Ep. 402: Plato Talks Homer: Hippias Minor and Ion (Part Two)

Finishing Plato on the Hippias Minor

0:00You're listening to the Parsons Examined Life, episode 402, part two. We are finishing up our treatment of Plato's Hippias Minor, and we will very quickly get on to the ion. How far are we? I mean, we've outlined the Hippias Minor argument. Well, we have two more sections. One is 369b to 373c, which is, you know, we'd have to spend a lot of time on it. That goes back to the Odyssey. And then the last section, 373c to 376c, only the good man errs voluntarily. Only the just man is the one who intentionally does bad things. That's a new argument.

0:46But in this dialectic and literature section, Socrates just gives, and I'm using Ravi's. He breaks these out into nice little sections for us. But Socrates just points again to the fact that Achilles speaks falsely. And Hippias brings up the point that it was unintentional, or that he changed one's mind, which is kind of in the realm of the unintentional, right? So if I say, I'm going to screw you, I'm going home, I'm not playing a game anymore, I'm not going to help you win the war against the Trojans. And then the next minute, I changed my mind, right? The first, I didn't intentionally say a false thing, I just changed my mind. And therefore, what I said was unintentional.

1:27And then this sets up, Socrates actually says something strange here, which is nowhere in Homer does Odyssey, does Odysseus speak falsely, but Achilles does. But anyway, and then that's what Hippias responds to. And then we get this, the other thing that Hippias says, right? So there are little hints of the correct argument here. He says, he changed his mind because he had a good disposition, right? And the disposition is the very thing, is the very key to the argument. Hippias just can't get it going enough. If he knew more, he would be able to pile drive Socrates' argument into the ground.

The Thesis on Intentional Wrongdoing

2:03So the next step is that, and this is around page 141, right? This sets Socrates up for a thesis that whoever intentionally does injustice, whoever speaks false, whoever deceives, whoever goes to stray, they're better than the one who does so unintentionally. So yeah, I would put us at 141, and then we can discuss this whole thesis. Okay. You guys agree with it, right? I always agree with everything you say, Wes. This is, I mean, what Socrates says, you have to, so he's going to prove it, but he states the thesis first. And 373c to 376c is where he thinks he, Socrates, well, he doesn't think, but, you know, Socrates pretends to prove it with a really intricate argument that moves from the concept of what it means to do something well, by virtue of performing some property, right?

2:58So doing running because where quickness is good. So you get performance with respect to a property, and then we move on to body parts and tools and souls. Very, very weird, intricate argument to try to prove this thing. Yeah. Can we go back to the running thing real quick? Yeah. I mean, I think that's where we should start.

Running and the Property of Quickness

3:19Yeah. Okay. So this is, what is this, 373d? Do you say there are good runners? I certainly do. And bad, yes. Now, the one who runs well is good, and the one who runs badly, bad. Yes. Okay. And the one who runs slowly runs badly, while the one who runs quickly runs well. Yes. So in a race and in running, quickness is a good thing and slowness is a bad thing. Well, sure. What else? Then which is the better run? The one intentionally running slowly or the one doing so unintentionally? The intentional one.

3:54So before you move on to intention, why is he doing that with that first part of the argument? Well, because you start with just a general concept of good. This is the value virtue. Are there virtuous runners or they're not virtuous runners? Yes. Well, in virtue of what? Is a runner good or bad? Well, in virtue of speed. Ah, so the good runner is the fast one and the bad runner is the slow one. And prior to introducing the notion of speed, that doesn't exist. There's just some vague concept of good runners and bad runners. So then it becomes a techne, as you said, Wes, you know, it becomes about, are you capable of running fast? Then you are capable of being a good runner. And hence, you are also capable of being a bad runner. But if you are not capable of running fast.

4:41This will turn on intentionality, though. He had clearly not heard slow and steady wins the race. Well, I know he's obviously talking about sprinting here. Yes. So I just want to make the brief comment that he's saying that being good at X, I'm going to do a little analytic philosophy now, means doing X well, P-ly, where P-ly is, right? There's got to be some property in that domain that determines what's good and what's bad. And in this case, it's quickness that is good and slowness that is bad. And there's a reason for this. And there's a reason for this in the argument, because he's going to make a lot of, it's going to set him up for a lot of shifty moves to stuff that doesn't really hold. But this is the anchor.

5:22Yes, there's an internal logic. There's a telos to any given activity. And so just identify which, what the P is, what the property is that captures that. Yeah. We start with the property, but we're going to move on the body parts and things like that. Yeah. So the better, sorry, Seth. So you're getting at the intention part now. No, no. I was trying to get at exactly what you just explicated in your brilliant analytic way, Wes. So then he says, yes. So who's the better runner, the one intentionally running slowly or the one doing so unintentionally, which is really to say, who is the more capable runner?

5:58Who is the more competent runner? Right. And then now here's the next move. Socrates isn't running a case of doing something. I don't know. We may want to appeal to the Greek here, but Hippias says doing something. Yes. And if it's doing, and if doing, isn't it also a case of bringing something about? Yes. So the one running badly brings about a bad and disgraceful result in the race. Bad. Yes. How could it be otherwise? And it is the one running slowly who runs badly. Yes.

6:29Then the good runner intentionally brings about this bad and disgraceful result while the bad runner does so unintentionally. Okay. So it seems. All right. So now we have the next thing. So. By the way, doing something, what do you imagine that to be? In Greek? Ergon. Ergon. Ergon.

6:48Work. Work. Working at something. Working. Doing. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I should throw in, Wes was on the pretty much Pop Survivor episode. And so like when the one tribe wants to get somebody out, so they intentionally lose a challenge. The most capable, Ozzy, the most capable individual on the team intentionally throws the challenge. Is that me, you know, out of his capability? But it actually, then it is left to the judges who are not given any criteria. And this was something that Lawrence was frustrated by in that episode.

7:20It's like in deciding who wins the whole game, there's no criterion given to them. They just decide. So in this case, it wasn't that, you know, they agreed with Hippias, you know, on the whole, that to intentionally do something like that is worse, even though you are more capable. So we will just, you know. I agree with that. But I like the idea that the excellence is not necessarily built into the activity, that we're always engaged in a number of activities at a time. And so it really is sort of a practical matter or a matter of who the judges are in any given circumstance, what counts as the disgraceful performance here.

7:59Yeah. And then Socrates, right, makes this move from good runner and bad runner to worse to court, but it's on page 145.

Expanding the Argument to Wrestling and Posture

8:11And then Hippias tries to correct him, but it just goes, well, then Socrates will respond to that correction with a whole list. So Socrates says, so in a race, this is around 374a and just starts just a little bit above it. But so in a race, the one who unintentionally brings about bad things is inferior to the one who does so intentionally. And Hippias says, well, in a race. So we're talking suddenly about putting this in very strong terms. Socrates doesn't say inferior racing, just says inferior.

8:42And Hippias wants to confine that. And then the evidence that Socrates doesn't want to confine that is that he's going to say, well, let's talk about everything, every other sort of activity that you can think of. What about in wrestling? Which wrestler is better? The one who intentionally takes a fall or the one who does so unintentionally? Well, is the judge of this Ted Lasso? Because I think Ted Lasso. Is it professional wrestling or is it real wrestling? In professional wrestling, the better one is the one who intentionally takes a fall.

9:15But if the soul of wrestling, the telos of wrestling is do your best, then I think the one who unintentionally fails is actually better, is more in the spirit of wrestling. But what about the case of graceful bearing, Mark? Isn't the characteristic of the better body intentionally to adopt poses that are disgraceful and inferior and have the inferior body to do so unintentionally? Poor bearing, yes. Sit up straight, Wes. Come on. Posture. What's interesting is, you know, in many cases, the question of intention is kind of murky, right?

9:49If I have good posture, I've been habituated into that, and it's kind of in my muscle memory, am I intentionally having good posture? Is Charlize Theron in the movie Monster, where she, you know, this gorgeous woman has to play someone who is ugly. I never saw it, but is she superior, intentionally making herself uggo, as opposed to someone who's naturally like that? That seems like the bearing you were saying, Seth. Yeah, well, but I think that the broader picture here is, because now this is connecting, so we've moved from disposition to capability, and now connected that with consequence or outcome.

10:31So it becomes, it's not just deceiving for the sake of deceiving, right? Lying for the sake of lying or whatever. It's lying in order to achieve an outcome that one knows can only be achieved through dissemination. So, if we circle back to what we started off originally with the Hippias' opposition or distinction between Achilles and Odysseus, right? We've reached the point now where Socrates has essentially maneuvered the conversation and maneuvered the characterization, where Achilles is just naive.

11:09He's not virtuous, right? He's not capable of manipulating other men in the way that Odysseus is, because he's just on the surface. He's that kind of, which I don't think Hippias would disagree with, right? Well, the manifest content of the argument is that Achilles is the liar and Odysseus is the truthful one. Well, that's what Socrates says, but I'm just saying, you know, if Achilles either doesn't or isn't capable of misrepresenting what he is going to do or wants to do for the purposes of achieving a specific outcome, like of trying to get somebody to do something.

11:52And I think we know that he's not, right? When you read the poem, you know, he and Patroclus are very earnest, right? And Odysseus is not. But what Socrates is just trying to say here is that Odysseus is certainly significantly more capable than Achilles. But then the question turns on, but does that make him the best man? Is capability what makes one best? It's because I think he has spun Hippias around here.

12:23He's spun me around too. But I don't think we've changed the characterization of the two actors in the story. It's just we've now changed the spin on what we're emphasizing as virtuous characteristics. And as we were talking about this at the end of the last episode, Mark, you know, I was thinking it's a big part of my undergraduate education was to read not just this stuff, but the Greek tragedies. And are you guys familiar with the Oristia trilogy, right?

12:59So there's an interpretation of that as the transition, it's sort of articulating the transition from the set of Homeric values to Greek values, right? From just like we read in Hegel, right? From family law or natural law to civic civil laws represented by Athena and so forth. And, you know, part of me wonders if that isn't an apt, wouldn't be an apt rubric for interpreting this is that, you know, Socrates is bringing, let's call it a modern sensibility to these poets who are tied to this Homeric set of values.

13:42And they're getting wrapped up because they're really speaking about the same thing, but from two different interpretive frameworks and that it's, you know, it's more like a culture clash than it is a rational argument.

From Techne to Human Souls

13:56So the trajectory for this final argument is the, right, what we got before was about the one telling the truth being as the same as the one who tells lies. And here, the end point that we're trying to get to that Socrates is trying to get to is that the better man is the one who does wrong intentionally, which is precisely the opposite of what our intuitions tell us and what our laws tell us, right? We punish people who intentionally do something wrong much more harshly than people who do it unintentionally.

14:31Manslaughter is not as severe a crime as murder. So what are the steps to get here, to get there? He starts with like the whole running thing and then we get to body parts and some absurd statements like feet that limp intentionally are better than those that limp unintentionally. As if the feet had the intentions, that limping is a form of inferiority and the eyes that see poorly are better if they're intent, they intentionally see poorly than, or they belong to someone who intentionally sees poorly rather than someone who unintentionally does that.

15:11And the same thing, the same thing with tools, a rudder is better when it's used by someone who navigates badly intentionally versus someone who navigates badly unintentionally. Obviously, the rudder isn't better. It could be a well-crafted rudder. It doesn't become worse or better by virtue of who's using it. Very silly, intentionally silly, we should say. He's being, it's like a disease. Yeah, that these are shorthand for the, not the rudder specifically, but the complex that is the rudder and its manager, right?

15:46The activity is no longer fulfilling its telos. Although with your eyes, you could purposely fuzz your eyes so that everything looks, you know, you're not seeing, I'm not seeing the text in front of me as well because I'm doing the freaking magic eye puzzle. And you have to make yourself see poorly everything else in order for the magic eye puzzle to pop. You have to phase them out. So, yes, you're showing a skill. You're showing that the telos can be widened to include other things, right? Then normally you want to get to the destination that everybody in the boat wants to get on.

16:21But, hey, I'm such a good pilot and so skilled with my rudder that I can sneakily, I can expand that to go only where I want to take the rest of the passengers and, you know, murder them and take their stuff. That is just expanding the uses of the rudder. The purpose of this absurd argument is to get us to horse's soul. This is to get us to the concept of soul because we use animals as well as tools. And the better horse is the one who, it's better to possess a horse that we will ride intentionally badly than unintentionally badly.

16:59The soul of that horse is better. Really, really bizarre thing to say. And then we move to human souls. Well, first we move to vocational souls. The soul of the archer who intentionally goes wide with his shot is better than the one who unintentionally does that. And Hippias, again, tries to restrict this. And then in archery, Socrates, in archery, but Socrates is willing to say medicine, music, any other form of art or knowledge you want. That is the case. And then souls of slaves who we use like tools.

17:31But then the final step is the same with our own souls. As if the soul were like a body part or a tool, right? It's better to have a soul that goes wrong intentionally than one that goes wrong unintentionally. And from there, we can get better to be due to injustice intentionally than unintentionally. So just a crazy, crazy, crazy argument. Given that they're discussing the media of their time, and I keep throwing out these media references, I will throw out the reference.

18:02I will recommend the Goes Wrong Show, which is a British slapstick thing that's on Prime right now that is a longstanding institution. And I saw a live version of it in Vancouver. But it's actually very difficult to have a play in which all the props consistently fail. And to have that level of precision for things to go wrong intentionally is quite astounding. I think a good example of this kind of thing. Just to give the whole, you know, analytic exposition, right? It started with X-ing Peely, right?

18:33Running quickly or not. And we got, right, if A, X is Peely and B doesn't, A is greater than B, right? The person who does it is superior. The other one is inferior at that particular activity. We might want to qualify that. And then we move on to X-ing not Peely, but, well, the parts or the tools of that person are inferior or superior. Then the souls of that person qua the particular activity are inferior or superior. And then it becomes the soul in the expansive sense, the soul, the virtue, right?

19:08Just that you have a good soul, you have a bad soul without respect to any particular techne, but with respect to virtue or justice or something like that. So we get that elision from the technical into the ethical. We're gradually, like, getting the frog boiled, right, to try to deceive us into making this conflation between techne and virtue. So you had described this in the, when we were discussing this beforehand, as a reductio against the normal Platonic view that knowledge is virtue.

19:44Like that he was pulling a Parmenides here. No, it's a, well, the Platonic, it's a reductio in favor of the Platonic view. I thought maybe this, okay, I thought you were implying that this was sort of a Parmenides that, you know, famously in, as we discussed in that dialogue and other things, Plato argues in favor of the theory of forms. But in the Parmenides, he actually takes it apart. So here, I could see this as potentially if you think that knowledge means that you will have virtue. Well, clearly in this case, Hippias is right to object to Socrates' conclusion that the person who has enough knowledge to be able to do evil is not in, by that very feat, virtuous.

20:26So there's, at least to argue, if this was a, again, an early part in the overall Platonic Socrates arguing in favor of knowledge being virtue, then this would have to be a first rejected step, this entire dialogue. That, well, what we mean is not merely having the knowledge, having the capability, but, and, you know, we'd have to argue, as I was bringing up before, that to truly have the knowledge means you understand how each techne fits into an overall eudaimonic picture such that you then, you know, allow Hippias to deny some of these things, to say,

21:03oh, actually, the intentionally slow runner throwing the race is not the superior person because it is, you know, what running fits into the overall human good such that it is, you know, try your hardest is part of that, something like that. So the reductio is in favor of the proposition, no human being knowingly does evil, right? And to get a reductio, you just take the opposite of, well, one of the methods is to take the opposite of what you're trying to prove. So suppose that it weren't the case that no man, no person knowingly does evil.

21:39Suppose people could knowingly do evil. Suppose they could intentionally run badly. I mean, they obviously can, but not in, you know, in the case of techne's, they obviously can, but not in the case of virtue. Because if they could, in the case of virtue, if they could knowingly do the wrong thing, then it would just be a techne. Then it would just be the thing that it's not. It would be the case that the one who tells the truth is the same as the one who tells the falsity.

22:09It would be the case that it's just a matter of capacity and not disposition. But it's the fact that knowledge and disposition are mutually implicated at the level of virtue and justice that we can't have that. We can have it in techne, but we can't have it for virtue. Knowledge and disposition are mutually implicated in this in a way that they aren't with techne. That's the difference. So we have to say virtue is an immersion quality. Merely patching a bunch of technes together does not add up to virtue, which is Hippias' position.

22:44Yeah. He knows everything. He has every art. But even if you sum up every single art, it doesn't become virtue the whole. Every part of the, you know, if it's the part of the soul qua archer, qua this or qua that, if there are parts of the soul corresponding to that, even if you took all those parts, you don't get the whole soul. The whole is more than the sum of those parts. The whole meaning what corresponds to virtue.

Introducing the Ion and Homeric Poetry

23:10All right.

Introducing the Ion and Homeric Poetry

23:11So how does the ion relate to all this? Mark, you were really excited by the ion. I just thought it was a more fun. Definitely. Well, no, actually, I don't. I think I would call ion tangential, not necessarily like duplicative or anything like that. So basically, ion is a poet that Socrates meets. And he's not a poet in the sense that he's like Homer or an original poet. He's a rhapsode, which means he specializes in performing Homeric poems, specifically the Iliad and the Odyssey.

23:47And there are rhapsodes for other kinds, for other poets. And the question here is, an ion is a particularly gifted rhapsode. So when he performs the Iliad and he expresses the anguish of Achilles or the anger of Agamemnon or what have you, the crowd feels it. They get angry. They get anguished there. He's exceptional at this particular task. So the question here is, how does a rhapsode get to be good at doing that?

24:23Is it required that the person reciting the verse actually understand what the poet means? So it's a question of knowledge here. And Socrates is going to interrogate him on that point because ion claims he's an expert on Homer. Ask me any question. Ask me anything you want about Homer. And I will be able to tell you the answer because I know everything there is to know about Homer. And that's what makes me great at reciting Homeric poetry.

24:54But don't ask me about Hesiod or whoever else there might be. Because when everybody talks about those people, I just fall asleep. I got nothing, nothing to say, nothing to add. But I'm all Homer all the time. And so Socrates wants to get to the bottom of this.

Mastery versus Divine Inspiration

25:12Intentionally or not, Socrates lays a trap for ion. If ion possesses mastery of Homer, Socrates says, he'll also be a master of everything Homer writes about medicine, chariot, driving, generalship, etc. Because that's what mastery of a subject means. But ion isn't. And worse, he doesn't even have mastery of the subject of poetry. Just Homer alone. That's because there's no actual discipline of poetry to be mastered. That means ion skill isn't knowledge. It's inspiration. The capacity to be pulled by the God and pull others along with you, like iron rings to a magnet.

25:48That's a pretty good description of what it's like to have a business idea and nothing else. The idea is the magnetism. Real. It's pulling you. You can feel it working on you. But magnetism is not mastery. It won't build a website, won't take the payment, and won't ship the order. What turns inspiration into an actual business isn't more inspiration. It's mastery you can borrow. And that's Shopify.

26:11Shopify's AI e-commerce expert, Sidekick, is the mastery ion never had. Ask it almost anything about running your business, from holiday discounts to the hundreds of other small tasks that come up, and it answers like a master of the subject. Because, unlike ion, it is. Socrates' timing and meeting ion right after the poetry competition couldn't have been better, and neither can yours. Launch now, before Black Friday, when people are ready to buy and let Shopify's mastery deliver your inspiration through the holiday rush. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to shopify.com slash P-E-L to start your free trial.

26:46That's shopify.com slash P-E-L. Go to shopify.com slash P-E-L today to hear your first... So this is very relevant for the fanboy way of engaging pop culture properties or even philosophy. You know, the philosophers that we most object to, that I most object to on the show, are those that attract rabid, monomaniacal fan bases. So Ayn Rand, the Stoics, sometimes Heidegger, there are people that are just Heidegger snobs,

27:18because I do not feel that these people have a grasp of, particularly with Ayn Rand, like, oh, when people talk of other philosophers, I merely fall asleep. I believe that. You know, if you're using these people as entry points to a larger world, like, that's okay. And it's not a smackdown of their, or Marx, of course, is another one. But do you really understand? I think maybe Socrates would even agree that Ayn understands Homer. The question is, does Homer, as a poet, understand what he's talking about?

27:50And therefore, does Ayn, in claiming to understand Homer, understand what Homer is talking about? And so they give examples like, when Homer talks about being a general, and you understand, you can recite back, and you, you know, maybe have some comprehension, we can ask you detailed questions, you can pass the Turing test in your knowledge of Homer. But does that mean that you know that you are in a position to judge whether Homer was speaking truthfully about the wisest way to be a general, right?

28:21Only a general would actually know that. And then, you know, the general would have geeky, you know, if you ask policemen about police procedurals on TV, or ask lawyers about legal dramas, and they're going to have a lot of picky things, they might really be fans of some of them, but they're going to, you know, be the ones that will actually be able to judge. Homer did not, as far as we know, have, before he wrote the poems, he used to be a general. And before that, he used to be a slave, and you know, all the people that he's trying to represent. So it seems like even the slave, they give it as an example, when Homer writes about being

28:53a slave, don't you think that the slaves, you know, the slaves are doing something in particular, they're working on the farm, if Homer's never worked on the farm, you know, he's faking it, maybe he interviewed some people, but probably he's just faking it, and given, you know, his depiction, and does not actually know everything, even if he, you know, all these topics come up in his own work. Well, the idea is that if the Rhapsode is going to have an art, if he's going to have a techne, then it can't be the case that he only can do it with Homer and not with Hesiod

29:27and others, because the art of the Rhapsode would involve knowing all of the technes that Homer is talking about and being able to speak well about them and all of that stuff. And it's not entirely untrue. I think of these novelists like Ian McEwan, who, right, they want to create some verisimilitude So he did things like shadow doctors, or if you're doing a historical novel, you do all kinds of research.

29:58Or, you know, if you're writing a procedural, you want to know how the courtroom works, and you do lots and lots of research. So it's not like you don't need to know something or learn something about these different arts that are being portrayed in the text. But is the art of the Rhapsode, if there is such an art, merely that, I'm not so sure. But, you know, the move that he makes is pretty appealing, which is to say being a Rhapsode is not an art, but it is like being a poet, a matter of divine possession.

30:35And then he gives this wonderful metaphor of the magnetic rings, right? So where the gods inspire the poets, and then the poets inspire audiences, or is it the poets inspire the Rhapsodes, and then the Rhapsodes inspire the audiences? I forget how the chain works, but... It's a chain of infection. Yeah. These linked rings of inspiration, and inspiration is supposed to be something distinct from Technic. So there certainly is a technic of being a Rhapsode, right?

31:09That you observe other Rhapsodes. Well, Socrates is denying them. I would think, in knowing how to... Says Ion does not have an art. That's the whole argument. So, right. This is contra to Kant and Roger Scruton, when we read, you know, this is in favor of the romantic theory of, he's just expressing himself, Ion, when he reads this. He's feeling the emotions. He says this, and he makes his audience feel the emotions. Whereas we would think that the skilled performer is not the one who is reduced to tears, because

31:45then you can't even finish the piece. You're reduced to tears. No, you got to keep it together and know which are the lines to emphasize, and you're a manipulator. You are someone who, if you are too lost in the passions, you actually cannot be an effective manipulator. You want to have some kind of balance where you are emotionally connected to those passions, but it's more that you've mastered the language of conveying the passion than that you are summoning that up in yourself. You need to contain them formally, contain them in a technique, right?

32:16It's like the difference between a poetry slam and a poetry reading. Sorry, that's a little bit unfair. But where someone lacks an art and they're all expression, it can be kind of excruciating. But if you're going to have a lot of pathos, you want to wrap that up in some art and some formal expertise.

Poetic Form and Technical Expertise

32:35So what we would say is the poet, right? We would want to say, just step back from the rhapsode question, whether the rhapsode has an art. We would want to say the poet has an art and inspiration, divine inspiration might be part of it, but it's got to be contained and channeled into something very structured and formal. The same thing if you're soloing, for instance, you're not just randomly hitting notes on the guitar, soloing as a guitarist. You are inspired and you don't know what you're going to do next necessarily as you improvise,

33:06but you're within a scale of some sort and music, as we know, is very structured. So those two things I think would have to come together in music or poetry in a way that Socrates is ignoring here. We worked with two different translations here. I was recommending the one that was just by Paul Woodruff. I just asked the AI, what's the best translation, the most cited? And Paul Woodruff was another guy, right? He was a prof at UT. Yeah, I took a class. Yeah, he was also dean of like the honors college.

33:40Yeah, we've got a lot of UT connections here. There's Vlastos was mentioned. I think he's... Well, it's like the number one classics department in the country there. At the time we were there. And it overlapped with the ancient philosophy department. Vlastos, Ravi, Woodruff, who are missing Hankinson. Yep. Hankinson, yeah. Analytic ancient philosopher extraordinaire. Expert on Galen. So in his translation, at some point, Ayan says, I would be amazed if you could speak well enough to convince me that I am possessed or crazed when I praise Homer.

34:11I don't believe you'd think so if you heard me speaking on Homer. So even though Ayan, by the end, is like, okay, Socrates, I completely agree with you. At least at this point, he does not believe that he is, you know, of course I have training and I have practice and I've become, there's a reason that I win awards for this kind of stuff. Of course I have a tech name. Yeah. I don't know what the rhapsode is doing exactly. Are they critics? What exactly are they doing? They're just reciting. They recite the poems because it's all oral, right?

34:41It's not. They recite, but don't they do other things as well? They perform. They're performers. I thought it might be like Hippias as well, right? Hippias was giving this commentary and using the poets to be a scholar of that poet. So if you asked, you know, what is your Homer's view of virtue? And then somebody would be able to give you a bunch of quotes and someone that I think Ayan can do that kind of stuff too. Yeah. I think that might be part of it. If you'd heard me speaking on Homer.

35:12Doesn't he say at the beginning, he just came from winning first prize at something? Yes. Some kind of a contest, but that's probably. But if he had, if he were merely reciting, and I vaguely remember that they do more than recite, but because if it were the, if he were merely reciting, he wouldn't have to know anything about what's in the poem. Right. Right. He could just say the words. I mean, he'd have to know enough to express the emotions, but he wouldn't have to know anything about fishing or any of the other arts. Sorry, I'm thinking about the Homeric Chinese room here where we have the, the person inside

35:47the room does not understand the words of Homer, but is able to, by following the rules, create a simulacra so that the room itself expresses the Homeric. Okay. Basically, it's probably an actor when it comes down to it. Right. So actors have to learn something about some actors learn more. Some actors learn less. Some are methods, some are whatever. But, you know, ultimately we can just, he's a performer and he's saying, the reason I'm such a great performer is because I know everything there is to know. And Socrates is saying, actually, the reason you're a great performer is that you're a chunk

36:19of iron, you're a steel ring, and you're particularly attuned to Homer. And that explains also why you don't have that same resonance with Hesiod or Antilochus or whoever, whatever that guy's name was. But part of what Socrates says is, Aion says, ask me anything you want about Homer and I'm an expert in it. I can answer it, but don't ask me anything about Hesiod. And Homer, and Socrates says, well, surely Hesiod and Homer talked about the same things, at least in some cases, right?

36:51And he says, well, yeah. And he says, well, if you're an expert on Homer when he talks about goats, you know, then when Hesiod talks about goats, wouldn't you be competent to speak to that since they overlap? And then Aion concedes, well, yeah, I guess so, right? I guess maybe I do know something about Hesiod. My feigned ignorance, you have pierced the veil of my feigned ignorance, Socrates. Well, you should, as a fanboy, at least be able to say why Hesiod is not as good.

37:22If I make you sit and listen to a little bit of Hesiod or somebody telling you about Hesiod, then you'd be able to say, well, you know, it lacks the thing that I really like about Homer. You'd at least be able to say that. So people who are fans of Ayn Rand, just like Ayn Rand herself, have a lot of things to say about Kant and Aristotle. They're just not smart things about those philosophers. They're just undergrad shitty readings of those things. Yeah. To be a literary critic, and that's what Hume points out on the question of taste, I forget,

37:53what is it called? Anyway, right, to refine your taste, you need to have comparisons. You need to be reading and understanding a bunch of different literature and doing comparative literature. But just to give some background here, so in the introduction I read... It says R.E. Allen is your version, yep. Yeah, it says, all right, these rhapsodes, they recited, they acted things out in the performance, and they were often itinerant. They were going around doing these performances.

38:24And then he says, but Ayn thinks that the most important ergon of his art, its work, product, function, object, is interpreting the thought of Homer. He not only interprets as an actor, interprets a part, but also explains his meaning, both actor and commentator. So that's why I was... And it could be that it was eulogistic paraphrase, since he's a praiser in any way, then this goes on to talk about what that would mean. But it's more interesting. It's a more interesting argument if he's also commentating. Because if he is commentating, right, does the critic and commentator need to know anything

38:58about fishing if Homer is talking about fishing? What kind of pedantic critic are you? If you're just like the fisherman who's... I just really disagree with his particular depiction of fishing. That is not the way fishing works. But if you're reading a novel that just portrayed the courtroom and in this absurd, clunky way, this sometimes happens when I'm watching TV. It's like, okay, come on. The courts don't work like that. But it's just, your honor, I'm just a poor country lawyer.

39:32You rushed the thing to trial and got through the whole trial and within 40 minutes and do a satisfying narrative conclusion within that episode. Amazing. So these are mimetic arts. So there is something to be said for some faithfulness to their object. So it becomes a complicated question, I think. You know, as usual, it's just being treated simplistically here. But it's a... I mean, overall, it's another absurd idea that you would have to know all the techniques that are being portrayed in order to have an art as a commentator or performer.

40:06Performers and commentators obviously have arts, even if inspiration is an important part of it. So again, even for something that's this short, there's a lot of repetition because he has to go through the different examples, right? Does Ian really know about chariot driving because of what Homer says about it?

40:25Does he just go through... My favorite one is the fishing one. Yeah, read that. What is the thing in Homer that he quotes about the ox horn? I see it's on 538D when Homer says, She plummeted to the seafloor like a lead weight, which mounted along the horn of an ox who ranges the fields, goes downward and takes death with it to the raw ravening fish. Should we say it belongs to the fisherman's art or to the rapsos to judge what he means and whether or not he speaks well?

40:55Clearly the fisherman's. Okay. Yeah, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Well, there's a footnote in mine where they don't really understand what Homer is talking about there. Was there like a lure made of horn and weighted with lead, like a jig that you put in the ocean? No one really knows exactly what's being referred to there. But yeah, it gives right to really flesh out that image. It seems like you have to know something.

The Limits of Fandom and Knowledge

41:22And interesting, Homer is just using it for a metaphor, really. It's someone dying. And yeah, fishing is just the metaphor here. Well, this does really talk about the limits of fandom, right? That if you are a real Nietzsche fan and you just read all of Nietzsche's texts again and again, and you can recite them and stuff. But if Nietzsche makes a reference to something in his time, unless it's right there in the footnote, or you care so much that you've chased down all his references, it still seems there are going to be some references that you're just not going to get.

41:54Maybe even people reading it at the time, maybe his sister didn't understand what the hell he was talking about either, because you just can't get in his head. Sorry. It's important to, you know, Socrates, as usual, to say that rhetoricians and poets and now rhapsodes, they don't know what they're talking about. Scientists know. People with techniques know about their particular arts. But what are you doing when you do those things? And you could be using them for ill, right? If you're portraying Homer, he says in the Republic, you're portraying all these, you're portraying gods as bad people, you're having a bad influence on people, giving them all

42:28the wrong emotions. So there's something dangerous about the mimetic and about images as opposed to reality and about simply copying, making images of reality as opposed to a dialectical approach or a more straightforwardly technical approach. So I do think it, again, it kind of falls into the category of not treating virtue as a techne, right? Because what the commentator in the rhapsode is supposed to be teaching you about, there's some kind of ethical upshot. There's a moral to the story.

42:58And that's the part that Socrates doesn't like. There's no techne that says these, the moral that's illegitimate to have morals to these stories. The morality belongs to something else. Yeah. So we're supposed to compare this to, of course, what he says in the Republic, that if you think that what the poet says comes from the gods, you're just channeling the gods, you're being the representative of the gods, that would seem to imply that it is good. Whereas he wants to say in the Republic that, no, it has not been evaluated, right?

43:31It's coming from somewhere, but it is not necessarily something that everybody should hear because it might, say, depict the gods being jealous of each other and being mean to each other. And that's not what gods do. Gods are wonderful, moral exemplars for all of us. So yeah. How do we connect these two things other than to say, as you were just saying, Wes, that the poets themselves, they're just crazy. They don't know what they're talking about. And so it's up to the moralist to come along and say, this is a morally appropriate poem

44:02to have in the Republic. And this is not one. And it's just, I'm just not sure how to connect that with, they all come from the gods, even the worst ones, right? Specifically about Homer, that he's saying this in the Republic, we don't like that depiction of those jealous gods. So yeah, it is a contradiction. I mean, it could be just that what's wrong with the poets being taught in the Republic is that the average person maybe can't handle them because they're not morally equipped to

44:33hear those, to, to interpret and to contextualize those gods sent messages. If you are, so this is like Brave New World where the leaders, they get to read the Bible. They get to read the various dangerous books because they are above the noble lie, whereas ordinary people just can't handle that. So maybe that's, so the Rapsos themselves by publishing, by publicizing this and spreading the infection to the general populace, they're the ones that are actually doing wrong.

45:05The poets maybe can't even help it. They just, they get their divine callings, but maybe, you know, they should just have their work very carefully censored, not burnt, but kept in the special room for reviewing. We just talked about Furious on Pretty Much Pop. You had recommended it, Wes. The room where you, where the FBI people look at the child pornography is the reference that I'm trying to get at. Did you like that show as much as I did? It was a very good show and drenched with Greek mythologizing, Medusa and things like

45:36this. It's called Furious. Really, really incredible, incredible acting and dialogue. But a dangerous show because it does get you thinking, makes you want to sympathize with the serial killer and wanting to exert vengeance outside the law on anybody that has done these horrible acts or even witnessed, looked at child porn or whatever. So do we want to, as a society, be encouraging violence as the answer? No, no, no, no. We don't want to do that. But it's okay for the intellectuals to think about this.

46:07We just don't want to get out and people to start taking the law into their own hands. This is, I'm being the Republic here. No, this is very relevant. I mean, one of the things I liked about the show was that it does this in a complicated way. It doesn't get simplistic and political. You both sympathize with the serial killer and you're kind of horrified by the things that she does. It betrays the suffering of women and suffering, the kind of suffering that is particular to women without just being ham-fistedly political.

46:40This is a little political, but it could be bad by being too moralistic. So I think this fits with Aristotle's response to Plato and the Republic, and that's in the Poetics, where the identification with the people doing bad things on stage is not going to make you bad necessarily, the way Plato suggests in the Republic. It's going to be a catharsis. So you can imaginally identify with wrongdoers and wrongdoing and have that elevate you more

47:12away.

Generalship and the Dialogue Conclusion

47:13So to get back to the dialogue and the way this sort of wraps up, not just fishing, but being a general. Now, since you know the business of a general, do you know this by being a general or being a good rhapsode? And Aion says, I don't think there's any difference. Socrates says, and aren't you the best rhapsode in Greece? Oh, by far, Socrates. Are you also a general, Aion? Are you the best in Greece? And Aion says, certainly, Socrates. That too I learned from Homer's poetry. So of course the question like, well, why haven't they made you a general if you're so fucking

47:46wise about being a general? Oh, well, you know, it's all politics. I just don't know the right people. Like, well, there's others. Well, no, I'm a foreigner. They're not going to make a foreigner general. And then Socrates lists all these foreigners that they've made general.

48:00So Aion ends up agreeing with him in just a few pages later, right? If you're not a master of your subject, you're possessed. If you're possessed with a divine gift from Homer, so you make lovely speeches about the poet without knowing anything, then you're not doing me wrong. And you're divine is what, and Aion agrees with this point by Socrates. He'd rather be divine than being somebody who is lying to Socrates. Well, he's either a wrongdoer or divine. That's the way the dialogue ends. Choose then how you wish us to consider you, as a wrongdoer or as divine.

48:32And he chooses divine. So of course, there's a little, it's kind of a backhanded compliment to say that he's merely inspired and divine. Which just, there's got to be a name for that as sort of an informal fallacy when you back somebody like, well, either you agree with me or you're a shithead. You don't want to be a shithead, are you? Oh, no, no. I guess I agree with you. Despite the fact that that's not what I was saying five minutes ago. Yeah. Socrates is a bully. No doubt.

49:02He's got a passive aggressive bully and a gaslighter. He accuses Hippias at one point of being like Odysseus, but he's the one who's like Odysseus, obviously, in the pejorative sense of Odysseus. I mean, is there any modern resonance to the idea that the artist doesn't know what they're doing, that they are, right? We talked about this in some other contexts and Dylan brought up that like on my music podcast, a lot of times, this was in the Protagoras when we were discussing this, that right, being able to do the thing and being able to teach the thing are quite different talents

49:37such that when I have people on my music podcast, some of them are very good at articulating what they do and why they do and could pass this on. And many of them are not. They're just describe themselves as I just follow my intuitions and I make these wonderful things and I don't even remember how I did them and I never listen to them when they're done. I'm just a conduit. How do we feel about that in general? Yeah, they're divinely inspired, but they probably had to practice a little bit on their instrument, right? We believe in flow.

50:07I'm of course using the royal we here. There's a larger question, right? Divine inspiration is like something mimetic, right? Which is the way culture works with just the infection thing that you mentioned, Mark, and the dangers of infection. And whether, so there's a larger question of whether culture should be allowed to operate mimetically and randomly and spread like a wildfire, whether it's good culture or bad culture or whether it should be controlled from above, as he suggests in the Republic,

50:39whether there should be some sort of top-down approach to culture. Which is relevant to our times because there have been movements on both the right and the left, right? To say we have to define what culture is going to be and how things are going to be represented and that's immoral. You're having a bad influence. You're representing people in the wrong way. All of that stuff. But I think we probably all agree that better than a top-down solution would be to educate

51:11people to be able to regulate their own cultural diets, that they're, you know, just like bad political ideas, that if you teach your kids or your citizens critical thinking, then they're not going to fall for all these terrible conspiracy theories. Education is top-down, though. That's the irony. Okay. So we want to give people a liberal arts education, maybe, just to take that. Is it centralized, though? But that means we've chosen one form of education or another.

51:41And if we're bringing people up from it at a young age, we're just dictating it. Children don't have a choice. It's not liberal for them. I mean, we're teaching them to be liberal, but the imposition of it is not liberal. There's an inherent paradox in education. Sure. And there's different ways of constructing this. I mean, ideally, the most effective educators are the parents that are around most, or you could have, you know, different empowering teachers, right? Empowering teachers to have a one-on-one connection with their students to enable, like, this seems like you cannot have a truly top-down cookie cutter teach you to be an independent thinker.

52:16You need to actually have a student that is interacting with multiple different independent thinkers to sort of learn by example, right? It's a techne. It's a how-to as much as it is a knowledge that. So, yes, you can have some standards and some top-down and some, here, I want you to do all these exercises. I guess, yeah, I'm thinking about a coach that, like, how well that you could have your, the president's physical fitness test. That is something that it's top-down, but who actually gets all those kids able to achieve

52:51it has to be individual coaches that are taking the individual student where they're at and trying to get them to some goal and be a well-rounded physical individual. Not just make everybody run laps, the god, the centralized government that, like, okay, everybody, it's lap time. I'm thinking about those Chinese- Wearing the same track suit. Everybody's radio goes off. It's time to do our jumping jacks all together in the whole nation. Yes, but was that done to achieve that outcome intentionally or unintentionally?

53:23It is a fundamental tenet of economics, right? That we, it's the unintended consequences that always trip us up.

Upcoming Topics on Philosophy and AI

53:31Well, I think it's better to end the podcast badly intentionally. This was a fun diversion from, we're going to go back to a little more philosophy of mind. So I wanted to do these papers on AI before we get to them in my class. And I believe I just asked, I know we put out a call for people to recommend philosophy and AI Pipers. And I thought, Wes, that you collected those. I don't know. I didn't know where they were. So I just- I did collect some at some point. Okay. Well, those were not conveyed to me. So when I was coming up with my draft

54:04syllabus for my philosophy of mind class, and I was looking for what we should try to cover on here and just to see, are these the right things? Maybe we need more than one. Maybe we'll try, maybe you can track down more of those. But anyway, there was one called A Philosophical Introduction to Language Models, Part 1, Continued with Classic Debates by Millier and Buckner. There was also an article by David Chalmers called Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious? So those are like cutting edge, considering the technology that we actually have now, not talking about the fucking 1950s, what they thought about the possibilities of computers.

54:39So let's see how intolerable they are and whether we- I saw him present, I listened to a YouTube video of him presenting that thesis. Maybe he was presenting the paper. He's always at least a fun read. I don't know about these other folks. The presentation wasn't honestly that fun, but we'll see how the reading goes. Okay. Usually, usually he's, you know, yeah. Well, it's not too late. Even if we do these, you can recommend more papers to us or re-recommend them if we apparently didn't track down your responses before. Or follow us and communicate with us through social media. Join our Patreon. You can email

55:16it. We for sure get your messages through Patreon. That's the best way. We will not ignore them. Thanks, everybody. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night.