern philosophy which has to admit the limitation of philosophy that it can. Well, maybe we should back up for one second, because that sentence that you quoted philosophy which believes that it can refute the possibility of revelation and the philosophy which does not believe can do that, that somehow explains the difference between ancient and moderns which for Strauss is crucial. Right, right, right.
And this is in the lecture's end of the mire book, right? Yeah, this is in the notes, what Meyer calls the notes for philosophy and revelation or notes on philosophy and revelation. And I think that's from the 1946 D'Rislem and Aslan lectures at St. John's.
But that's up for debate. But at any rate, this sentence itself is interpreted by different Strauss readers very differently. So many people, and I typically use Michael and Catherine Zuckert because they're so clear, read it as according to Strauss, the ancients like Socrates recognize the limits of their knowledge and the limits of philosophy in thinking that we cannot refute this possibility, whereas modern philosophers according to the Zuckerts like Spinoza or Hegel did think that philosophy could refute revelation. So the question is what did Strauss mean to say, and one of the questions is what did Strauss mean to say in 1946 and what is actually the case historically?
The former question is somewhat easier to answer. I think the context of these notes that Meyer published make it pretty clear that he seems to suggest that the ancients were convinced that philosophy could refute the possibility of revelation. And we, because that has remained controversial, have dug a little deeper and have published a note that you can find in our volume in the introduction in note 13 on page 11, where he pretty much explicitly says this. And this note is, we claim connected to its separate, written on a separate piece of paper, but it's connected to that 1946 lecture.
So he says there, quote, "'Modern philosophy has to admit the limitation of philosophy. "'It cannot maintain the possibility of refuting revelation, "'or as classical philosophy does not admit "'this limitation of philosophy, "'and it does maintain the possibility of refuting revelation.'" So here at this level, we're very clear, right? And it's still like an outrageous claim and one that needs a lot of justification, and that Strauss of course needs to show that ancient philosophy was able, was convinced that it was able to do that and how. And the note goes into a lot more detail and I think we should, if we have time talk about it here.
And just as a side note, I mean, my assumption is that Strauss later on might have corrected this view, right? He later on might have said that some moderns also were convinced that they were convinced that they were right and being convinced. It does the same thing that they had the ancient approach, which is in a way, a trivial issue, where I mean, we'll call that ancient modern. But I mean, but I actually wrote, there's the global categories and I do think, I mean, don't press me on this, but I do think there were some moderns who thought they had refuted who did not have the ancient reputation.
And there's some who simply ignored and set aside, that seems right to me. But whether or not, maybe, thought they did, it's Strauss that no, no, you didn't, actually. Well, that's how philosophy law begins. That's what I thought.
But sometimes this is not so hidden because if you say that the youth of all contains a half truth, I mean, it's not the kind of thing that can be a half truth. I mean, are you here or there? I mean, yes or no, that is by these superfluous, then it's a reputation. I mean, superfluous.
But it's not true because even as he talks about, it still remains politically necessary, is that the half part of the street? Yeah, the half is popular, right? He says, yeah. But it's still irritating.
I think the reason it's irritating because the soul is missing. So I think maybe you have to show how it originates as well. He refers to his genealogical approach at one point. He says, integrate with my deduction.
I don't know if he saw that in one of the notes, we have to defend it. But he's not the only thing that you have to show the error and then the genesis of the error. This is even in the lecture. And the error and then the genesis of the error.
But then he will not be correct to say that the youth of all contains a half truth. He would be, if it indeed contains the genesis of the error as well, then it would be full truth. So I still, I'm not, maybe I had one time I don't know if you guys, if something rings a bell here. This half truth sounds like some kind of phrase from somewhere.
But is it something Nietzschean maybe? I don't know. I think it's a pretty common word in German, Hudweitz. Yeah.
So it's common in English too. Is that right? There's something that's half truth. Yeah.
Especially in an opinion. I mean, he says versions of this, like where if you say, the sun is shining, but it's nighttime or something like that. He says, well, this is still a half truth. Right?
There is a sun and something that shines, you know, in certain occasions, right? So there's, I think that's what he means when he says the popular one is that it contains a kernel of truth, but you're not somehow, I think the irritation in a way is a kind of, well, it obviously suggests a dispositional difference in relation to this kind of half truth versus a popular half truth. Which is a kind of activity, right? He spells out in a kind of active thinking that's required and that's involved in that.
And I think, I mean, it's easy to say, yeah, that's a half truth, that's a half truth, but not understand to what degree something is. Whereas when you look at what Socrates seems to do, like the band of themes argument from Republic One, right? You know, that's clearly true in a limited case scenario. That justice is good when your life is right or you have some common enterprise.
It doesn't nearly get to the controversial aspect of justice. Right? And so in those situations, I think it's common to speak of an opinion as a half truth or something like that in English, but it's the irritating part that seems to be is really his novel part of it, right? Or popular versus irrelevant.
And then I move on to another topic. I don't know if you guys still want to keep going or we can stop whenever you want, but we mentioned this, this came up in passing and previous up so I think, but we talked about it this as well, but the extension to monotheism, I mean, to what extent does Socrates's argument still apply to a monotheistic world? And you sort of, I think, as Raco talked about the idea that, well, actually, even saying Christ is a big part of what it means to be Christian. I actually have a sort of honestly mentioned that.
Let me try my very simple straightforward. I mean, there's not all monotheism, right? So it doesn't, on the face of it, there's still this problem, which monotheism? There's that first puzzle, but then I think, even the heart of the puzzle still seemed to remain.
I don't know if there's anything you guys wanted to add to that. Yeah, how would you apply it to, I mean, of course, you can read the Bible and find contradictions within it and say, well, how do you clarify? Do you need a standard that would enable you to purify the Bible from its contradictions? And therefore you choose this criterion.
And therefore you go, this is the case of Abraham, where the two instances, what one he seems to sort of submit to God, no matter what his asking you to do, kill your son, for example. But then the other example, when he's, I forget, he's gonna destroy the city and Abraham's trying to negotiate with him. What if I could find this many just people or this many? So the former example I just gave would seem to be, I think that is the more problematic believers, like we'll just submit to God's commands no matter what.
But the second would seem to be in line with you, this youth of all trying to get God to be subordinated to some kind of standard. Yeah, yeah. So one of the questions here is, I think, sort of this extension to monotheism, that is an articulation of what the youth of all problem applied to a monotheistic world would look like in the lecture, right? He says that, while in the youth of row, the singular God does not appear, right?
Socrates or Plato had this in mind because the question doesn't fundamentally change. So on page 90 of our edition, he goes through the possibility of imitating one God, imitating the God as a pide as imitating the God if there is only one God, then he says, it is true, so trust says, quote, it is true if there is only one God, there's no difficulty in thinking that pide consistent imitating God. One must know that God is good or just or wise, by either God complies with the rules of justice. If that rule were subject to God or dependent on God or made by God, if it could be changed by God, it could no longer serve as a standard.
So that is the end of the relevant Shouse quote, I think a version of the Youth of Row problem works, at least a version of the problem that Shouse discusses in his notebook on Plato's Youth of Row is very much in play. And I think this is where sort of Sodom that plays an important role, right? It's sort of, there's a renegotiation going on, it seems like between Abraham and God about the right number of people. But that number isn't no just people should be present in the city, right?
It's not a truly reasonable standard. The God still cuts off the discussion at a kind of arbitrary point. And Abraham, I think it seems to suggest that because for Abraham, it seems like the will of God is the ultimate authority and not the ideas or God's compliance with an independent standard that he can understand. And this is very much, I think, where Shouse comes in.
So even though the question is somewhat changed under the lens of a Jewish theological, or under the lens of Jewish theology, or Christian, I mean, curiously Shouse here mostly discusses Christian theologians, right? Occam plays a role for him. So theological volatourism, I mean, there are Islamic, this is an ocean more clearly articulated in Muslim, Islamic theology than in Christian theology. But he still, for some reason, goes to scotus and Occam and articulates it in a more Christian version.
But in a theological lingo, you would ask, like, is there a theological volatourism? Like, is the will of God the source of all things, of justice and so on? And one way to explain that, and Shouse gives this example, is murder bad or evil because God commands us not to murder people, or is it intrinsically bad? So could God also command people, command us to murder others, and thereby murder would be intrinsically good, but would be good?
Yeah, and another way to put this question is in relation to the menos, which I think is quite related to this topic, but is when he's trying to fight this anonymous comrades conventionalism, this idea that laws are just buried by time in place, and Socrates bare bones argument is that, well, no matter where you go, the noble is opposed to a shambles, the chest is opposed to the unjust. And is that a strict enough intelligible necessity that you need to have certain things to find as contrary to one another, and that these categories might have a certain interrelationship, right? That the noble, for example, might what we call super-rotatory, might be above and beyond the just, right? And that the good might have a particular relationship to each of these two categories, and might there be a part of justice that's therefore ugly, like punishment, right?
And then execution, things that you know, Leonteus only begrudgingly looks upon, right? There might be, so that might be a kind of necessity that moves beyond this pure will of God, right? But it would be very, very, I mean, this is a very inontology. Well, I'm part of my list, very formal.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a big deal. Because in one society, we're just, yeah, yeah. We're bare-cous. I mean, he doesn't want to play as the theory that all theistic positions stand or fall by the admission of necessity.
I think he means that they themselves need necessity. That was in 102, it's not 10. I mean, that's, then what would you add? Otherwise there's chaos or chance.
Because I mean, God himself doesn't say worship chance or meaninglessness or stone or chaos. No, I mean, it's certainly not, I mean, for many, for many believers, it's not a problem, sincere and impressive human beings. It's not a problem to say murder is wrong, only because God said so, and God could make murder. I mean, I had to say, yes, we befriended, we've mentioned him, but I'm only going to mention him now.
He said, this first command was kick and spit in your neighbor's face. That would be the first commandment, but the only commandment. You probably have to use a different word than neighbor. I mean, that's the word.
Like murder, right? You have to, yeah. It's different. Yeah, murder has the bad word built into it.
Yeah, neighbor implies that the person will near you, I guess, but yeah, right close to you. Implies, liability, you would say? Yeah, on some level or at least some social plenty with them. Otherwise they would be your neighbor, they'd be your farmer or something.
I mean, I don't want to press this too much, but it does mean, my reading of Genesis actually does seem to imply that God gradually grows uneasy with murder. He's not ever on board, I'm not trying to say that, but it's like, oh man, you killed your brother. Right, go away. Blah, blah, blah.
My lock says this evidence that murder was always bad, right? Because he can't know as the people are going to hate him, but there's no prohibition against the shedding of blood till after the flood. And so it could be the case that God's finally like, look, you people need a rule. Don't do this anymore.
I don't mean to say it was murder holiday before that, but yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know. There's something more logical about this dialogue that Strauss attempted to develop and that's necessary but insufficient. So why do you need necessity in the case of God?
Because otherwise God could easily decree from now on, I'm dead and make sure everybody's an atheist. And that's, he says he's an inconsistent. I mean, I mean, then he'd come down to inconsistency though. He's an aggressive statistic here in consistency.
But that is one example he gives, twice decreed that university atheist they've grown that one. God, there's a couple of things. There's a couple of things we touched on. I just want to circle back on a couple of things.
Strauss has recourse in his account of the youth. So a couple of things that I'm just, one is the ideas, right? But we already discussed that the ideas may not be necessary. So that's a problem.
And there's this strange assertion that philosophizing is an imitated to God's. But then why? Because that's what the wise man does. Okay, that seems preposterous on the face of it.
When elsewhere, he seems to indicate that the gods don't philosophize, right? And as Zarco mentioned a little bit ago, if there aren't natural necessities in the gods, wouldn't simply, it wouldn't have knowledge because there wouldn't be things to know. So I mean, there are all these sort of playful sort of roll ways and then like, oh, by the way, we know that there are gods. What, where did that come from?
Like, nothing in this essay has led me to think that that's where you're gonna end this thing. Oh, well, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we know so, you know. You know, actually we know that justice is good.
I mean, he's, as though he hasn't read the Republic. Right? This is just a, yeah. So there's, I mean, there's a number of operating assumptions in the essay that he points directly towards.
And there's some that are not. And he must know our question. Of course he knows. And that point beyond, I think, to larger considering.
I mean, this is part, I think of his obvious attempt to point to the larger, but on a cosmopolitan way, right? Like those three, some. We have to, we have to call it, I have to get going. And I'm a host of this call.
I could keep doing this for hours. Right. But I mean, this is fantastic. What urgent business?
The way the Utherfro ends this will have to end. Well, yeah, I gotta go get this prosecution, right? Alex has to run off. Oh, by the way, this is the last, my last footnote to this, but Diogenes, Laersius, is that how you pronounce it?
He suggests that Socrates managed to convince Utherfro not to prosecute his father. So I think the ending is somewhat more, I mean, it is ambivalent, right? It's not clear. Plato doesn't give us a clear indication of what happens.
But it's entirely possible that Socrates was convinced, that Utherfro was convinced by Socrates. And that's, I think, how Strauss reads it. Yeah. And we also at the New Thinkery, we denounce killing your father and prosecuting him for murder.
So listeners at home, don't don't prosecute your father for murder. That's the New Thinkery. The Old Thinkery, that's the Old Thinkery that advocates for other beings. It's great.
We're great. Yeah, yeah. We've been saved. We've seen the light.
All right. Well, thank you. Like, rate, subscribe. Thank you, Zarkar.
Thank you, Hana. This has been fantastic. And when the next 10 volumes of straps, notebooks come out, we'd like to have you for 20 more episodes. Absolutely.
Thank you very much, guys. Thank you. Thanks, guys.