Ep. 299: Philosophy in Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens” (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: Hey. This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 299, part 2. Still discussing Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare. But we've had some personnel changes. Jonathan Bate is no longer on the call. And new people, introduce yourselves. Sarah.

0:26 Sarah: Hello, I'm Sarah Manton. I am still in a cupboard in New York City.

0:33 Dylan: It's a very long time to be in a cupboard.

0:36 Sarah: It's a nice comment.

0:36 Mark: It's a little hot with a nice mic. You are one of the only guests. We had many guests, but many of them had. There was something weird with their audio when I was engineered, but yours was very nice. Thank you.

0:48 Sarah: Okay, well, fingers crossed it's gonna work again today. Don't want to jinx it.

0:52 Mark: And Seth, did you have a wacky intro or something that you didn't get to read in part one?

0:56 Seth: No, no. This is Seth Paskin here in Austin, Texas, as usual.

1:01 Mark: Did you guys both get to listen to the part with Jonathan?

1:03 Sarah: Yes, it was great.

1:05 Mark: No, Seth does not look at his emails or his slack. That's fine. We had left things. We were kind of debating whether what was going on in the play was that the over reliance on money or reciprocity formalizes social relations in a way that makes it impossible to have real connections with people. And so when it breaks down, when reciprocity is not returned, that's like a deep existential crisis for Timon. So I wanted to return to that and see what y' all thought of that idea. I finally finished the edit last night, so I've gotten through the whole play again.

And there were things in it that made me think he always wanted to. If somebody gave to him, he wanted to give them more. He wanted to keep. You know, maybe it was a power thing that he wanted to keep ahead of them. But he also, when he was owed money, he was like, look on the bright side. This is a chance to test my friends. And he said elsewhere, like friends, if they're not useful for something like friendship needs to be road tested or something like that.

2:04 Wes: He compares his giving of money to filling caskets with love or something.

2:10 Dylan: Like that.

2:11 Wes: And then he can dip back into that. So I still think he sees this in very innocent and naive terms.

2:18 Dylan: Right.

2:19 Wes: It's not just about money. It's about all the false hypocritical stuff we do as part of social relations. I think money is just the most obvious and concrete part of that. But there's also this concept of flattery, which has a lot to do with hypocrisy and just the normal social deceit, the type of thing we've talked about, especially with Nietzsche, that is an inevitable part of social relations. But Timon wants to take the surface stuff, I think, as being the deep structure of relationships, when the deep structure actually does have a lot to do with things like power and status.

Timon, in a childlike way, wants it to be very innocent. And his way of expressing love is very innocent in a way. Right. It's like, what's your love language? I thought of that with Timon, you know, words of affirmation, acts of service and gifts and things like that. So it's this very concrete way of gift giving. And in a way, he's making love to society in the old sense. He's courting society as a whole or the social. And it doesn't requite his love because that's not how society works. And when that idealized version of society doesn't work, he turns into the misanthrope.

But in the beginning, he's, in a way, he's the inverse of the misanthrope. Right. He's unlike most of us, who are not either the misanthrope or the inverse. We have a much more integrated or subtle view of social relations, which is we just accept the fact that when someone says, how are you? They don't really mean that. And we say it back. And that's the tip of the iceberg. We can deal with the level of deceit in social relations and not take it seriously.

4:02 Sarah: Yeah, it's interesting. There are certain times in the first half of the play when he verbalizes that he isn't completely taken in. Like one of them says, oh, believe it, dear Lord, you mend the jewel by wearing it. And he says, well mocked. I don't know. And then there's another. There's another bit when he's talking about the painting. The painting is almost natural man. For since dishonor traffics with man's nature, like he's acknowledging that he is. But outside, these pencil figures are even such as they give out. He's saying the painting is more Trustworthy than man.

It's almost like he's. If you're thinking about it in a tragic sense. Tragedy. The characters have a fatal flaw. And in a way, it's that he doesn't take any competitors in philanthropy. He's like. It's almost his ego. You could see it as. It's his ego, that saying, I will not accept anything. I'm going to be the one to give. I'm going to be the one with all the power.

4:57 Seth: That.

4:57 Sarah: His flaw. That would be a way of looking at it. The innocence is. I am one of those humans that can be cynical, I suppose. And so the innocence is less believable if you're thinking about it in terms of a real person. I'm always, as an actor, thinking in terms of why and how did this person become real.

5:13 Wes: The innocence conceals. The unconscious part is, yes, there's a hunger for power there and there's a desire for power. And to be the only giver, to be the bounteous one who's inexhaustible. Right. It turns out he is exhaustible, and there's a lot of talk about that. But he wants to be like the sun or like a God who can give and give and give and not ever be depleted. That's the hubris part of this. So unconsciously, yeah, it is about naivete is on the surface. And then unconsciously, yeah, I think you can talk about his desire for power.

5:41 Dylan: You're both exactly right on that naivete part. And how much of it is naivete versus a conscious play for power. My read on him is that his hubris is more or less innocent in the sense that he is unsophisticated about the way the power dynamic is working. And that's revealed by, yes, he wants to be the bounteous one, but he doesn't understand enough about how this. Even the kind of social relation that he's bought into works, which requires him to exercise his power by demanding reciprocation. In that way, he's much less powerful because he fails to expect and demand reciprocation than he would be.

So he has this idealistic view about how that works. Mark helpfully sent us a really nice piece by Peter Adamson, the Cynics. Just a quick overview about them, which had a lot of nice detail in it. But one of the main things that made more clear to me why Apemantus as a cynic is in the play is very, very appropriate, is because in a lot of ways he wields his power much more knowledgeably by extracting himself from social conventions. And he's, you know, he's your typical cynic disdainer of social convention. But he also, in that role, maintains power in a way that Timon doesn't.

7:09 Wes: Cynicism is really an early version of Stoicism, right? And it involves, first and foremost, a reconceiving of one's relationship to externalities that one normally might think of as the source of what's good and locating goodness entirely in one's state of mind or in one's character and specifically in one's being virtuous. This is still basically ancient Greek virtue ethics. That's the key to happiness. And this all has its roots, right, in Plato and Aristotle, but especially Aristotle. So the emphasis for the Stoics, I mean, sorry for the Cynics, although you see this in the Stoics as well, is living according to nature as opposed to social convention, which means, in part, living this very simple ascetic life.

And I think, right, Diogenes is supposed to have lived in, like, a wine. A wine casket or something that's ceramic, the ceramic jar, having it on. And I was trying to think about how he did it. Was he like the Cookie Monster or not the Cookie Monster?

8:11 Mark: Oscar.

8:11 Wes: Oscar the Grouch in the trash can, or does he have it on the side? And is he, like, crawling in and out? And then on the other hand, it's bucking social convention and seeing social convention for the form of hypocrisy that it is and being shameless and being willing to do the types of thing that things. Although I think Apemantus is a caricature, obviously, in railing against everyone and all that stuff, but being willing to kind of be a weirdo, buck social convention and be persecuted for that and not withdraw from society, even though you're living in a wine casket.

8:46 Dylan: And the idea that we should live like dogs or other animals, that among the social conventions besides, you know, not living in a house and not having things, is his. Diogenes was famous for gratifying himself in public just like an animal would.

9:01 Wes: So you have this interesting opposition between Apemantus, who sees through social conventions, for whom social convention is nothing, and Timon, for whom social convention is everything.

9:12 Dylan: The one thing I did find a little bit interesting about thinking about the cynics is another feature of them is that they are in society, right? Even though they're claiming, you know, they're arguing the best life is life close to nature, you know, removing social convention, they don't become Hermits, they make their living by begging, right? And so they rely on external social connections. So there is a self reliance that's going on, meaning in that not having sort of have nothing that you, you know, do not need kind of thing, and an ostentatiousness about it. But they're still. They're not subsistence farmers. They're not out there hunting and, well,

9:55 Wes: they don't do any type of work.

9:57 Mark: Well, it's gathering. So Timon himself, when he's talking to the bandits, he says, behold, the earth hath roots within this mile, break forth a hundred springs. The oaks bear mast, the briars scarlet hips. The bounteous housewife nature on each bush lays her full mess before you want. Why want? So it's like the lilies of the field.

10:15 Dylan: I do think this particular aspect of it is very telling. I want to say hypocritical, but very telling regarding the cynics. The fact of begging, whether it be for food or money to get food or whatever it is that level of relying on society as opposed to being animals, take care of themselves. And so it's just an interesting get a job hippie.

10:36 Sarah: I think you're right. And that was what I kind of love about some of those stories of Diogenes, which you can see in Apemantus. There's a story about Diogenes walking into the theatre the opposite backwards, the opposite way to the people coming out. I mean, things like that are so theatrical and so sort of. You're like, he's getting pleasure from that. He's definitely. Or you could say he's trying to teach everybody all the time in a way. Apemantis. And I'm interested in the Apemantus and Timon relationship in terms of, like, there's a few of these and Shakespeare just being a counsel to a monarch or a wealthy person.

And the fools. And the fools, all of their sort of uses in Shakespeare. And how he doesn't exist without Timon. It's almost like he needs. And he goes to see him, you know, I love that scene when he goes to see him. There's so much interesting stuff in that. You know, that bit where they're just hurling insults at each other. It kind of really builds. And it's almost like something happens to Timon, like he has a catharsis or something. I mean, it says in the, you know, one of the productions he was sobbing in his arms and things sort of change and he comes around to an acceptance after that.

My point being that maybe all Of Diogenes and the cynics behaviors. Yeah, are exactly what you were just saying, you know, has. They have to have an audience and they have to be teaching and doing it to teach.

11:58 Seth: Yeah, that's exactly it. At the root of the cynicism is still the concept of moral teaching, whether it's by example or instruction. And I agree with you, Sarah, that Apemantus, you can see if you think of Timon as the king like figure, then you can think of Apemantus as a fool, as the fool who can speak truth. Now, the structure of the play, I think is a bit flawed in the sense that lots of people speak truth to Timon and he just doesn't receive it very well. They're not afraid to speak it. But it's Apemantus who, as you say, gets through to him eventually in some respect.

But of course, Apemantus also has no problem speaking truth to any other sorts of personages in the play as well. But to your point, Dylan, I think it's not that the cynics in some sense are just there, let's say, demonstrating animal behavior. There is a moral aspect to the choice to stay in public or stay in society, behave the way they do, and honestly perform to some extent. You know, as Sarah was talking about with the walking backwards, like just making a point about juxtaposing their behaviors against societal norms in order to somehow display or unearth or uncover something about societal behaviors.

13:16 Wes: Yeah. And this question of where nature begins and where it ends and society begins is actually very fraught. And by the way, I don't think Timon is a cynic at the end. Right. For various reasons, including. And you know, Apemantis is right. They have a kind of argument, an implied argument about whether Timon is really a cynic in the end. And the cynic isn't upset because their love towards society is unrequited. They're not just throwing a tantrum because society wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. But the other part of this is that the nature part is that Timon will say even nature is hypocritical and it's flattery.

Right. So Earth is a whore. Earth gives us the gold that causes men to become evil. Or when Apemantus talks about becoming a beast, Timon gives a speech about how if you were the lamb, you'd be preyed on by the wolf. If you were this, that. So the relationships between beasts is cast entirely in terms of predation. And then there's that speech where the sun, everything Steals. The natural elements are all thieves. Well, it starts with the natural elements. And then he works his way up. So the sun is stealing from the ocean or something like that.

And then he works his way up to say that goes even for laws. So the law itself is a thief. So we get this kind of progression from the natural to the social. But the important part is that the natural grounds of social. And it's all hypocrisy all the way down. For Timon, the cynic is not saved by going back to nature.

14:46 Mark: So you brought up the law. So I want to use this to transition or at least get on the table, the whole B plot, the Alcibiades thing. I'm sure there are literary parallels, maybe even Antigone or something like this. But the idea that he. Sir Jonathan, brought up whether we should talk about that character in terms of the gay angle, because of the background with the symposium. I'm not sure what to think of that. But he's introduced in a very passive way. He's just at the party. He seems to be behaving honorably. I think he might accept a gift, but it's not in the way that the slimy lords are. Then he is before the Senate. Actually, he does have that one line, defiled land. So this is in the second scene that Timon is saying, alcibiades, thou art a soldier, therefore seldom rich. It comes in charity to thee. For all thy living is 'mongst the dead.

15:37 Wes: Yes.

15:37 Mark: And all the lands thou hast lie in a pitched field. And he says, I defiled land, my lord. So this is sort of expressing his ptsd, you know, that he's been living

15:46 Wes: defiled by all the dead people, you know, who fall on the field of battle. Yeah.

15:51 Mark: And so this is his. When he's talking to the Senate later and his friend, who. It would have been nice if they showed us this friend. Maybe there was a thing about, like.

16:00 Wes: I know. See, this is a part.

16:02 Sarah: When I read it, I thought it was Timon. I was like, oh, something happened. And this is how they're telling us. Timon's being.

16:07 Wes: It's very confusing. And it's the thing that makes it most clear that it's a rough draft, that there are supposed to be other scenes in there that said more about this friend.

16:15 Mark: It seemed like he was giving a you can't handle the truth kind of speech to the Senate there. I mean, it seems a little overreaction. Like I had described it, that he chose to go into exile.

16:25 Sarah: But.

16:25 Mark: No, the senator actually exiles him. But it's exiling him for pushing back. He sort of gives him an ultimatum. It still seems kind of an overreaction on the Senate's part. Like, how dare you?

16:36 Wes: Well, he says, you forgot. You forgot who I am. Right. He tries to pull rank, you know, I've saved the city. I'm an important guy, you know, and that's when he gets exiled.

16:45 Dylan: I was trying to figure out what the whole deal with the B plot was, because it really is parallel in this funny way in the symposium, right. Alcibiades, you know, bursts in and his bursting in ends up being an important part of the whole happening of the symposium. But in this case, it's just kind of like a cutaway, like, oh, we're going to show you another movie now. And maybe this is again, the draft part of it. But there is potentially an interesting parallel with Timon's naivete regarding social conventions and Alcibiades, right. His expectations regarding how a being a general ought to be treated and the role of his power and stuff like that, and the lack of respect that he's getting from the Senate.

That leads to him to be exiled and Timon becomes bankrupt and falls afoul of social convention and, you know, people. So he gets cast out from society because they don't come to help him. In a parallel way, I guess the difference being the way in which Timon doesn't go take over society again, but Alcibiades does.

17:51 Wes: They both get injured by Athens and they both want to destroy Athens. But I think there's an interesting contrast. The nature of the injury is different because Alcibiades has his pride wounded. It's a matter of honor, right. He's kind of owed something by the city for all the service that he's done. And even his friend's crime is cast as a crime of honor done dispassionately because someone insulted him or even threatened him. It's kind of unclear whether, you know, Alcibiades will argue with self defense. So anyway, I think this is like wounded pride or narcissistic injury on the case of Alcibiades. But for Timon, it's not. That's the interesting thing. It's not just about pride being wounded, although you could argue that way, but it's more about unrequited love and rejection.

18:36 Sarah: Yeah. And just interesting. Just the different options you have when you're hurt or when you're angry. I mean, I think there's anger with them both. The beginning, when it first happens to both of them and Whether you fight or whether you let it consume you and then have no choice but to die. The other thought that I had in terms of the function of this plot was the funny thing about this play is that a lot of Shakespeare plays, there's some kind of, like, futurity, like some kind of reproductive futurity, like there's family at the end, like, something moves forward at the end.

There's either a lot of things resolved, or even in, like, is it Macbeth, where Malcolm's there at the end? Like, there's somebody at the end. Whereas this play, if somebody dies and it's almost like nothing is there at the end to sort of move forward beyond the play. But then there is, and it's him. You talked about last week with Jonathan, which was so great, reading the epitaph. There is a sort of hope through this reconciliation. So it could be that they were just, how are we going to end this thing?

19:37 Wes: Or, I don't know, should we talk about that?

19:40 Mark: The death.

19:41 Wes: Yeah, the epitaph and the.

19:43 Mark: Or in the multiple drafts of the epitaph that he's, like, saying that he's going to write an epitaph. And then the soldier finds he can't read the actual epitaph because he just takes a scribbling of it, but it has sort of a heading that he can read. So he gets some of the information.

19:57 Wes: Well, he finds a rough draft of the epitaph that he can read, and then the actual epitaph on the gravestone, he can. And he has to take a wax impression of it to bring that back to someone who can read it.

20:07 Sarah: And then, because I was reading that part and somebody else reads the epitaph and says they took a wax thing of it, it's like a different person.

But do people took wax things of it?

20:16 Mark: Exactly. Should the soldier and the messenger have been the same person? So you were the messenger. Right. And I had.

20:22 Sarah: It's like, how many. How many people came and took a wax impression?

20:27 Seth: Let me ask the question, and this is genuinely out of ignorance. Sarah, you. And we've heard this mentioned before, that there's no family structure. There's not other people who are somehow related to the main character who can perform this redemptive function at the end, which is common in the other plays by Shakespeare. So what is that function that we're looking. The resolution or the redemption we're looking for? And then is it something that we actually get out of the epitaph piece, or is it just absolutely lacking from this?

20:59 Wes: So let Me give one thought about the epitaph because I was confused about it. I didn't really have any ideas about it in our last conversation, but I think the one that's on wax. Right? Okay. So I think the first one, the first draft is just, you know, you all hated me. Curses to you. You know, just. But keep walking if you see this grave.

21:18 Mark: No, the final one is. Is a. You know, don't let me pull you down. Here lies a wretched corpse. Seek not my name, A plague consume you, wicked wretches. Left here lie I, Timon, who alive all living men did hate. Pass by and curse thy fill. But pass by and stay not here thy gait, which we were interpreting at least with Jonathan, he was arguing, I think that that is supposed to be not just screw you, keep on walking, but a don't be dragged down with me. And that's the way that Alcibiades takes it.

21:51 Wes: Alcibiades gives a eulogy, little mini eulogy, which I think is telling because he says, though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs and scorned, our brains flow. You found a way. So he's basically saying, even though you abhorred our crying and our mourning, human grief and mourning of your death, you found a way to get Neptune to weep on your grave forever because you put your grave on a beach, which is very telling. So it's like the ocean is tears. So human tears. No, But I'm going to have nature perpetually grieve for me.

22:28 Dylan: So at the end, you, Neptune's weeping on the grave, and then on thy low grave, on faults forgiven and then dead, is noble Timon, of whose memory hereafter more. Bring me into your city and I will use the olive with my sword. Make war breed peace. Make peace stint war. Make each prescribe to each other as each other's leech.

22:51 Mark: The footnote, literally, the parasitic worm used to treat various ailments, hence also possibly blood suckers. So leech, as in medical. It's not a bad thing.

22:59 Dylan: Yes, but what I'm hearing is a reinstantiation of reciprocation. You know, the Alcibiades is going to go in and re. Establish proper reciprocation, as that he did not get, and that Timon also did not get.

23:15 Wes: The context of this right, is that the senators have just implored him and said, we're going to open the gates to you, but please don't kill everyone, because not everyone is responsible. There's not collective responsibility here. If you want to kill 1 in 10. Or if you want to find just the people who wronged you and kill them, do that. But otherwise, please be nice.

23:33 Mark: Well, as a casting.

23:34 Wes: And he relents. But Timon's death rite is kind of interspersed here as a casting thing.

23:40 Mark: I just made you senator one both times. So you're the one that kicks Alcibiades out. And then you're the one who says not everybody here is responsible. But he doesn't give it like a name such that you could say, but I'm responsible, Wes. The senator, you can kill me. Like, is it even supposed to be the same person?

23:59 Wes: Right. So senators, who would be the first to die? Basically, the two. The first and senator one and two.

24:05 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

24:06 Sarah: And that they're scared. I mean, they. Alcibiades is going to win, you know, that they're really scared. So much so that they go to Timon and offer him everything in the forest. So in the way of the two choices of how to. What to do when you're injured fighting, it's probably going to work better. It didn't bring peace. It needed Timon's actions to bring peace. It needed both.

24:27 Wes: It's like a one, two punch. You know, you get the pleading senators. And then something about Timon's death is supposed to. I don't think it works very well or it's incomplete. But that's the concept that's going on in the play is that there's something in Timon's death, that when Timon was funding Alcibiades war.

24:44 Dylan: Right.

24:44 Wes: They had the shared goal of destroying Athens. But something in Timon's death saves Athens.

24:49 Mark: He was funding the war. And, you know, going through this again, it seemed like his charitable giving and things was integral to the whole setup of the society.

24:59 Sarah: Right.

24:59 Mark: He was one of the senators is like the first collection person that is referred to. And they go to bribe him to bring him back. And it's this a more intimate relationship between the merely ceremonial, formal individual, him being a father figure, as we were saying, a power, and the actual government. It seems like those were not as separate as it might look like to us.

25:28 Wes: And they offered to give Timon absolute power. It's a direct quote. The phrase absolute power will basically make you a dictator if you come back.

25:36 Sarah: Which they wouldn't do unless. Yeah, it had been some. Him not being there. It really affected society in some negative way. Him taking himself out. They felt it.

25:46 Wes: They're worried about Alcibiades.

25:48 Dylan: Yeah, they know that he's funding Alcibiades Right.

25:50 Seth: You're right.

25:50 Dylan: They know that he's funding them, and that's where Alcibiades is getting his army. And so they offer him to become the dictator behind the army. Thinking about the way in which other Shakespeare plays. And there's this kind of future looking. The way you talked about it, Sarah, made me think that there's a certain amount of taking that forward energy from certain natural relations among human beings regarding their family relations or relations of love which are somehow natural. And I'm wondering in this case if there is an implicit assertion regarding the naturalness of these reciprocal social relations. And Alcibiades is acting as a force of nature in this respect. The way in which the predator takes care of the prey. Right. You know, and there's a reciprocal relation of give and take amongst the elements of nature.

26:46 Wes: Well, there's the speech about the twin. The metaphor of the twin brothers.

26:50 Dylan: Right.

26:51 Wes: So I think where he talks about the fact that this is right when

26:54 Mark: he starts in the woods. Yeah, yeah.

26:56 Wes: This is scene three in act four. And he basically says he's saying a prayer, you know, I want to create two brothers. One is fortunate and one is not. And the better off one scorns the less fortunate one. And then he makes this comment about our miserable human nature. Can't really bear great fortune without despising humanity, basically. Giving up natural affection. I think, Dylan, thing you were just talking about. So in other words, there's something in our nature which leads to us giving up our nature. There's a conflict within our nature, something that is there naturally that makes it easy for us to give up natural affection and to scorn the less fortunate one.

This kind of aligns with, again, the Nietzsche idea that political superiority resolves itself into the concept of psychological superiority or moral superiority. This blame the victim and we have strong feelings for the more powerful person. We tend to moralize it and say, power is good. But the way that fantasy ends is he says, I want honor to be hereditary for the beggar. So in other words, he wants to reverse that system of values. It's almost like institute slave morality within nature. Morality per se as we know it, make morality a natural thing so that the weak are inherently seen as more honorable.

28:19 Dylan: The weak shall inherit the earth.

28:21 Wes: Yeah, but not because of a church. But that's just natural. Like, that's just the way things. That's the way we would naturally think about things. Not, oh, look, they're excellent at something or they're powerful, therefore we should honor them. But anytime we see a Beggar. Anytime we see someone in misfortunate honor accrues to that not by virtue of anything social. That would be our natural inclination. And that would be the thing that would solve the problem of this conflict within us where natural affection is undermined by the way in which we moralize misfortune as something you're bad because you're a beggar or you're bad because you're weak or whatever.

28:58 Dylan: Yeah, but that is in line with both the weak shall inherit the earth claim as well as I think it's implied in the cynics that social convention is a misinterpretation of it might be natural, but it is a natural thing that has trumped the true nature. And so the argument against it is a back to nature argument, whether it be nature as a impersonal force or whether it be nature in the sense of God as being the true nature of the world.

29:33 Wes: Timon wants to reform nature, right. He says nature is not constituted correctly. Like that's. The cynic would say it is, but Timon would say nature is set up in a flawed way.

29:43 Mark: Timon criticizes Apemantus for saying you flatter suffering because I think he thinks, and maybe there's a commentary on cynicism, that cynicism saw suffering as good, right. As a way to test, just like doing perverse things against social mores shows that you're independent. Just suffering shows that you are better than the simple nature. That would seem that we're attracted toward pleasure, we flee from pain. Right. The Epicureans would just want us embrace that, build on that, like that is our nature. But I'm not sure about this, that you're describing the cynics as being like the Stoics, Wes, as we want to be in tune with nature. But if suffering is part of nature, then is this extreme. I want to liberate my will from suffering. This sounds more Buddhist than Taoist, than being.

30:35 Wes: Well, tranquility is a big. From what I read about the Cynics is a concept and that becomes big with the Stoics. It's also big in ancient skepticism, Ataraxia and I think they're two different terms. But yeah, so I think this concept of tranquility is there. It's just asceticism. I think they think that's the key to tranquility. Even the Stoic. Right. It's not just the Epicurean, but the Stoic would say, yeah, you can live a good life, you could be emperor even you could be high up in politics. You could have nice things as long as you treat them just as preferable, not as like the ultimate good. Power and money.

31:10 Sarah: One of the things that I read in that thing you sent us, the despising of pleasure is a very great source of pleasure, provided that one has exercised oneself in that beforehand. And just as those who have become habituated to a life of pleasure find it most disagreeable, like Timon, which is exactly what Apemantus says to him, most disagreeable to cross over to a contrary form of life, so those who have undertaken the opposite course of training find greater pleasure in scorning pleasure than in the pleasures themselves.

31:36 Wes: This can be interpreted in two ways, right? They could just be masochists, or there's also pleasure and self mastery. And those two things are often difficult to distinguish. More masochism, right? But we take a certain amount of pleasure in mastering ourselves. And the compensatory pleasure, for instance, which is being a good person, like I'm not going to do bad things and pat myself on the back and feel good about, you know, even though I'm frustrating my instincts, I feel good about being a good person and being pro social. So there's that compensation. But then there's also just being a masochist like Whitney. I like it.

32:09 Dylan: I just watched this movie cartoon called Bad Guys that came out on Dreamworks and the big bad wolf who, you know, has a gang of boa constrictor and a shark, all these. All these animals who have bad reputations, and he ends up saving a cat and it gives him pleasure. The sign is his tail starts wagging and he starts feeling really, really happy because his tail starts wagging. And that's the sign that doing good things is its own pleasure.

32:39 Wes: And then he just impulsively eats the cat right after them.

32:42 Mark: He does not.

32:43 Seth: In fact.

32:43 Mark: In fact.

32:44 Dylan: In fact, they all turn to the good side, even though they've been cast

32:48 Mark: as villains correcting nature.

32:49 Wes: I wanted to take my knee, my niece, to see that, but now you've just spoiled it for me.

32:56 Mark: One of the things Jonathan brought up, in fact this is in his introduction in the version that we're reading, is this is a world without women. And he said he wanted to talk about that in the discussion. And then we didn't end up talking about that. Is there anything to be added? Sarah, you were excited at the end about this feminist production of this, which is actually something we were going to do more or less in that, you know, Lucy Lawless was signed on to be our lead and Then I was going to get some other women. You know, she had her co host, her co star on her current show was recommended to be all the nobles and like have us dudes be the servants and sort of construct.

And it just didn't work out that way in terms of who I reached out to. But I didn't have any other than the sort of normal gender blind or just kind of screw you to the conventions of the casting. But it's clearly in this past production there was something deeper, you know, in terms of not just only the casting, but in changing things. Like removing all the misogynist language. Yes. So what do we think of the Jonathan's thesis that this is what goes wrong in a world without women? All this, what Wes has been talking about, of honor and letting ceremony replace actual relations and things like this.

34:07 Wes: The two are connected. World without women, world without love. There is a much. I think it's a much anthologized essay about time and. And that's the thesis of this essay. And it might be where he. What he's talking about. It's all about a world without women. It might even be the title of the essay. I have to find it. And we could. Maybe we could put it online.

34:24 Sarah: Yeah, I don't know. Just I miss women. But it is also just there's no sort of familial when Flavius comes in because Flavius is a really interesting character and does have a big effect on him. And Flavius's goodness actually does get through to him. And Flavius is all good and saying, I love you and I'm still there for you, and cries. And then the quote I couldn't find was Timon says something about, oh, I'm going to call you a woman. And then I can accept this kind of thing. It's because of the tears. And there's a whole thing about tears and only women cry. But it could also be thought of as kindness. You know, there's a kindness there which is not really exhibited anywhere else other than Flavius.

35:11 Dylan: Well, and also the kind of relationship isn't the closest thing in there to a loving relationship that doesn't involve simple reciprocity. And that would be something that you would have seen with a loving relationship with his. A wife or another lover. Something that transcended mere reciprocity.

35:29 Sarah: Because it is kind of amazing in a way. Like Flavius is a bit. Is he real? You know, is he for real? It's sort of like Horatio, but Flavius is a Servant Horatio's been a life like with in Hamlet. Horatio's been a lifelong friend and is the one who tells the story at the end and is the one that's the one moving forward. But Flavius is just a servant and we don't see any backstory to know where that came from.

35:50 Wes: Yeah, normally in the tragedy like this, Right. We'd see the engine of the tragic development would be something love related. Right. So it could be Desdemona cheated on me, or it could be my mother is sleeping with my uncle, or King Lear, my daughters have rejected me, or something like that, so we can't be

36:11 Dylan: together because our families are mortal enemies. Yeah.

36:14 Wes: I kind of was thinking about Shakespeare setting up a challenge for himself. I'm going to make this all just revolve around money and the social and social niceties. We're going to take any deeper relay and see if we can motivate something tragic out of that.

36:28 Dylan: Do you think that Shakespeare at this point was, like, really hard up for cash and really pissed off because his patrons weren't giving him any money to. I mean, that.

36:38 Wes: I think he was already famous for

36:39 Sarah: this, but, yeah, he's already famous, but, I mean, this is probably not relevant, but this is a big change where he was in London and he was doing all the plays and he was an actor. And then he went to Stratford and the plague had happened and he'd lost a child and, you know, he came back to Stratford by himself. And I don't know, part of me just wondered if he's sort of like, I've been putting myself out there. I know what this is like as an actor, so I'm clearly talking about myself. But, like, I've been putting myself out there. I've been giving, giving, giving. And then, you know, nobody gives back sometimes. And then he's withdrawn. He's almost like retreated to Stratford. And maybe he sees himself a bit in time.

37:16 Dylan: And I don't think that's crazy at all.

37:19 Wes: I think. Sorry to just backtrack a little bit to the love before we move on from that and the women thing. I think part of what's going on is the love part has become abstract because what the love object is society itself. And it's thematically important to the play that familial and love relationships be absent. Right. Because society is the love object, and the unrequited love has to do with society turning out to be disappointing and not being an appropriate love object. So we talk about the social and all the deceit. And the falseness that go on in social relationships.

But familial relationships and intimate relationships with loved ones. Right. They're the counterweight to that. There's supposed to be something real in that, and women are required for that. And that's part of what's important about their absence. So in a way, you know, the absence of women and the absence of deeper intimate relationships here goes along with each other. And so you get this kind of antiseptic, experimental realm which Shakespeare can explore, where society, as in, you know, surface social stuff, is everything.

38:23 Seth: Yeah.

38:23 Sarah: And it does feel like there's some disillusionment there in terms of his. Him as a writer, because if I just read this without reading his other work, I would be very. You know, the women are whores. They literally are actually talked about quite a lot. Like, there's a lot of whoring talked about, but there's nothing else. Oh, no, no. He does say, were you born of a woman? But literally, so that it defines that. Are you a man, therefore you are rogue or whatever.

38:54 Dylan: You're not a beast.

38:55 Sarah: Yeah, but, you know, obviously the other plays show how much he understands women and, you know, has all this extra stuff so that redeems him. But if you just read this, you'd be like, oh, this guy. But, yeah, you're right. He's probably exploring something.

39:07 Wes: Be strong in whore. That's a great line. More whore.

39:11 Seth: Yeah.

39:12 Wes: When they're asking for more gold, more horror for. I hear that in, like, Christopher Walken accent, like.

39:19 Sarah: Yeah, like, what was going on with his. In his life? You know, maybe he was. There was something as well, wasn't there? You know, and she.

39:26 Wes: There is a meta reflection on what it means to be an artist in this, which is. Is why we start with the artist, you know, that's something we may want to do.

39:32 Mark: I think we need to save that for part three, because we're not going to have time to get to that this time. I do want to use this, though, as a transition to just ask about the fool, because the fool is a stock character in plays of this time. In Shakespeare, a quote that Jonathan and Eric had pulled out in the intro to our edition is him describing what Varro's servant asks him, what is a whoremaster, fool? And the fool says, it's a fool in good clothes and something like these. Tis a spirit sometimes appears like a lord, sometimes like a lawyer, sometimes like a philosopher with two stones more than artificial one.

He's very often like a knight. And generally in all shapes, that man goes up and down in from four score to 13. This spirit walks in and the Varro's servant, the money collector, says, thou art not altogether a fool. Like this is supposed to be a wise thing, but I wasn't really sure why this fool. Seems like apemantus is already serving the purpose here. The other quote here is when he leaves, I do not always follow lover, elder brother and woman, sometime the philosopher. So Jonathan pulls this out as this is in contrast to Timon. And there's discussion of like, hey, Appomantis, I'm the fool.

Will you leave me at Timon's? So I guess there's some symbolism here going on that Jonathan at least was picking out as Timon could have followed the way of the woman, the way of love, and just ends up getting scorned. But yeah, what did you think? Like, Sarah, your experience with fools in Shakespeare, why have this?

40:54 Sarah: I do like that Apemantus says, oh, that's something I might have said. You know, it's the one time he approves of something somebody says is when the fool talks. And just the relationship between the philosopher and the fool is interesting. I was thinking about Jaques and how he's a sort of philosopher. He's definitely a philosopher and kind of a cynic. And how he really loves the fool as well. He's like, oh, this guy. I met this guy in the woods and he was saying all this stuff and you know, so it's interesting, just those two parallels between the philosopher, fool relationship.

You know, all the world's a stage. Which is quite a cynical speech actually, if you really look at it. And yeah, and I mean at the end, because they're in the woods, they've, you know, come out of society. And he's more depressed though, than Apemantus. Apemantus is more like front foot and you know, really quite enjoying being annoying. Jaques is more melancholy. But at the end of the play, Jaques, everyone's is all resolved and Jaques goes off to live with the other meanie duke in a cave again. But he doesn't go off by himself. He goes off with this duke.

So it's almost like he's not, you know, in the way that Apemantus needs society or needs somebody. These sort of figures that are these advisors need somebody, these philosophers need somebody to advise, you know, I don't know, it just occurred to me that parallel.

42:14 Mark: I mean, Flavius is like, let me stay in the cave with you and tend to you. And yeah, okay, maybe that's all we need is Somebody. Somebody to love us or need to be the advisor.

42:26 Sarah: That's what the philosophers need, somebody to advise.

42:28 Wes: I think the appearance of the fool is kind of odd because Apemantis really plays the part of the fool, for the most part. And so the fool is like the fool's fool and the character is undeveloped. So, you know, again, it's just more evidence that there's a lot of ideas going on and in a rough draft. And it's, you know, this is something that might have just been cut out or it would have been developed. But I think the idea that the definition of the whoremaster as a fool in good clothes, a spirit and then inhabits all shapes, right. All different roles of society, all our identities is just.

It's a common idea in Shakespeare, which is that the fool just shows us ourselves and we're most foolish when we most take all the social stuff seriously. Right. So Lear, similarly, there's a similar idea in Lear with unaccommodated versus accommodated men. So clothing, you know, even to dress up in clothing is. There's no more substance, right. To being a judge than wearing a robe, for instance. So our social roles end up being a lot like as arbitrary as wearing certain garments and as deceptive. So the idea here is that foolishness and the arbitrariness of social roles are related.

Who gets to be powerful, who doesn't, who gets to be a judge, who gets to be the criminal and so on.

43:46 Sarah: And they also. I found it interesting, that little section with the fool and Apemantus is with the usurer's servants. And they're all lower class. And there is a whole other dimension to the play about like the social classes and what that means and how time. And because he's fallen from a height, he finds it harder. And whatever lower order Apemantus was born under, he says it's fine for you. Blame your dad if anything, but you know, you would react differently if you had money because you were born in a lower class. Anyway, that little scene is.

I haven't got specific quotes, but I remember thinking Apemantus is acting a little differently with these guys than he does with the other guys. So it's not fleshed out in any way and it's not a great scene. Doesn't really work in the play, but it could have been, you know, it's the fact that it's put there with all of these lower class servants.

Yeah.

44:35 Mark: And some of them names like Flotius or, you know, they name these servants for what reason?

44:41 Seth: If we take seriously the idea that Apemantus is playing the role of the fool. The role of the fool is to speak truth to power, not truth to non power. So it makes perfect sense that he would behave very differently with servants than he does with all of the pompous, rich, powerful people.

44:56 Sarah: Yeah, and that's good writing.

44:58 Mark: Maybe to wrap up, there's a quote that I can't figure out exactly what to do with, given our discussion. When he's talking to Ventidius at the beginning of just one. Yes, at the beginning of Act 1, Scene 2, he talks about ceremony. This is Timon. Ceremony was but devised at first. Instead of gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes recanting goodness. Sorry ere tis shown. But where there is true friendship, there needs none. It seems like the entire process of reciprocation and the mutual recognition, the mutual respect, comes down to ceremony. That there is, you know, we've been talking about a fool in fine clothing.

Even though Timon at the beginning of the play here thinks that he can set aside ceremony, that he can use love, you know, his generosity, it's not actually possible. You can't set aside ceremony. And in fact, what he's doing is just more ceremony. It's ceremony all the way down. He is a hollow person, as evidenced

45:52 Seth: by, I mean, yes, he loans money, yes, but there's just non stop banqueting. He's constantly throwing parties, constantly inviting people. It's all about food and gatherings. I mean, that rings hollow from the

46:05 Dylan: very beginning, but it is also a gesture towards the truth of the cynics and the other people. Right, because what he's implying is that true connection, true natural reciprocity is absent ceremony, it's absent social convention. And so he's actually pointing to the notion that yes, society is maybe not all the way corrupt, but society is a veneer. And the more natural existence in the better higher existence is one that is absent society. So he's just, he's just parroting.

46:44 Wes: He's engaged in all the ceremonial stuff, but he just doesn't see it as such. He treats surface social stuff as if it were the deep reality of the social. This is my take on this. And it.

46:55 Dylan: That might be true that he's taking the surface stuff as the actual, but he is denying the surface meaning of it.

47:06 Wes: At least when he says ceremony is unnecessary, it's like he's confused because he's doing it right. So he's saying that this isn't just ceremony, this is our. We're really good friends, you know, I'm Throwing feasts for you. I'm giving you stuff. And it's not that he doesn't loan people money. Right. He gives them money to loan back to him. So when someone, when he's giving him these gifts, he owes them the money that he borrowed to give them the gift. That's what they're collecting on. Well, maybe it's too clever or too.

47:36 Seth: No, you're never too clever, Wes. Always on point. I mean, I don't want to belabor this because we're at the tail end of our time, but it'd be a question to ask of what would reciprocity look like for him. So if he invites you to a banquet and you come and eat at Timon's house, is the reciprocity he's expecting that you would in turn invite him to eat at your house and would he define that as friendship? And I think the answer to that is no. Right. And so he doesn't understand himself well enough to know what he's actually doing and what he actually desires and how what he's doing is not going to get him what he desires.

48:15 Wes: Can you imagine having Timon over for dinner? He wouldn't know what to do with himself. He'd be like a fish out of water.

48:21 Mark: You know what he'd do?

48:22 Sarah: He'd bring dinner.

48:24 Mark: He'd bring dinner. Exactly.

48:25 Wes: Or he'd jump in front of the stove.

48:29 Seth: You're like, no, I don't want your jacket. I just want you to sit down. I want a compliment.

48:34 Wes: Let me do all the dishwashing. Oh, no, we'll do the dishwasher. No, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it.

48:38 Sarah: Which is annoying. People who don't. You can't take.

48:41 Dylan: Yeah.

48:41 Sarah: Is annoying.

48:43 Seth: Yeah.

48:43 Mark: Sarah, did you. Thank you so much for joining us for this. I was glad to hear your voice a little more. Did you have any closing thoughts? An issue that we didn't hit hard enough? Something that is still niggling at you?

48:56 Sarah: Just that there are lots and lots of scenes in this play that are brilliant and that are actually. When I first read it, I was actually not so keen on it at all. It was quite hard going. But now when I've been through it again, especially in the second half, there's some really fun stuff that if you dived into it, is quite accessible, actually, and fun. And it was nice to have the chance to dive in.

49:21 Seth: Do you have anything to plug?

49:23 Sarah: Anything to plug? Oh, really? I mean, the next job that I am definitely doing, hopefully doing jobs before is playing actor two in A Merry Little Christmas Carol at Virginia Stage in Norfolk in December. So if anyone's listening from Virginia, you can see me there. And yes, maybe things will happen before then, too. Lots of auditions, lots of self taping in my bedroom right now.

49:50 Seth: So, yeah, that is a tough life.

49:52 Dylan: Good luck, mate.

49:53 Wes: Thanks.

49:53 Seth: Yes, good luck.

49:55 Mark: You know, because we didn't get to talk about Shakespeare's views on art in this play, we went ahead and recorded a part three to this episode for supporters that'll come out next week. Our next episode is Partially Examined Life, live streamed, talking about Nietzsche's untimely meditation number two on the uses and disadvantage of history for life. By the time this comes out, the unedited video for that will probably be already on our YouTube channel. If you want to search for that or just wait for the nicely edited audio coming out as our next regularly scheduled episode.

We would love to hear from you as to what we should cover. Whether you liked this kind of theater treatment, what else in that vein you might want to hear? So you can reach out to us@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com or through the contact form on our site. You can also join in the fun by joining our Facebook group, following our Facebook page, following us on Twitter, on Instagram, or just signing up for our mailing list@ partially examinlife.com which will tell you when new episodes in our network and other blog posts come out. Thanks, everybody.

Good night.

51:02 Seth: Good night.

51:03 Sarah: Good night.