Ep. 376: Plato’s “Laws” (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 376 is something like to what degree is society supposed to make us more virtuous? And we read selections from Plato's lengthy late dialogue of the Laws. More information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer leaving my children an abundance of awe rather than gold in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Seth: This is Seth Paskin laying the groundwork for my benevolent dictatorship in Austin, Texas.

0:43 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, drinking my way to justice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey unmelted in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:52 Mark: A dialogue that we have put off for a long, long time. This Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article that Wes, you had found for us, that was a good summary of the whole thing since we weren't going to read the whole in its hard copy in this translation by Thomas Pangle is 577 pages. So obviously that's not all a dialogue, but a lot of it is dialogue. It's, you know, 300 some pages. So yeah, definitely not going to read the whole thing. And I guess it's unfinished too. Is that right? That's scholarly.

1:23 Wes: Apparently it is, yeah. Apparently it's according to. Was it Aristotle or some other commentator? He thought it was unfinished.

1:31 Mark: So this Internet Encyclopedia philosophy article, the Laws is Plato's last, longest and perhaps most loathed work. This is the objective. I thought it was okay, the parts that I read, I was looking at this sort of like the Kant on ethics lectures, like we're revisiting. So here we're revisiting his politics. But you know, it was always a question in the Republic. Is he just talking about this, the ideal state, just to make a point about justice in the individual? Is it really political philosophy? Well, this is definitely political. Philosop here is, you know, let's make up the laws for a new city.

Let's talk about the laws of a couple of the participants in the dialogue. You know, if you're, if you're a Spartan, if you're a Cretan, kind of what the laws are there. Let's make up this new, you know, ideal. But it's going to be in the real world, you know, we can't just pie in the sky. Well, it'd be really nice if the smartest people were in charge of everything here. You know, we actually have to deal with, well, how would we figure out who are the smartest people? What so? But, you know, it seems to complement to me a lot of what we saw in the Republic.

2:31 Wes: Not only how do we figure out who are the smartest people, but we have a kind of chicken and egg problem, because the laws deal not just with correction and punishment. In fact, ideally, that we wouldn't even have to do that at all. At one point in the dialogue, he says, it's kind of weird and shameful that we would even go through this process of defining penalties, because if the laws are correct, everyone would be educated perfectly every anyway, and everyone would be virtuous. But our institutions depend on education, and the lawgivers must be properly educated as well.

The way the dialogue ends, it says, in a way, we can't create a textbook for this, we can't create laws for the process by which laws are created. There has to, in a way, be a, you know, the lawgivers have to get together and kind of have like one long liberal arts seminar where they bootstrap themselves up to the point where they are properly educated and then can start legislating.

3:29 Dylan: Yeah, but isn't that chicken and egg problem rooted in the fact that you need to have wise people who are implementing and leading in that way? It sort of takes off from the Republic. In the Republic, you have the desire to have the best people, the philosopher kings, who are the wisest ones, who are going to rule properly, and everybody is in their place. And there is that acknowledgement that the only way people get to that place is by the right kind of education. And therefore the best you can do to solve the chicken and egg problem is to educate people properly. But even that isn't foolproof. So it does feel different than the public in this way is. It's just way more practical.

4:15 Wes: The way things go in the real world is that there is. Right, there's just millennia of culture and a kind of learning process which is quasi rational, but doesn't happen through explicit reason. So in the real world, we get an educational foundation. That's very flawed, Right. We have lots of unjust customs and racism and nationalism and culture custom that serves as a poor foundation, but has the seeds of good foundation. And so we have a whole educational process which is very flawed. And then ideally, that educational process bootstraps itself over time and refines itself.

But ultimately what we're looking for, right? Yeah. The law is, according to this dialogue, all about creating virtuous citizens, because it's only virtuous citizens who are going to be susceptible to the Law anyway, it doesn't work just to compel, just to force people. This should remind us, by the way, of course, Kant, who emphasizes the fact that command is necessary, right, for the kinds of laws we give ourselves, but we also need reflective endorsement. Plato almost just comes out and says exactly the same thing. We need ultimately penalties and compulsion, but we need persuasion.

We need reflective endorsement to supplement that.

5:37 Seth: Well, right, and we should probably rewind just a second here. And the relationship between the need for virtuous citizens is about the contribution or the importance of virtue and virtuous citizens to a healthy state. Ultimately, the question is, well, what are we trying to accomplish here? What are the laws actually for? It's not to maintain order in a disordered or unruly state, and it's not to maintain a state that's the best at fighting wars or fighting off enemies. Right. We're trying to create an orderly, well regulated state that provides something important to all the citizens, stability, like a certain level of wealth, happiness, health, et cetera.

And so ultimately what he's saying is, in order to have that kind of a state that is actually concerned with the virtue and the Constitution and the well being of its citizens, you need to have virtuous citizens, and not just a couple of them at the top, which was kind of what we got in the republic, but you need to have a populace of virtuous citizens, right?

6:54 Wes: In other words, our institutions are only good as the people. And you can say this is a point that Lincoln made, right? When people, people want to listen to our Lincoln podcast that we did recently, the liberalism podcast. You know, it's, it's one thing to say we have the institution, but it's another for it actually to persist and survive and be executed as the institution it is. And it requires certain values and a certain virtues and an education on the part of the populace. Now, how widespread do those virtues need to be? That's another question.

Does it just need to be a group of elites? That becomes a complicated issue. Same thing in Schiller. We've seen this over and over again on this podcast. Schiller disillusioned by the French Revolution. There is no revolution until the populace has been educated and prepared for the revolution. If there's going to be a just society, the groundwork must be laid first in the character of individuals before it's laid in institutional realities.

7:48 Mark: So a concern to float above this sort of as we're going through. People had asked, just reading the Republic, is Plato a totalitarian? Is he right? We have Karl Popper wrote a whole book on how a lot of traditional philosophy, including his whole section on Plato is right. The Open Society and Its Enemies is. The name of the book is Anti Freedom. So that's a question like, apparently one of the things I read was there's some more democratic elements than you would expect from Plato, who, you know, clearly doesn't like democracy overall in this, you know, as a practical matter, again, we want the smartest people to be in charge.

Well, we don't just know that we can't make the kind of measures that he recommends in the Republic of getting rid of all families and putting everybody in a pool and testing them when they're babies and elevating those people. So we have to do something. You know, we're. We're going to have, as you were saying, Seth, you know, an educated citizenry. So we, you know, we want to have everybody involved in some ways. Right on juries. There's still obviously going to be the issue of who's going to be a citizen. It's not like, you know, I think Aristotle follows very directly from this, that they're going to be slaves, they're going to be outgroups, they're going to be resident aliens and things that are not citizens.

But in any case, we want to. Yeah. So in coming up with this in the first place, though, you definitely need. He recommends a benevolent dictator just to come up with these laws and impose them in the first place. And all these models haven't even really set up the dialogue. It's three characters are on a journey and they're talking about, you know, so an Athenian. The Athenian stranger is the one who talks most of the time, is. Maybe it would be Socrates if. Socrates.

9:27 Dylan: Aristotle thought it was Socrates.

9:28 Mark: Yes, maybe if Socrates was the kind of person who did this kind of politics. He claims in the apology, I don't do this kind of politics. Maybe it's Plato himself. Any k. It's, you know, we've seen the stranger in some other things. And even though they were talking with him for 300 pages, the other two guys still call him the stranger. Like you've met, you know, can you ask his name some of this time? Can we just get over this? But the other two guys do have names. Again, one is from Crete, one is from Sparta, and they're comparing their laws.

They're coming up with this new system. And. Yeah, so what they're doing basically, is what somebody has to do at the beginning. And if everybody just had to join together and agree on this as A constitution that would be very difficult. So it'd be better if we could have some sort of dictatorship to put it in place. And then as we were just saying, you know, well, we have to somehow get all the populace up to speed. So, in fact, the whole purpose. One of the big theses of this book is it is the purpose of the state to make people virtuous, which is not what we would.

You know, there's no room for freedom in that. Freedom is means you're going to stray from the virtuous path. We want to, especially as for young people. But throughout your whole life, the educational process should be putting you on the straight and narrow. So, yeah, is this going to be the kind of thing that we want to have anything to do with, given our commitment to freedom?

10:44 Dylan: I don't know if I agree with you about that. It has nothing to do with freedom. And I want to think about. Maybe I'm being infected by listening to podcasts about Genghis Khan and thinking about what a Spartan militaristic society would be. And the difference in what Seth just brought up is what is the city for? And it just strikes me that it is a pretty radical notion to imagine that the city is really for the same thing that an individual ought to be, which is to be excellent as an individual, and that what should be doing is what the city should be oriented to doing is cultivating excellence of spirit and soul for this in the individual for the sake of the city, as opposed to cultivating excellence of excellence in combat solely for the defending of the city from intruders or any number of other goods, or just that the city doesn't have a good.

That the, you know, sort of this Thrasymachian argument regarding justice, that whoever is the strongest, you know, a kind of Hobbesian. It's just a battle of the wills of individuals, and whoever is stronger ends up winning. That notion that our good and the good of the city is somehow tied to excellence of soul has seems to me a lot to do with the notion of freedom that we would have. Now, I'm not disagreeing that as prescriptive as it can be, it doesn't seem to run counter to our notions what we would think of as freedom, not just normally, but just in any kind of conventional way.

12:30 Wes: Yeah. To Mark's point, what's called law here, which I think the Greek word is nomos and can be translated custom as well, will sound a little bit more encompassing than we would normally think it'll sound like it includes customs and gets very deep into not just protecting rights or preventing people from doing criminal things to each other, but regulating. So, for instance, there's a marriage law that's suggested where you got to get married between the ages of 30 and

13:02 Dylan: 35 and you have to marry somebody. You're positively encouraged, though not required, to marry someone who's your opposite.

13:10 Wes: Right. So you get these social rules. Now, on the other hand, we do have all kinds of social rules that are enforced by social coercion, by cancel culture, which is a, you know, just a prevalent part of. Of human life. So there might be some shame in not being married, for instance. And much of the enforcement that Plato talks about in this dialogue does involve things like chaining. Now, it is more explicitly institutionalized. Right. Than we might be comfortable with. But I just want to point out that we do have these more informal institutions.

Some things are dishonorable and will get you looked down on even if it isn't written officially into a law. And then the other aspect of this is a lot of this is about education. And we, of course, you know, it's a point I made on the Lincoln podcast as well. There's kind of an authoritarian element to education. So we strongly regulate the environments of children and what they learn and in a sense, indoctrinate them. Even if we're indoctrinating them to try to make them free, to try to give them the ability ultimately to think for themselves, we have to indoctrinate them with the value of think for yourself, think for yourself.

So there's a kind of paradox. There's. So a lot of the dialogue is about this formative stage, whether it's in a state or whether it's a human being. And the more formative that stage is, say, in early childhood development, then the more like a dictatorship it is. But ultimately, hopefully later on at a different developmental stage, it looks like it incorporates something democratic and something free for the most part. The word freedom kind of has a bad connotation in what we read. It's associated with libertinism. Although he does positively talk about free doctors.

Right. The doctors who can give scientific explanations of what they're doing. Freedom of thought. As opposed to slave doctors who are just tyrannical in a way, themselves tyrannized by habit. I'm just going to do what's in the manual, so to speak.

15:13 Seth: Slave doctor was going to be my thing. Slave doctor in Austin, just that term. I think something like veterinarian would have been better because. Right. The difference between the slave Doctor and the regular doctors is the slave doctors just give the medication. They just like, just do it, do it.

15:31 Wes: Physicians, assistants.

15:32 Seth: Well, just, you know, you don't have to, you don't persuade or convince a sheep that, you know, or a horse. You just do it. Whereas human beings have to be persuaded. So I mean, it's just a funny metaphor. Analogy. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but.

15:46 Mark: So they're doctors of slaves. But then there also are probably the slaves, the slave slaves themselves, right?

15:54 Wes: They are, they are slaves and they're more like assistants to the doctors who know better.

15:59 Seth: Well, and also slaves don't deserve an explanation. You don't explain to a slave why you're. And convince them that this is the right medication or the right course of treatment. You just tell them what to do. And they. Because they're slaves.

16:11 Dylan: There's both aspects to it, right? Being, you know, being a slave to the, the rotness or the recipe and also the treating of slaves or, you know, individuals who aren't making choices of their own care.

16:29 Wes: And he, he associates it, by the way, with the empirical. The word, you know, some word that's, I think translated as empirical is used. Right. So you just go based on experience. Or maybe the word experience is what's used. So it's correlation rather than causation. The free version of medicine understands the nature of it, understands all the scientific causes behind what you're doing. The unfree version is just, oh, this herb worked in the past. I'm going to take it again. I don't know why it works, but that's so.

16:56 Mark: Yeah, this is a very familiar Platonic thing, the techne. Oh, it's merely a techne. You don't really understand. You're just a horse trainer. But if you understood where horses fit in the greater animal kingdom, if you've understood how the horses are matter and how matter makes up the universe and how matter relates to energy and the more philosophical and abstract you get, the more that you know. And so the wise lawmaker is going to have the ultimate justifications, is going to, you know, have the grasp of the form of the good that will ultimately ground all the particular information.

17:32 Dylan: Yeah. Otherwise you're a baker.

17:34 Mark: But it is, I think, made clear here that in the Republic that like, you do have to teach statesmen how to be statesmen. You don't just have to teach them geometry and teach them ethics and somehow then they'll just know how to organize people to create a granary and an irrigation system. Like you have to Actually learn those things as well. I believe there's. There's more of that sort of detail in this.

17:56 Wes: He doesn't. I mean, in what we read, he just says they must be taught piety. They must be taught that the soul is the oldest of all things and rules bodies. And they must be taught that the stars and astronomical. That basically intelligent design, that the world is built off of intelligent design, not of materialistic determinism and necessity. And then he says, and they need to learn other subjects that precede this. And he doesn't say explicitly what that is, but I took that to be mathematics, as it often is, and Plato. So he. He doesn't say we got to teach them math, but I think it's implied. This is.

18:30 Mark: This is not the leaders that you're talking about. I think this is everybody. Right. We need everybody to be a theist.

18:37 Wes: Or else at the end of the dialogue where he's talking about the council, this is explicitly the nocturnal council. Yes, everyone has to be taught that as well. But first, the. With great precision, more precision than anyone else, the council has to be taught this. Yeah, let's teach it to themselves.

18:55 Mark: Say a little more about the structure of. And I think we should talk save. Save for the nightcap. How we chose this 60 pages because it's a little controversial, but we found 60 pages, and it seems like a good 60 pages. So the beginning of the dialogue, they set things up. They reveal these characters. They talk a little about, you know.

19:15 Wes: Can you elaborate on that just a little bit?

19:17 Mark: Sure.

19:17 Wes: Just because you gave the. An Athenian, a Cretan and a Spartan walk into a bar.

19:22 Mark: Yes.

19:24 Wes: They're walking to a. To Knossos, where there's a temple where apparently Zeus was born. And I looked this up. You can still go there today. It's like a tourist attraction. This has like 4.5 stars because someone didn't like the way the steps go down into the. Into the temple. But it's really interesting, you know, that it's still there. And this is what they're on the way to do. And it brings up. And they're going to have. And it's a very long walk and they're going to have this conversation while they walk. And the conversation, I think, sort of pivoting off of the fact that they're going to see a sanctuary of Zeus.

The idea comes up of whether or not the laws are something created by gods or human beings, which is another way of saying, is it a matter of convention and custom? Is it just relativistic or is there such a thing as natural law? In a way? That's the question that starts off the dialogue. And then Marcus, you pointed out, later on in the dialogue, we learned, well, hey, one of these guys is actually about to start his own state, his own city, coincidentally enough, Magnesia. And so we really got to work hard on figuring out how we're going to set that up.

20:33 Mark: Yeah, so this walk, this is supposed to actually parallel the walk that Minos, who came up with the laws of Crete, that he, he would consult with Zeus, would do this walk to consult with Zeus. So it was in the mythology of the different cities that, you know, some. One individual consulting with the God created the laws, you know, and of course, they're wonderful. So after setting that up and talking a little bit about, you know, again, the function of the state is to create virtue. A little, little about education, we then jump to book four, which just talks about book four and five, what a law should look like, and that a law should have an explanatory preface.

Right. You're trying to convince the citizens to obey this. And then book nine, we jumped forward to Crime, Intention and Punishment. So the law says, like, here's why you should obey this law, here's the law. So hopefully you're convinced by that. But if you don't, we're going to punish you. And some of these laws are like, you should believe in God, you should believe in the gods. And so that's what in book 10, that we jump to is the theology of law. So it's an argument for the existence of God that we should be able to put right there as a prelude in one of the laws.

And everybody, all the atheists, all the foolish atheists should buy it. If they don't, they're going to be in trouble. We're going to exile them, we're going to imprison them, we're going to do something and other crimes. If they're attacking temples, if they're irredeemable, then we should just kill them because it's just better for them. It's better for them not to exist if they're so far from what the human good should be. And then we concluded with a little bit of book 12, this nocturnal council that was mentioned. So this is the practical substitute for that class of guardians that's mentioned in the Republic.

Here again, it's not just the guardians. Everybody has some amount of education and some amount of wisdom just to go along with the laws in the first place. But we do want somebody, people Constantly. We don't want just have a constitution that then is unquestioned. We want people who have the highest philosophical knowledge routinely evaluating these laws and their foundation to see if something should be tweaked.

22:42 Wes: All right, with that, should we just jump in now into the dialogue?

22:46 Mark: Sure, yeah. What else in book one and two here?

22:48 Wes: All right, so going back to book one. Yeah, so I just mentioned this beginning, which is a question about whether the laws are just conventional or come from the gods. And then the kind of second point that's made in book one or the section that we read 624A to 632D, is that, well, the. An idea comes up from Kleinia. How are we going to pronounce all these names? Kleinius.

23:16 Mark: Kleinias of Knossos, the Cretan. Right. Megillus of Sparta or AKA the Lacedaemonian. Sparta is shorter.

23:27 Dylan: The Spartans.

23:28 Wes: In my notes, their names are abbreviated as K and M and A. And then also I don't like distinguish between who's saying what. So I don't know who, I don't know who introduces this idea. But the. An idea is introduced that the, that the laws are. Are basically the purpose of the laws in a city is to instill habits or virtues in people that will serve the defense of the city. I mean, ultimately will turn out to be right, to make them courageous. Right. So one of them is to have people have a common mess together, for instance, and to do gymnastics.

And so it's a really weird but interesting when you think about it, idea that. Because we would normally think about law in terms of internal law and order, right. What keeps people from harming each other or you know, think about in terms of ensuring rights and punishing crimes. But here the idea is that, well, there's this state of nature, this war between, perpetual warlike state between all cities. And we have to have laws that are going to help us defend and be victorious over other cities.

24:36 Dylan: And isn't that in parallel with the observation. And I think the Athenian stranger brings this up and then Cleinias sort of agrees with it, that you're taking the extension of the city as the arrangement that, that an individual soul has with themselves. And because the Athenian brings up, you know, there's this derivation about cities to get to the problem of the relationship of a person to themselves and that Clinius formulates it as well. The thing that we need to do is that the first and best of all possible victories is the victory of oneself over oneself. So sort of the, the enemies that you have within yourself. And so the right. The right arrangement of one's soul. Soul and the parts of one's soul for a flourishing individual is again made parallel to the right arrangement of a city where we.

25:34 Wes: There's an emphasis on the fact that we don't want. So he drills down. He starts with, okay, so there's conflict between cities, but there's also conflicts between neighborhoods. There's conflicts between households, there's conflicts between individuals, and then there's conflicts between. Of. Between a person and himself. He doesn't initially put it in term, republic terms, between conflicts between parts of a psyche, but that's the way it sort of falls out. They're parts of people's psyches, and they are in conflict with each other. And then the idea is, yeah, do we really want them to be victorious?

Right. Do we need courageous warriors who are gonna defeat their neighbors or use the rational part of their soul to defeat the passionate part of their soul? No, we somehow got to stitch the parts together and make them friends, reconcile them. So the laws have to have not just this repulsive force quality. If you're thinking about this in ontological terms, it's almost like someone asking, well, think of it in terms of natural laws. What are they supposed to do for an entity? Oh, they're supposed to keep everything out so the entity can persist and not be encroached on and destroyed in that way.

And then someone else comes along. Actually, you need internal structure, and you need something that explains why something is one thing and why the different parts cohere together and work together. And that's what this type of law is supposed to explain. And that turns out to be virtue in the broad sense. So you don't just need courage to repulse. We need all the other virtues. And they're going to help things cohere, whether in the state or in the psyche. Right.

27:09 Mark: And the way that the stranger in Socrates, like fashion, convinces the other to. Right. It's not just about defense. It's about because, you know, defense from dangers, but also defense from pleasures. That to be master over yourself is not just to not run away from the enemy, but to not uncontrollably run toward the delicious cake that you need. So it ends up, you know, in the place around where we stopped. It goes into this part about, well, surely drunkenness is, you know, terrible. That's, you know, you're out of control. And the stranger is like, well, you know, you could.

Let's talk about parties where you get drunk. There are Good times to do it. And that is when you are basically training and you can only do this with adults. You don't want to do this with young people. Training people to resist temptations, that if they never have any temptations, then how, how are they going to be defended against them? So we're going to invite people to get drunk in a controlled way just so that they can control themselves and not drink too much. Or if they do drink too much, then they learn from that experience, et cetera.

28:17 Wes: The idea is for them to be able to get drunk without doing stupid things while they're drunk, doing rash things. Just like if you want to train someone to be a warrior and to be courageous, you put them in a lot of dangerous situations and say, do it anyway. Do the right thing anyway. Even though you're terrified drunk, don't give in to pleasures just because you're disinhibited.

28:39 Dylan: Yeah, but again, you know, the way part of it is the training, which is a supervised, semi constructed circumstance. If you know, you. There is the implication that just letting people get drunk, not being supervised by sort of the right controlled situation, then you won't get the education effect that you want in the controlled way that you want.

29:06 Wes: Parents by the alcohol for the children.

29:11 Seth: Well, actually the, the iep, the Internet encyclopedia philosophy entries characterizes this as like, you know, youth are just, they're just energetic. Right. They're just crazy. And like, we don't want to give them alcohol and get them drinking parties because they'll just get totally out of control. Especially because that's the time you're also listening to music which as we know, can inflame the passions and cause all kinds of undesirable behavior. But then in the 30s, people just

29:42 Mark: gotta, gotta police those musicians. Just like in the Republic.

29:44 Seth: Definitely gotta police the musicians. That element is still there. But then he said, you know, when people get older, they just get tired and bored and then they're just dead. They're not up for partying anymore. So alcohol helps create sociability and give them the energy and the wherewithal to participate in their civic duties.

30:08 Wes: Well, you. Yeah. So before 30 you can't have any alcohol. After 30 and up to a certain age you can do it moderately. And then when you're old, the point is to like, your passions have died down too much. We don't want to have too little passion. We need to like rejuvenate ourselves and alcohol can help us do that. That's my experience of every older person I know who drinks A lot. So useful.

30:35 Mark: So eventually this gets to. We. We had a section toward the end of book one and then into book two into what is education? And I think there's a lot more of it in this book that we did not read. But it's, you know, sort of a lot of what you would expect from the Republic. But this formulation of play games, there's a correct nature, one of which. One which as much as possible, draws the soul of the child at play toward an erotic attachment to what he must do when he becomes a man who is perfect as regards the virtue of his occupation. So we're trying to instill habits. You can. So much of Aristotle seems to just fall directly out of this.

31:14 Wes: You're looking at book two now.

31:16 Mark: No, this was the book 1-643B that you had. Page 24.

31:20 Dylan: Okay. I mean, it's developing habits and also liking the right things, right? Yep.

31:25 Mark: Make one desire education from childhood in virtue. That makes one desire and love to become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled with justice.

31:34 Wes: Yeah. And then he, you know, he seems to say that. Right. And this, this interests me because it's really about upbringing. So there's formal education. And then the effects of. Right. Parental interventions during early childhood development are not distinguished. I mean, later on we'll say, for instance, you know, you got to really set an example. But there's a lot. Right. That goes on, a lot of subtle things that go on psychosocially that affect whether, you know, the character of the children and whether or not they're going to be virtuous.

So all of that stuff would have to be attended to. And the other point here that he's going to make here is that we are. And this is another point of interest to me, we're going to need to use the Thomas and the related concept of honor to help regulate this. The way to regulate the passions is to counteract them with honor, which we'll get into a little more.

32:28 Dylan: Just wanted to make the comment. And part of it is just reacting. You know, Mark, you've. A couple times, you know, the sarcasm about it comes out about like the regulating of people towards justice. And I get it. But what I'm partly wondering is, even if it's missing, even if it's extreme, isn't there something still absolutely, clearly true that you. That the ability for the children don't raise themselves and that people don't raise themselves and that they. And that you. That without the right structure in the right way and we could talk about what that is. The only way you end up with, I don't know, competent people who live and work with other people is by accident.

33:24 Mark: I think competent is the good word here. That, that, that is more modern than perfect. You want to train everyone, and the whole of your education is just shaping you into this perfect model citizen. And we just don't think in those terms of. And part of it is just. It's a more cynical age, and we don't think that that's possible. But I think a lot of it is also the liberalism that. This is. The discussion that you guys had on liberalism. And Plato is not a liberal. Plato is, in fact, one of west and I. On close reads, we read Isaiah Berlin talking about the two types of freedom.

So there's the freedom from, you know, we don't want interference by the government, et cetera. And then there's the freedom to live according to a way that, you know, your religion, your customs, a way that you envision as being the best possible life. And I think you guys gave a good presentation, that there are good ethical reasons for both of these things. Like, we. We sort of have committed as a society to the liberalism thing, and that is why we don't think we can. We should be imposing even on our children. I want you to be exactly this kind of person.

Like, no, I want you to have the basic competence, the critical thinking skills, the generally good habits. We want, you know, I don't want you to become a drug addict. I don't want you to be drunk all the time. I want you to be able to sit and be quiet and listen to other people in a group. Like, it does require quite a lot of training, but, like, once you can do those things, I want you to explore and figure out the world for yourself. And I just don't see that here.

35:02 Wes: Yeah. I think we underestimate, though, how much effort and structure that we do put into this as cynical and how much coercion, as cynical as we might feel consciously. So, for instance, when I was. Before I got to school age, I remember being terrified of growing up in general and going to school. Like, I didn't want to get older because all my older sisters had homework, and I was terrified of having homework. That just seemed like the worst thing in the world to me, like a complete encroachment on my freedom as a child with very important things to do.

So and then, you know, after doing, you know, K through 12, I don't know, sometimes I look back and then it occurs to Me, God, isn't that really strange that we take these little beings and we stick them into these institutions for eight hours a day or however long it is behind desks and make them sit there and subject them to chem. All these subjects that Plato's time didn't even exist. Sitting in chemistry class, just bored out of my mind, fantasizing about the girl next to me, all of that like very coercive. And it's hard, it's not easy to get through that.

But we do it because we don't want people to turn out to be complete assholes. We want to shape people into workers, maybe give them a chance of right.

36:20 Mark: Compliant workers. We're making them into drones.

36:25 Wes: That's right, economic units. Perfectly polished economic units. That's what we want. Good citizens, good people. There is an ethical component to this. We do create educational curriculums that are very well defined and include things like chemistry but exclude other things. And you're right, it's not in the domain of law exactly, but it is in the domain of policy. And I guess this, I mean, I guess there are laws that define curricula in a broad way federally. Right. I don't know a lot about this. And then a lot is defined at a state level or at a local level, even by school boards.

But yeah, people have to make these decisions. And it is all about shaping people in part to be a certain kind of citizen so that they can actually. So that the state can even be viable. If you didn't do it, there wouldn't be a city, there wouldn't be a state. It simply wouldn't be possible if people didn't receive the right education.

37:17 Mark: And Plato actually seems a little more progressive in terms of the John Dewey esque education as play involve. People don't just sit them in a desk for six or eight hours and expect them to absorb things. Maybe there was just less things to know, less books, you know, back when Plato was writing. But even so, I feel like he is in on the idea that we are going to be evaluating. Right. This is another theme that comes up. We are sort of slaves to a pleasure pain calculation. And so education is about aligning that calculation with doing the right thing.

Of like putting people so that they are rewarded when they do the right thing. And so that, you know, virtue is per Socrates, normally in the Republic, something that is a pleasure, it's a joy in itself. But we want to actually construct a society to make sure that the bad people are not rewarded, to make sure the good people get the Great honors and stuff. So, yeah, that's all. We are definitely dealing with the flawed animal that the human being is, instead of just trying to assume that he has the capability of being. Of acting like a machine in a learning environment.

38:29 Wes: And I want to just say a little more about what the flaw is. And this is on page 10. The flaw is that people are. There are these two types of goods, one he calls divine right, and those are the virtues, and the other are human. So beauty, strength, wealth, and even health. And we tend to prioritize the human things over the divine things. We tend not to see the point of being overly virtuous if, for instance, we can get what we want. And it's very hard to reverse that and convince people that, hey, you're actually going to be happier by focusing on virtue than by focusing on these externalities.

I've been studying philosophy for a long time, and even I am not, like, fully convinced of it. So it's a nice idea, but I. I don't know at a deep level that I'm fully convinced of it. So the other aspect is, okay, well, if you have a problem that, that, that's. That's that hard to solve, because I think it is a very hard problem to solve. How do you do it? And this is page 10 to 11 where he says, essentially, we have to regulate a people. People's effective responses to things. I think, Mark, you were. You were just making this point. Pain, pleasure, desire.

We've got to change the way. The configuration of their passions and how they respond to external stimuli. And then how do you do that? And that's where he says, do that by honoring one that, you know, honoring the good and dishonoring the bad. So there's going to be a lot of honor in doing the virtuous thing and a lot of dishonor in not doing the virtuous thing. And that is going to give us a lot of clues about how to set up our penalties as well later on for crimes.

40:14 Dylan: Yeah. When do you get your time out? And when do you get your attaboy?

40:18 Wes: Yeah, he does say you shouldn't shame children at one point. So it's not exactly about shaming. He says you should be more about. Not about setting an example and not doing things that are. That are shameful. But it seems like, yeah, it's hard to escape the implication that there's a certain amount of shame involved. And of course, children, you know, often do when they're being reprimanded, they seem to feel shame. Yeah.

40:41 Mark: So we did just a little bit of book two, just to elaborate on some of this where he. For instance, page 41. You compel the poets to say that the good man, being moderate and just, is happy and blessed, whether he be great or strong or small and weak, whether he be rich or not, even if somewhere is richer than Cinyras or Midas, if he's unjust, he's a wretch and lives a life of misery. So this is the. And a lot of the length of this book I felt like was repeating basically that kind of thing. It's telling me, the reader, you know, yes, society should steer us all toward virtue. And I feel like maybe in his final draft he would have tightened this up a little bit.

41:23 Dylan: It does make me pine for the concision of Euthyphro or something like that. Right.

41:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean, this is. It's been criticized for being. Yeah, that's why it's so long and for being. Being disorganized. But, yeah, yeah, this, this what he's saying early on in book two is that we can habituate children, and again, by the regulation of pleasure and pain, and make them hate what, you know, hate what's bad and love what's good. And then he'll say on page 32, education, I say, is the virtue that comes first into being in children. Pleasure and liking, pain and hatred become correctly arranged in the souls of those who are not yet able to reason.

And then when the souls do become capable of reasoning, these passions can in consonance with reason, affirm that they have been correctly habituated in the appropriate habits. This consonance in its entirety is virtue. And that's very interesting because we often get a picture in which reason and passion are opposed and reason has to overcome passion. And it even looks a little bit that way in book one. Reread part with the famous puppet cord analogy where he compares human beings to puppets who are pulled by a.2 hard iron chords of pleasure and pain.

And then one chord, which is calculation. And it's kind of gentle and soft, which reminds me, by the way, of Hume's idea that reason is something like a soft, gentle sentiment, but.

42:57 Seth: Right.

42:57 Wes: So calculation will tell us what truly is better or worse. So I don't know what to make, you know, it seems a little bit indeterminate or inconsistent. What he does say about calculation is that because it's gentle, it's in need of helpers. And then the question is, well, what do we think the helpers are for calculation? I think, again, it's honor and this echoes something that's said in the Republic, which is that to overcome the passions, reason needs the help of Thomas, needs the help of this concept of honor. And then the other obvious answer to that question is that early on the helpers are the parents and others who are instilling these virtues.

43:42 Dylan: From a young age, you want to get your thumotic alignment with your reason, rather than having it aligned with other things.

43:53 Wes: Yeah, right. Because he also uses honor. People often honor just lines up with all the human goods. People think that that's what's honorable. So when we. He'll even say love of honor is a vice, but he means it in the sense of right, I'm being honored because I'm a great this or that, for instance, because I'm rich or whatever.

44:11 Dylan: I mean, it's hard for me not to think of the conversation with Alcibiades and the interaction with Alcibiades in the Symposium, for instance. And you know, the Republic also is talked about as a book, you know, a book all about education. And maybe in certain ways many of the dialogues would be that way. But you know, in the Symposium at least, you have interaction with somebody who becomes a kind of, you know, he's a general and tyrannical kind of ruler, and you have him being affected by Socrates, but there's a kind of failure of Socrates to penetrate into his soul, to actually persuade him effectively.

44:55 Wes: Right. As a warrior, his thumotic energy is all turned outwards. And that's the way we began this dialogue. Right. Are we turning Thomas outwards and against enemies, or do we. Can we use it somehow to foster internal cohesion in the psyche?

45:12 Mark: Well, that seems like a good point to wrap up part one with. We will talk about this city that they're going to try to build, what the laws look like in that city, and specifically how they argue about the existence of God. In our next part, you can find Partial life a citizen through our website through Patreon. That would get you your part two right? Now, if you support us through Apple, or you you not supporting us at all, you'll just see it next week. Thanks.

45:44 Seth: Thank you.

45:44 Dylan: Thank you.