Plato's Terrifying Secret Doctrines | Jason Reza Jorjani

Plato's Noble lie isn't simply one concept or one strategy that he deploys as part of the larger edifice of his thought. Plato's entire philosophical project could be seen as a noble lie. My thesis is essentially that Plato didn't believe in the existence of the forms; that he contrived this doctrine for the purposes of psychological and social engineering.

Before he met Socrates, he was an aspiring tragic poet in the theater of Dionysus. The story is that after he heard Socrates talk, he burned his great tragedy in an offering to Prometheus. He calls forth the god of fire and decides to become a student of Socrates. But he's coming from the background of having been a tragic poet. Dionysus is the god associated with tragedy.

A case can be made that people who understood very well what Plato's esoteric project was, and people who knew how to deploy noble lies, engineered the Abrahamic revelation, the biblical religion, as a catalyst for the transformation of society. But the catalyst was not intended to get people to become good Jews, or later good Christians, or even later good Muslims. The catalyst was intended to get people to go to the devil, instigate rebellion, give people models of challenging authority. That's very Plato. His intention was to separate the goats from the sheep.

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Well, it's great to be back with you. Yeah, we've been planning this talk on Plato for a really long time, and, um, it's a difficult subject to approach. I've written two essays that are relevant to it, which I want to reference right up front, uh, because, uh, as deep as we may go here, it's still only going to be scratching the surface compared to the complexity of what I've written in these essays. And the most important of them is called "The Pharmacon Artist." And "Lovers of Sophia." So I believe it's the second essay in this book, "Lovers of Sophia." It's an anthology, it's a collection of essays, rather than really being a book. And, um, these essays were actually written before "Prometheus and Atlas." I think almost every piece in "Lovers of Sophia" preceded "Prometheus and Atlas," in some cases significantly. And frankly, I have to confess that "Pharmacon Artist" is the oldest of them. So, in that essay on Plato, you see, which is fitting because, you know, uh, as I, as I quote Alfred North Whitehead at the beginning of this essay, um, you know, some people have taken the view that the whole history of Western philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. That's how Whitehead put it. And so I suppose it's fitting that my own first philosophical work was my interpretation of Plato, which is an essay of almost book length. It could be a, you know, short book. Uh, and I wrote it in my 20s. And in a lot of ways, this essay, "The Pharmacon Artist," can be seen as an esoteric key to my entire corpus. Uh, and by the end of our conversation, maybe I'm going to highlight a few ways in which that's the case. So that essay and "Lovers of Sophia." And then there is a chapter in "Prometheus and Atlas," uh, toward the end, I believe it is, um, chapter, uh, yeah, chapter nine of "Prometheus and Atlas," "Atlas of the New Atlantis," deals with, um, Plato's "quote myth unquote" of Atlantis. And we'll get into that as well here because I think it's very relevant to understanding, uh, what we could call Plato's Unwritten Doctrine, or, you know, esoteric Plato. Uh, his knowledge concerning Atlantis is very relevant to that subject. And in that chapter, "Atlas of the New Atlantis," I get into, you know, Plato's understanding of Atlantis and how it's related to the way in which he wanted to transform, uh, Greek society. So, anyway, those are the two references that I wanted to give up front. Um, and I mean, do you have any, uh, preparatory remarks you'd like to make before we jump in?

Yeah, I just want to lay this out for people that this, we didn't know, we didn't plan this out as a series to begin with, but it's becoming, it's, it's materializing as one now. So we started off our discussion, this is going to be a four-part playlist on my channel for people who are watching. It's okay if this is the first video you stumbled on, you can watch this one first, you can watch them in any order. But I would prefer to start off with the Mithra video because Mithra is such an ancient idea that has his, has his tentacles in the Vedic world as well as the Western world. And then, so that was our first video. We introduced that. And then we went into Zoroaster. And Zoroaster, coming out of the Mithra tradition, revolutionizes religion, theology, philosophy for the entire Western world. And so then, after that video, we did Prometheism. And why that's so important to come through, word, it's because from the Prometheism video, it really shows that there's a divide in the world between people who are submitting to this idea of a, uh, a tyrant God, the Al-Kuhul, the Judeo-Christian religions, versus the Promethean religions of divine knowledge that'll make that you, because self, become like the gods. So there's this, there's this idea of the two. And now we're getting into Plato. And so Plato is going to be the end of all this, but also the beginning of something else. And so, any, if you want, based on what I just said, tell us why this is so important to have Plato at the end of this.

You know, I, I don't want to go on about Iran again, uh, you know, and continue to give people the impression that I'm some kind of Persian chauvinist. But there are a few, uh, points that could be made with relation to these other conversations of ours that you referenced. And one is that, of course, Plato was a member of the Pythagorean order. After the death of Socrates, Plato went to Italy and joined the Pythagorean order. And, you know, of course, uh, Pythagoras himself had studied at length in Egypt. And so Plato kind of followed Pythagoras' footsteps and then studied in Egypt for a while, tracing, you know, some Pythagorean ideas to their source in ancient Egyptian wisdom. But as we've discussed in our previous conversations, Pythagoras also studied for over a decade in the capital of the Persian Empire. He was brought back to the capital of Iran by Cambyses II, the son of Cyrus the Great, and he studied with the Magi in Babylon, the administrative capital of, uh, you know, Iran. And so, and by the way, um, Pythagoras only left Iran when the Persians conquered Samos. He was from Samos. And so he only goes home once his homeland, his island, becomes part of the Persian Empire. And there's some evidence to suggest that basically he was kind of sent on a mission by the Magi. And that his founding of the Pythagorean order in Sicily is an extension of sort of the Magian order of Babylon and so forth. And so here you have one of Plato's sources of, uh, wisdom, namely the Pythagorean order, having been fundamentally shaped by Mithraic, Zoroastrian thought. And then Plato, as we're going to get into in this conversation, very significantly, Plato's, I don't know if you want to say second most important source of influence, whatever, another major influence on him was the school of Heraclitus. Um, and in fact, let me reference this right here. Okay. Aristotle tells us that Plato in his youth, presumably after the death of Socrates, Socrates died when Plato was still quite young, uh, but presumably immediately after the death of Socrates, Plato became a Heraclitian. And specifically, he studied with this Heraclitian teacher, Cratylus. Okay. Cratylus, who was a thinker in the school of Heraclitus. And actually, we just want to take the, the time for a moment to read this quote here, uh, because it's very significant to the argument that I want to lay out about Plato's Unwritten Doctrine. One is where Aristotle tells us in his Metaphysics, "For as a young man, Plato was originally an associate of Cratylus and Heraclitian opinions to the effect that all perceptible things were in a permanent state of flux and that there was no knowledge of them, and these things he also later on maintained." Unquote. Then there's another remark regarding this from Aristotle, also in his Metaphysics, where Aristo, and by the way, for those who are not familiar, Aristotle was Plato's student. Okay. Actually, Aristotle was Plato's greatest student, even though Plato did not choose him to head the academy after his death. So, you know, Aristotle is a fairly good, uh, you know, witness and source of testimony regarding the developmental trajectory of Plato's thought. And the other thing he tells us in Metaphysics, um, concerning the Heraclitian background of Plato's philosophy is this quote: "Now the starting point for those who came up with the theory of forms was a conviction of the truth of the Heraclitian considerations to the effect that all perceptible objects are in a permanent state of flux, so that a condition on the very possibility of knowledge and understanding was the existence, in addition to the perceptible ones, of certain other natural entities which are not in a state of flux, on the assumption that entities in flux were not possible objects of knowledge." Unquote. Okay. So this is what Aristotle tells us about. And then there's one other remark that's specifically about Plato's Heraclitian teacher, Cratylus. So this is Aristotle commenting on Plato's, uh, teacher from the school of Heraclitus: "They, meaning the Heraclitans, observe that all nature around us undergoes change and held that one cannot speak the truth about that which is undergoing change, so a fortiori nothing true could be said about what was changing at all points in all ways. This is the position of those who appropriated the legacy of Heraclitus, notably of Cratylus. His mature position was that speech of any kind was radically inappropriate and that expression should be restricted exclusively to the movement of the finger. He was appalled that Heraclitus had claimed that you could not step twice into the same river. In Cratylus' opinion, it was already going too far to admit stepping into the same river once." So that was, well, I, I presented that as a kind of a side, but it's going to become key to the argument that I want to make. But I took the time to just, you know, um, uh, put those quotes out there because Heraclitus was invited by Darius the Great, the emperor of the Persian Empire, to be the court philosopher of Iran. Wow. Okay. So look, in a country where you have all these Magi who are the bearers of the legacy of Zarathustra, Darius doesn't choose one of his fellow Iranian Magi to be the court philosopher of the Persian Empire. He invites this Greek from Ephesus to come to the Persian court. Now, of course, Heraclitus refuses and instead he exiles himself to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, never leaves other than to come out onto the temple steps and play games with children whose parents are, you know, visiting to, uh, basically worship the goddess. Um, but Artemis, the goddess whose temple Heraclitus sequesters himself to, is also originally an Iranian goddess, specifically worshiped by the Sarmatians. So Heraclitus is very clearly in the Iranian orbit spiritually. And so now we have a second major influence on Plato who's steeped in Iranian thought, Heraclitus.

Let me just jump in for one second. Artemis has the subtitle, her, her name, her nickname, Luciferia. She is like the female aspect of Lucifer. So you have this, we, when we talked about this in Prometheism, this idea of the opposing viewpoint of these two different views on what God is or who, which God we should give our, our devotion to. And so here we are with the, this court with a, with a goddess whose subtitle's name is Luciferia. And that's from Callimachus. I can show the sources if you guys want. I'll add something esoteric that makes this even more striking. So the, the name Artemis, uh, contrary to what some linguists have argued, doesn't really mean anything in Greek. But it means a hell of a lot in the original, uh, Old Iranian. And that's, it means immortal truth. Arta meant truth in the sense of like, logos, cosmic order. And so it's the undying cosmic order, which, by the way, was symbolized by fire. Heraclitus' fire becomes, you know, the metaphor for cosmic energy in his thinking. Means immortal truth in Old Iranian. And it's a, what do you call it, um, they say Seth fat in Persian. It's a quality. It's a, um, an epithet, okay? It's a descriptor. But the actual name of the deity that was worshiped by the Sarmatians, who is, uh, described as Arthana Misha, or immortal truth, was Satano or Shatana. Okay. So, and so I've always thought that, look, I mean, this culture, the Scythians invaded, the Scythians and Sarmatians are kindred cultures, in some cases, they're almost indistinguishable from one another. And they invaded the Middle East by at least 700 BC. And we know they got as far as the, uh, the border of Palestine with Egypt. Okay. Or, or the border of Israel with Egypt. And so I've always thought that this reference in Hebrew actually is coming from the name of Shatana, and was a demonization of this serpentine goddess figure of the Sarmatians, who had, you know, serpents entwined around her. Um, and who was served by the Gorgons. The Gorgons were sort of, uh, goddess figures associated with this Great Goddess. And so, in any case, there's a lot there, you know, uh, behind Artemis. And, uh, the figure that, of course, Heraclitus decided to, uh, devote himself to, or rather, at least take refuge in her, in the sanctum of her temple, rather than accepting the invitation of Darius the Great. Anyway, we went on a tangent. My point was that Plato is influenced by at least two figures who are steeped in Iranian thinking: Pythagoras and Heraclitus.

So, did you want to, uh, well, okay. So I just want, I'm glad we laid that out because I'm trying to show the setting in which we're in that leads up to the world that Plato. So when we get to, by the time we get to Plato, Plato is, is initiated into the Pythagoreans. But we hear about him at his funeral, according to people who write about us. Aristotle says the Magi attended his funeral. So what, what is he, what is he?

I got distracted. This was the third thing that I was going to mention is that I believe it is Aristotle. This is reported on by Mary Sedigast in her book "When Zarathustra Spoke." According to classical sources, the Magi attended Plato's funeral and they claimed he was a member of the order. Okay. Now, this doesn't mean that, um, Plato was like a Zoroastrian or something. Okay. Like, this is a common misconception today. The Order of the Magi, you know, I discussed this at length in "Iranian Leviathan." Originally, it was a Mithraic accord. And it was very esoteric. Um, you know, it had incorporated various Babylonian and Assyrian beliefs into it and so forth, Chaldean astrology. And so it was a complex esoteric order. Um, and just because Plato was a member of the Order of the Magi didn't mean that he wasn't also a member of the Pythagorean order, and also this, and also that. I mean, today people who belong to Freemasonry tend to also belong to, I don't know, the Golden Dawn and any number of other esoteric societies. And so Plato was probably such a person in those days.

He said Augustus initiated into seven different things. Yeah, yeah. But it's worth mentioning that, you know, Plato wanted to go to Persia after traveling to Italy and Egypt. Never made it to Persia. But, you know, the Persian Empire extended into Greece, into parts of Greece. And it appears at some point he was initiated into the Order of the Magi. And the Magi consider him among their own. Now, okay, here's a good lead into to the, you know, uh, conversation that I really want to have. The most striking thing about Plato being a Magus, a member of the Order of the Magi, is his concept of the noble lie. Because as Herodotus tells us, and as we know directly from the, uh, compositions of Zarathustra, lying was considered the worst thing among the Persians. And, um, well, I was going to say among Zoroastrians in particular, but also in Mithraism. Early Mithra is, Mithra is the god of oaths and contracts, right? This raising of the right hand that we have to this day, this is a Mithraic oath. You know, when you raise your right hand to supposedly tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth in court and so forth. And so how is Plato a member of the Order of the Magi and also someone who's advocating this concept of the noble lie? Now, in "Iranian Leviathan," I have a whole chapter called "Emperor of Noble Lies," which is about Darius the Great. And I show that the understanding of truths that prevailed amongst the Mithraic initiates in Iran was a lot more complex than some simplistic idea of, you know, honesty to a fault, right? And, you know, so, so someone who wants to, to understand the nuances of the concept of truth and its relationship to strategic deception in an Iranian context should look at that chapter, "Emperor of Noble Lies," about Darius the Great in "Iranian Leviathan." But to bring the conversation back to Plato, in this essay, "Pharmacon Artist," that I referenced at the outset, I argued that Plato's Noble lie isn't simply one concept or one strategy that he deploys as part of the larger edifice of his thought. Plato's entire philosophical project could be seen as a noble lie. By his entire philosophical project, I mean the elaboration of the so-called theory of forms. So I make this really radical argument in "The Pharmacon Artist," some of the highlights of which, you know, I'd like to discuss with you, um, where my thesis is essentially that Plato didn't believe in the existence of the forms; that he contrived this doctrine for the purposes of psychological and social engineering. And that his "quote unquote" Unwritten Doctrine, which he confesses to having, [Music] is one that is, uh, let's say deeper than, or, um, yeah, let's say deeper than, more profound than this exoteric theory of forms that he, uh, publicly disseminates. And they've become so seminal and pivotal in the history of Western rationalism. So that's the basic thesis, uh, that I forward in, in the essay, "The Pharmacon Artist."

Now, that's interesting because in the dialogues that Plato gives us, there's this, this really important dialogue called "Parmenides," where he has, uh, the, the master of that time period was Parmenides. But underneath Parmenides are these two up-and-coming sages that are students, Socrates and Zeno. And Zeno is, is, uh, he's, I guess you would say, before the Epicureans, he's sort of a, not, he's against the forms. He's more of like an atomic atoms and void. But Socrates, in the, he has, through the mouth of Socrates, he's arguing for forms, and he wins the debate, and he convinces Parmenides that forms is the, is the real reality. And so, is this part of this? He's setting up, look, even the great master Parmenides believes in these forms. Is this what's happening?

So, okay, Parmenides is among the most complex Platonic dialogues. And in that dialogue, Parmenides, and the dialogue called "The Sophist," where, you know, Plato is engaging in another one of his critiques of the kind of sophistry that prevailed in his time, um, where people would hire these tutors to basically teach them how to argue anything, regardless of whether they believed in it or not. In these two dialogues, "Parmenides" and "The Sophist," Plato engages with the thought of Parmenides. And one of the keys in my argument, one of the key points in the thesis that I lay out in "Pharmacon Artist" is that Plato makes a straw man both of Parmenides and of Heraclitus in order to develop the theory of forms. Right? So, um, let me, yeah, since we're on Parmenides, let's, let's go with that, and then I'll come back to Heraclitus. In essence, what goes on in these two dialogues, "Parmenides" and "The Sophist," is that Plato, uh, feigns stupidity in the guise of Socrates, his mouthpiece, by misinterpreting what Parmenides means by "being" in the sense of the One, and by "nothingness." Okay? So, in his "Way of Truth," in Parmenides' poem, the "Way of Truth," and Parmenides was, let's see about, he flourished, as they say, in the Greek context, he flourished around 475 BC. So we're talking about someone living a generation before Socrates, on a couple of generations before Plato. And Parmenides, his point in the "Way of Truth" is very similar to the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta. It's that the world of multiplicity and change is illusion, and really the only existent thing is an absolutely unified, eternal, and infinite One. So if anything really exists, it has to be one thing, of which nothing can really be predicated. And all of the specific characteristics, the changing things have, changing both in space and over the course of time, all the predicates, uh, and and qualitative characteristics of changing things are really illusions. Okay? And so, you know, what we really are are sort of, sort of like, uh, facets of this infinite and eternal One. Um, and we should strive by the power of our transcendental minds to apprehend our union, our, uh, our, yeah, our identity with this transcendental One. And the Eleatics, the school of, uh, Parmenides, would engage in various practices in order to, uh, initiate adherents into the mystery of this transcendental Oneness, including the use of psychedelic drugs inside caves. So Plato, besides studying with Cratylus, who was a Heraclitian, Plato at one point studied with, I believe his name was Hermodorus, uh, representative of the school of Parmenides. So Plato is not getting his own, his only understanding of Parmenides through Socrates. Plato, prior to having written the "Parmenides" and "The Sophist" dialogues, studied under an Eleatic or, you know, Parmenidian teacher himself. And I, okay, so I cannot believe that what we see reflected in the dialogues "Parmenides" and "The Sophist" represents Plato's actual understanding of Parmenides because basically he argues that, like, Parmenides doesn't understand what non-being means. That when, when Parmenides is saying, look, either you have to say that there's nothing at all, or you have to say that really everything that's in a state of, in a seeming state of change and all of the multiplicity in the world is actually just a One. Right? When he sets up, Plato says that when, when Parmenides sets up this false binary in the "Way of Truth," his poem, he's mistaking what non-being means. And that when we say, you know, nothingness or or the non-existent, we are just referring to something other than the present state of affairs. It's what we would call, like, an indexical reference. So, you know, right now, um, you know, I'm not sitting in a taxi. So, you know, if I say, you know, like, you know, my laptop on my lap in the taxi, now it's referring to some other state of affairs than the current state of affairs where I'm sitting in this room, right, in this, uh, in this apartment. And so it's a counterfactual that we intend to indicate when we use "not" such and such, when we use a negation. It's not some mysterious nothingness. This is what Plato's arguing. And Parmenides, on "The Sophist," and so, uh, basically what he's trying to parse out in these dialogues is what we mean when we refer to a true or false state of affairs with some kind of a logically constructed proposition. He's trying to lay the groundwork for epistemology, for a theory of knowledge. But Plato, well, let's just say, would have to have been dim in order to believe that this is really what Parmenides was on about, right? I mean, clearly Plato could have understood that by nothingness, Parmenides meant something like what Gotama Buddha means when he talks about, and that Parmenides' you know, advocacy for, uh, an ontology of an absolutely perfect, unified, and eternal being is similar to the argument of Advaita Vedanta adherents against what they consider Buddhist nihilism. He would at least have had to have that level of understanding. And if you read the, you know, Platonic corpus and see the kind of sophistication of thought this man engages in, and, you know, his flair for irony and sarcasm and the subtlety with which he writes, there's no way to me that that could have been lost on him. And also the numerous passages in various dialogues, especially "Phaedrus" and "Symposium," where Plato reveals himself to be a profound mystic, there's no way that he thought Parmenides was making this kind of a logical error. And yet he creates this straw man out of Parmenides. And he, part of the, the other part of the straw man is that he says that what Parmenides meant by the One is mistaken. That the One is sort of like what makes anything the particular thing that it is, right? It's like the, what, what makes a substance cohere as that particular thing that it is. It's not some, you know, mystical, vague, uh, sort of, you know, Oneness that encompasses all things. Because if there were a Oneness that encompasses all things, then anything that you would predicate of that would contradict its essence as infinite and eternal, right? Like, if you imagine, if you imagine the Oneness as some mystics have, as a sphere that extends in all directions, well, you can't wrap your mind around the outer edges of that sphere without putting the sphere in a certain space, in the context of a certain space. There's something outside it. And once you admit that the sphere is inside a certain space, you also admit that it has spatial parts. You can think of the top of the sphere, the side of the sphere, the back of the sphere. So then there's a multiplicity spatially. And then, as you're thinking about the sphere, time is elapsing. So then you're thinking of the sphere as it was in state A as opposed to state B, or what it's going to be in state C. So the sphere winds up, or say, you know, it's a rotating sphere, it winds up having temporal parts. So as soon as you have any coherent conception of this sphere, uh, of the One, it has both spatial and temporal parts. And anything that you predicate of its spatial and temporal parts contradicts the, uh, the essence of infinity and eternity that's proper to this One. So this is the kind of argument that he engages in, right, in "Parmenides" and "The Sophist." And I think that it's making a straw man out of Parmenides. Plato does something similar with Heraclitus. Okay. So Heraclitus is an incredibly sophisticated thinker. Um, this guy, when he describes everything in the cosmos as an ever-changing fire, he is not using fire the way Thales used water as a kind of element from out of which all other elements or things can be derived. Right? We had thinkers very early in the history of pre-Socratic philosophy who took one or another element as fundamental. In the case of Thales, it was water, and they derived everything else like Earth and air and fire from out of it. It's a huge mistake to think that that's what Heraclitus means by fire. If you understand what Heraclitus means by fire, look at what Werner Heisenberg says about him in "Physics and Philosophy." The greatest German scientists of the era of the Second World War, German physicists rather, Werner Heisenberg, one of the pioneers of quantum theory, writes about Heraclitus in "Physics and Philosophy," saying that how Heraclitus describes fire and its relationship with the psyche, and the way in which fire is a metaphor for the Logos, okay, the, the order in the cosmos, and the relationship between the fire and the psyche, to the mind of Werner Heisenberg was some kind of a precursor to the relationship between consciousness and quantum potential in quantum theory. So that what Heraclitus means by fire is something like what we mean by quantum potential. Right? You have these, like, uh, early atomists that thought the world was basically made up of marbles. Their metaphor for the fundamental stuff were like something like, you know, the marbles the Greek children played with, right? You had others who believed that some substance, you know, like, uh, like water went through various changes of state and did all things arose, had their genesis in that manner. What Heraclitus is saying is that what everything is made up out of is a dynamic flux that can't be pinned down and that is never in a static state. At no point you find it in a static state. It's something that's always inherently in a dynamic flux. And that thing is integrally interconnected with consciousness, or what Heraclitus calls psyche. Psyche and the relationship between such a and this dynamic flux has a Logos to it. It has an order to it, okay? And it has, it expresses certain teleology. And this is very similar to what we eventually arrived at on the other side of atomism in the quantum theory that, you know, describes the collapse of the, uh, quantum wave potential by consciousness. So Heraclitus, you know, is so sophisticated in his ontological thinking that, you know, Werner Heisenberg, I think rightly saw, um, his understanding of, you know, the cosmic flux and its relationship to the mind as a precursor of quantum theory. And Heraclitus makes it very clear that he isn't saying there's no such thing as existence. In other words, it's not a view of pure becoming as opposed to being. It's that existence, uh, is always in a state of process. And this process does have a kind of teleology to it. Um, and so when, uh, Aristotle claims that Plato developed the theory of forms because Heraclitans like Cratylus, Plato's teacher in his youth, thought that you couldn't know anything about things that are in a state of perpetual flux, this is not credible. Okay? Um, there's no way that Plato did not study Heraclitus for himself. There's no way that, you know, this book that we call "The Fragments" today, that used to be called "On Nature," isn't the book that Plato picked up and read for himself. He probably poured over it for years. And as a, as a student of the Heraclitian school. And so even if Cratylus was such an imbecile that he misunderstood Heraclitus so badly that he says, you know, Heraclitus shouldn't have said you can't step into the same river twice, you can't even step into it once because as your foot is going into the river, it's not the same river, the waters keep flowing, right? Even if Cratylus was such an imbecile to believe that, uh, Heraclitus was advocating a view of such sheer becoming that, you know, you couldn't know anything about objects, right? That, you know, not knowledge was, was, uh, ruled out, and that we were going to wind up in a state of like perpetual, uh, skepticism regarding everything. There's no way that Plato wouldn't have understood Heraclitus better than Cratylus himself did, right? I mean, this is this is typical. Like, you go to study a certain doctrine with some teacher, and that teacher is a lame representative of that school of thought, and you're introduced to that school of thought through the particular teacher, but then you go and, you know, study the origins of that thought yourself, and you come to a better understanding of it than this person who, you know, uh, gave you some introductory lessons concerning. And so I have to believe that that's the case in terms of Plato's understanding of Heraclitus. And I argue that it is the case on the basis of all kinds of remarks that Plato makes in "Cratylus" and "Theaetetus," in particular. There are two dialogues, a dialogue named after the Heraclitian teacher, he had Cratylus, and another dialogue, "Theaetetus," in which, and you have to read my essay "Pharmacon Artist" to really be able to see, you know, how I do this, but in which, if you subtract the forms that Plato's setting forth, the account of the world that you're left with is a deep understanding of the teaching of Heraclitus. So, so, so basically, uh, you can see from in between the lines of "Cratylus" and "Theaetetus," that Plato thought deeply about the doctrine of Heraclitus. But then he wants to make this straw man from out of Heraclitus. The same straw man that Aristotle gives us when he says Plato studied with Cratylus, he saw that if you have this view of all things in flux, knowledge is not possible. And so he came up with a theory of forms as a way to build an epistemology, to build essentially what becomes the first theory of knowledge and the basis for science, ultimately. Yeah, uh, it requires making a straw man out of Heraclitus in order to do that. Because see, essentially, essentially what Plato does is this: he takes Heraclitus and he turns him into this cardboard cutout where everything is in a state of flux, we can't know anything about physis, right? And in fact, the mind is not stable enough and separate enough from the flux of nature for the subject to predicate anything of objects that have independent existence. He turns this into the view of Heraclitus, right? So everything is flowing, you can't know anything about the, the, the dynamic, uh, physis, that's let's say the material world, right? Hyle, matter, is a dynamic physis that you can't know anything about because it's always flowing. Then he makes a straw man out of Parmenides, right? And he says, okay, well, what can be salvaged from out of Parmenides is this idea of the One as what gives something enough coherence to be the particular thing that it is, namely to make it a substance. And he says, instead of there being this One that's synonymous with infinite and eternal being, uh, which would render the entire world of multiplicity and illusion, there is a multiplicity of ones. There's a multiplicity of unities. And this multiplicity of unities interacts with or interferes with nature in a state of flux in order to give us the objects of our perceptible world that we experience. And here the Pythagorean doctrine becomes significant because this multiplicity of ones, okay, that he's getting from Parmenides, he's adapting from out of Harmony. It takes a mathematical form, which he's getting from the Pythagorean order. So remember, Pythagoras, quote unquote, believed the world is made of number. That's an oversimplification, but Pythagoras thought that the fundamental constructs of the physical world were geometric and mathematical in nature. So Plato takes the Oneness of the One of Parmenides and he fuses it with the geometric quality of the fundamental nature of reality as Pythagoras elaborated it. And he creates these forms, which compares to geometricians, geometers' templates, the templates the geometers work with. Templates they use in machine shops also, even back in ancient Greece, the templates that, you know, a craftsman, technites, the craftsman's work with. And so you have these templates that each have absolute, imperfect unity. Right? So, so the form of the circle is not circular, the form of the circle isn't round, and the form of heaviness isn't actually heavy, it doesn't weigh anything. Each of these forms is absolute, it's perfect, it's infinite and eternal in the same way as the One of Parmenides. But there's a multiplicity of these, and they're of a geometric or mathematical nature. And these infinite and eternal forms interfere with the flux of pure matter, of, right, as a kind of a dynamic energy, the fire of Heraclitus. And from out of this interference, you get the, uh, the objects of our world, the things that we experience, right? And also the human mind, as shaped by experience in a human body. Okay? This is how basically Plato develops the theory of forms by taking a straw man Heraclitus and a straw man Parmenides and fusing them together, also drawing on the mathematical thinking of Pythagoras. And I think the most complete form of this that you see in the Platonic corpus is in the dialogue "Timaeus," you know, Plato's dialogue "Timaeus," where he talks about how the forms and matter, pure matter in a state of ceaseless flux and chaos, uh, basically, I don't want to say intermix, you know, but how they interact with each other in this void, in this, um, uh, chasm that he describes in "Timaeus." And from out of this chasm, this interaction of forms and matter and flux, produces the multifarious objects of our experience, of which we can predicate things about, which we can know things with reference to the eternal forms, right? So our rational minds are of the same nature as these infinite and eternal forms. And although our minds are ensconced in souls that are further shaped by the conditions of our physical body, it's still possible for our minds to grasp and analyze the physical world in terms of these supposedly non-physical forms. Yeah, and that gives us the basis for, you know, episteme, or what later comes to be framed as scientific knowledge about the world.

Yeah, I'm trying to show this in a way where we can like see the timeline because if I'm not mistaken, is it because, okay, Zeno, or not Zeno, Parmenides comes from what was a part of the Persian Empire, which is modern-day Turkey. He goes to Magna Graecia, which is in Italy now. And was Pythagoras there before him? Does he, is he going to the Pythagorean? So he, so he basically joins this Pythagorean movement happening in Magna Graecia. Parmenides, yeah, is that what happens? I, I haven't seen any evidence that he joined the Pythagorean order. But that's what I'm asking. Are they separate? Was first, Pythagoras is first? Parmenides comes from from the East, sets up at the same general area as Pythagoras, but they have two different schools. Now, is this where Heraclitus is? Is he learning from both of these people? Is he coming because both of them, right? But I'm saying Heraclitus, where does he fit in between Pythagoras and Parmenides? Is he one of their, is he part of one of those schools, or is he a completely different school? Are these three different schools?

Different schools. So we have three different schools. At least. The interesting thing is that Heraclitus hated Pythagoras. They were both coming from out of the Persian Empire. I don't mean just geographically, right? Remember, Pythagoras studied for over a decade with the Magi. And then Heraclitus was invited by Darius to be the court philosopher of Iran. So they're both coming from out of this Persian spiritual intellectual background. And yet Heraclitus hates Pythagoras and takes a few jabs at him in his fragments where he basically says, guy, like, he's like a charlatan who came up with some like new-agey cosmopolitan. Which is true, though. Well, okay. So now, now I just want to lay that out. We have these three schools of thought. Is Plato trying to unify them? What is, what is he trying? And what is what is his goal in, like, straw-manning these brilliant thinkers? What is he trying to do with these three schools of thought?

Yeah, okay. This is really the question. Okay. This is really the question. So in order to answer that, we need to step back and look at the world into which Plato was born, okay? And the time, you know, and society of these men that we've discussed so far. Homer is often misunderstood as a literary figure and as a poet in the contemporary sense. That's not at all the case. If you read "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," and particularly "The Iliad," which is believed to be actually older than "The Odyssey," and there's some question about whether "The Odyssey," you know, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" were both oral traditions and this Homer who at some point wrote them down was a particular bard who sort of codified what was for a long time before that, a century before that, an oral tradition. But the world that's revealed by "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" is one where basically people are the playthings of fate, uh, and, you know, are at the whim of the gods and don't have hardly a thought that's their own or a conscience of their own at any moment. When someone, quote unquote, comes up with an idea in "The Iliad," it's because some god suddenly came in and gave them a particular inspiration. Eros comes up with his bow and strikes you, now you're in love with somebody. That's, yeah, that's the idea. Anger, or when Achilles is seized by anger, or when, you know, any passion that seizes a person is attributed to the influence of a certain god. Uh, and they would hear these gods, and sometimes they would see these gods. And there's no sense of personal conscience. All of the actions taken by the heroes or the villains in "The Iliad" are basically either dictates of one or another god, or they reflect some deeply ingrained social custom and ritual. We're dealing with a completely ritualistic society of custom, an incredibly conservative, traditional society wherein there was no distinction even between nature and culture. Right? Like the same way that birds had certain habits, they had a certain way of life that was proper to them. It was proper for women to be in the kitchen, you know, and to like take care of the domestic sphere. That wasn't considered an aspect of a particular culture. And the migratory, uh, patterns of birds are an aspect of nature. The distinction between nature and culture is something that was defined by the first philosophers to begin with. It didn't exist in the world of "The Iliad." So all of these actions taken by various figures like Agamemnon and Achilles and so forth in the, in the Homeric world are either based on what was expected customarily, or they are, uh, you know, they're things that the gods commanded. There's no personal conscience or sense of free will even that would allow for conscientious action. And the other important point is that the medium of the Homeric, let's call it whatever sagas, the medium of the, of the Homeric epics was something akin to rap music. It was, it was recited and performed in a way where the, the tempo, uh, and, um, modality of the poetic performance was meant to sort of contagiously move the audience in a way where they embodied the message being delivered through the medium. A book that's been written about this is, uh, Eric Havelock's "Preface to Plato." So I refer people to that. Havelock's argument in "Preface to Plato," where he's saying that we shouldn't think of Homer as poetry in anything like a contemporary sense. It's more like a cultural encyclopedia. Yeah, of like, for example, there's huge passages on shipbuilding in "The Iliad." Like how to build ships. Use the internet. That knowledge was transmitted through this poetry, quote unquote. Okay. The Orphic and Homeric hymns are the predecessor of the internet. Is that, would you, would you agree with that statement?

Well, there's something to that in the sense that the internet is becoming, uh, yet again, a, a kind of highly mimetic medium. The, the core idea in Eric Havelock's study, "Preface to Plato," is the idea of mimesis, or high mimicry, okay? Action that's highly imitative, in which there's no reflection, right? So it's like, you know, highly imitative embodiment of the message being conveyed by a medium without any, uh, personal reflection or critical thought about it. And so this is exactly what takes place today, let's say with bad rap music. Not, not the kind of rap music that occasionally has like thought-provoking messages, like revolutionary political rap, but like gangster rap, you know, the old bling-bling gangster rap about money and cars and hoes and etcetera, and whatever, right? And the people who listen to this rap, and you can see them, like, on subways when they, like, and they're moving their bodies in a certain way. The Bacchic revelers were like this. They were just full energy, full, just going with it, just going hard, like that was what that would be the equivalent of what that rap is. Yeah. And so when you say the internet is like that, it's because in a way, like, we are being, uh, we are being, how can I put it, uh, barbarized, or kind of like, uh, being reduced again to a kind of pre-rational, pre-reflective state through the intense mimesis, the memetic power of the internet, right? It's okay, that's a whole critique. That's a side conversation. But point being, Plato was dealing with a society where that's what poetry is. And this poetry is totally corrupting children with all kinds of stories about, you know, sadistic and manipulative gods like Zeus, who use people as their playthings and engage in, you know, rape all the time on, you know, using various disguises. Um, and so, so he considered this totally deleterious to the development of the moral fiber of children. And when he bans the poets in his Republic, this is the kind of poetry he's talking about. He's not talking about poetry in the contemporary sense. He's very specifically taking aim at Homer.

Okay, let me jump in for one second. Yeah, this is about to, this question is about to lead up to, I know this is going to be the one. This is going to be the quest. You're going to enjoy this question because in, let's not forget the previous question. I'm still trying to

Come around to answering, "Why did he make a straw man out of Parmenides and Heraclitus?" You know what? You're right. Let's do that first. Go ahead, but don't forget it. Don't forget this. I've got my notes, though. I've got a really good question that's going to follow up.

So, so here's the thing. In the context of this culture of mimesis, of, you know, unreflective imitation, and the basically unthinking absorption of traditional cultural values, right? In, in, in what had for centuries been an oral culture, these sages like Parmenides, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, are breaking out of that, and they're teaching people to think for themselves. But the people who they're teaching are an extremely minuscule elite, okay? And by elite, I don't necessarily just mean wealthy people, although that tended to be the class of people in the Pythagorean schools in Sicily, for example. Um, but they were teaching, at the very least, we can say, a very rarefied spiritual elite. And so they had the luxury of engaging in very esoteric manners of expression, very cryptic, uh, and profoundly thought-provoking formulations of the kind that you find in Heraclitus and in Parmenides and in the school of Pythagoras. I mean, the guy didn't even write anything down. It was, it was, it was, you know, not permitted at his time, in his own time, to write down his teaching. And he had two grades of followers, at least. One of which was in front of the curtain, sitting at his feet, and the others of which had to sit behind the curtain that separated him from them. So, Pythagoras is the original "man behind the curtain." That's where the expression comes from. Wow.

So, so, point being, point being, these esoteric sages were not really changing the society of the time. And in fact, when the Pythagorean order was in danger of reshaping the society of Sicily, when it started to have significant socio-political influence, the aristocrats riled up the mob, and they set fire to the Pythagorean schools. And this is how Pythagoras ultimately died himself. He either died in the fire or from, you know, wounds that he sustained during the burning of the Pythagorean schools by the mobs of Sicily, who were riled up by aristocrats.

So, Plato looks, and then of course, Plato sees how his own teacher, Socrates, is executed by the democratic assembly of Athens for provoking people to think for themselves and question authority and question custom and tradition. And so Plato realizes that it's not enough to express yourself in this esoteric and cryptic form and convey deep truths by that means, the way that Heraclitus and Pythagorean, Heraclitus and Parmenides did. You have to build a theory of knowledge that you can institutionalize in an academy, which then becomes responsible for educating the youth, rather than allowing them to be corrupted by what they're absorbing through Homer, for example, right? And in point of fact, Plato does set up the first Academy.

But, you know what we have to remember about Plato, who sets up the first Academy, um, is that before he met Socrates, he was an aspiring tragic poet. He had written, this tragedy that, you know, he was going to submit to a competition in the theater of Dionysus. And the story is that after he heard, uh, Socrates talk, he burned his great tragedy in an offering to Prometheus. He calls forth the god of fire and burns his great tragedy that he was going to enter into this competition, and all of the rest of the poetry he had written up to that point, and decides to become a student of Socrates. But he's coming from the background of having been a tragic poet. Uh, and of course, Dionysus is the god associated with tragedy. And then it's reputed that Plato, when he died, was discovered to have had a copy of, uh, Aristophanes's comedies under his pillow, which he slept on every night. Okay, well, she took the bed with him.

And when you look at the Symposium, toward the end of Plato's Symposium, there's this conversation between Aristophanes, who appears as a character in that dialogue, and a representative of comedy, and Agathon, who's a tragedian. And Aristophanes and Agathon, after everybody else has fallen to sleep, they're all drunk and they're falling asleep, they're all sprawled all over the floors. These two are the last ones awake. And as the dawn is rising, they're having a conversation about whether there could be a new form of art beyond the binary of tragedy and comedy. And I think that this is what Plato wanted philosophy to be. That he's conceiving a philosophy as a new art form that embraces the best qualities of both the tragic view of the world that you see in, like, Heraclitus, and, uh, comedy. Um, in other words, that Tiresias, this is where you get the satyrs from, to try to merge the two together. Yeah.

And, and, okay, in Symposium, Alcibiades, who is this, uh, scandalous politician and disciple of Socrates, actually, people say he was trying to become Socrates's lover, gives this eulogy of Socrates with the maenads all dancing around to the flute tunes of Dionysus. Okay, this is the backdrop as this Dionysian ritual is taking place, and everyone's drinking, and they're playing the Dionysian flutes, and the maenads are all dancing around. Alcibiades gives us this eulogy of Socrates, and he says, Socrates is a, he is a trickster, he is a pharmakon, a witch doctor, who has brought us a pharmakon. It was snake poison that was used by traditional doctors as a cure. So, in the right amount, it's a medicine, but in excessive doses, it will kill you. And he says he's been subjected to the venom of Socrates's poison, and it's driven him mad. And that Socrates deploys all these arguments in an apparently rational manner, but really, what he's trying to do is drive a person toward a kind of divine madness. And he admits to having been driven there himself by Socrates. And so we get this, "Why does Plato present this image of Socrates in Symposium?" And why, in the same dialogue, does Socrates say that Eros is the only thing that he's ever understood and the only thing that he worships? Socrates says this in Symposium. Excuse me, what happened to the forms? Right, right.

So, Diotima, he had this teacher, Socrates had this teacher, Diotima, who, according to Plato and how he writes the Symposium, taught Socrates this great mystery of Eros as the, you know, the ultimate, you know, um, enigma, the ultimate secret, right? That, you know, divine love, in, in the sense of the erotic, yeah, it's somehow the ultimate key to wisdom, right? And essentially, it's a Western form of Tantra. Okay. And, and he lays out how in every, he said, look at the stories of Homer. Every time a character is in trouble, Eros comes, he strikes his bow, and makes one of these lovely ladies fall in love with the hero and save them. Eros is always, he said, Eros, according to, um, Longus, from this, from the novel Daphnis and Chloe, Eros has more power than Zeus himself. He has the power over all the elements. That's like, what, what the hell is Socrates talking about? Yeah. And, and, and what happened to the forms?

So, look, if you go back to Plato's Republic, there are some rather cryptic remarks that he makes. This is my question. This was going to be my question. Because in Plato's Republic, he says, Homer's no good. Homer, no, no, no, no, no. Homer has Achilles in Hades crying. That can't be. This we cannot have. We need a cosmology where the good people go to heaven and experience eternal bliss, and the bad people go to Hades. Not Achilles going to Hades. And so my question is, is Plato setting up the, the cosmology of Judeo-Christianity?

So, so now, I was going to go to Republic, but let me just make a, a brief aside here that's relevant to how you frame this question. In Phaedo, the death dialogue, the dialogue where Socrates drinks the hemlock and martyrs himself, Socrates's disciples are all around him, his friends, his friends are surrounding him, and he says that he, he tells them they shouldn't worry because he's going to a place where he's going to be surrounded by all the best men, essentially an afterlife populated by the virtuous. And, uh, lays out, as you put it yourself, a kind of prototype for the Christian vision of heaven. Uh, and he basically, how is this set up?

Let me, let me actually read you the passage. It's, because it's quite striking. Uh, this, uh, friend or, uh, disciple of Socrates, Cebes, or Simmias, says to him, "Probably even we there is a little boy who has these childish terrors. Try to persuade him not to be afraid of death, as though it were a bogey." "What you should do," said Socrates, "is to say a magic spell over him every day until you have charmed his fears away." "But Socrates," said Simmias, "where shall we find a magician who understands these spells, now that you are leaving us?" Okay, that's, uh, when they're imploring him to console them about his dying, right? To reassure them that he's going to a better place, and that they shouldn't, you know, uh, excessively mourn his death. And so then Socrates comes back with, he comes back with, quote, "If I did not expect to enter the company first of all than good gods, and secondly of men now dead, who are better than those who are in this world, now, it is true that it would be unjust for me not to grieve at death. As it is, you can be assured that I expect to find myself among good men. While I would not particularly insist on this, I assure you that I could commit myself upon this point if I could upon anything. One more time, while I would not particularly insist on this, I assure you that I could commit myself upon this point if I could upon anything." Unquote.

All right, this is a disaster, and I'm going to tell you why. First of all, in the same dialogue, Phaedo, this is, these quotes were from Phaedo. In the same dialogue, Socrates says, at Plato, of course, in the mouth of Socrates, says that we can't have any true knowledge while we're inside the body. That we can only have a proximate knowledge. And that true knowledge can only be attained through total freedom from the senses. Objective, absolute knowledge can only be attained when our mind has been freed from our body and its distorted perception of things, and we're able to perceive, sort of like, as if from the vantage point of the realm of forms. Okay? But he's presenting a vision of the afterlife where that's not the case. When he wants to reassure his disciples, he's presenting like the becomes the classic sensuous afterlife of, let's say, Christianity, by faith. Right? Having faith. And that's in that state, you have what's called a soma pneumatikon. That's what the Greeks called it. It's the spectral body. Soma pneumatikon. It is a world where you still have perception, and you still have sensations.

Even now, here's a further problem. This heavenly afterlife that he presents us with in Phaedo contradicts what he writes in Republic. In the myth of Er, in the myth of the, the story of this soldier, Er, myth, myth is not the right word, in this tale of Er in Republic, we're presented with basically like what we call today an NDE, a near-death experience account, where this guy Er sort of dies and lives to tell the tale, comes back and lives to tell the tale of what the afterlife is like, what is the transition between death and rebirth like? Because of course, Plato argues in favor of reincarnation. The Orphics use this as the secret, um, the secret knowledge of what to do when you go to Hades and how to reincarnate the right way and keep your memory. Yes, Plato studied all these things, right? So, but the thing is this, the story of Er portrays a kind of afterlife transition between death and rebirth that's actually very similar to what we see in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, these Buddhist accounts of the Bardo state. And it is not the same as what Plato says to reassure his disciples in the Phaedo. They conflict with each other. Absolutely conflicts with what Plato says about knowledge only being possible once we free our mind entirely from the senses, because the Bardo state, or the state of the soma pneumatikon, is still a sensuous state. And so this stuff doesn't make sense. Okay. And the guy obviously not a [ __ ] he's not contradicting himself. He's saying this apparently contradictory things for a reason.

Let me present one more. Yeah, no, and everything you're saying is, this is what I've been wondering about Plato since I've been reading about him, like, where, what is going on with Plato? And his, it seems that he's changing. He wants to change the norms of what people think about reality in the, in the afterlife. But go ahead. So, one more point that's relevant to this death scene, to, you know, the, the account that we get in Phaedo of Socrates's last days. His disciples show up, and they see him writing poems based on Aesop's Fables. These animal stories, the animal stories were the moral about donkeys and things, yeah. And he's sitting there in his last days writing poems based on Aesop's Fables. And they ask him, basically, like, "What are you smoking? Like, what's, have you lost your mind, Socrates? Like, what are you doing, man? This is how you're spending your last days?" And this is what Socrates says in reply. He says, quote, "Now, let's keep in mind, right now, this is the Plato who's writing. This is the guy who in Republic has claimed that the poets should be banned, right? Because they're corrupting the morals of the youth. And he thinks there should be very narrow, like, limits on, like, what kind of poetic compositions there are for the sake of edification and inculcation of virtue in the youth. This is the guy who's writing what I'm about to read. He goes, Socrates says to his disciples who are wondering if he's lost his marbles, versifying Aesop, quote, 'I did not compose the poetry to rival either Evander or his poetry. I did it in the attempt to discover the meaning of certain dreams and to clear my conscience, in case this was the art which I had been told to practice. It's like this, you see, in the course of my life, I've often had the same dream appearing in different forms at different times, but always saying the same thing: Socrates, practice and cultivate music, the arts, in the sense of poetry, music. Socrates, make music. In, in the past, I used to think that it was impelling and exhorting me to do what I was actually doing. I mean, that the dream, like a spectator encouraging a runner in a race, was urging me on to do what I was doing already, that is, practicing the arts, because philosophy is the greatest of the arts, and I was practicing it. But when my trial had taken place, and this God's festival was delaying my execution, I decided that in case it should be this popular form of art that the dream intended me to practice, I ought to compose and not disobey. I reflected that a poet ought to work on stories, not discourses, and I was no story writer. So it was the stories that I knew and had handy which I versified. Aesop's, the first ones that occurred to me.'"

So, okay, this is a diabolical writer. Yeah. This is a, what is he telling us here? He's telling us something about the relationship between the Dionysian essence of the poetic and the kind of art that Plato sought to produce in his youth as a tragedian, on the one hand, and the Apollonian rationalism of what becomes Plato's philosophical project, on the other hand, as exemplified by the theory of forms. And the same Socrates who's telling us this ridiculous and unbelievable thing, namely that, "Oops, maybe I was supposed to like, versify children's stories and animal fables instead of doing philosophy? Maybe that's what this voice, this daemon, was telling me all my life that I should make music?" Right. Uh, and I did. I wasted my whole life. So I make up for it by making poems of, you know, animal fables that I read in childhood. No, no. So this ridiculous story is really another way that Plato is signaling the fact that there's an esoteric and unwritten doctrine here. That when Socrates says in Symposium, "The only thing I've ever understood and that I've devoted myself to worship in life is Eros," again, Dionysian power, right? Um, and so now, where I was going to go before, and I think it's a good time to loop back, uh, around to it, is these passages in Republic where Plato is comparing the forms to the diagrams drawn by geometers. And so, look, according to the conventional understanding of the theory of forms, you obviously can't see forms, right? Right. So you, no matter how perfect the circle you draw is, it's not a representation of the form of the circle. Nor is a perfect triangle the form of the triangle, right? The geometric diagrams that are drawn on blackboards or whatever, or these days that are formulated by computer code, are not the form of that geometrical object. I mean, if you, if you zoom in enough on what appears to be a perfect triangle generated by a computer, it's going to pixelate at some point, okay? Even if you were to print out a, what appears to be a perfect triangle using individual atoms, right, in molecular nanotechnology, if you use an electron microscope, it's going to also pixelate. So nothing we can craft in this world will represent the perfect circle, or the perfect triangle, or the perfect square, or whatever, right? Isn't that debunking?

Well, no, but here's the thing, right? Plato claims that the forms exist in this invisible realm, right, beyond the physical world. But here's the thing. Is it? I don't think he really believes that. No, me neither. There are passages in Republic where he compares the invisible forms to the diagrams drawn by geometers, okay? Try to grasp this point. It's a little bit of a subtle point. So the diagrams drawn by geometers can never represent forms. They're infinite, they're eternal, they exist in this realm beyond the physical world. So Plato shouldn't be comparing forms, the real forms, the transcendental forms, to the diagrams drawn by geometers. But he does do this. He does do this in Republic. I'll give you the passage in a minute, but let me lay it out. And what he says is that these forms are meant, like the diagrams used by geometers, to act as stepladders in order to help us intellectually grasp or spiritually grasp with our mind's eye, the Form of the Good. So all the other forms are simply stepladders or, uh, useful tools like geometers' diagrams to help us grasp the Form of the Good. The way that geometers use the drawing of a circle on a board to help someone understand what a circle is as an abstract definition. And with equal significance, Plato says, "I was afraid that if I," and he said, "Okay, so that was Republic, what I just, uh, you know, laid out there, and I'll give you the passage numbers in a minute. And then in Phaedo, he says that I was afraid that if I contemplated the Form of the Good directly, I would go blind, the way someone who looks into the sun does. And so I took refuge in the realm of ideas," or, "and so I took recourse to ideas," meaning the forms, right? So what are these forms then? Are they constructs that are meant to help you not go blind intellectually and spiritually? And what's the relationship between that looking straight into the sun and the madness that Plato talks about in Phaedrus, and that Alcibiades accuses Socrates of having him driven, having driven him to in Symposium, the divine madness?

Okay, so let me just, let me just, uh, take a moment to give some references here. Um, the geometrist diagrams that I was talking about, that's in Republic 510 to 511c. 510c to 511c, where he's saying that all the other forms are there only so that you can contemplate the Form of the Good, and they're like tools, they're like geometries diagrams. And then the passage where he says that he was afraid he'd go blind by staring straight into the sun if he contemplated the Form of the Good directly, that's in, uh, Phaedo 99d to 100a. Phaedo 99d to 100a, specifically he says, quote, "I thought that in the contemplation of true existence, I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul, as people may injure their bodily eye by observing and gazing on the sun during an eclipse, unless they take the precaution of only looking at the image reflected in the water or in some analogous medium. I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether if I looked at things with my eyes, and I thought that I had better have recourse to the world of ideas and seek there the truth of things." The world of idea, meaning the realm of forms.

Now, I want to look at, um, two really important letters that Plato wrote. One is the Seventh Letter. These are, they're referred to as Plato's Epistles, the letters. The Plato wrote to various people. One is the Seventh Letter, and one is the Second Letter. And significantly, the Second Letter, Plato's Second Letter, is a letter that he wrote to Dionysius II of Syracuse. Oh my God, this is gonna, it's gonna lead up to another good question. Go ahead. Where, okay, because doesn't he try to kill Plato later? Plato writes a story. What's one of the tyrants of Sicily or Syracuse tries to kill Plato, and then Plato had to get out of there. By the time I thought you're secure, no. Yes. Kill. No, no, no. It's a disaster. Yeah.

So, okay, so Plato, this is also a really important point to grasp in terms of the philosopher living his ideas. A philosopher, someone who doesn't just sit in an ivory tower, but wants to change the world, okay? Wants his ideas to reshape society. Plato attempted to implement his conception of the ideal society. He went to Syracuse, in contemporary Italy, uh, southern Italy, and he attempted, through a follower of his in the court of Dionysius the Elder, Dionysius the First, a guy named Dion, who was part of the family of Dionysius, was a follower of Plato. And this Dion gave him, basically, Plato, a foothold in the royal court of Syracuse. And Plato tried to influence the son of Dionysius to not be a tyrant like his father, and basically mold him into the type of philosopher-king that he portrays in Republic. And long story short, Dionysius gets rubbed the wrong way by this, and his courtiers convince him that Plato's out to wreck the conservative, traditional society of Syracuse. And he has Plato sold into slavery. Yeah. And Plato, and some rich guy bails Plato out, basically, and buys his freedom. And Plato escapes back to Athens. Then Dionysius dies, Dionysius the First dies, and Dionysius the Second comes to power. And Dion, uh, who's his uncle, Dion is the uncle of Dionysius II, he winds up with more influence at court. And so he basically implores Plato to come back and try again. And Plato comes back, and he tries again, now to shape Dionysius II, a monarch who's actually on the throne. And the second letter is a letter to this Dionysius II of Syracuse, which Plato writes to him after Plato is forced to flee again. Plato is forced, you know, at the risk of his life, for a second time. Plutarch says that this, I think it was the second Dionysius, wanted to kill Plato and almost did. Was very close to doing it. Yes. And then get this, he repents. At some years later, Dionysius II has a change of heart, and he convinces Dion to beg Plato to come back for a third time to Syracuse. And, and he agrees. He's gonna let Plato basically experiment in Syracuse with his ideas for social engineering and so forth. Um, and it ends badly for a third time. And the third time, as Dionysius II basically, uh, you know, conspires to execute both Plato and Dion. Dion leads a coup d'état against the government of his nephew and tries to take power directly, basically as a representative of Plato's philosophical project. And Dion is killed in the process, and Plato has to escape Syracuse, you know, for the third time, right? So he, that he missed. Right. And this is very important. This is the same geographical location where Parmenides and Pythagoras and all these guys are. Yeah. So this is, this is a huge thing for what for the Western, the Western civilization. Like all these events are shaping the world today in a weird way, in a ripple effect way. Yeah.

But no, this is really important in, in terms of understanding the concept of the noble lie. Okay? This is an idea that, that Plato, uh, brings up in, I'm going to come back to the letters. I know we're going on a tangent, but it's still relevant to setting this up. What Plato's misadventure in Syracuse is very important to understanding the noble lie as an applicable concept. And for, uh, 414 to 415 in Republic, Plato introduces this idea of an a lie that would be noble. A deception that would be, uh, you know, that would be of merit and would have, you know, that would be virtuous. A virtuous deception, okay? He introduces this idea at 414 to 415 in the context of the so-called myth of metals, where he's saying that, you know, we have this tripartite society with the guardians, or the philosopher-rulers, at the top, the military class, uh, of of basically, you know, noble-minded knights in the middle, and then the general citizenry of farmers and business people in the third tier. And he's saying that as part of getting people to accept this type of structure, uh, in society, which is of course a meritocratic structure, because people are educated, they all receive the same general education, and it's throughout the course of their education that it's determined which class of society they belong in. But as part of getting people to accept this kind of meritocratic tripartite class division of society, we will inculcate them from childhood with the myth that the gods have mixed one or another metal into their soul. And the philosopher-rulers have gold mixed into their soul, the, uh, noble warrior cast has silver mixed into its soul, and the, uh, general populace of farmers and merchants. And so that's the context in which he introduces. So, in other words, this is [ __ ]. Okay? It's a lie. It's some myth. But children should be brought up with this myth because it's constructive to reinforcing what is actually a noble attempt to replace the, uh, arbitrary aristocracy and kind of quasi-feudal society of the time with a meritocratic system, right? So it's, it's serving to actually reward individuals for their merit, as expressed through their, uh, performance in the course of their education. So that, that's what makes it a noble lie. And then this noble lie comes up two more times. Once in the context of how, uh, marriages will be set up with the view to eugenic breeding. How, okay? In the Republic, the philosopher-rulers and the military class are all married to each other. They, they have a kind of a common marriage. It's like, basically free love. Okay? People in, the men and women in the ruling class and the men and women who serve as soldiers, basically have a communal life where they're all sleeping with one another. The general populace, though, how, you know, have marriages and and have families. But the marriages are arranged with a view to eugenic breeding. In other words, the people with the best genes should be the ones who get together in order to produce children free from diseases and deformities and so forth, and the brightest children and so forth. Plato's the father of the concept of eugenics. But he says, to make this go down easier, we'll tell the general populace that, like, you know, we're going to hold certain lotteries that determine who they get to marry, what, what group of people are their eligible mates. And this is the second application of the noble lie in service of the eugenic breeding program. The third and final example of the noble lie, uh, is the most important, though, and the most relevant to our general conversation. And that's where Plato says, again, going back to his attack on Homer and how all the sadism and brutality in The Iliad, for example, is deleterious to the development of the youth. Plato says that, look, these religious myths that we have are ancient, and we don't know whether what they're depicting is something that ever really took place. We have little knowledge of vast antiquity. And so we should spin these myths. We should rewrite them in ways that are more constructive to the development of the youth, and frame a religion that portrays gods and goddesses and so forth in a way that will serve as an ethical example for the children brought up with this religion. And the guardians, the philosopher-rulers, don't have to believe in this religion. It's not true, but it's constructive for developing a society oriented toward actual discovery of the truth. In other words, a society where science can flourish. Yeah. And, okay, so now you got to understand, we're dealing now with an incredibly duplicitous person. This person is proposing restructuring the entire religion of the society based on lies and creating a false religion, which the rulers themselves won't believe in, but which they'll get the majority of the population to believe in, because that type of religion, that, I don't want to call it a cult, uh, will actually foster scientific thinking in the long run, and will be more conducive to the development of reflective, critical, and strong individuals. Which seems a little paradoxical, right? But it's the idea that you have to force people to be free. And on the way to doing that, on the way to forcing people to think for themselves, you need to give them certain constructive fables, myths, right? Ideas that may be false, but that will be thought-provoking, and that will, uh, be, um, that will cultivate virtue in them. Okay? So, so these are the different, you know, uh, examples of the use of the noble lie. And as I said at the beginning, what I'm suggesting is that this entire theory of forms is itself a noble lie.

So to get back to that argument, right? We were talking about, you know, the, the sun, which if you stare straight into it, and by the way, the metaphor of a sun that never sets is at the heart of the writings of Heraclitus. So I think that Plato is getting the simile of the sun straight from out of his years as a Heraclitean in his youth. [Music] This whole discussion of how until and unless you're ready for it, contemplating the Good, the Form of the Good, can blind you intellectually. It can drive you mad spiritually, right? And so you need something like the forms as a sort of safety net on the way to that.

In the context of all of that, let me, uh, read what Plato, uh, says in, in some key passages of these two letters, this the Seventh Letter and the Second Letter, the one to Dionysius II of Syracuse. In the Seventh Letter, Plato writes, "Much at any rate I can affirm about any present or future writers who pretend to knowledge of the matters with which I concern myself, whether they claim to have been taught by me or by a third party, or to have discovered the truth for themselves. In my judgment, it is impossible that they should have any understanding of the subject. No treatise by me concerning it exists or ever will exist. If I thought that any adequate spoken or written account could be given to the world at large, what more glorious life's work could I have undertaken than to put into writing what would be of great benefit to mankind and to bring the nature of reality to light for all to see? But I do not think that the attempt to put these matters into words would be to men's advantage, except to those few who can find out the truth for themselves with a little guidance. That is why any student of serious realities will shrink from making truth the helpless object of men's ill will by committing it to writing. In a word, the conclusion to be drawn is this: when one sees a written composition, whether it be on law by a legislator or on any other subject, one can be sure, if the writer, if the writer is a serious man, that his book does not represent his most serious thoughts. They remain stored up in the noblest region of his personality." Unquote.

And now, one short passage from the Second Letter, his letter to Dionysius II of Syracuse: "Take precautions, lest this teaching ever be disclosed among untrained people. It is impossible for what is written not to be disclosed. That is the reason why I have never written anything about these things, and why there is not and will not be any written work of Plato's own. Farewell, and believe. Read this letter now, at once, many times, and burn it." Wow.

So, Plato never wrote his philosophy. All these writings we have, the most voluminous intellectual work that survived the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and so forth, the corpus of Plato, does not represent the teaching of Plato. What Plato wrote were plays. He was a tragedian. He was a trained playwright. Remember, he burned his plays when he met Socrates. He torched them and dedicated the burning of his plays to Prometheus and called for the god of fire to inspire him in his next endeavor, which is his philosophical project. But he did that at the theater of Dionysus. And as someone who's coming from out of the Dionysian tragic poetic tradition, uh, a tradition of ecstasy, of mystical frenzy, right? Of, uh, the contemplation of beauty as the key to understanding the nature of the divine. And so I think that Plato's Unwritten Doctrine, which he, he tells us exists, right? In the Seventh Letter and in the Second Letter, he says his true teaching remains unwritten. So meaning what? Meaning we have to read between the lines of the dialogues if we want to understand, you know, what Plato actually thought. And we have to read between the lines, understand what the hell Plato was trying to do in Syracuse, or why Plato thought that noble lies needed to be employed for the sake of reshaping society beneficently. Okay? So this is what I argue in The Pharmakon Artist. That Plato, and of course, the name of that essay is a play on words, right? Pharmakon, it's the snake poison that's also a medicine in the right dose, which is what Socrates is accused of dispensing. Is being accused of being a pharmakon? But obviously, my title, The Pharmakon Artist, has con artist in it. Accused Socrates of being a con man in Symposium. Why would Plato write that? He builds up this character, this great tragic martyr, seeker of truth, enlightened. And he, he allows Alcibiades, he gives him the stage with the maenads playing the Dionysian flute tunes in Symposium, to portray Socrates as a kind of con man, you know, basically, uh, magician, witch doctor, right? Because Plato's telling us something about himself and who and what he really is, what he's up to. Wow.

Now, when Plato talks about how what you want for a society is that you want them to think that their laws are not only divinely from God, whether they're most ancient and they go back to the beginning of time. And when you weigh this up with what is being said in, for example, the Old Testament. And there are, there are some people who now are theorizing that the Septuagint came first, and the Hebrews came regardless. If that's true or not, even if it's, even if it's not true, there could be the other, and the other side. There could be that this Old Testament myth fits so well with what Plato envisioned that the people in Alexandria said, "This is, let's put this together as this Septuagint." That's Hellenistic Empire, that is Greek, obviously. And never they have the, the libraries, and they play those writings. Are they putting together what becomes the myth of the Western civilization as we know it, Judeo-Christianity? That's the question. I think, is Plato the one who constructs this? I don't know.

I don't know if you realize the profundity and, uh, terror implicit in the question that you just framed. I mean, um, it is perhaps the single most disturbing question that we could grapple with about the history of Western civilization, and by extension, the entire world that's been conquered and dominated by the West. And hold on, let me just stop a second. I have all the hours of us talking of leading up to this question right here. It literally has been. And this is, this is like the question: Did Plato construct what we, what became the myth of the West, the religion of the Western civilization as we know it, you know, the universal church?

So, okay, I answered this question not in The Pharmakon Artist, although, you know, I'm developing an embryonic phase of it there. I'm planting the seeds for it there. But I answer this question of yours at the heart of Iranian Leviathan, um, in the series of chapters that goes from the one I mentioned earlier, Emperor of Noble Lies, where I'm portraying Darius the Great as a noble liar in the style of the Platonic philosopher-king, all the way through Hassan-i Sabbah, the leader of the Order of Assassins at Alamut Fortress, claiming that nothing is true and everything is permitted, and that the entire Quran, with its Sunnah, its Sharia law, was a noble lie. Okay? In this series of chapters in Iranian Leviathan, I basically, which includes a treatment of the origin of the Old Testament under the influence of Mithraists, who were the patrons of Jewish Pharisees that set up the Second Temple state after Cyrus and Darius rebuilt the Temple of Solomon. Okay? I have a whole treatment of that. That chapter is comically titled "Tickle, Tickle, Manichean Echo," and it's about the relationship between the Persians and the Jews, and how Judaism was created and why. And you also have so many commonalities between the Mithraic orders and the early Christians. So much overlap. They're even using the same worship places, right? So now, look, that would, this is like a whole other conversation. It could be. Yeah. Okay. But in a nutshell, in a nutshell, the answer to your question is that a case can be made that people who understood very well where Plato's esoteric project was, and people who knew how to deploy noble lies in the most sophisticated way, on the highest level, or at the deepest level, if you want to put it that way, engineered the Abrahamic revelation, the biblical religion, as a catalyst for the transformation of society. But the catalyst was not intended to get people to become good Jews, or later good Christians, or even later good Muslims. The catalyst was intended to get people to go to the devil. The purpose of the catalyst was to confront people with an image of divinity that ought to be rejected and resisted by the conscience of the human individual. It was a pharmakon, remember? Pharmakon. It's poison if you don't take to it the right way, it will kill you. It's a snake bite. Like the snake in the Garden of Eden. Why would you tell a story like that, by the way, if your point is to get people to believe in Yahweh? Why do you even have the whole narrative of the serpent offering the fruit of the tree of knowledge to Adamic man? Why? Why even include the story about the fallen angels and how they taught humanity to rebel against the Elohim? Why even have the Tower of Babel in there? I mean, if you just want to instill paternalistic, patriarchal, collectivistic obedience into a society, like Confucius, don't tell us about this serpent, and about these rebel angels, and about this Tower of Babel. What are you trying to do here? Instigate rebellion? Give people models of challenging authority? That's very Plato. So, okay, so you think my view, my view is very radically divergent from the common understanding of the relationship between both Christians, scholasticism and Plato, and then later Islamic scholasticism and Plato, because Plato was as important to the medieval Muslim thinkers as he was to the, uh, Catholic Scholastics. Conventionally, it's believed, and even Nietzsche subscribed to this idea, that Christianity is Platonism for the masses, right? And that this Scholastics, Aquinas, before him, Augustine, and so on and so forth, they basically adapted elements of Plato into, uh, you know, aspects of the Christian faith by making them more, uh, amenable to a popular understanding, right? But what you just did is you just answered the question that scholars have been dumbfounded by. Is that, is the closer we get to the origins of Christianity, the closer we get to the beginning, the more diverse it is. The more Gnostics there are. The more opposing there are. There's people who literally say that Yahweh is evil, and that Cain was good because he wasn't offering blood sacrifices. They start off that way. They don't become that way later on. They start off that way because you're seeing the duality within the stories you choose. You're choosing a side. And so I, I believe it's a travesty, you're right, dude, the Christian Scholastics to frame Plato as a quote virtuous pagan, unquote, like he would have been a Christian if he were alive today. No, no. Plato is out to create the devil. That's his aim. Plato wants to, he wants to basically promulgate diabolical, what the Greeks called diabolical, a, uh, dynamic tension, a throwing through of opposites. This is what his dialectical method is about. It's why his dialogues. It's why he wrote dialogues, and it's why his writings are structured in the conversational and oppositional way that they are, because he wants people to set positions against one another. He assumes all kinds of positions through the mouth of Socrates that he himself doesn't subscribe to, and that over the, over the course of his corpus contradict each other. And he does that for the sake of provoking insight and catalyzing independent thinking. That's, he's literally separating goats from sheep, in a sense. Exactly. Here's the story. However you interpret this will determine if you're one of these types. That's exactly it. And in fact, um, it's genius. It really is. In fact, he comes close to saying this, you know, uh, in the Seventh Letter, that you can't get philosophy from some treatise. That it's not like, you know, philosophy is not about subscribing to a worldview that some guy has written down in a treatise. You have to have direct experiential, uh, knowledge of certain things about the nature of reality. And you're only going to get that in dialogue and in a life in common, he says, with others also devoted to seeking the truth. So Plato has this Unwritten Doctrine, and this Unwritten Doctrine deploys all kinds of noble lies, up to and including, I believe, the theory of forms. And, and to my mind, Plato doesn't subscribe to the objective existence of these forms. They're useful constructs to promote the rise of rational thought, of the kind that eventually becomes scientific analysis. Wow. Really? Also, really, Plato sees the world more like Heraclitus saw it. That is amazing. I have no, I, I don't even know what I think.

That I want to leave it right there because that's that's perfect. That leaves the, the, the viewer with something to think about. And because I think when we started off with talking about the Mithraists and how their religion sort of is this religion that influences all areas of the world, in all religious aspects. And obviously, Zoroaster comes along, he transforms this, this movement, and he shapes the philosophy of the West. And then we have this divide happening. There's people looking at gods in different ways. And which side do we devote ourselves to? Plato comes along and answers that question in an inverse way, very secretive, very esoteric, but he does it. That's it. And I think the takeaway is what you said. As you put it, his intention was to separate the goats from the sheep, to find a way to, you know, basically pass society through that filter. Um, and force people to test people's metal. Is where the freaking oppression comes from, right? It's the myth of the metals has our expression to test someone's metal comes from the myth of the metals, ultimately, to see what someone's made of. What are you made of? Right? Um, by the way, just as a nice concluding note, that's very much the question in, um, Christopher Nolan's film, The Dark Knight, which I think is the greatest of the Batman films. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. What are you made of? Right? I mean, that's where that film turns around. The whole film's about the noble. Well, Batman as the guardian of Gotham, the philosopher-king, the guardian of Gotham, is forced to lie to the entire populace, to take the blame for the murders committed by Harvey Dent, so that Harvey Dent, or Two-Face, can retain his image as the White Knight of Gotham. Because if people were to know that this district attorney, champion of justice, and, you know, uh, you know, hero fighting against corruption, that he was driven by the Joker into becoming Two-Face and committing all these murders, if people were to see Harvey Dent in that light, they would lose faith. And, you know, it would unleash anarchy and chaos in the city. And so the Joker, the trickster, forces Batman to become a noble liar in the guise of being the guardian of Gotham. But yeah, what, what does that film turn around? The idea of testing someone's metal, of asking, hammering someone the way Batman is hammered by the Joker, and of asking them the question, "What are you made of?" Show your face, the one under the mask. Plato wore masks throughout his entire philosophical career. All of these characters in these dialogues are one or another mask of Plato, not just Socrates, but the conversation we've been having is really ultimately about the face underneath those masks that Plato wore. Wow. That is just phenomenal. And I'm sure we will think of another thing to discuss in a future date, but as of now, I think this completes this four-part series in the, "What is Behind Western Esotericism and Where Does It Come From?" And how does it end up with Plato on Plato's lap for him to make their choice? And it's like an IQ test. He's like, giving the world an IQ test. Here you go. Here's, take it or leave it. Let's see where you're at. Let's see how you interpret this character. And a test of character, of ethos. Test of ethos, right? Because who, who within ethos would ever worship Zeus or Yahweh? I mean, in Plato's ideal state, in the Republic, you have the philosopher, but then the warrior cast. The warrior cast, they're in the positions they, they are because they're virtuous. They're noble. It's why they're entrusted with the weaponry to protect society. They're not geniuses, the people in the warrior cast, but they do have ethos. Ethos defines them. And so those people are not, you know, individuals who would worship a Zeus or Yahweh, right? Yeah. And it's so geniusly gives them something to, to go to battle for. Yeah. So it helps out. And that's it. It's so late. It has so many different dimensions of playing the, uh, what do you call it, the puppet with the strings. Like he's got so many puppets on different strings, all by one person on top, but they're all, they're all doing different things, different purposes. It's really, yeah.

As a last point, Neil, let me just say that people should think of my philosophical project in these terms. Okay? I learned from Plato. I mean, people, a lot of people have framed me as a Nietzschean or something, or a Heideggerian. First of all, I don't belong to any of these schools. The philosophy I have, my own philosophical project. But when I say I learned from Plato, I mean I really learned from Plato. My work is in the style of Plato. My project is very much an esoteric project in the sense of Plato's esoteric and Unwritten Doctrine. Well, I have links in the description. Where else can they? What do they have anything coming up? Anything you want to promote? Just, uh, for now, I am always writing a new book, so I'm in the process of doing that right now. But for now, let's just link in particular my YouTube, uh, the Prometheism YouTube. So that's the, you know, where people can remain most up to date with my work. I'm showing it on the screen right now. Go hit that subscribe button. Links in the description. And you have attained true gnosis. You have just attained true gnosis. The demiurge has no power over you. [Music] Junior. [Music] Foreign.