Jorjani’s defense of the "Noble Lie" highlights a disturbing tradition of intellectual elitism that prioritizes social control over individual autonomy. It frames the philosopher not as a seeker of truth, but as a cynical architect of mass delusion.
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Plato's GNOSIS CHANGED the WORLD | Jason Reza JorjaniAdded:
The Christians have raped Aristotle.
This is another way in which Aristotle is so anti-Christian because he's saying the Christian to the Christian, right? Everyone can be saved by pistice. Just have faith in Jesus Christ and you can be saved. And even if you come from a horrible family and you come from the worst ghetto, war torn, violent ghetto ever and lived under the most abysmal condition and you've done horrible things but you didn't know better, just give your heart to Christ.
just confess and give your hearts and you're going to go to heaven. Christians are wrong when they say you can't have Lucifer without Christianity. Lucifer or Prometheia or the convergence of the Apollonian and the Dian. It's way older and it arose as a Satan an opposition to the Olympian pantheon or the really the ancient Indo-Uropean pantheon. Plato's looking at this and saying we have to reconstruct the religion of the people from the ground up. They're not going to all become philosophers. In fact, almost no one's going to become a philosopher.
So, you have to give the majority of people a religion to believe in, which might not necessarily be true. It's what he calls a noble lie or it's made up.
It's woven out of nobleized where myths and folklore are recast in various ways that will be more conducive to the development of the ethical fiber and ultimately uh work on the cognitive capacities of people to a greater extent than the garbage that they've been given to believe in or in our days it would be the Bible or the Quran.
Joining me today is Dr. Jason Resza Georgiani. Here for the fifth or sixth maybe seventh time the most recent book by Dr. Resa Georgiani which is fundamental thinkers which this book itself covers the war game world of Ericitis the occulted Plato Aristotle's political ontology compe hermetic spirit Nichi Harold the superman and Haidiger the greatest philosopher of the 20th century Most of that will be covered in this 2 and 1/2 hour podcast. You're not going to want to miss this. The link to buy the book is in the description. It is available right now on Amazon. I already started reading it. In this video, we're talking about the occulted Plato, the religion of the West, dualism, the battle between Lucifer and the biblical God, all the stuff that we always talk about and more. You are about to attain true nosis.
Welcome back to the Gnostic Informant and you are about to attain true nosis and as you just seen in the introduction there new book by Jason Resza Georgiani is out right now. The fundamental thinkers it covers Heracitis Plato Aristotle Kant Hegel Nichi and Haidiger Dr. Resa Georgiani, my one of my fa one of my audience's favorite guests.
Welcome back. How are you doing?
>> It's great to see you, Neil. Uh hope we can make an occasion to see each other again in person. Maybe I'll make it back over to New York. Uh but in any case, it's been too long and it's good to be back with you.
>> Yeah, great to be back. And um we you and I had a quick brief little discussion. I I was able to read a good chunk of your book before we started, not the whole thing. Um, obvious obviously I went straight to the Plato section and the and the Hegel section was another one I flipped towards and then Nietze those three. Um, and you and obviously I read your introduction too.
The introduction was phenomenal. And you kind of go through philosophy what it even what it even is philosophy. Is it is it is it philosophy as we see today where you have a philosophy major who gets a PhD and then teaches what the history of philosophy or is it something else? And what you mentioned something that was actually it was powerful line in your book right in the beginning where you said the philosophy departments today are a mausoleum of the dead of what is of of something that is dead now. What do you let's let's start there and we'll get into Plato later on.
So look uh philosophy as as you know well being a classicist uh philosophy begins by framing itself against um two different modalities of um let's say discourse.
One is relatively uneducated unreflective uh blind belief and baseless opinion. In other words, the the everyman's unreflective uh beliefs and attitudes about everything that he takes himself to be qualified in passing judgment on. And for the most part in the Platonic dialogues, we see Socrates attack these kinds of people. Now, they may be very wealthy people. Uh it doesn't mean necessarily by every man that we're talking about like uh you know impoverished members of society here, right? So, uh, one of the things that pissed off the Athenians to the point where Socrates wound up being prosecuted by the democratic assembly of that city is that he humiliated too many wealthy but ignorant people who were uh basically not just volunteering baseless opinions but making very important decisions on the basis of unexamined beliefs and assumptions. So that's one modality of human uh discourse that philosophy is framing itself against.
And of course that's very old. I mean that's like uh you know the default modality of most of human history before the rise of philosophy in classical Greece. Then the other modality of human discourse that was relatively more recent which philosophy is also framing itself against is sophistry. In other words, you had these people beginning, let's say, in the archaic period who were books smart. They had read a lot and they were clever in being able to craft arguments like a lawyer so that they could argue your case for you either orally or in writing no matter what your position was. And they didn't give a [ __ ] whether you were in the right about whatever it was you were arguing only whether you were paying them enough to craft a clever argument either to win them a case in court or to um get a bill passed in the assembly so that let's say if you're Pericles you know you hire one of these sophists uh to write an oration for you right and to try to move the assembly through the cleverness of your discourse. So these sophists were out there uh doing this also and one of the most famous of them was a guy called Isocrates not to be confused with Socrates there was a guy called Isocrates who was an infamous sophist in that period. And so Plato through the character of Socrates through this dramatic persona that Plato the aspiring playwright turned philosopher uses as a mouthpiece throughout his philosophical project.
Plato is taking aim both at the, you know, baseless opinions of relatively uneducated, unreflective people on the one hand and then the nihilistic sort of um uh amoral sophistry of these u you know uh clever argumentative people for hire on the other hand. And so that starts to to indicate, you know, what philosophy is, namely an authentic concern with understanding truth, beauty, and justice as different avenues of approach toward what you could call the good. But the good has to be understood uh in a way that's not filtered through 2,000 years of Christian moral discourse. Namely, not as you know the virtuous uh or you know the uh the morally right um but the good as what all other things are good for. In other words, that for the sake of which the tilos, right, of all things like one mistake that's commonly made, and we'll get into this later, we can stay with Plato for a bit, but you know, when we get to Aristotle, one mistake that's commonly made is that people think that Aristotle's prime mover is like the good in the sense of the Christian sum bonum and it's identifiable with somehow the Christian God. But Aristotle's prime mover is really the good in exactly the same sense as Plato talks about the good. Namely that for the sake of which I believe the Greek something like to henkah that what all other things are for and the end that determines all ends >> and that's Aristotle's tilos.
>> Exactly. Exactly.
>> Endgame. Yeah. Now, and what you're saying what you're saying is that Thomas Aquinus totally bastardized this idea in the Western mind and now we have this all all jumbled up. We we don't have it right anymore.
>> 100%. So, um, you know, anyway, I don't want to get too far down into that ontological rabbit hole right now, but in short, Aristotle's first cause is not a is not a um an originary causal mechanism that like sets the world into motion or creates the cosmos. It's the final goal or purpose uh for which all other purposes are provisional and towards which they are moving.
>> Wow. Is it would you you know you know how you get these enlightenment deist thinkers are they sort of going towards that idea or is it something different?
The problem with the enlightenment theists is that as much as they wanted to free themselves from Christian scholasticism, they're still subconsciously conditioned by it. And >> sure, >> they wound up uh thinking of the creative agency of God in terms of the high precision manufacturing that Swiss clock makers were, you know, um inventing at that time. So that you know as soon as you started to get uh finely tailored identical replacement parts of complex mechanisms the thinkers of the age began to conceive of the cosmos having been put together the same way namely by some supreme craftsman. And that is not Aristotle's conception of the cosmo. I mean in fact it's not it that's not uh a conception of the cosmos that any of the classical Greeks had. In my book when you go you know through Heraclitis, Plato and Aristotle you see that from Heracitis onward there is the understanding that the cosmos as a whole is uncreated and this for some reason is difficult for contemporary people to grasp. I mean you know this you you argue with these people all the time. Um, you know, it's like beating a [ __ ] dead horse. Uh, you know, like they can't wrap their mind around the fact that >> it's a human fallacy to believe that because we make things, by the way, we always make things from out of other things that already exist.
>> Exactly. Exactly.
>> Whether you're a farmer who's getting an egg from a chicken, right? or whether you're a craftsman who's, you know, tailoring a pieces of a hammer in a workshop, you're always working with pre-existing material, right? And these guys can't wrap their minds around the fact that the universe as a whole or the multiverse or what the Greeks simply called the cosmos doesn't need to have been created by anyone.
Things come to be and pass away within this cosmos. Solar systems may come into being and then may disintegrate, right?
Whole galaxies may uh may emerge and then eventually they may decoher, right?
But the cosmos as a like now let's say you subscribe to the multiverse idea. A whole universe could come into being. It could bang, right? Out of a quantum instability, >> out of chaos.
>> Out of chaos. And that universe could collapse, right? uh but it doesn't mean that there aren't other universes or in other dimensions that continue to persist in a state of flux. So this notion that the cosmos as a whole or everything that we could aspire to wrap our minds around had to have been created by someone at some point is is a complete logical fallacy. It's a logical fallacy. So and it is not a a mistake that the classical or archaic Greeks made. Heracitis, Plato, Aristotle all understand that uh the cosmos as a whole is uncreated. Philosophy's task is to understand the causal nature of the processes through which things come to be and pass away and and the nature of knowledge about those things. In other words, ontology and epistemology. How does the we can come to know those things? And then what are the ethical implications of that ontology and epistemology? Once you have some understanding of the nature of things and once you have a model of uh the right way to acquire knowledge or the proper methodology of knowing something rather than uh simply operating on baseless beliefs or opinions, then there are ethical implications that follow from that. ontology and epistemology. And one of the most uh interesting things that you see in in both Plato and Aristotle that I point out in fundamental thinkers is the extent to which aesthetics shapes the ethics of these thinkers like all the fundamental ethical terms in Aristotle and this is again another way in which the Christians have completely perverted Aristotle. All the fundamental ethical terms in Aristotle are aesthetic.
The man is talking about the good as kon as the beautiful and a virtuous life. In other words, a life of arate as a life of excellence.
And repeatedly when he talks about the good, he talks about the most beautiful action and so on so forth, right?
Exercising the you know the the mean virtues like for example courage which is a a mean between recklessness and cowardice. foolhardy recklessness and cowardice exercising the mean virtue of courage is to act beautifully as Aristotle puts it. His ethical descriptors are often aesthetic and you see this going all the way back to Plato uh that aesthetics and ethics are really almost inextricable.
And then finally, what follows from a proper ontology and epistemology and an understanding of the ethical implications of that is a conception of how to structure social life so that it is just. In other words, a political philosophy.
And unless you have a political philosophy, you're not a philosopher.
Because, and I've explained this at length, including in this book in the intro that you were referencing earlier, because you're liable to have political assumptions and implicit ideological commitments that will warp the rest of your thinking. It'll limit what you allow yourself to think about in the domains of ontology including let's say what human nature is or it will make you filter certain things out of the net of your um comprehension of things so that your epistemic framework will be unconsciously censored by implicit political commitments that you have because you know you'll be subconsciously thinking that Oh, if I even entertain such a thing as a form of knowledge about, let's say, human biology, then I'm, you know, I'm I'm violating whatever implicit commitment I have to a certain political uh ideology. Like, like for example, to make it concrete, if you implicitly believe that all humans are equal, right? That like all people are born with with equal potential and equal capacities and therefore they should all be treated equally. Well, you know, you're not going to engage with uh massive biological and psychological data that demonstrates significant human population group differences and capacities, right? And so your uh epistemology is going to be warped by implicit political commitments. So a philosopher has to be able to think in all these dimensions and across these dimensions and to develop original concepts that address everything from ontology and epistemology to ethics, aesthetics and politics. And you know my reason for saying that uh and taking that as exemplary for the philosopher is that that is precisely how philosophy comes into the world. I mean we know what philosophy is based on who the fundamental philosophers were, right? I mean Heracitis, Plato, Aristotle represented a new human type. There was nothing like that in recorded history before them. And so they are exemplary for a modality of fundamental thinking.
That's why I called the book that a modality of fundamental thinking that has persisted now for 2500 years and where we can identify certain key figures that form the backbone of that trajectory to the present time.
And now the these thinkers all have their elements that you basically point out like epistemic, ethics, there's a few other ones you throw in there. Um, >> ontology, aesthetics, and political philosophy.
>> Political. So these fundamental things all have this holistic approach. Without all without one of those things, the whole thing collapses. What you're saying, >> it's it's vulnerable to collapse. And more importantly, the lack of any one of those things like let's say I mean clearly if you're not thinking metaphysically, if you're not asking questions about the nature of the cosmos or what human nature is and so forth or whether there is a human nature, well then clearly you're not a philosopher, right? Like for example, I mean Leo Strauss, he said it himself. He said, "I'm a political thinker. Don't call me a philosopher. People call him a political philosopher. Well, there's no [ __ ] thing as a political philosopher. If you're if you are engaged in serious political thought, you may be analyzing ideologies very adeptly. You may um have analyses that are uh really um insightful, incisive and precient regarding geopolitical affairs or domestic policies and so forth. But okay, you're a political thinker. You're not a philosopher unless you're asking about the nature of reality or let's say you know posing humanity as a question. What is you know what's human nature? So that's very clear. But on the on the other hand also like if you're thinking metaphysically and maybe you even have an ethics like William James did but you have no serious political thought whatsoever.
Not only are you vulnerable to the collapse of other aspects of the system that you've built up because you have this Achilles heel and an undeveloped political thought.
You're actually an undeveloped person as a thinker and you're the the qualities of your character do not fit the type of the philosopher as it was defined by Pythagoras, Heracitis, Plato, Aristotle, right? So like a philosopher part of what I'm arguing and I have been in a number of my books now including this one fundamental thinkers is that a philosopher is a type right and like an artist is a type I mean you can identify an artist as a human type I mean an engineer is a human type right and so is a philosopher and um essential to that type is this integral thinking is this integral thinking right across all of these different dimensions Because these dimensions exhaustively describe the scope of fundamental thinking. Like you you cannot identify for me another domain or aspect of thinking which would be fundamental besides ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and politics or what Plato would have called truth, beauty and justice. That's comprehensive and everything else follows from that.
Like for example, if you're a scientist, you know, physics, biology, chemistry, etc. that follows from ontology and epistemology. Those are outgrowths from that. Or like even astrophysics, for example, those are then then you know further branchings from out of ontology and epistemology. And historically we saw that all of the empirical sciences devolved from out of philosophy. Right?
We only get people who start calling themselves empirical scientists in a limited sense saying I'm a physicist.
I'm a biologist, whatever. We only get that in the 1800s. Before that, they all called themselves natural philosophers.
So that's what I would say about uh you know the integral character of philosophical thought. Yeah. Now I wanted to talk about knowledge.
Obviously nosis is a big um topic on this channel and you talk about epistemic and noises in your book. Um, real quick, I just want to show something from Plato if I if you don't mind. Socrates and glalcon are talking and I this is like this this to me stands out as one of the esoteric um doctrines of Plato that don't that people don't make no I don't I don't know what to make of this but he says uh you should also say that not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good and he used the word in Greek I checked it it's epistemma not nots here the objects of epistem owe their being known to the good to the kon But their being is also due to it.
Although the good is not being but superior to it in rank and power.
>> Okay. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
Hold on. That requires unpacking right there.
>> Yes. Yes. Go ahead. Please.
>> Very complicated. All right. It's a little bit subtle. Okay. So, not only do the objects of epistem owe their being known to the good. In other words, if there weren't that for the sake of which, okay, if there weren't this that for the sake of which, you couldn't know anything.
Meaning meaning that the modern and post-modern idea that or let's say notion the post the modern you know the the let's say relatively recent notion that well um the the there's nothing that is necessarily affording us knowledge.
And anything that we happen to learn about something is arbitrary and haphazard. In other words, we happen upon facts that we organize as data and there's nothing that's making that knowledge possible.
Plato rejects that off the bat and he says there's a condition for the possibility of knowledge and unless that precondition existed ontologically let let's say unless that precondition were in place ontologically you couldn't know anything about anything in the first place. So that's the first part of the statement and then he says but their being is also due to it. In other words, no thing would exist but for what it is that makes knowledge possible.
So the same I don't want to call it a thing. The same condition of possibility which affords us the potential for knowledge is what is making things manifest in the first place. Nothing would appear but for this condition of possibility. And then he says the last line, although the good is not being but superior to it, what it is that's a condition for the possibility of knowledge and which also is allowing things to manifest as what they are that is not being.
Okay. So later in Haidiger there is this notion dine existence and H highaidiger makes this important point and you know Haidiger's thought comes from a very close engagement with the Greeks and they say Haidiger used to be able to think in Greek not just write in Greek and he says that there is an ontological difference between being and beings in other words um you know any particular entity whether Whether it's a thing or a person is a being small B small be and there's a difference between those beings and being existence but then there's also something which is what Haidiger calls ab grundig abyssal abyssal unfathomable I think the gnostics in Greek called it bthos and that's what Plato is talking about boss but yeah you said you said it in modern Greek that was good modern Greek Yeah, buthos is what Plato's talking about here. Although the good is not being. No, it's buthos. So there is there is it's hard to even put this in words. I mean it's kind of it's ineffable what he's saying. There is this condition for the possibility of knowledge which is unfathomable.
But it is that wellspring forth from which anything manifests in the first place and one should not raify it or objectivize it as if it is being capital B. Okay. Or some kind of objectively existent thing. So that's what's going on there.
>> Wow. That was that explains a lot. So then Glalcon is like disturbed or something by this by Apollo and it's interesting he uses Apollo here but instead of by Zeus because there's some solar imagery happening here. What a donic superiority. Like what? He's like it's your own fault. You forced me to tell you my opinion about it and I don't want you to stop either. So continue to explain the similarity to the sun if you've admitted anything. And then he says I'm certainly admitting a lot. Well don't not even the smallest thing. I think I'll have to admit a fair bit. But and that's that's interesting. I'm he's he's omitting things here. What? So there's some things that he can't even say. But as far as is possible at the moment, I won't admit anything voluntarily.
Don't understand then that as we said there are there are these two things.
One sovereign of the intelligible kind in place, the other of the visible. I don't say of heaven or Urinos so as not to seem to you to be playing the sophist with the name. In any case, you have two kinds of of thing visible and intelligible. Right now, this is where I I actually highlighted this because this is this is clearly some Pythagorean esoteric [ __ ] here. It's like it's like a line divided into two unequal sections. Then divide each section namely that of the visible and the of the intelligible in the same ratio as the line. That's the golden ratio.
That's the beautiful that's that's what you see all throughout nature. The golden the golden mean the golden ratio.
He he literally just described it in terms now of relative clarity and opacity. One subsection of the visible consists of images. And then um the editors put together this chart. You can see the golden mean over here. And it's got imagination, aasia, belief, pistus, thought, the anoya, and then understanding is the highest level of epistemic. And you talked about this in your book. This is why I brought this up because um so just let me get your thoughts on this and anything you you um are you see here that you want to point out.
>> Okay, I'm going to lay out my interpretation of this, which you know again in this book like I go into this in some detail, okay? And it's it's a very subtle argument, so it's really worth reading it in the book. But to summarize it here, um, let's try to unpack this and you draw me out on the finer points >> and and one real quick, it almost looks like an archaic or ancient version of some sort of scientific way of thinking because in the scientific method and and Bacon cites Aristotle for the scientific method, you first first you have um observation and then you have um and then you then you have a hypothesis. And just to pull this back up, think about this.
Imagination, that could be observation.
Belief, that could be some sort of hypothesis. And now the thought thing, it's like that could you could almost think of thoughts as like doing experiments on it, thinking about it, doing things about it. And then understanding is when you come to a conclude. It's almost like this a protoscientific method here, but it's metaphysical. So I just want to this is just mind-blowing to to even talk about this. Anyways, >> so I'm going to crossorrelate it with what he says in a number of different dialogues. At the most superficial level, on the surface, here's what Plato is saying.
That in ordinary everyday life, we have beliefs about objects. So, we see things through our senses and we form um uh beliefs about objects without all that much study or analysis. Right? Now, when we're dreaming or we're uh daydreaming and engaging in imaginative flights of fancy about, you know, unicorns and Pegasuses and whatever, you know, things that don't exist as don't exist as objects that are readily perceivable by us. That's imagination.
So on again on the most superficial level, Plato is saying imagination is inferior to belief because it's even more removed from reality. The things that we have beliefs about that are based on our immediate perception are more real than things that we fantasize about or that we create as conglomerations of different perceivable things and that we engage in flights of fanciful imagination about. And it's on this basis that in Republic for example, Plato says that representational art should be banned uh because it encourages uh too much imagination and fanciful basically hallucinations and and so on and so forth. So he thinks that you know overly mythological fanciful uh expressions of art should be constrained in society so that people don't get lost in delusions and so that they can stay closer to reality. Now, our beliefs about readily perceivable things um are uh inferior to an intellectual grasp of the abstract principles which shape the things that are perceivable to us. So that again going back to the text that you cited, Plato has a notion that the material substrate of the world which is generally in a state of flux in a in a dynamic and in disccernible state like energy, right? What we would think of as energy in physics that the material substrate of the world is shaped into the things we perceived by abstract forms that are not in the physical world. And these abstract forms have a causal effect on things. In other words, there's a formal cause at work in the world in addition to efficient causality. And being able to understand the way in which these non-material abstract forms shape uh the material substrate into the things that we perceive is a higher form of cognitive functioning than mere belief. So thinking right is higher than mere belief because you're engaging with the forms that shape uh the perceivable objects in the world.
But there's a higher level of understanding than that.
And what noasis is is to be able to I was going to say grasp but grasp for certain reasons is not the right descriptor.
Noasis or this higher understanding is to be able to intuitit or have an intellection regarding what it is that makes the forms possible in the first place. Remember how in that passage before he says by Apollo he says there's a condition for the possibility of knowledge at all and the analogy is to the sun. So that for example in the allegory of the cave within the cave you have only the light of the fire that's up above the people chained to the cave wall and there are these puppeteers who are holding mockups in front of the fire and the outlines of these mock-ups are being cast onto the cave wall and those shadows are believed to be reality by the people who are shackled within the cave. So that's the realm of belief, right? Remember belief and imagination down here toward the bottom. If you escape the cave and take the tunnel up to the surface world, you see that no, the true source of illumination is the sun. Okay? And so the things in the surface world by analogy are the objects of thought uh understood as shaped by the forms. But the thing that makes them light up is the sun. and and to to um to have an intellection regarding that to in to intuitit that uh son mentally is to have real understanding or noasis. Uh all of this is on the superficial level, right? This is what uh they teach canonically as Plato and like you said this schema is coming to an extent I think from the Pythagorian order which Plato was a member of.
Here's where it gets esoteric and I I get into this in fundamental thinkers.
Plato on the one hand is saying that you know the poets should be censored that people shouldn't be in you know they shouldn't have their imagination indulged uh by artwork that allows them to go on flights of fancy and so forth.
On the other hand, his entire philosophical project uh is framed in terms of a dramatic dialogue that includes tremendous amounts of Dian imagery, particularly in dialogues like symposium and where Socrates himself is described as a kind of selenus figure like a kind of like a >> a sadder.
>> Yeah. Saturn with these flute girls and main ads all like dancing around him >> Dian >> there's tremendous amount of Dian imagery in the platonic dialogues and Socrates himself at one point I believe it's in symposium he he says through the mouth of alabi Plato says through the mouth of aliades Socrates is like a a seder who when you open him up he's he's like grotesque dian figure from the you open him up and he's got all these statues of the gods inside him and these are like the forms and there's repeated references also in the dialogue also to Socrates's teaching being like a uh a serpent's bite and that his teaching is venomous in some way >> the sting of the gadfly >> he's a pharmarmac farmuse a witch doctor dealing in pharmarmacons made from snake poison and it it's all very dian imagery and so then you have to look more carefully at uh you know Plato's letters like the second letter and the seventh letter and you see him talk about how uh anyone who says that they've learned his true teaching simply from his writings doesn't know the actual philosophy of Plato and that contemplation of the forms is really just a pedagogical tool which is meant to um put the mind in a state of tension where it's capable of uh accomplishing what is ultimately an irrational intuition of something that is not rationally graspable and that this is truly the good, the good as the beautiful. This is truly the good as the beautiful which he talks about in Fedrris as well. um and which can only be comprehended erotically.
Which is why Plato says in symposium that Aeros is the only thing he's ever Socrates through the mouth of Socrates Aeros is the only thing he's ever really understood. The only thing he's ever really understood. So when you when you excavate what we just went through on the surface layer using these various other admissions and confessions, you see that even the sun is an illusion.
And that's why he says by Apollo in the line before that because as the contemporary devotees of the uh shining Apollo don't understand the Apollonian is an illusion. It is a beautiful shimmering messmerizing surface of glittering light beneath which is this unfathomable dark dionian abyss. Okay.
>> That's why I said what a donic superiority.
>> Yes. And so that's what's really going on here. It has a surface exoteric reading and a more profound esoteric reading. What's so fascinating about this and let me just share this one more time just to highlight something. You mentioned Plato's cave is to get out of this bottom area of belief and imagination. Right now what's so f what what what blows my mind about this is in Christianity all you the the endgame is pistus. You're saved after pistus. You're done. They don't want you to have no Isis. They want you to have pistas and that's the endgame. They want you in the cave.
>> Look, Christianity and every other revealed religion including of course Islam going back to Moses.
Moses quote unquote is um the conj job being played on the people shackled in the cave by those guys who are standing on the plank. Remember in pl in Plato's allegory of the cave and republic he describes how there's a plank or a platform behind the people who are shackled to the cave wall and these archons is what they are. These archons are standing there and the people in the cave don't even see them and these archons are holding up props in front of the fire in a way where the shadows of the props are cast onto the cave wall. And this shadow play is mistaken for reality by these people with their baseless beliefs.
And that's what Christianity is. That's what you know beginning with Judaism going all the way through Islam. These religious revelations are a shadow play that is purposefully deluding people. um and it's being promulgated by archons who Plato understood understood very well are manipulative uh governors in this world and I think that even Plato's critique of Homer and of you know the conventional Greek religion uh is motivated by his understanding that it was promulgated by effectively archons who want to keep humanity ignorant and enslaved.
And so this is really what the Gnostics they were looking at through scripture and they were saying we need this whole thing is exactly the opposite actually.
Yahweh is some demonic figure. He's not the one. He's not the good. And this is what this is how you sort of get the sort sort of gnostic uh worldview. Um yeah. What do you think about that?
>> Yes. But the problem is first of all I mean that's 100% where it comes from.
Okay. by the way with a lot of Persian influence but there was also a lot of Persian influence on Plato.
>> Yeah. He in the in the in the in the play Alabiades he literally says oh by the way our whole tradition goes back to Zoras. He's the first he's the beginning of it all.
>> Yes. And when so okay let's just briefly I mean we've discussed this in other conversations we've had people go watch those videos but briefly um Plato's the two major influences on Plato were Pythagoras because he he you know was a member of the Pythagorian order I'm talking about after the death of Socrates the two major influences on him were Pythagoras because he was a member of the Pythagorian order and then Heracitis and Aristotle tells us that Plato was a Heracletian in his youth and both Pythagoras and Heracitis are completely connected to Iran. Pythagoras spent a dozen years studying with the magi in the capital of Persian Empire and then Heracitis was invited by Darius the Great to come be the court philosopher of the Persian Empire. Okay.
So the two major influences on Plato are are already deeply Persian and then at Plato's funeral the magi attended. They came to attend his funeral and at his funeral they gave a eulogy saying that Plato was a member of the Magian order that he was considered a magi himself. Uh so there you have that but point being yes together with a lot of Persian influence clearly this matrix uh of Platonic thought is whatnosticism is born from out of. However, there is a certain metaphysical dualism or let's say at least a dualistic tendency that uh devolves from out of Plato intonosticism um which you don't see in every Gnostic school but in a lot of them you do uh where there is this categorical um distinction between or let's say dichotomy between uh the material world and the spiritual world and where the material world is considered fallen and those archons in the cave are like basically manufacturing the material world on behalf of the demiurge or the demiurge from Tmus is using these archons to manufacture the world and uh that they're controlling the world for the demiurge and then there's a higher spiritual realm that you can intellectually ascend to uh by escaping this lower fallen realm >> and they they call it the noetic realm too.
>> Yes. And that dualism is not in Plato.
So Plato is not a a metaphysical dualist who is giving a moral valuation to the intellectual realm as opposed to some uh morally inferior corrupt material realm.
Uh Plato is valuing knowledge and um you know informed judgments and enlightenment over ignorance and you know baseless belief and you know reckless decisionmaking. That's not the same thing as an endorsement of dualism on a metaphysical level. You know that having been said there were also gnostics like the Valentinians who were not dualists and who had a more kind of emanationist view of the world.
>> Yeah. And where you do find that um that dualist worldview is in the orphic the orphics um who were like they were like the original evangelist there's a story about antisin uh where the or it literally says in a group of orphics orphoy came to him with a bunch of books that were written by mousis and Orpheus is what it says and they asked Antony's will you join our will you be initiated we'll initiate you right here and he said if I get initiated will I go to the will I go to the aisle of the blessed when I die?
They're like, "Yes, of course. That's the whole point." And he says, "And you're initiated?" He's like, "Yeah, of course we're initiated." So, you're going to the aisle of aisle of the blessed. Yeah, we're going there. We want you to come with us. Well, why don't you just kill yourself and go there?
It's one of the funniest stories from antiquity. Um, but yeah, that's that sort of thinking, but brings you to it makes you turn into that type of person where you're going around evangelizing to save people. It's it's the it's the it's the realm of pistus.
>> Yeah. By the way, speaking of orphism, one of the the great um you know, cinematic um works of the mid 20th century that has a lot to do with orphism that people should check out if they're interested in that is uh the surrealist Jean Cockto's film Orpheus from 1950. It's a French film uh by the surrealist Jean Cockto called Orpheus and it's a very uh cool modern take on Orphic mysticism.
Yeah. real quick before we move on. Um, in in in the the Orphic mythology, their their central myth was the sort of dying and rising motif of Dian Isis where because he's ripped apart by the by the Titans. Zeus goes crazy and causes a delusion that doesn't just end the world, ends the whole cosmos. And then after he takes the dead the the the bodies of these dead titans who consume Zagrias who is a fruit god by the way.
Let's keep that in mind. They consume the fruit god the the forbidden fruit and he takes their bodies cuz they consume this fruit or the body of Zagrias and he creates the new cosmos out of it. So now you have this what and the result of this is a dualism.
Everything is mind and body. The mind is Dionis. That's the soul that's within the body. And the body is the is the flesh of the titans. So all human beings, all animals, all life, all matter for that matter is half Dianisis, half Titan. And the good you want to you want to be in tune with your your Dionian mind, your your spirit, your suk, and you want to exit your evil titanic nature. That's orphism. That's orphism 101 for you.
>> Yeah. And it has a it casts a long shadow over spiritual history because you still see the same >> same thing >> way of you know conceiving things in manism all the way down to like you know 400 AD 300 400 AD uh Manny was in the 200s but you know the the religion thrived in that era 3 400 AD you still see basically the same belief uh at the bottom of it. Yeah, it's the sort of um sin uh you know eternal sin, trying to get rid of sin, that type of thing.
>> Plato's conception of the philosopher ruler. Another very relevant contemporary way of conceiving of the role of the philosopher is in terms of social engineering.
Nobody before the era of Plato with the exception of Pythagoras who's you know coming in immediately you know generation before him generation or two before him and sort of proto philosophical figure but uh basically beginning with Plato you have this idea that human societies should be to some extent deconstructed deconstructively analyzed pulled apart intellectually and then deliberately reconstructed from their foundation by people who have a proper understanding.
This is an incredibly radical idea. It remains radical and incendiary to this day. People would call that fascism today because it's it's the aristocrats in control. That's what they would say.
I've actually heard a person I know Richard Carrier who studied he's a PhD in the history of philosophy. He's not a philosopher, but he's that's what his uh dissertation was on. And he calls Plato a fascist because of this reason. What are your thoughts on that?
>> It's more undemocratic than fascism. Let me explain why. So fascism is still a form of populism where a Mussolini or a Hitler has to deal with the common beliefs and uneducated attitudes and customs of the majority of the Italian people or the German folk or whatever. And to the extent that there are some highlevel intellectual advisors crafting policies for those regimes, those um think tank advisers or high level planners have to compromise to a great degree with the folk beliefs of the people which is why for example Mussolini made a deal with the Vatican right because the majority of people in Italy are Catholic and you know at a certain point you've got to appease the folk.
Well, that's fascism.
It's still very democratic. It's a kind of form of conservative democracy. And by the way, most democracies, beginning with the Athenian democracy of Solon, were conservative. Democracies were generally based on what Rouso calls a civic religion. In other words, a a belief system that was customary and that uh most of the citizenry adhered to as an implicit unquestioned basis for decision-m. Right?
So when you're a democratic assembly and you have to have a vote among the members of the assembly to decide policies, you cannot stop and question every presupposition that is in the background of one or another proposed policy. You have to assume that the majority of the gentlemen and you know women were excluded from this in those days. uh the majority of the gentlemen who are members of the assembly were raised to believe in the same religion as you. So there's a customary belief system that's a tacid underbelly of you know decisionm in any democracy and democracies don't work without that.
So actually, so actually contrary to what a lot of liberals would like to believe, most democracies are fascistic and democracy only works if it tends toward fascism and fascist states are still very democratic.
>> Yeah. You want and that's why in even today in the US Senate or what wherever you go, you're going to see the symbols of the fascists. It's literally the the idea of f of of f of what fascism was supposed to be at least was the bundling together of ideas that don't necessarily go along with each other. That's so okay. So this not it's not Plato then is what I'm trying to get at.
>> Yes. So let let me explain. So people look at various Platonic policies like the institutionalization of eugenics.
Plato was the first person to propose eugenics. In other words, he took the idea of of um hybridizing and improving plants and interbreeding choice horses to produce the best raceh horses and so forth. And he decided we should apply this to the human population. And that's the beginning of eugenics as far as we can see in recorded human history. Okay? Plato's the father of eugenics. People look at that and they think, "Oh, look how fascistic this is." No. No. No. No. No.
Do you think the majority of people in the society of that time any more than the majority people in society of this time wanted to be told who they get to marry and who they get to have children with or who they're prohibited from falling in love with and having children with? Absolutely not. I mean, this is a completely undemocratic policy. Okay. What's much more undemocratic even than that is Plato's idea that the philosophers ought to reorganize and and really remake the religion of the people from the ground up that in the case of Plato the Home and he religion is so corrupting to the ethical fiber of children right like like the Bible it's so full of unethical crap sadistic backwards just [ __ ] tyrannical behavior which is the worst model for the development of an ethical person from childhood upwards. Right? I mean, look at Zeus and he's kind of right about Zeus and Gany mean it's >> Zeus is a tyrannical serial rapist and manipulator, sadistic manipulator of people just like Yahweh in the Bible, right? And so Plato is looking at this and saying we have to reconstruct the religion of the people from the ground up and we need to make a belie. Look, they're not going to all uh become philosophers. In fact, almost no one's going to become a philosopher. So you can't cultivate an oasis on the part of the majority of the population. You can give them an excellent education system which he emphasizes triple underline in Republic how important the education system is. And he makes it a universal education system. Everyone has to, you know, attend the same school system and it's a meritocratic educational system.
In other words, if you're a farmer's son or whether you're coming from a family of a statesman, it doesn't make a difference in terms of how you're treated and evaluated in the education system. to the extent that if you're a farmer's kid or a merchants's kid and you prove that you have the capacity for an oasis, you're taken away from your family and you're reassigned to be brought up by the leaders of the state or the scientific planners of the society. And vice versa, if you're a kid from the ruling class and you wind up, you know, showing that you're not just ignorant, but you're [ __ ] you're taken away from your parents and you're put in like a peasants's family. Yeah.
Okay.
>> And so there is a uni universal and meritocratic educational system. That's incredibly important, but that is not going to make a philosopher out of everybody. You're not going to cultivate an oasis, you know, across the population. So you have to give the majority of people a religion to believe in which might not necessarily be true.
It's what he calls a noble lie or it's made up. It's woven out of noble lies where myths and folklore are recast in various ways that will be more conducive to the development of the ethical fiber and ultimately uh work on the cognitive capacities of people to a greater extent than the garbage that they've been given to believe in by Homer and the tradition. Okay. Or in our days it would be the Bible or the Quran.
>> Yes. Yeah.
>> Especially especially the Quran. So this is why Plato is not a fascist.
Islamic Democrats are fascists. So for example, the Islamic Republic of Iran which has democratic elections and they elect presidents and they elect members of parliament but it's based on the civic religion of Islam in an unquestioned way that is [ __ ] civic >> and it's democracy. It's a fascist democracy.
Plato is not a fascist. Okay. He is so radically anti-democratic.
>> Aristocrat.
>> Cannot be Exactly. Don't mistake aristocracy with fascism.
>> Absolutely.
>> Is a true aristocrat.
>> Rule of the best.
>> Yeah. And that means the rule of the best. It certainly doesn't mean the rule of wealthy people. And one of the main proposals in Republic, which is insane, is that he says the ruling class aren't allowed to have private wealth. They can't have any property. They can't have bank accounts to prevent against corruption.
>> Yeah, you have to. This is not something that you want to give. People don't want this position. It's for the people.
>> No person. No normal person would want this position. And by the same token, uh you can't have a concentration of force among normal people. In other words, you can't have, you know, farmers and merchants and whatever building up huge armories where they can then lead a private army out to get rid of the philosopher rulers. Doesn't work that way. So, weapons have to be sequestered within the ruling class and and basically a cast of knights of the place calls them auxiliary guardians who are there to protect this system. Uh so look my point is this that from the beginning of the history of philosophy we have this idea which then reemerges repeatedly throughout the uh trajectory of uh philosophical thought that the philosopher can also be seen as a social engineer and that we should aspire to engineer society. that actually the highest form of techn and this is what what Aristotle calls it. Aristotle says that the highest form of techn the master craft or the highest art is politics. And in Nikomachian ethics he says that the properly governed state is the condition for the possibility of the cultivation of virtue and the pursuit of all the other arts and sciences.
In other words, our capacity to know anything at all depends on people having set up a functional state for us.
because you're not going to have a proper educational system and proper scientific institutions that aren't interfered with. Like for example, the when the mob in Sicily came and burned down the Pythagorian schools because they were teaching women and they were teaching ideas like reincarnation.
Okay, you're not going to have scientific research institutions that aren't interfered with unless you have a properly governed state. And more importantly, without the right kind of political system, you won't even have families that cultivate the right values in their children from basically their infancy onward.
that the capacity to even become an ethical person is something that only arises in a functional family. And you cannot have functional families if you are living in a failed war torn state with you know rival ghettos or whatever and mass poverty and you know in constant insurrection like these banana republics or like third and fourth world countries. Okay.
>> Yeah.
>> So so and this is very again again the Christians have raped Aristotle. This is another way in which Aristotle is so anti-Christian because he's saying the Christian to the Christian right everyone can be saved by pistice just have faith in Jesus Christ and you can be saved and even if you come from a horrible family and you come from the worst ghetto war torn violent ghetto ever and you know you've lived under the most abysmal condition and you've done horrible things but you didn't know better you're like >> you're the worst person ever give your heart to Christ just confess and give your heart and you're going to go to heaven, right?
>> And not not only that, not only that, you have you have eternity with God.
>> You are deified to the highest extent, you become higher than any other living soul or God or don that ever lived before you just from Pist.
>> Yes. Whereas Aristotle says in the most anti-Christian fashion, if you have been brought up without proper ethical exemplars and you were in a family or in a community that did not allow you to be habituated from childhood in the right way. So that doing good things or performing beautiful excellent actions eventually becomes second nature to you.
You are [ __ ] at a certain point. If you haven't had either the right family or the right friends, if you haven't had a relative stability in terms of the community that you uh were raised in and that was supposed to inculcate certain values in you, you don't even have the condition for the possibility of becoming an ethical person anymore, let alone becoming an intellectual. Let alone becoming an intellectual. You are so degraded at that point that your only worth is as a natural slave.
>> And that's harsh.
>> It is harsh. But but people listening to this might think this is harsh. We all know people like this who are just they had a rough upbringing. They had bad parents. They were in the wrong neighborhoods. And you and you and they're in their 30s and you know there's nothing this person will ever >> He's gonna have to work construction.
Hopefully he doesn't go to that jail.
>> Hopefully he doesn't you know that's it.
That's it's it's true what he's saying.
>> Yeah. And so social planning is important. Okay. As much for Aristotle as for Plato.
Aristotle has a more subtle conception of it because he's looking at the fact that Socrates was executed, the fact that the Pythagorian schools were burned down, and then that Plato went to Syracuse three times to try to turn Dionis of Syracuse into a philosopher king and barely escaped with his life because the court of Syracuse conspired against him. Okay, they considered him a subversive with radical ideas and he wants to like turn this, you know, Dianisis into some counter-traditional, you know, thinker and so on and so forth. And and so Aristotle is looking at this and saying, you know, I got to be more esoteric about this. And despite that, Aristotle also had to flee Athens and basically self-exile himself from Athens out of the concern that he would wind up becoming the next Socrates. He said, "I don't want the Athenians to to have the blood of another Socrates on their hands." But Aristotle was more successful in cultivating something out of Alexander than Plato was with Dianius. And by the way, I actually found out there's more more of these like sages from Athens getting sent out on missions to different kings and different there's quite a bit of these stories like this. Yes. And so um Aristotle, he's talking about being sent out. That reminds me that also Aristotle had a think tank. He ran a think tank basically where he he had laboratories where he would dissect the sea creatures. They bring sea creatures from the pyus. He had a deal with the fishermen where you know weird [ __ ] would wash up in their nets that they weren't going to sell in the fish market. They would bring it to Aristotle's laboratories and he would dissect it and learn anatomy from >> Gaylin cites Aristotle all the time.
>> But he also had think tanks that were writing the constitutions for various citystates on contract. So these people would come, I mean sending people out is one thing, but he would have like uh people come to him at his think tank in Athens and they would secretly write constitutions for them and the constitutions would be calibrated to the customs and the values of those particular people to use, you know, platonic noble lies as it were to develop a constitution that is close enough to what those people believe and what their customs are that it will lead them toward the good in a way that they can still accept that is going to be practical enough for them to adopt. And so this is social planning. It's social engineering. And >> this even goes back to Pythagoras too.
This even because um Herod just talks about this hyperorean king who came to learn under Pythagoras for a certain amount of years and then goes back to Germany and then rules as a Pythag. So this was cultivating all throughout Europe this whole plan and this goes back to this is a thing that's been happening for a long time.
>> Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean we talked again about this in another conversation we had that Pythagoras comes back to Samos and then eventually sets up in Sicily.
He comes back to Magna Grea with these ideas after a dozen years in the capital of Persian Empire with the Magi. So it seems like this social social engineering business was put into this Greeks head.
>> Should we be surprised though? Look at the Persian Empire. Look what it was doing. Look how it how it acted, how successful it was. This shouldn't surprise you at all. This is, >> you know, >> Western civilization really does have this its roots in the Persian Empire.
>> Yes. And the the more important point is that it has its roots in people who um based their political thought on Zarathustra who is the most counterraditional thinker that we had before his time. Okay? I mean, Azarusra is literally inverting the religious worldview of mankind where he's saying that these gods that you all believe in, they're a bunch of manipulative sadists.
They're what the Gnostics later call archons. And they are serving uh a wicked principle, a negative principle which he calls aimman. Uh and this principle of constraint and deception and manipulation is reflected in these gods and their rule over humanity. And you need to reject them and instead you need to worship wisdom and enlightenment. And you need to work on yourself and the world so that there will be progress and bit by bit the world can turn into a paradise. This is the ancient Persian worldview. And it's no coincidence that basically Pythagoras adopts this after a dozen years in the capital of Iran and then you know uh Plato belongs to the Pythagorian order right and the rest is history. So >> yeah, >> this idea of social engineering is radically counter-traditional and undercuts the customary religious orientation of mankind whether it's a pagan uh religious orientation like the Olympian religion or Hinduism to this day or whether it's a revealed religion like you know Judeo-Christianity and Islam. In either case, what philosophy is doing from the foundation is challenging this in the name of human self-determination and wise social planning. Okay. And the re-engineering of society. So this is what we see continued on in August compt uh in Hegel to an extent and definitely again in Nietz with his idea of the overmen uh and the masters of the earth.
Um we see them adopt and adapt this idea in various ways throughout the history of philosophy.
>> That's f now anything last time like pl how what do you think about Aristotle?
How much of Plato's project does he continue and like is he because people people like to talk about Aristotle and Plato is like they're completely different and Aristotle rejected all this stuff from Plato. I don't see that as much. I think there's a lot more um a lot more loyalty in my in my reading of Aristotle. What do you think?
Certainly the perennialist school um that begins really in a way with Plutinus and includes the neoplatonist and then is picked up by people like um um Al Farabi uh in Iran in the what corresponds to the European middle ages.
Uh and then you have these contemporary relatively contemp recent um perennials like Renee Gunnan and Avalon so forth.
Certainly those perennialists are wrong in thinking that Plato and Arisol are saying exactly the same thing. I mean there is this also this like they think oh it's all the same. It's different expressions of the perennial wisdom and [ __ ] No >> plethon used to say that too and he's wrong. Yeah >> right. He's a platonist.
>> Yeah neoplatonist. Um on the other hand, on the other hand, I agree with you that a lot of what Aristotle is um uh presenting in you know the domain of uh ontology or epistemology or his political thought that we just went through is an adaptation of Plato. It's a building on refinement adaptation of Plato. Like for example, Aristotle says and and and also it's not just an adaptation of Plato. It's that there are things that Plato is keeping >> esoteric >> that Aristotle makes public that Aristotle you know says more forthrightly. Um like for example, Aristotle says in the domain of ontology there are no independently existent forms. It's not like there's a transcendental realm of forms somewhere beyond the physical world and that from that transcendental realm material things are being shaped into the objects of our perception. Rather form is one causal factor intrinsic to the perception of any object.
So that you cannot have a thing subsist.
No thing can be a substance. By the word, by the way, most people don't think about this. Our word substance means substance.
It's what makes something stand up.
A substance is what is under the stance of a thing.
What makes it hold up as a thing? That's a substance. Yeah.
>> So, Aristotle argues that no thing can have any substantiality unless it also has form in addition to matter. There's a formal cause at work in things in addition to matter.
And where you can see this most vividly is in his description of plant life in I believe it's deanma on the soul. Again, these [ __ ] Christians just read this and they try to like read it into, you know, their theology of the human soul and [ __ ] That's not what's interesting about the what's interesting is where he talks about plants >> and non-human organisms because what he says is that even plants have souls.
plants have a a threepic soul and that has to do with perception and growth.
And he says that you can see that in plants in their in their type of soul there's a formal cause at work in addition to the material causality that has to do with what the seed is materially made of. Right? And there's also a final causality that has to do with why it is that the plant absorbs sunlight. And the ultimate uh shape that the plant is supposed to take as it reaches toward the sun that's nourishing it. It has to do with the plant's tilos or final causality.
But there's a formal cause at work in the plant also that makes it the particular species of plant that it is versus another one. Now modern mechanistic reductionist science rejected this when evolution >> right well evolution is part of it but uh when materialism predominated during the era of the enlightenment again everything became efficient causality and it's related to evolution in the sense that Darwin's evolution by natural selection is a purely efficient causal account it's all based on it's based on the selection of random mutations by the environment which is all efficient causality. It's like uh billiard ball causality. Bing bang boom, right? Blind efficient causes. One thing bangs another thing, another thing bangs into another thing, things coagulate, they pull apart. All right. So in the early modern era they got rid of any other causes but efficient causality again which by the way makes nonsense out of matter by the way and like this was lost on Newton. This was lost on Daycart.
This was lost on all these people. How if you think in terms of purely efficient causality you can't really even explain what the [ __ ] matter is.
Whereas Aristotle and Plato before him were saying matter is a type of cause.
There's a material cause but then there's a formal cause that shapes the matter that gives it the the form that it has and then there's a final cause that's what that thing is growing toward or developing toward what that for the sake of which the thing develops as what it does. Okay. But here's the thing.
When Aristotle was talking about the souls of plants and the formal cause at work on let's say a plant as an organism, it turns out now we know that he was right because there are studies that have been done in the 1970s by Cleave Baxter who was a polygraph expert who worked for the CIA and hooked up polygraph machines to plants and it turns out that plants are capable of communicating with other organisms including people and they also are >> especially trees. Especially trees.
>> Yes. And they're clairvoyant. Plants are clairvoyant. They can see what's going on at a distance. Obviously, they don't have eyes. They don't even have a brain as we understand it. They don't have a central nervous system, but they have a form of perception. And Aristotle got this right. And there's a >> wow. And moreover and moreover as Rupert Sheldrake has shown with his experiments on organisms both plants and like you know uh eggs and uh you know various types of flowers and u you know insect larae also in a lot of experiments with insect larae like fruit flies.
things have a formal cause that's at work on them that cannot be explained by the genetic code of the organism.
So that um during embryological development whether it's a human embryo or whether it's a fruitfly that's developing there is a form that's coming from somewhere which is not material and is not explainable by the genetics and you can modify the form by like for example bombarding fruit flies with radiation.
It causes a kind of mutation in the fruitfly as the embryo is developing and you will find that mutation in a control group of fruit flies that has not been subjected to the radiation. So you have a control group and the more you bombard a certain group of fruit flies with radiation it warps the formal cause and because the formal cause is non-physical and it's acting across distance instantaneously a control batch of fruit flies that has not been subjected to the stimulus starts to exhibit the same mutation.
Okay, which shows you that there's an independent formal cause at work which Sheldre calls morphic resonance. Well, that's the formal cause. Okay, that Aristotle was talking about. So forms can change the realm.
>> Aristotle didn't understand that.
Aristotle understood that forms are at work on things coming from out of Plato.
And he said, "Look, these forms are not like people think Plato was saying they exist in some other realm, some transcendental realm." No, but they're an integral and intrinsic factor in the development of any organism in our world. And he was right about that much.
What he didn't get was that even forms can change. You can you can mutate you can mutate forms. And here's the here's the worst example of that. Let me give you a crazy example of this.
>> So let's say there's like I don't know 7 billion humans on the face of the earth.
78 billion humans at this point right on the face of the earth.
Let's say some horrible catastrophe happens like uh the earth's crust slips or something and there's tsunamis all over the world and we're down to one billion. We go down to one billion. It's happened many times. Been many mass extinction.
>> Yeah. Dark the dark ages.
>> Yeah. I mean even before that >> Justinian the Justinian plague wiped out two like twothirds of the population.
>> Yeah. Uh yeah. And then uh in medieval Europe also the black plague wiped out like almost half twothirds of the population. So, let's say some horrible thing happens and there's only a billion people left on the surface of the earth.
If a bunch of people went underground and there were um large facilities underground where technology was sustained and you could carry on experiments and genetics if you according to this morphic resonance theory which Sheldrake has provided a tremendous amount of evidence for drawing from many other scientists.
If you start mutating humans underground, let's say you start using genetic engineering to mess with the formal development of the human organism.
People on the surface will start to be born with the same mutation.
So if you take a group of two billion humans under the surface of the earth and you start genetically modifying them so that their formal development is altered, people who have have uh been completely untouched and are supposedly you know um you know engaged in a natural process of embryological development on the surface of the earth will start to exhibit the same mutation or deviation from the norm as the genetically modified population underneath the surface. You follow?
>> Yeah.
>> And this is a way of thinking that Aristotle would have understood. It would have been less shocking to him as it is to some of these materialist scientists, you know, of our era.
>> They don't know what to think about.
Well, it's because they h there's a presupposition, a naturalist presupposition where they can't think outside of they can't think of things as like oh there might be something greater something where you're not we're not seeing there like they they can't think of things in that a priority way that you and I could for example as a philosopher.
>> Yes. And this goes back to the divided line of Plato that you you laid out because there are forms of understanding there there are types of understanding not to use the word form which has a technical meaning here but there are types of understanding that involve um you know intuitions that are not perceivable that involves the imperceptible that you know intuitions of things that are invisible but that nonetheless have a an effect on the world. Right? And that's what it means to be able to, you know, cognize things to to be able to engage in noasis.
All right? Is to to be engaged with a domain of causes that are not uh perceptible in a sensory way, you know.
>> Yeah. One more thing on Plato. So Heisenberg was considered a modern Platonist. He's also like one of the founders of quantum physics among other Germans. Um, and he, you know, the Heisenberg principle, that's his name on it and all that stuff. He said that when he discovered that the subatomic realm is full of atoms, that he didn't necessarily just think that the Epicurans were correct and Plato is wrong. You would think that would be his, oh, it's over. Plato's wrong. Adams and void is everything. He said no because actually when you when you disrupt the atoms and you smash two atoms together they don't break down into smaller pieces they form as they they make symmetric forms. says well actually he said actually Plato's right forms is that the bottom of everything is forms >> of course and not to mention that the important thing for Heisenberg is not just that uh the subatomic subatomic realm reveals form. It also validates it also validates the insight that consciousness is inextricable from the physical world. Right? I mean, remember for Plato, >> this is why I'm not an atheist, by the way. All these things that we're talking about, this is like, you know what I mean?
>> Yeah. For for Plato, uh, it's absurd for there to be any things without souls to perceive and understand them. I mean, the whole nature exists for the mind, right? The mind is that for the sake of which things manifest such that we may know them. And what quantum physics shows you and what Heisenberg explains in that great book of his physics and philosophy is that quantum physics is suddenly bringing us back to the way of thinking of the Greeks where >> you know from Heracitis onward nature is a flux that's in a reciprocal relationship with consciousness with with what Heracitis called psyche and psyche is co-constitutive of the physical world from out of dynamic chaos. Okay. And that is basically the whole freaking idea of quantum superp position. So the cutting edge discoveries in quantum physics bring us right back to Heracitis and Plato and and you know morphic resonance brings us back to Aristotle.
>> Yeah. And as you mentioned, the the naturalist, the one who's presupp presupposing just pure naturalism, when they see mutations, they it's always just a that's just a random mutation that happened to work out for this population and because of it, they evolved into this species and now they're dominant. Now they're they do.
But but like you and I might think maybe it wasn't a a a random mutation. Maybe there's the forms working here and people are going to watch this. So these guys are crazy. I don't care. I'm just why why why are we presupposing all pure naturalism here when a lot of these things can be answered without it?
>> Absolutely. Uh let me give you an example.
There is this argument now look the UFO disclosure thing is everywhere now. I mean it's you know the most hotly debated political subject and there's this argument among scientists in the midst of this whole [ __ ] show. Okay.
from out of the circus. There are some interesting scientific voices who have been saying it's rather peculiar that all of these entities that people have close encounters with are humanoid. For the most part, they're human. Even when something is described as a reptilian or as a mantid or whatever, >> it still walks on two feet and has arms.
It's >> an evolutionary biologist who believes in Darwin would tell you that a a reptile that evolved intelligence and was a tool using entity wouldn't actually look like that. It wouldn't look like these reptilians or what and it wouldn't let's say that, you know, a mantis, you know, an intelligent mantis would not look like the way these manted people that people supposedly have close encounters with appear, right? because they're operating from assumptions that are Darwinian evolution by natural selection so forth.
What they don't consider is what you know again Sheldrake compiled really from out of a whole bunch of different biologists. You can look at his books uh new science of life and morphic resonance and also another book he wrote called the presence of the past where basically he argues that it would stand to reason that humanity itself has a form that humanity not has a form but is corresponding to a form and you can see this in in uh again mutations in embryological development that mutations in embryological development are dev deviating from a form that is setting a norm on genetic development for the most part except when there are contingent interfering causes that cause deviations from that in the form of mutations and this form of humanity may predate the rise of homo sapiens on the earth. So that if there have been things like humans on other planets throughout the universe in other galaxies in other solar systems right and let's say you know these civilizations of humanoids have arisen and they've fallen and maybe these species spread out and eventually they died out but the fact that they existed for so many billions of years. I mean, we're a late species homo sapiens on Earth in a, you know, in a universe that was already billions of years old.
So maybe the form that we have, the basic form, two arms, two legs, upright head, binocular, vision, it's a form that was tried and tested and it worked out in many other worlds. And it's non-physically shaping genetic development on the earth.
>> Yeah. And we're not dependent on like like birds are dependent on air to fly.
So it needs to be on a planet. It can't be in space.
>> Uh fish are dependent on water. All most animals are dependent on some sort of ecosystem where humans are can we we can literally adapt anywhere. We can we can conquer any sort of realm because of how we are. So it seems like we're the highest type of form of of living. So the the the particular resilience of the human form may have made it such that it predominates in resonating with biological matrices that could take that shape. And it is non-physically influencing shaping organisms not just on our planet but across the universe. Which is why whatever entities show up here kind of look like us >> humanoid. Yeah.
>> So that the Star Trek view of things may not be that far off or the Star Wars view of things may not be that far off.
>> It kind of makes sense actually. Yeah.
>> There may be a morphic field that generally makes intelligent species look like us. Not saying that there wouldn't be some that look like octopuses, whatever, but it may be that ours is particularly effective and it's >> for this universe. Yes, it's particularly effective and you know it may predominate. So um just as a hypothetical I put that out there another way in which an aristoilian platonic uh manner of thinking may have been more or less accurate as compared to let's say Darwin.
>> Now you another person you mentioned you said like modern science is bringing us back to the Greeks such as Plato Aristotle. You also mentioned Heracitis.
What about Heracitis's thinking that is being um vindicated today?
So I mean above all it's what I said earlier in terms of quantum theory the idea that there is a an amorphous dynamic flux of energy which is a substrate of the cosmos.
And it's only in interaction with and and interference with consciousness, namely what Heraclitus called psyche, that things take the conditioned and transient shapes that they do. Okay?
That things aren't what they look like to us in an objective and intrinsic way.
Things appear in the way that they do and change constantly and pass out of existence only in relation to our perception and experience of them. You see this in the fragments of Heracitis.
And this insight winds up being legitimated completely by quantum theory. And where it's actually more profound than Plato or Aristotle is that in Plato and and again I I don't think that Plato didn't get this and I point this out in fundamental thinkers that I think there are places where Plato makes a straw man out of Heracitis on purpose because he wants to develop a sophisticated epistemological framework that's going to wind up being further refined by Aristotle and becoming the bedrock shock for the sciences. He wants to develop complex scientific thinking, right? And so he makes a straw man out of Heracitis saying that oh Heracitis with his view that everything is in a state of flux makes it impossible to know anything at all. No, not really.
What Heracitis understands and what is legitimated by quantum theory is that there are no objectively existent forms that um would be there but for human consciousness.
Form is something logos is something logical structure articulated you know uh articulated interconnectivity uh theworked nature of things the the warp and weft of the world which gives it any meaning is something which emerges in the interaction between psyche and fussis okay and fousis without psyche is just a chaotic flux of energy. It only takes the shapes that it does in our perception of things because we're there perceiving them. And our perception of things is in deep internal tension and conflict depending on who we are, what our perspective is, and where we're situated in the world.
So that people with differing beliefs, people from different cultures, people with differently conditioned perceptions and expectations see things differently. And this is really a you know a war over how the world presents itself at a fundamental level.
>> Wow.
>> So that there okay there's a dynamic tension over how things are going to take shape in the world. There's war in Heracitis on an ontological level. And this is borne out by quantum theory in a way that still people are uncomfortable accepting >> because there's the idea that the you know the double slit theory thing where are you seeing is it is it waves is it is it particles but then when then when you when you put a camera on it all of a sudden it's different or something like you know something along those lines.
>> Yes. And you can carry out that kind of experiment of of whether or not the whether or not the quanta is observed on its way through the double split slits or not determining whether it manifests as a particle that's observed to have a particular location or whether it winds up as an interference pattern on the other side of the double slits.
You can carry out that experiment retroactively where the whole apparatus is concealed and the the measurement process is randomized and automated and the decision is only made after the fact. So that the the wave function is retrocausally being collapsed based on whether or not you make a decision in the future that you should observe the thing going through in the past or not.
And if you extrapolate out from that, you could create whole systems that would be like what they call Schroinger's cat. Uh whole systems that would be in a state of quantum superposition and that different people or different groups would be struggling with one another to collapse that superposition in one way or another. Uh and and that's like some spooky [ __ ] uh that Heracitis would have understood well >> where you're dealing with a war over the way the world is going to manifest at all.
>> And it shows the flux right there. It shows the >> it shows the flux >> underlying flux >> that that flux is is has the nature of polyamos in relation to conflicting psyches which is why Heracitus says war as father and king of all. All things come to pass and uh you know uh all things come into being and come to pass in accordance with conflict. Uh because the flux only takes the shape that it does in relation to consciousness and different and psyches are differentiated. They're individually differentiated and they're differentiated among waring and rival communities. And so you know now H highaidiger eventually understands this in terms of a war over world a war between worlds over the earth. So that the hermeneutic circle the the uh domain of interpretation on a tacet level implicitly the domain of interpretation that gives things the meanings that they have differs from culture to culture society to society.
And it's very hard for us to understand this because we live in such a globalized world with internet and you know international television and you know basically mediums of communication and connectivity that are increasingly collapsing the world of Shanghai, China and you know whatever New York America right so it's very hard for us to understand this now but you would have to go back into the era where let's say European colonialists are entering the world of unconted tribes And you would see as certain anthropologists did in that time in the era of uh what's his name who you were engaged with his work a lot.
>> Frrazier. No, Frasier. The anthropologist.
>> Yeah.
>> That back in those days these European colonialists would come into the cultures of these unconted tribes like let's say Amazonian shamans and weird [ __ ] would happen and they'd write about this. They'd be like, "You, we saw some [ __ ] in the forest like that." You know, I and the shamans were like, "Well, yeah, but that happens all the time." Like those are just the tree spirits and like this is the thing they do. And like, you know, the Europeans like, "What the fuck?" You know, who are what are these witch doctors we're with?
And maybe the church fathers were right.
Maybe we shouldn't have come here. You know, maybe this place is, you know, possessed by Satan or something. And what you're seeing in that interaction is two different hermeneutical circles conflicting. There are certain implicit expectations of how the world should behave that the Amazonian shamans have and there are other ones that are conditioned by modern European rationality and they're coming into conflict here. And the really interesting and somewhat tragic thing that tends to happen is that if let's say the European colonialists overpower the native culture at a certain point, the hermeneutic circle of the Amazonians collapses and as the tribal people put it, the magic goes away. The magic goes away.
The world becomes disenchanted for them because their matrix of subconscious expectations has been sheared through by the rationalism of the imposing colonial culture and they essentially uh lose the will to believe in the possibility of certain things. Okay. uh such that those things then become impossible for them.
And this is the kind of thing that Heracitis was getting at when he said that you know there's a war over the nature of reality itself.
Um and there's no objectively existent uh way that things are apart from the conflict and tension between various psyches in the cosmos.
>> Yeah, you're right. Frasier definitely gets into the whole homeopathic sympathetic magic stuff about um performing these rituals that sort of engage with fouseist nature. He doesn't use the word fuses. I'm using that now.
But this war is it does is there an appalonian dionian thing going on or is that or do you think this is something a different >> Yes. No, there's an epalonian dynian thing going on also because the epalonian as Nietze analyzes it in the birth of tragedy is the higher organizing ideas the crystallin formations of thought that again are like you know shimmering and they have a certain lucidity they provide lucidity in their shimmering they provide lucidity they make you more lucid And they offer enlightenment in that sense of being these brilliant crystalline structures that organize perception according to certain higher ideas right and depending on what those ideas are now those ideas don't have to be you know uh materialist they can include like uh ESP and psychokinesis understood in a rational way as part of a science of parasychology ology for example they could but depending on whatever those higher ideas are a certain aalonian order is being imposed on Dian chaos in a way that makes certain things visible and hides certain other things and the things that get hidden or occulted are what we call the oult that's what the occult is the oult is the dionian that gets oulted by the apalonian that organizes the realm of the possible for any society.
>> Perfect example of this in history is the late stage of the Roman religion in late antiquity where you had this exoteric public religion of soul invictus the sun. Everyone can see it.
It's right there. Everyone's in nobody's it's not a culted. It's right there. You can see it. But then you had the mythic mysteries that was a culted only for certain people. You had to be initiated.
You can't see it. It's like it's in a cave somewhere. Mhm.
>> And that's how that's that's that's a perfect example. You can see this in the church later on where you have these little orders of Franciscan orders that are completely like, you know, or or like the the the you know, up on Mount Aos somewhere. But then then there's the worldly religion where everyone can go to mass.
>> Yes.
>> Heard like that.
>> Absolutely.
>> Yeah. Anything else on Heracit? Her clericis is one is there. Why do you open up with him? What's What was the reason for open I got to go right to Heracitis.
I'll answer that in one second. Let me just say another thing about what we were talking about and then I'll I'll answer the question about Heracitis. Why open with him? Uh what I want to say in response to your remarks on Roman religion >> is that you see myithism combined the Apollonian and the Dian.
As you know in the Hellenistic period they start to use these um references to Mithras uh as Apollo Mithrus.
>> Mhm.
>> Okay. Hyphenated and you see it in particular in Anatolia but it it was w fairly widespread where Apollo and Mithrus were understood to be the same being. At the same time there's a tremendous Dianian energy to mythism and the mythic myth you know has a kind of Dian substrate to it. A lot of Dian imagery and Dian structure to the various initiatic rituals >> bowl being slate. It's the Dianeian bowl.
>> Yes. And also so Mithras sort of um you know originally Mithraism comes from a from a Gorgon cult and this whole idea of Gorgans tearing the initiate apart and so forth is very Dian.
>> Yep.
>> And the whole intoxication in the in the Mithraic mysteries is a Dian intoxication and also involves serpent venom going back to again media and the gorg guns and so forth. So the mythraic religion combined the Appalonian and Diane. It understood both light and shadow and the archetypal interplay between them.
>> This right here, this is a picture that was taken by um who wrote the mythic mysteries. Uh how's his name again?
>> You're talking about France Kumant.
>> France Kumant. Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Thank you for you knew right away. It you can barely see it, but it says Dio so Invictto Mithray. So Soul Invictus Mithra is one. It's one godhead. So, invictus and Mithras. It's a god, the invincible god. Right here, it's hard to see, but it says nama, which is a it's archaic Indo-Uropean word. It doesn't even exist in Latin. Nama, like namaste, nama sabasio, >> which is close to the thrian, but it's not. It's something different. Some of the some some deep Indo-Uropean language being used.
>> Yeah. Dianis, >> give thanks to Sebasius Dianisis.
>> Mhm. And he's the he's the sacrificial bull in the orphic hymns. He's called the bull. He's called the bullfaced. All that the son of the bull. All that stuff.
>> Yes. Anyways, I just wanted to make sure we uh I >> Exactly. Exactly. And then again, there are other inscriptions literally where you see Apollo Mithras hyphenated as the same. Now, um another uh another cult or another um uh deity uh the reverence for which betrays a proper understanding of the interplay between the Apollonian and the Dian is Prometheus.
>> Yes. And there's a reason why Nietze in the birth of tragedy where he provides this whole analysis of the interplay between the Apollonian and Dian says that Prometheus is the first mask of the Dian.
Now of course you know literally Prometheus was the first mask of the Dian in the sense that the Prometheus trilogy of Escilis were the first plays that were ever performed. So literally like Prometheus is the first mask of the Dian art of tragedy. In fact, the city Dionia which happened in the winter or the early spring I believe one of the Dion I think it's a city Dionia or one of it doesn't matter one of I'll put it on the screen um the one that happened in the springtime which is weird because we have our Oscars in the springtime they what what happened at the Zia was they gave awards to best tragedy best comedy best satire and it was like it was like it was like it was like an ancient Oscars the First person to win best tragedy was Ascalus.
>> Yep. And unfortunately, we only have one of the plays in the trilogy left.
>> And it's at the Dionia that he wins it where they offer sacrifices to Dian Isis at that exact thing.
>> Yeah.
>> In fact, I was at Athens at the the the theater in Athens. You know what's at the bottom of the theater?
>> The temple of Dianisis.
>> Well, there you go. So the thing is Prometheus is certainly a Dianian figure in many aspects of his myth not the least of which is you know his punishment and his liver being torn out by the eagle of Zeus and so on so forth right and the the way in which Prometheus let's say how how can we put you know the passion with which he sacrifices himself self and just like throws himself headlong heedlessly into a service for humanity that is going to uh wind up um you know uh leading to this horrific punishment right that is very dian and it's ecstatic it's it's a kind of self-sacrifice that's ecstatic which then of course is aped by Jesus Christ later >> yes Yeah.
>> Uh so there's that. But then Prometheus is also super appalonian. I mean Prometheus is all about like he's the bringer of the arts and sciences and all scientific and technical knowledge is being gifted to humanity by this deity uh who steals the fire of Havvestus you know and and brings it and gifts it as a a way to to transfer the techn of the god's humanity. So uh there's also this tremendously aalonian aspect of Prometheus that of course includes his you know forethought forthought after which he's named Prometheia.
>> If you make a van diagram of Apollo and Dianisis you the middle like I say you know you have blue and red and purple in the middle the purple section would be Prome >> Prometheus and Mithra. And it is no coincidence that if you really trace the myth of Prometheus, as I have repeatedly, including in my book Iranian Leviathan, >> you see that >> Prometheus and Mithra are originally the same figure.
>> It comes from a Caucasus cult.
>> Yeah.
>> Of a fire stealer who goes up against the gods on behalf of humanity. A figure that in uh old uh Iranian religion is called Amirani. Um and uh is associated with the Gorgans which is why you see these references to Media worshiping Prometheus.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. And why Media was also taken to be the founder of Nithraism. Media >> is also in Georgia or Caucus.
>> Exactly. Which was northwestern Iran until 150 years ago. Okay. All of Caucus was part of Iran.
>> You have Heroditus and Iodor saying the Mes were called Aryans. Exactly. And then they love media so much they change the name to me.
>> Exactly. So this is the same figure originally. It's this um rebel titan against the order of the gods which on the one hand leads to the prometheus idea in the west and on the other hand leads to zorastrianism in Iran and the worship of basically titanic wisdom aura mazda in the Iranian tradition. they're coming from the same uh fire stealing titan figure associated with gore guns and so forth. So point being the Apollonian and the Dionian are two dimensions of a certain figure that you could conceive of as either Prometheus or Mithras.
And this is been occulted.
It's been occulted.
Okay. So now I mean I can get to your question about Heracitis unless you want to say something else.
>> Well that's the lightbringer. That's so we know why it's a cult. It's the light and >> there's a good like like I mentioned in my videos talking and I and I I I always slap Christians across the face with this. There's no Lucifer in the Bible.
It's Sa Satan is not Lucifer. Lucifer was applied to Satan for good reasons.
And I I've admit this. I lightbrer there is one there is that one passage in Paul's letters where he says sometimes Satan disguises as an angel of light.
>> So there's good reasons why this stuff happened and as you mentioned this is the sort of synthesis of all what is opposite to Christianity is this lighting beauty.
>> No look it's for very good reasons that that identification was made. It's just that Christians are wrong when they say you can't have Lucifer without Christianity. Lucifer or Prometheus or the convergence of the Apollonian and the Dian Mithras is way older.
>> It's way older and it arose as a Satan, an opposition to the Olympian pantheon or the really the ancient Indo-Uropean pantheon. This is a Indo-Uropean counter tradition. That's what it is. It's a humanistic progressoriented forward uh thinking Indo-Uropean counter tradition. That's really what we're looking at. Um the rebelarian uh path which you know in India was called the left-hand path.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. So uh the ashurik path in any case heracitis which is relevant to what we're saying because Heraclitus again was invited to be the core philosopher of ancient Iran and so he must have been deeply familiar with uh these beliefs and uh this this form of mysticism. Um, and when you look at the fragments, you know, some people have argued that the fragments show Zorastrian influence.
And I'm sure that Heracitis would have been familiar with the Gothas of Zustra.
But what I see when I look at the fragments and think about them in an Iranian context, and I argued this in Iranian Leviathan, is Mithraism. What I see is Mithraism. And Artemis, Arta Amisha as the original Iranian form of her name. Artaamesha or Artemis was a Mithraic deity worshiped by the Sarmatians known to the Greeks as the Amazon, an Iranian tribe related closely to the Skyians. So when Heracitus takes refuge in the temple of Artemis, I think it's another indication that the man's philosophical project is coming from out of substratum. Okay.
>> U but why do I take Heracitis uh first in this volume? Because we don't look Pythagoras was clearly a philosopher in in in the epitomizing sense in which I lay out in the introduction to you know fundamental thinkers. uh the the criteria that we talked about at the outset of our conversation of what constitutes an actual philosopher all of them are clearly met by Pythagoras and exemplified by him but we don't have any writings we don't have any writings >> so you know being responsible in a scholarly way you can't take Pythagoras to be first and and quote like I amus says that Pythagoras believe that like you can't do that okay >> yeah in the in the Pythagorean source book that was put together by Guthrie.
It's mostly fragments from the neoplatonist and it's just like and you can see it's got all the triads and the intelligible triads and you're like h I don't know if Pythagoras maybe he said something similar to this but I don't know. Yeah.
>> Exactly. So the first author that we have that fits the bill in all the different criteria that constitute a philosopher is Heracitis. Okay. He has a protoontology, a protoepistemology.
>> He's pretty much contemporary with Pythagoras, right? He's pretty close. He writes about him, so he obviously knows who he is.
>> He was a little younger, I think, but he they their lives overlapped.
>> Yeah.
>> And so this is the the thinker in the generation before uh Plato that fits all the criteria for a proper philosopher and that's why I begin with him. But there's another reason.
Aristotle tells us that Plato was a Heracletian in his youth before he developed the theory of forms.
And so therefore, Heracitis's thinking is fundamental for Plato. And then you look further in the history of philosophy and you see that Hegel is deeply indebted to Heracitis for the basic structure of his entire thinking. In other words, the dialectic the Hegelic dialectic.
>> Yeah. thesis, antithesis and synthesis as the motor for the development of history that puts all different domains of experience in a state of flux. So that you know basic structures of scientific thinking are changing over the course of history. According to this dialectic social structures are in you know are um social structures are being transformed through revolutionary change. Yeah. over the course of history, according to this dialectic. Styles of art are changing over the course of history. According to this dialectic, all of the the basic structural transformations in the different domains of human life are being transformed through a dialectical process which Hegel is getting from Heracitis.
>> Heracitis. There's this deep impact of Heracitis on Hegel's thinking and I have to say also the idea of the end of history in Hegel is something that he's getting both from Iranian thinking because you know Hegel was actually the founder of uranology you know the serious complex uh modern European study of Iran known as Iranian studies or eronology really begins with Hegel in particular his philosophy of history.
>> A lot start with Hegel. I mean his two students his two star students well on one hand you have Marx on the other hand you have Bruno Bower who wrote the Jew on the Jewish question. He started the whole mysticism uh movement in Germany.
um he was uh anti-Christian to the core but also might have been a little bit influential on some of the Nazi thinking. Anyways, you have Nazism and communism coming out of Hegel in a way which is >> and fascism and fascism because Giovani Giovani Gentilele uh the the pre premier theoretician of fascism was a Hegelian also.
>> Yes. The young Hegelians and the old Hegelians and they clash. He designed this.
>> Right. Now, now this is interesting also. I don't I'm I'll come back to what I was saying in a minute, okay? But you see this with real philosophers all the time. You you saw it with Plato, starting with Plato that a real philosopher winds up with multiple schools that argue over the interpretation of that thinker.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. You have multiple Platonist schools that argue with each other over the proper interpretation of Plato. You have multiple schools of thought interpreting Aristotle that are clashing with each other. This is true of Hegel like we just pointed out. And man, is it true of Nietze. I mean, you know, you've got Nietian Nazis and you've got Nietian anarchists >> and leftist Yeah. leftist ner radical leftist Nietians and you know so and then you Haidiger was literally a card carrying Nazi highlevel Nazi party official uh and then there are anarchist Haidigarians and by the way it's not an illegitimate interpretation you can find a lot in Haidiger to support anarchism actually so what it shows you is that and another example that's important is August compt because compt's thinking was actually implemented in the positivist regimes of Latin America in particular Brazil where it had a very direct real world impact and people argued over what the correct implementation of positivism is in let's say Brazil versus Mexico and other places. So the point is that one marker of a real philosopher is that his ideas are so deep and complex that people wind up having radically divergent interpretations of this person's project.
>> Right?
>> And that's how you know a philosopher by contrast with an ideologue. This is not true of ideologues.
Okay? like someone who de develops a very narrow ideology or let's say a a a cult leader who develops some kind of religious dogma, right? Like Scientology, right? There's one interpretation of Scientology, folks.
And if you deviate from it, those [ __ ] are going to come after you. The Church of Scientology people.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay.
>> Look at this.
>> So, you see, >> you have these young Hegelians they call left Hegelians, Link Sheg, I don't know how to say that. were a group of intellectuals in the 1830s uh from this guy Hegel. Okay, sorry. Um and they laid out the groundwork for socialism and Marxism. Well, what the hell? And then you had these other guys called this led to a split in Hegelian school between the conservative right Hegelians or old Hegelians who defended the compatibility of Hegel philosophy with Orthodox Christianity and all that stuff. But also not not even just I think that's there's more. There's other right-hand who are anti-Christian like Bruno Bower were. Bruno Bower started off as a left-handed alien later in his life switched over. Anyways, >> yes. And they both have and they both have legitimacy to them because on the one hand you can easily see how Hegel's account of the dialectical development of socioeconomic and political systems in a way that ultimately overcomes the alienation of the master slave dialectic could be supposed to end in a classless and egalitarian society such is communism. Hegel doesn't say that himself but you can clearly see how someone would develop that from out of Hegel. On the other hand, if you look at let's say the philosophy of mind, Hegel is talking about the different spirit of various races and how different races have different spirits and how the state is best understood as an organism and you know that you need to understand a state as a social organism so that you know different states are appropriate to different races. You see? So, you know, there's ideas in Hegel that will definitely go toward the right wing and there's ideas in Hegel that are much more leftwing. Um, so anyway, there's that. Now, uh, the point I was making is that you see this with all great philosophers and it it's it's one of the ways in which you can distinguish a philosopher from an ideologer from the founder of a cult or >> you also said this goes back to Heracitis Hegel's the dialectic which is pretty obvious I think. I don't think that needs much explaining but you can >> another reason that I no we already went through that another reason that I started with Heracitis is because Hegel's indebted to him >> Nietze is massively indebted to him I mean the whole uh you know account of being or existence as becoming and the world as a will to power expressed in different forms of life that are engaged in perspectival struggle with one another on an ontological level is an ontology that you know has taken shape under deep influence from Heracitis who Nichze considered to be his favorite philosopher and Nichze both lectured on Heracitis at length and he wrote about Heracitis at length you know he has these two the pre-platonic philosophers by Nietz is a lecture series of NZE on the prelatonics in that context he calls pre-platonics. That was his preferred term because he con he considered Socrates one of the what we call prescratics. So he called them the pre-platonics and he had a whole lecture series on the pre-platonics which we have now in book form uh where Heracitis is predominant. And then he wrote this other little book, you know, short but a gem of a book, the um philosophy and the tragic age of the Greeks.
>> Oh yeah.
>> Philosophy and the trag have a copy of that right here.
>> Yes. And in that book it's clear that you know Nichze is in love with Heracitis that you know Heraclitis is clearly Nichzche's favorite philosopher.
>> Yeah >> great book. Um so so Nietze is deeply indebted also to Heracitis and then Men Hyiger he he does a whole lecture series he does I think more than one lecture series on Heracitis um which you can use as a key to decipher how much of Haidiger's thinking is indebted to Heracitis and one of the most interesting Go ahead go ahead >> I was going to say real quick Nichi was even even talks about how he's appreciates Heraclitus more than Parmmenities for for his reason of the be the be becoming idea.
>> Yeah, absolutely. Um and and I mean I don't want to get into this in great deal deal of detail but you know Nietze also makes a straw man out of Plato in certain ways just like Plato makes a straw man out of Heracitis. Nze makes a straw man out of Plato in certain ways. And he kind of presents this narrative where Plato is uh being obtuse and not understanding the world the way Heracitis did and that Plato is taking thinking off in a rationalistic diversion that uh winds up creating this uh transcendental metaphysical arc through history which NZ sees it as his task to deconstruct. So really what Nichch is doing is bringing philosophy back to Heracitis right by >> he blames Plato for Christianity.
>> Yes. By deconstructing Platonism and Christianity and so and you know where he's returning to his Heracitis. And then we see the same idea in Haidiger where Haidiger says that philosophy needs a second beginning and that where philosophy kind of um got lost in rational objectification and became increasingly dominated by a technoscientific will to control things that endangers us with the instrumentalization of human life where things went in that u direction which is not to say it's a mistake but you know because H highaidiger like Hegel understands the development of consciousness dialectically. So it was a necessary diversion, but you know, as a kind of antithesis, there's a thesis that's going to be opposed to it that is going to sort of lead to a synthesis that represents a higher understanding. But Herac I'm sorry, Haidiger uh describes this as a second beginning of philosophy, a new beginning of philosophy that would sort of pick up again where Heraclitus left off and take philosophy in a new direction with all of our modern scientific thinking, okay, informing it, take philosophy in a new direction again from out of the understanding of the cosmos that Heracitis had. And if you put you know Haidiger's lectures on Heracitis next to his own original philosophical works you can see how much of Haidiger's thinking is also indebted to Heracitis. One of the most interesting examples of this is in Haidiger's political project which almost no scholars will talk about because he was a Nazi right. I mean how many times do you hear about Haidiger's political philosophy?
Well, he had one, but it led him to, you know, become a high level Nazi official.
And this is actually one of the areas in which you see the deepest influence from Heracitis.
>> Haidiger >> stood on the same line to join the Nazi party on the same day at the same hour on the same line as Carl Schmidt. Carl Schmidt was the leading legal theorist of VHimar, Germany, political thinker, leading No one no one no one no one went after Haidiger after 1945. He just kind of lived his life.
>> It was good.
>> They banned him from teaching.
>> Well, they obviously they're going to do that, but he didn't have to face any trial or anything, right?
>> He did. He was prosecuted and found guilty and banned from teaching as a punishment. As a punishment. Yes. He was one of the prosecuted Nazis.
>> And um >> I know that.
>> Long story. Tried to kill himself at one point. Long story.
>> Wow.
Anyway, um, so he's on the same line to join the party on the same day, same hour as Carl. He's like, "Hey, Carl.
Hey, man. What the [ __ ] you doing here?
What are you doing here, Marty?" You know, and they're they're going to join up with the Nazi party on the same day.
>> Wow. Well, these two exchanged letters with each other because they were both highle faculty members working on the reconstruction as they called it the reconstruction of the German university system under the Nazi regime. The two of them were working on it together and they exchanged letters about it and guess what comes up prominently in these letters? Heracitis >> of course >> and their shared interpretation of Heraclitis and the way in which they understood the aims of the national socialist regime as being in accordance with Heracitis's conception of sovereignty because the National Socialists believed in the persistence of a political sphere that's multi-polar and involves involves differentiated and divergent centers of force engaged in dynamic struggle with one another. In other words, polos.
That the idea that the communists had that you're going to resolve all social struggle and political conflict in a perfect universal society, right? Where the proletariat of the world will be united under a single political system.
That is to dehumanize us by depriving us of the differentiating struggle that is the context in which our higher ideals become clear and that tests our metal and forces us to define our character on an individual and social level. Okay? because you're going to wind up with one system of totalitarian world state that conditions you from childhood to believe in the dogmas of Marxism and why you're living in a society where social justice has been achieved for everybody. There's no outside there. You see, there's no outside where you can then judge your your ideals and your society by whatever it is that rival societies stand for, whether they're allied societies that are different from yours or whether they're the societies of one or more enemies. Okay? Now, that's a problem with communism. On the other hand, capitalism, which America was the exemplar of in that time, the Americans and to a lesser extent the British, the Anglo-American world, right? Capitalism threatens to dissolve all socopolitical conflict through mercantile activity.
Money becomes the common exchange rate for all things and ultimately dissolves all values so that everything and everyone has a price and corporations ultimately become more powerful than the state and instead of your communist world order you wind up with a global oligarchy run by multinational corporations and Haidiger and Schmidt were saying look this is also a misunderstanding of the proper form of political sovereignty because it is also denying the ontological primacy of strife and the uh way in which on a metaphysical level political differentiation is a precondition for psychic development and for our cultivating a personal ethos.
Capitalism is as corrupting to that as communism.
>> And so they saw Haidigar and Schmidt in national socialism a third way that also was explicitly adopting and adopting the classical Greek heritage. I mean you know the Nazis were obsessed >> Oh yeah.
>> with the Greeks.
So they saw in this the national social a third way uh to basically salvage or retrieve a heracitian conception of a uh political sphere shot through with strife and where the um you know differentiation between peoples can persist on a geopolitical level. This is this >> sorry, finish your thoughts.
>> In a way that's conducive to the cultivation of personal ethos. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah.
>> The more you say this, the more it's getting clearer and clear what you're saying because I mean, look at the attitude, the warrior homeriic attitude of the Nazi Germans. I mean there were war going in and uh taking over nations going and taking over North Africa, taking over Greece, taking over obviously France and you know bombing Britain and and then then and then what then you would think okay now we have all of Europe literally like we did what we just did was like comparable to Caesar and Alexander the Great.
Well, let's keep going.
Let's go into freaking uh Russia. Like that is that that can only come about from a from a from from that.
>> Yeah. Here's the important point, Neil.
important place not to make a mistake is that it's not a will to world conquest that Haidiger and Schmidt found appealing in national socialism um and that they found consonant with let's say a heracleian political philosophy is precisely the idea that the Nazi Germans were never going to take over imperial Japan. The Nazis wanted the Japanese to be Japanese.
>> Yes.
>> Capitalists want Japanese to be American and communists want everyone to be the Marxist proletariat.
>> But that's the Greek way too is every every part of the Mediterranean had their own culture. Yes.
>> And you don't stop their culture. You let them keep their culture.
And this is why Alexander's men betrayed him and he wound up dead prematurely because Alexander was a bad student of Aristotle uh in so far as Alexander adopted Persian cosmopolitanism and wanted to create a one world order.
His way of thinking wasn't he left Greek thinking behind and his men did not like that.
So, so you see uh this is what appealed to Haidiger and and and Schmidt and it's why they had a common love of Heracitis that you see, you know, come across in their correspondences. So, point being that was all by way of answering to you why did I start with Heracitis? Because Plato is indebted to him, Hegel is indebted to him, Nietze and Haidiger's thinking are really inconceivable without Heracitis as a background. And so he really winds up being the seinal thinker of the history of philosophy.
>> The only one we haven't touched on is Kant. And I know I know absolutely nothing about >> [ __ ] Kant. [ __ ] Kant.
You know to get into Kant now.
>> Yeah. No, I don't even care.
>> I never got into K.
>> No, man. You know, don't you don't need to get into Kant. No pun intended. No.
You know, you know how that word is pronounced in the original German, right? Kant is a misprononunciation, right?
>> What is it in German?
>> Kunt.
>> Kunt.
>> So, don't get into K.
>> Let's not get into K. Okay.
>> Yeah. So, but >> well, let's round it out with Nichi obviously is my favorite modern philosopher in the modern world. He's just for so many reasons. I I don't get much into modern philosophy. I got to get I've delved a little bit into Hegel.
Um I mostly stay in the ancient world, but Nichi, I love Nichi. I'll read Nichi all day long. Um, you know, you mentioned he's he's embedded indebted to Heracitis.
Um, any like what else can you say about Nichi as far as what we've been talking about?
>> Okay, this is a great place to end. So, a careful reading of Nietze in the context of some of these fundamental thinker that we've already talked about, right? like so if you I mean a lot of people read Nietze in their teens and they don't have any context you know in terms of the history of philosophy and so on and so forth and um fortunately by the time I read Nietze I had already read a little bit of Plato and um but you know often your first encounter with Nietze is ignorant of the history of philosophy so you don't know the Greeks it's going to be gibberish >> well this is the thing and this is how most people's encounter with Nietze right and so they come across thinking ah man, it's all might makes right. And he's a relativist. He's a relativist.
There's no morality. And uh you know, the will to power, it's all about how you if you dominate, then you're justified. And these supermen of the future, they're like these cynical amoral people who can manipulate all of society and so on and so forth. No, this is not Nichza. Okay? And you can only really understand that if you come back to Nichza after having studied some of these other fundamental thinkers like Plato and Aristotle um and Hegel and you realize that oh wait a minute the way in which NZA is legitimately deconstructing Christianity is bringing us back to the that Aristotle thought about ethics and how society should be run, right? And uh let's say Nichzche's ontology by deconstructing the um Platonic Christian or Scholastic Aristotilian trajectory of thought which predominated in the middle ages. He's bringing us back to the way Heracitis thought about ontology.
>> Yeah. So, Nietze is actually very much um bringing us back into the sphere of thinking of the Greeks both in terms of ontology and epistemology and also in terms of ethics and politics.
And one of the things that you realize in an informed reading of Nietz from out of the perspective of the Greeks is that Nichzche's conception of the overmen is very much a successor to the philosopher rulers of Plato or the uh aristocrats of Aristotle. Okay. So there's a reason why NZ also calls the overmen the aristocracy of the future. He uses that phrase on a number of occasions. He calls them the masters of the earth, the overmen and the aristocracy of the future.
>> He also refers to them as artist legislators or philosophical artist tyrants.
And uh what he's essentially doing is further developing the Platonic Aristotilian conception of the social engineer which we also see in August compt.
He's further developing that in a way that's um conssonant with contemporary technoscientific development.
So that aware now of Darwin right Nietze writing in the wake of Darwin deeply impacted by Darwinian uh evolution >> writing in the wake of Darwin and of the social Darwinist theorists that arose immediately together with Darwin including I believe Darwin's cousin um wasn't Francis Galton Darwin's cousin I believe >> yeah so he's writing Nietze in the wake of Darwinism and social Darwinism and he's saying included a bunch of eugenicists obviously like France Elton is reappropriating eugenics from out of Plato in the context of Darwinian evolutionary theory and Nietze is saying look >> it's not just a question of a certain class of social planners reconstructing the society that everybody else is living in along lines that they have intuited and understood to be more conducive of human flourishing.
It's also the case that humanity is an evolving organism and that this current constitution of mankind should not be assumed to be the end point of our evolutionary trajectory considering what's possible with emerging technologies and techniques.
So that techn as it's uh evolving in the modern era and NZE is bearing witness to and techn broadly construed to include not just machines born of the industrial revolution but also techniques in behavioral modification that are coming from out of psychology and social reconstruction that's coming from out of sociology a science that after all was founded by August Compt one of the fundamental thinkers I address in the volume. Nichch is looking at all of that and saying that techn is coming to a point where the basic parameters of the human condition can be altered by technology.
And so it's no longer simply a question of a higher type of man being a social planner for the rest of human society.
Things have come to where technology may uh yield a bifurcation of mankind into two divergent species. An overman or superhuman species of the future and a subhuman species which devolves from out of what Nze calls the last men.
And these last men are people again like to go back remember what we were saying in terms of Aristotle like if you have no proper upbringing and you know >> the last men >> yeah you're in a violent ghetto and so well things are coming to the point where given the technological possibilities that are in play if you're one of these what Aristotle calls like irredeemably degenerate people what need to call the last man somebody with no aims no direction no ethos no aesthetic cultivation etc >> which which is most people today, >> which is most people today, you're going to wind up a robot.
If you're in the world at all, technology and technique has progressed to the point where the machinery of production and control of behavior will turn you into a robot, into a cohawk in a vast machinery which is going to serve the purposes of these highly differentiated Supermen.
the the Uber man. Okay.
>> Yeah.
>> And they are going to meet the same conditions of the advancement of technology that we're witnessing today, you know, cybernetics, virtual reality, mediation of everything by artificial intelligence and the possibilities opened up by genetic engineering. They are going to meet all of those technological possibilities with vision, will, determination, purpose, inner cultivation. And they're going to use those possibilities to even further differentiate themselves from the undifferentiated mass of zombies that are going to be incorporated into the machinery of production. Okay? And we're going to therefore see a bifurcation of the human race. And this then changes what social engineering means from what it meant for Plato or Aristotle or even August compt because we're no longer and also it changes the dynamics of what Hegel analyzed as the master slave dialectic because still for Hegel the master ultimately needed the recognition of the slave on a psychological level in order to overcome come alienation and be a whole person.
In Hegel, the master relationship to the slave needed to be restructured into a more egalitarian dynamic that allowed for the master to receive recognition from the slave as uh members of the same society.
And this is one of the ways in which you can see very clearly how Marxist communism evolves from out of Hegel because Marx >> communist society that's dismantled class differentiation is the only society in which who formerly was the master is going to >> u be afforded that type of psychological recognition from the the former slave now as his peer and fellow in society.
Okay. And the only way to rise above that class system is to have everyone believe that they're all equal and you're literally just, you know, the, you know, above it all.
>> Well, in terms of what? Communism.
>> Yes. Like a world communist system where everyone sort of has this like you're all just workers and you're all like, you know, you have the masters of that.
You have to be there has to be someone controlling.
>> Oh, hold on. This is a very subtle point because now >> that's a critique of Marx what you're saying right now because Marx believed that the dictate what he called the dictatorship of the proletariat >> was a temporary measure where these people like Len who eventually became like Lenin and Stalin and whatever were going to like take power. They're going to seize power and they're going to be very totalitarian but it's just temporary and the point is for everyone to wind up in an egalitarian society together where there's no master at all, right? No gods, no masters, right? But in point of fact, what actually happened was the leveling of the masses and a totalitarian elite, the polit bureau, led by, you know, the Lenins and the Stalins >> with an insanely powerful military that can go and conquer most of Eastern Europe, >> right? Which kind of proves Nichzche's point, >> okay, about the will. And so what N is saying is what? [ __ ] this egalitarian [ __ ] What are you talking about?
there's a a a minuscule minority of humanity that's going to be evolutionarily selected for. And this is always how evolution works. Evolution picks minorities, mutants that are optimized for certain environmental stresses. So let's say the environmental stress today is the fact we could nuke ourselves off the face of the earth. The environmental stress is how the [ __ ] we're going to manage artificial intelligence. Right? These are the environmental stresses and a minority are going to be selected for their capacity to live in a way that can effectively manage these super dangerous technologies including genetic engineering. And the vast majority are not up to it. Not even close. In fact, they're their interaction with these technologies is going to be such that it fully transforms them into zombies, into robots. Okay?
And they will be they'll be uh they will succumb to total dehumanization and instrumentalization uh for the lack of ethos and the will to differentiation and discernment. Their lack of discernment.
So, so what Nichze is saying is also a critique of the master slave dialectic logic in Hegel where the masters really aren't masters of anyone anymore because the slaves aren't really slaves. They're like literally robots.
They've been cybernetically and genetically transformed into part of the machinery of production.
And the masters have their own aims and purposes that are no longer dialectically dependent upon a human person that is being exploited or subjugated.
Uh and so it you see this is a a very radical transformation that takes place in Nichzche and then Haidiger has a lot of anxiety about this uh in terms of the global infraring power of technological science and the danger that it will instrumentalize humanity and uh deep weariness on Haidiger's part about the mentality of total control and What will happen if we lose our capacity to let go and to experience ecstasy and to have an openness toward being that's no that's not thoroughly conditioned by a desire to control everything. Right?
He H highaidiger has all these anxieties about Nichzche's will to power and what these uber mention are really going to be like okay which are some of the reasons why in the later part of the Nazi era like going into the 1940s Haidiger increasingly distanced himself from the Nazis when he started to see the the aggressive eugenics programs and concentration camps and all this [ __ ] he was like whoa man this is some Frankenstein [ __ ] I don't know if this is really the way we should the direction we should be going in with this >> and he gives a whole series of lectures at that point in the 40s on Nichzche and uses those lectures Haidiger's Nietze lectures they're like this four volumes like this he uses those lectures to implicitly critique national socialism >> if he did it explicitly he'd have wound up being arrested so he uses the critique of Nietze na kind of as a straw man to critique Nazism um and the idea of the will to power anyway so that that kind of rounds out you social engineering, you know, as it comes to Nichze and then Haidiger's anxieties about that. Um, and this is reflected again in the later part of this book where I, you know, the last two thinkers I deal with are Nichza and Haidiger.
>> Wow, that's incredible. Um, I'm excited to finish the book. I'm going to go back to where I uh left off at Plato. I skipped ahead because I wanted to see what you were writing about Nichze and a little bit of Hegel. said, I'm going to go back to get to Aristotle and and uh um and and and continue on, but people really the link is in the description.
Get the book Amazon, right?
>> Yeah. Amazon. Amazon. Let me mention one other thing which is that >> y >> I just came out with a Substack called metapolitical metaphilos and it's very relevant to this book. it it takes the theme of the social engineer which we kind of been focusing on here in particular and runs it through the whole trajectory of these fundamental thinkers that I cover in this book. So that essay on my Substack, you know, you can add also a link to my Substack in the description is a good companion to this book. Uh and I'm thinking probably to write a part two to that essay uh sometime soon, maybe by the time you have this episode out.
>> There you go. Check out the Substack, get the book. also good. Check out his other books, too. Um, yeah, thanks for coming on. My my audience always just loves when you're here. So, any Yeah, thanks.
>> Thank you. I thank you. I missed being on and uh you know, we should do this more often.
>> Yes, we will. And maybe maybe we'll meet again in New York City. So, >> all right. Well, thank you.
>> And you have just attained true nosis.
Heat.
Heat.
Heat. Heat.
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