Should a student of the 21st century read Plato and Aristotle? Stephen Pimentel explains how Greek philosophy helps us to see past the conceits of our own era.
Transcript
Wolf: There’s going to be some positive outcome from an act of intellectual courage to actually go and challenge the sort of lies of the time.
Intro (00:00)
Wolf: Welcome to another episode of “The Students.” Today, should you be reading the old philosophers? So Stephen, you’re one of our big fans at Palladium, I remember. You wrote some great stuff for us. You were always there supporting us.
I really enjoyed that. That’s kind of where we met. You did one of the earliest interesting sort of substantive reviews of Costin Alamariu’s “Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy,” and you’ve definitely been kind of a fixture in terms of bringing the classical philosophy angle on a lot of topics. So, I thought it would be fun to kind of get together and talk about this topic that vexes me sometimes, which is should a modern student of the 21st century be reading the ancient philosophers? Especially obviously we mean Aristotle, we mean Plato, we mean Socrates.
But I wanted to get to the bottom of that matter with you. So Stephen, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.
Should you read the ancient philosophers? (01:16)
Stephen: Absolutely, glad to be here. So my initial answer would be maybe not, and we should take that possibility seriously. If you are comfortable in the warm embrace of the cathedral, if you think our regime is basically roughly reasonable and heading in a good direction and just needs some righting here and there, no, the answer is, you probably don’t need to be digging into what Aristotle or Plato thought about that stuff. But if your perspective is quite different, if you’re one of these people like myself who thinks that there is a very great deal wrong and it’s not simply a question of minor tweaking here or there, that there’s something very fundamentally wrong at the basis of the kind of liberal democratic regime that has now slid into this managerial, some people would say soft totalitarianism—and that we should really be rethinking things more fundamentally, then my answer is, yeah, you want to be digging into the best resources for that.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. So I guess part of it is at that time in history that these guys are writing, this is 300 BC—after the Peloponnesian War, they’re kind of facing the decline of Greek society. Right? This is the overall context as I understand. And so on that purely kind of historical comparison basis, they are trying to understand what makes a society bad or good, and through the lens of dealing with their own time of historical decline, at least at the beginnings of it.
And for that reason, maybe there’s some relevance. And so I’d love to hear though from you, what is it about that context that makes them in particular interesting? Why do we care about the Greeks? Why isn’t that just something a bunch of medieval fuddy-duddies kind of thought was important because that’s all they had? What is it about the Greeks that makes them relevant to our situation?
Stephen: So I think you’re right to say that they’re writing in a period of decline as they themselves perceived it. And there’s all kinds of... If you just read Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War, you can see the total wreck of things that had gone on, and they’re writing in the aftermath of that. But even prior to that, there’s a lot of features of their society where they had very clearly declined from sort of the more aristocratic ideals—that an earlier generation would’ve said were sources of strength in a society. And they really are grappling with that.
The first thinkers on regime foundations (04:24)
Stephen: So, why them? Why are they important? Because really, they are the first thinkers in the West to grapple with the questions of what makes a regime good or bad, what are the foundations of a regime—how does politics fundamentally work? And it really is kind of a open exploration. So one thing that I would really emphasize is you don’t go to Plato or Aristotle for doctrines.
You’re not looking for a blueprint. You’re not looking for they said this is how to do it in sort of concrete object level terms. That’s not the point. The point is that they opened up a way of exploring, of asking fundamental questions, not just about politics at its surface level, but ultimately about human life. Like, how should a man live?
What is a good, honorable, flourishing life? And they had a very, being a good warrior, being able to contribute to the defense of your city was definitely a part of that. So by no means was this some ivory tower kind of thing. We think of Socrates as this guy who just hung around and talked with people. And he sure did a lot of that, but we forget that he also served as a hoplite—for Athens in the Peloponnesian War, that he had this r—very impressive reputation.
Alcibiades and others comment on how well he served and how powerfully he acted in that capacity. So, there’s a lot of very practical experience that goes into this. It’s not just theoretical.
Wolf: Yeah. And people always find it funny to find out that Plato was his wrestling name. He’s a wrestler. It means he’s the big guy, he’s like a big plate of stone.
Stephen: And was reputed to be an extremely good wrestler. Not just that he did it sometimes.
Wolf: Right. And so these guys, it’s very different from today where your average professor or something of philosophy is this kind of very pathetic creature that you might read some interesting books, but doesn’t have this martial engagement with reality the way these guys did. And—
Stephen: Yeah. Athletics was absolutely presupposed as foundational to education. Not just wrestling, but a whole array of competitive, I guess you could call them sports or athletics, all of which were intended to reflect and prepare for skills you would actually need on the battlefield. So, javelin is an obvious example. But running, strength sports that reflected what you would have to do with armor on chariot races.
Some of them are a bit archaic by the time you get to their period, but nonetheless, very clearly derived from war. And that was just like, “That’s the foundation. That’s taken for granted. If you don’t have that, you’re not in a position to proceed further to the study of philosophy or whatever.”
Wolf: Right. Well, that’s an interesting point to make these days, is that to think coherently, you have to have some kind of strength of the body. Thought, it’s grounded in physicality at some level. And we don’t have to pursue that thought very far here, but—
Stephen: Well, I’ll just touch on it
Wolf: it’s interesting that it’s a little bit different than I think your typical kind of the nerd pretense or the—a lot of nerds think like, “Okay, actually the body is just this meat bag. I don’t need it. I don’t care about it. I’m just going to abstract myself into the realm of thought entirely.” And that does feel wrong.
It does seem that ends up distorting the thought, actually.
Stephen: It gets right back to this question of how should one live? What is actually a good life? And this notion of a sound mind and a sound body that somehow life is integrated and what is flourishing for a human is going to be both bodily and intellectual flourishing at the same time. If you’re truncated, you’re only doing one or the other. It’s like lifting weights only with your left arm or something.
You’re going to get lopsided and that’s kind of stupid.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. So, okay, so these guys, they’re very much serious people. Some of them are aristocrats, I think Plato—Plato in particular. Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander the Great.
These are not just a bunch of weirdos. They’re dealing with their own time. They’re dealing with this decline that is in some sense may be analogous to our own, and maybe that’s part of why they’re interesting, is they offer maybe a very fresh perspective on our own situation. And so I guess I’d like to hear a little bit more on those commonalities. What is it about their own time that resonates with ours?
As opposed to, there’s a lot of other times in history I think that are much more distant. You could read a medieval philosopher and—it’s interesting maybe from an intellectual perspective, but they’re just addressing very different things. But I feel like with the Greeks, it’s much more like, okay, there’s decline being felt at the height of a civilization, and this is the smartest guys in the room taking a crack at it. And, yeah. So I’d love to hear from your perspective, what is it more the analogy of the times?
What is that commonality?
Stephen: No, I do think that’s legitimate. I think response to decline is definitely a factor. But I would underline, it’s not so much in the object level details of their political situation. You’re not going to take features of Athens in particular or Sparta in particular and try to—map it onto something in our situation. But what is absolutely relevant is the way that they were driven by that difficulty of decline to begin reflecting deeply on what are the foundational factors that one can respond to and that make a good or bad regime.
So, one thing that’s really important is they don’t take for granted a particular form of regime. So someone in—the Middle Ages, for example, you read a political writer in the 13th century, they may have taken monarchy, and not just monarchy, but a rather specific form of monarchy—as example. I mean, as sort of a definitional example of what a regime looks like. The Greeks didn’t do that. They were familiar with monarchies.
They had city-states that were monarchies. They had city-states that were oligarchies. They had city-states that were kind of mixed regimes. They had city-states that were more or less direct democracies for the citizens, like Athens. So they’re looking at all of these things and doing this sort of cross-comparison and kind of a deep dive into, okay, well, what do you actually need to make any of these work?
What is functional? What is not functional? What are the best cases of each regime type? Aristotle does this kind of examination in particular. And what are the bad cases?
How do each of these types of regimes typically get corrupted? So why is that useful? Because if you’re looking at the United States today, so someone might think, well, our Constitution is great, therefore our government is great. Yes, we have problems, but we just need to tweak things here and there. Someone might think that.
My perspective would be more like, no, we have these deep structural problems where we’re seeing institutional failure at very profound levels, and therefore it’s worth looking at what is going wrong. Why is it going wrong? How is power functioning and flowing through our current regime in ways that kind of systematically mess things up? And then you can begin thinking about, well, how might you correct that? What might a better situation look like?
Wolf: Yeah. So, okay, let’s pull on that thread a little bit. When looking at our current situation, what do you think are interesting insights that you might pull out of Plato or Aristotle’s philosophy that could be applied to help us understand that question of how is power moving through our system? What exactly is going wrong? We have this sense that something’s going wrong because I think people are fairly aware at this point, we have declining quality of life across many ways of measuring that.
And I think that there’s still a lot of disputation on that. There’s still a lot of people denying it, but that there’s, especially in the last sort of 10, 20 years, been kind of this decline. Certainly the institutions turning into more of a lawless clown show.
Huge losses of trust with COVID and all this, all the drama around Trump. There’s a lot going on that just from a very neutral perspective is like, okay, maybe there’s something weird happening here. But what is it that going back and reading the ancient Greeks, what am I going to learn that’s going to help me understand our situation?
Stephen: Yeah. So, many of us are familiar with the idea of the cathedral. Nick Land, I think, has an interesting twist on this where he talks about cathedralism as a process in which propaganda and perception management comes to substitute for actual grappling with reality. Well, hmm. What does that sound like?
It sounds—
Wolf: It sounds like—
Stephen: a bit like Plato’s cave where—where he’s talking about the systematic use of images in substitution for a deeper, more accurate contact with reality. So right there we can see this sort of disjunction and how one might want to become conscious of that, and then use that insight to adjust one’s own assessment of reality and hopefully get a better grip on reality. Which is after all, the whole purpose of study of great authors like Plato or Aristotle. And just to use the COVID example as a follow-up, we saw in March 2020, this sort of turning on a dime of a lot of the propaganda messaging about whether COVID was not serious and it was very, very bad to even be concerned with it, to COVID is so serious you shouldn’t leave your house. You shouldn’t even have a funeral for your mother and attend that because that’s bad to have a gathering of 20 people.
And then we saw an immediate turning on the dime when the George Floyd protests started. Oh, no, now it’s okay to gather in large crowds as long as you’re doing it for the protest because—that’s an important and good thing. And obviously there’s a certain element of clownish nonsense to this, but there were a lot of people in positions of authority saying this very seriously, and there were a fair proportion of people taking it seriously. I don’t know if it was half the population or a third of the population, but there was some large fraction of the population convinced by this. And whereas a more penetrating perspective might have been, “Wait, I actually want to assess how serious this is, not brush it off, take precautions where needed.”
But also not believe that I have to never leave my house and engage in these extreme measures that are suddenly necessary but not necessary depending on—clearly political determinations. And so that’s just an example of how you might have a different relationship with sort of official institutional messaging that if you kind of have this better picture of how the regime works at different levels, you can, I think, navigate even on a personal level, you can navigate better in respect to it.
Wolf: And so reading these other texts, this would almost apply to a lot of the things we could read from history, right? You read Machiavelli, you kind of get a different appreciation on power. You read the ancient Greeks, you get this different appreciation on sort of how these things work. You get new thoughts. You read Nietzsche, right?
And, I guess one thing, though, that’s particular about the Greeks is just they do place quite a lot of emphasis on these questions of maybe even just epistemology, right? What’s just opinion? What’s law? What’s nature? What’s actually fact?
How do you establish these things? How do you think about the relationship between those things? They were grappling a lot with that just even with the absurdity of the trial of Socrates, right? He’s basically convicted of corrupting the youth, of some kind of atheism, maybe, and his argument was, “Well, I was just going around asking questions, trying to understand what you guys meant by some of the words you use.” But somehow that itself is this hostile action, and this is all happening in the shadow of some of the things that happened during the Peloponnesian War, like Critias, where Critias is kind of coming from this philosophical clique.
I think he’s Plato’s uncle or something. And, he had basically had this radically antinomian perspective of, well, the gods are fake, the laws are fake. It’s all just lies meant so that these masses of weak people can control the strong. And Nietzsche picks up on this—in his discussions of these things. But a lot of that surrounding epistemic context resonates with our own time.
You’ve been talking about Moldbug’s cathedral here. The cathedral being this kind of propaganda apparatus that shapes our own society, and then there’s all these faith articles that we’re held to in various ways that, as you’re saying, change all the time especially now. And yeah, so that’s kind of thinking of those in their relationship to the power structure of society is definitely something that the ancient Greeks were doing. And that part in particular feels very relevant.
Stephen: Yeah. Just as a sidebar, I want to mention, when I talk about reading Plato and Aristotle, by no means do I mean instead of Machiavelli and Nietzsche or any other modern authors. No, I read them, too. And they themselves, Machiavelli has this beautiful passage in one of his letters where he talks about at the end of the day, retreating to his library and communing with the ancients. That’s what he loved to do.
He wrote on Livy extensively, but he studied Thucydides extensively. Nietzsche even more so. Nietzsche immersed himself in the Greeks. Much of his writing is in response to the Greeks, even where he sharply attacks them, like he’ll attack Socrates. He has this kind of frenemy—relationship where he’ll intensely attack Socrates, but at the same time say that Socrates was of world historical importance.
And to understand what’s gone on in modernity and what the kind of line of thought from Machiavelli to Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Nietzsche, but also thinkers like Carl Schmitt, the Italian realists. To understand what they’re doing, you really need the Greeks as a background because they themselves draw so much.
Wolf: I guess that’s a good point. The whole Western tradition of political philosophy starts with these guys, the ancient Greeks, and then keeps building on them. And so—
Stephen: In positive and negative ways
Wolf: so they are very much this kind of skeleton key to the thing. It’s like, okay, well, you have to have that to be able to engage almost with any of these writers because they are so much talking... It’s all footnotes to Plato essentially.
Dialectic—the method of philosophy (23:40)
Stephen: Right. As Whitehead said. Yeah. So you mentioned their approach to how you come to know things, which they call dialectic—is the term of art that Socrates really develops. And I think there’s a really important way of approaching knowledge that they developed, where they start with opinions.
They start with, the Greek word is doxa, is opinion or appearance, and they would go around and gather, well, what do people think? What do smart people think about this? But it’s only a starting point. You don’t take that and believe it.
Wolf: No.
Stephen: You take that, and then you begin questioning it. You begin saying, “Well, this opinion seems to disagree with this opinion. And this opinion, it seems plausible, but it doesn’t cover these cases. So how would you deal with this case?” And you begin looking for exceptions.
You begin looking for counter examples. And it’s almost this process of sifting and combining and sorting. And the belief is that if you do this intelligently in conversation with good, smart conversation partners who are willing to pursue the truth with you, and you are really sincerely trying to figure things out, this is key. So often in conversations, people aren’t really trying to come to a truth. They’re not really trying to figure something out.
They’re just trying to win. They’re trying to win a conversation—to sound smart, which is a deadly phrase, I think. Whenever you hear that phrase, that’s a red flag for something not quite going on right. But you’re like, “No, no, I’m not trying to sound smart. I’m happy to sound stupid. I’m happy to sound like I don’t know what’s going on.”
Because in some sense, I don’t.
Wolf: Socrates is always doing this, right? It’s always like his big character is like, “Well, that all sounds really smart. That all sounds great, but hold on, I don’t quite understand what—you mean by this one word.” “Just walk me through it as a really stupid person.” “I don’t get it.”
And then that unfolds into this whole dialogue of realizing that concept was not as robust as people thought it was.
Stephen: Right. And people will argue about, well, is he being ironic? Is he being sincere? And I think it’s absolutely true that Socrates is sometimes ironic. Socrates is sometimes posing a question in order to steer the conversation in a different issue or to expose some issue that hasn’t really been covered yet—or to particularly respond to what a particular conversation partner needs in his estimation.
That’s all true, but I also think there’s this huge, even deeper level of sincerity where he’s asking those questions not because he has no idea or no clue, but because this is part of the technique—of exposing, of exploring, of navigating towards a better conceptual framework, of figuring out, okay, so if that’s not a great way to think about it, what is? And how would we grope our way towards that? And you can’t figure stuff out if you’ve convinced yourself or if you’re dead set on convincing others that you already know what’s going on, that you already know the answer. Because if you already know the answer, it’s hard to take on new information and learn.
Wolf: Yeah. I remember sort of maybe the most famous kind of example of this in that canon is the first book of The Republic, right? Where they go around and kind of solicit these opinions about what is the nature of justice. And a bunch of different perspectives are represented. Justice is the will of the stronger.
Justice is some lie. Justice is various things. And then, yeah, and then Socrates starts asking questions, and some of these definitions start kind of falling apart under scrutiny. And some of it’s convincing, some of it’s not, but it really gets the reader initiated into this mode of investigation, which is we’re going to chew on these concepts together, right? We’re going to interrogate the concepts together.
The method you’ve been describing here is kind of the method of philosophy, right? It’s like, wait a minute. Let’s actually go and examine the foundational assumptions of our concepts. Let’s examine how we’re using those, what they mean. And if you do that sincerely, there’s all kinds of insincere ways or stupid, half-baked ways to do that, but if you do that sincerely, then that’s the thing that’s kind of popping you out of the propaganda prison, where if you get together with a bunch of other smart people and you start really interrogating the concepts that you think you believe in, then that’s this moment of kind of coming out of the cave, as it were.
Yeah, partially—
Stephen: Yeah. Socrates’ arguments aren’t always good. Sometimes he’ll give an argument that makes you say, “Wait, that’s not quite right.”
Wolf: That’s a stupid... Yeah.
Stephen: But what he is always very good at is navigating. He’s navigating the conversation. He’s steering. He’s trying to cut off certain options that he thinks are clearly incorrect, and then opening up a space to explore what might be a better conception. So, reading a Platonic dialogue is not a gathering of arguments or of positions.
You don’t read them to like, okay, these are the three positions that Plato is trying to convey in this dialogue. And now I got them, so I know what he thought about that. No, that’s almost always wrong.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It reminds me of there’s another way to take this, which is you don’t read it at all for what they thought, their opinions. You read it entirely for the method. And I don’t think you ever read it entirely for any particular reason.
But it’s one of the things you can get from it is even just the method. And the method of you get a bunch of your friends together and you actually start thinking independently. And if you look at in the Greek case, what relationship did this have with the city? It’s like this is the thing that really starts to get at the root of the problems, get at the root of the current regime in a way that escalated quite a lot. And that it seems like a very powerful thing to be doing today is having real conversations among, for lack of a better term, the students, right?
The people who want to understand the world for real, who want that cognitive sovereignty. They don’t want to be propagandized.
This essential activity of philosophy is kind of actually having a dialogue, having the dialectic occurring outside of the legal and moral taboos of the city. And this is how I read kind of what they were doing. What was philosophy? It’s this kind of breakaway cognitive activity. You’re first of all removing yourself from intellectual control by spinning up this hard-to-contain dialectic among you and your friends that starts to really attack the foundational concepts and come to reconsider them and how they have distorted or misled your real interests.
And I don’t think that’s even stated explicitly as part of what they’re doing. But that’s what strikes me as nonetheless what they’re doing kind of judged in a historical context.
Stephen: Well, that kind of inquiry was dangerous enough and powerful enough that they killed Socrates for it. The formal charges were impiety and atheism and this kind of thing, but I don’t think Socrates was put to death because of any particular positions he was espousing. He certainly didn’t go around telling people there are no gods. But he did totally ask questions about how the citizens should conduct themselves in relationship to the gods and many other such questions. And that itself, that sort of stepping back and not taking received answers for granted and genuinely exploring them, the very act of doing that, the very act of thinking for yourself and exploring in that way was deemed very anti-regime and dangerous.
Every regime rests on taboos (33:41)
Wolf: Yeah. I would go so far as to say it’s actually always—like that to some degree. Every regime is based on some sort of foundational settlement, let’s call it a political settlement, where the various actors, the classes involved agree implicitly to relate to each other in a particular way using particular institutions. And this is always for individual rational actors in there, if you imagine them kind of fully extrapolating out their thought and running ahead of everyone else, I think the whole thing just falls apart. It actually is based on somehow there being blind spots and taboos and a collective regulation of thought to not go in certain directions.
I think every regime is in some sense based on that. And maybe at first, it’s just, well, we don’t know how to go in that direction. We don’t know that, so we’re suspending our judgment in that direction. Or well, we just had a really bad fight about that, so we’re going to agree not to talk about it for a while. Or just maybe there’s some legitimate reason, but especially as they start to decay, those taboos start to become the covering over the worst rot.
This is my kind of—reading on how societies work and how these things happen. And so then the act of philosophy is to say, well, we’re not going to respect those limits to thought. We’re going to do thought without limits, or at least as much without limits as we can muster it among ourselves, which as a small number of people still existing within a historical context is not actually thought without limits, but the sort of ideal of philosophy is kind of subjecting the city and its intellectual foundations to not just the city, but your whole society. Subjecting its intellectual foundations to kind of unrestrained inquiry. And it’s a very dangerous activity because it can—it can go to it could just destroy the whole thing.
And result in nothing better replacing it.
Stephen: It’s a solvent, right?
Wolf: Or it could result in the discovery of new principles and new foundations that are actually much stronger. And we look at this historically, philosophy is, of course, the birth of science, the birth of most kind of subsequent political ideas, especially since the Renaissance have been in some sense kind of come out of readings of these things and attempting to do this philosophy thing. Our modern ideas of democracy and all this, they come out of political philosophy quite self-consciously in a way that I think pre-philosophical regimes were less self-conscious in their foundation in that way. And so the act of doing philosophy, it’s not just the particular things you teach, it’s that there’s a usurpation of sovereignty kind of being done here or really throwing the question of intellectual sovereignty into disarray or throwing the dice on behalf of the city, letting the gods decide in some sense, or throwing the city into the hands of some higher power, which is kind of this dialectical process, which you can’t really control. It’s not like the philosophers actually get a lot of control out of this.
Sometimes they just get—executed. Sometimes they do get new ideas and they get something out of that. Sometimes it goes on in some direction inspired by them, but without them. But it’s this activity that’s very dangerous to the city, but somehow very necessary, especially in these times when it’s reaching that decline phase. It does seem necessary.
It’s like, okay, the thing has reached its limits. It’s now time for the new thing. And philosophy is the activity that goes and creates that new thing or opens up its conditions of possibility.
Stephen: Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right to underscore that every regime has its set of taboos, its predefined Overton window, and this is true no matter how enlightened, no matter how based on reason, how rationalistic the regime is. In fact, sometimes self-consciously enlightened and rationalistic regimes can have the strongest taboos.
We’re living in the aftermath of this post-World War II settlement where there are very strong taboos in certain areas. And, in terms of how the Greeks reflected on this, it gets to the whole contrast of nomos and physis. So nomos is custom, law—and it is basically exactly what we’re talking about. It’s the whole set of presuppositions often enforced to some level or other. But it’s not simply literal legal, sort of state-enforced law.
It’s the whole body of things that may be implicitly enforced—and that are taken for granted, and you’re supposed to take them for granted, and if you don’t, you’re a bad person. Whereas the whole notion of physis or nature is how things actually organically are. If a horse is a particular kind of animal and you are a very skilled horseman or horse trainer, you know how horses behave, you have some better idea of the nature of the horse. The human is a particular kind of animal. The human behaves in particular ways, thrives in certain ways, does not in others, and studying that is the study of human nature.
So this whole idea of studying nature is it is apart from nomos. It is not simply defined by or circumscribed by nomos. You might have people—you may be living in Athens, but you know about the Persians. You know perfectly well that over there they live quite differently. You may even have heard stories about India.
There are stories in Herodotus about this, about how they live really differently there. And so obviously, human nature doesn’t dictate that. Human nature has a broad range of possibilities. And when you go to study that directly, that’s dangerous because you are implicitly saying the nomos of the regime is not—
Wolf: Universal
Stephen: universal, is not necessarily true in some capital T sense.
Wolf: Yeah, and there’s different ways, like, okay, you’re a Greek, you’re looking at the Persians. There’s different ways of kind of parsing that. What I might call the primitive within nomos perspective would just be, “Oh, well, they’re just backwards.” It’s like, yeah, they do things differently, but that’s just because they’re wrong. Right?
And it’s that act of open-mindedness to say, “Wait a minute. Maybe they’re not wrong. Maybe there are multiple ways of doing things.”
Stephen: Right. Maybe they’re just them.
Wolf: Yeah. Maybe they’re just different. But then even further to say, what if we’re wrong? What if our sort of political and psychological order is wrong in some sense, out of sync with something of reality? And that’s where you bring into this concept of physis or nature.
It’s out of sync with nature. Somehow your order can be against nature—in the sense that it’s some aberration from life, and there’s some inherent flaw in it, some contradiction, something that’s not working. And this is the material of the philosopher, right? This is the thing that inspires the philosopher to do what he does, which is to find those contradictions within society, the consequential contradictions within the kind of frame of reference of society, and start pulling on those threads, chewing on it, trying to figure out, okay, if that’s wrong, then what’s right? Or what’s the alternative?
Or how should we be? If there’s multiple equally valid ways of being, what’s the one for us? And if it’s not this thing that we’re doing, then what is it? Or just how accurate or real is this one that we’re pursuing? And again, the axiom or the theory that I have that every society is based on some taboo.
It’s not just that every society has their own way of doing things, it’s that their own way of doing things is often, perhaps universally, based on some lie at some point, or some misapprehension of reality. And at some point, that becomes consequential. And when it becomes consequential, then philosophy becomes necessary, but also extremely dangerous because it’s going to blow up the society, because the society has become against nature at that point, where it’s become consequentially against nature.
Stephen: Yeah. And to give an example for the Greeks that was closer to home, if you’re in Athens, you don’t have to look as far as Persia or India, you could just look to Sparta. Because you knew perfectly well how their city worked and how it was different. And the Spartans were actually very much admired, not by all Athenians, but there was widespread admiration in the upper classes for Sparta. And after Sparta won the Peloponnesian War, that even gave more spice to that.
And so these questions about, well, how should a regime be best structured, are very, very immediate and close to home. And just looking kind of at, in our case, many taboos we could talk about, maybe the most obvious one is relating to genetics—and how genetics has or correlates with different cognitive and behavioral traits, and whether there are group differences in subpopulations. That’s been a very taboo subject to explore. Academics have lost their jobs over this. Papers have gotten yanked over this.
Many an academic wrist has been slapped for even straying too far into looking at data—that you’re not supposed to look at. And one could wonder, at some point, does this become consequential in—
Wolf: It seems to be, in fact, extremely consequential. I think on the other hand, that one has been cracked open a lot recently. I think everyone recognizes—not everyone. There’s people who are still denying it, but a lot of people are recognizing, okay, there’s some kind of real genetic basis to race and to differences between races and differences between populations and differences in talents and character and all these things, and that these are very consequential matters of human nature. They’re very consequential for society and so on.
And I think it has not reached the level of official acknowledgement—but I think those conversations are very much being had openly much more so than they were 15 years ago, let’s say. And nonetheless, I think there’s deeper taboos, right—around the nature of morality, right? The sort of egalitarian assumption with respect to actual human nature is maybe weakening, but the egalitarian assumption with respect to sort of moral dignity or something, that’s still very much intact. And though these things are being adjusted and digested as new information comes in. So society is engaged in this often irrational, I think it may be inherently irrational process of having to digest new information into its fundamental taboos.
And it’s interesting to see where it bends and where it doesn’t, and under what kind of pressure. But I think, yeah, the job of philosophy is, and this is kind of the impetus to the projects that I get up to, right? Whether it’s Palladium or this Students project. The thing I see that’s necessary is that we have to kind of have a real sovereign discourse somewhere—that’s actually trying to answer these questions and really getting to the bottom of these matters. Because otherwise, if we’re just wrapped up in our own blind spots and our own taboos, we’re never going to get anywhere.
Our society’s going to collapse. But it’s inherently a very dangerous thing to go and crack open all these cans of worms. But I think for the reason that I’ve tried to articulate here, I think it’s extremely necessary that we actually do have to have these conversations. And some of my colleagues and I, we’ve looked back on the last 10 years and thought, wow, we were right about a lot of things, but we were right about a lot more than we said as well. And maybe we could have done more if we were more courageous and more willing to speak and more willing to create conversation.
And so this is something, if we go back and read the Greeks, another thing you realize, of course, is, I don’t know, to put a mythic lens on it, the philosopher puts his life on the line, obviously, Socrates showed that. And therefore, philosophy itself involves a dosage of courage—to actually be willing to think. And not only that, but it’s essential what god is the god of philosophy, right? And the discussions that the particular philosophers we’re discussing were having were in the Academy, right? The Olive Grove.
There was a grove, I think, dedicated to Athena. Athena being, of course, the goddess of not only wisdom, which is what they were studying, they were lovers of wisdom, but also of heroes and courage and these things, right? And I think that’s not a mistake. It’s not an—accident. It’s not a coincidence.
There’s something like thought through a mythic lens. There’s actually almost a religious element to philosophy, is like being willing to believe that there’s going to be some positive outcome from an act of intellectual courage to actually go and challenge the things that need to be challenged in the sort of lies of the time, and that there’s, depending on how pagan you are, that there’s some divine force behind that.
Justice as proper order rather than equality (49:30)
Stephen: Yeah. So you mentioned the foundations of morality and how egalitarianism is very much bound up in that for our current regime. To me, this points directly to the question of justice—which is like the central—
Wolf: The subject
Stephen: subject and question being pursued in the Republic. But also very much something Aristotle is concerned with in both the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. And the striking thing is that although all of these thinkers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, are very much concerned with justice, it’s a very central concern. They in no way presupposed egalitarianism as definitive—of that. Quite the opposite.
Where they tended to fall out was that justice was fundamentally a matter of good order, of well-ordered, both for—the individual. Justice was a well-ordered soul in which the different faculties of the mind, reason, sort of thumos or spiritedness, and the appetites are all well-ordered in harmony, or for that matter, in the city itself. Different parts of the city are ordered so that they function well together and maintain the city the way it should be maintained. That’s a very high-level thing you can say. So their whole focus was on kind of functionality and order rather than this a priori assumption that everyone should, in some sense, be treated the same.
They were like, “No, people shouldn’t be treated the same. They should be treated in a manner appropriate to who they are in their station in life, according to what role they’re playing in the city. They should be treated in a way so that that works out well.” Which may not be this, you may have someone who’s a warrior, someone who’s a blacksmith. Well, blacksmiths are important.
You need your blacksmith, but you don’t treat the blacksmith the same way you treat the warrior because there’s two different functions being played there. And as for the matter of courage, yeah, I think that’s another central virtue, another thing that they’re very concerned about, one of the top four organizing virtues that Plato talks about. And the very act, you said a lot of this, but the very act of philosophizing, because of the way that it is dangerous, because of the way that it potentially puts you in conflict with the present regime, is necessarily one that requires courage. So...
Wolf: Yeah. And your point about democracy and justice and egalitarianism and the ways that the ancient Greek philosophers often found themselves in conflict with those, it’s a little bit maybe opposite the impression one would get by listening to modern academics—or modern ideologues. The modern kind of neocon ideologue will tell you that the ancient Greeks taught us the value of democracy and all these liberal democratic ideas come from the Greeks, which is almost the opposite of the truth, right? Athens was a democracy, but a very different kind of democracy than we have. They were a democracy of a much smaller citizen class—over a much larger class that was subordinated.
And even there, the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates. Socrates is executed for going against democracy, but from a position of almost this aristocratic nihilism or aristocratic radicalism. So they’re very much even further. Athens is less democratic than we are, and these philosophers were even less democratic than that. Which isn’t to say they’re just totally about hierarchy and domination.
I think you put it very well. It’s about this organic order. It’s about things in their proper place and being treated according to the functionality of the station and so on. But it’s important, I guess, to understand this, for someone kind of wanting to engage with these thinkers or considering engaging with these thinkers from the modern perspective, to realize that despite protestations by some, I think, modern factions trying to distort the matter, the ancient Greeks are not really in support of what we have now. As much as they are mustered in support of it is like, oh, yeah, America pulls on the legacy of the ancient Greeks who taught us wonderful things like democracy and so on.
But it’s really the opposite, is they actually they’re teaching a kind of aristocratic radicalism against decline. This is the thesis that maybe we should talk about in depth sometime, which is Costin Alamariu’s Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy thesis. Which is that in the decline of the ancient Greek polis, you get this attempt by the philosophers to kind of reconstruct the conditions of aristocratic excellence through argumentation and through—thinking. And that’s really the kind of essence of their project, is how do we create a society in which we can have the best people come forth, in which it’s possible to have great rulers and great people. And that’s this undertone in what they’re doing.
So I find that to be a very interesting thesis connecting to this whole thing. But it puts a very different spin on these philosophers relative to what you’ll hear, I think, from the mainstream today.
Stephen: Yeah. I’m pretty willing to just flatly say that the Greek philosophers are not, in fact, early forms of, or predecessors of, or even major contributors to our modern liberal democracy. That’s simply not the case. And not only that, but as late as the late 18th century, our Founding Fathers would not have thought them so. They would’ve thought very highly of republics, which are a mixed form of constitution, like the Roman Republic, but not simple democracies.
That really—even in the United States, doesn’t come until the 1820s. And if you look at the Greek cities, almost universally, in fact I can’t think of any exceptions, even in Athens, which was the most democratic, the citizenry is quite restricted. Citizenship is not tied to residence. You’re not a resident just because you live there.
Wolf: Yeah, they didn’t have birthright citizenship. That would’ve been an absurd concept.
Stephen: Aristotle lived and taught in Athens but was not a citizen, just because he had come from elsewhere. And they had this whole concept of metic, which is basically a legal residency status, but you’re not a citizen. So you can’t participate in any of the civic functions. You cannot vote. There would be religious rituals that you could not participate in.
You’re not a citizen. You’re totally welcome to be here. You can work, you can trade, but you’re not a citizen. And that was just taken for granted, even in the Athenian democracy. And in non-democratic cities like Sparta, even more so it was restricted.
So yeah, I can’t think of a major work by one of these thinkers or even secondary thinkers, which was extolling democracy. Yes, they knew about democracies, and there were examples, Athens most prominently, right before them. But more often than not, they were critical of it, not supportive of it.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, I wonder, it would be fun conversation that we should have maybe another time, the actual history of democracy as an idea. Democracy as we know it—as an idea. Where did this thing come from? How did it end up claiming such a mantle of intellectual legitimacy even though it’s actually quite a modern and aberrant idea?
It’s an interesting—
Stephen: There is a tendency—
Wolf: problem
Stephen: to give an ancient example, in the Roman Republic, for more and more power to flow downward to the plebs, who were citizens, so it’s not non-citizens. But the citizenry as Rome expanded its control, first over the neighboring areas of Italy—then further outward, there was a tendency both to expand the citizenry and to give further governmental and political rights to the lower social classes. All of which was in response to and led to great conflict, which then eventually flips over into the empire.
Wolf: Yeah. But I think it’s notable. I’m not aware of anybody who actually mounted an intellectual defense of that.
Stephen: Right. I think that’s right.
Wolf: Yeah. Anyways, I guess the ancient Greeks in particular, they were more intellectual than the Romans in a lot of ways. But reading them is this way to get not only a critical lens on many of the pathologies of our own society, not only a fresh perspective that’s just quite alien, but also in particular, this method. The practice of philosophy itself, I think is kind of one of... This is the interesting thing that I’ve been trying to emphasize here—is the practice of philosophy itself and what that means is maybe the essential lesson that I take from it, is that there is this tradition of breaking out of the cognitive control of the system, setting up your own dialectic, and then using that to sort of advance the system, advance your political context into the future against its own wishes, in this fashion that’s very dangerous to the people doing that, and also very dangerous to the system.
But it is sort of this necessary thing that must happen within the course of history and of the development of societies. And so that’s really the thing that I fixate on as some of the most interesting, this kind of epistemic process of philosophy. And that’s, as I’ve said, the kind of thing that I’ve tried to cultivate in my own life and that when I’m going around looking for the students, right—this project is called “The Students.” I’m looking for the people who are doing that effectively or who are building something that aids that or implements that, or applies the ideas coming out of the people who are doing the radical novel thinking. Because that’s where I see if we have hope in the future, that’s where it comes from.
It comes from philosophy unleashed from the cowardice that the system would have us adopt.
Stephen: That whole process of stepping back from the polity, developing your understanding through dialectic, not in isolation, but typically with a group of conversation partners, and then perhaps contributing back. That’s really the only way to attain deliberate navigation. Otherwise, the regime simply evolves by the pressure of different factions—the pressure of events. If you’re lucky, you may have some leader step forward who’s a very natural talent, but even that kind of person typically has gotten their ideas from somewhere.
Wolf: Yeah. And if you’re lucky, they’re a philosopher.
Stephen: That’s right. So, really, even with a strong leader stepping forward, for them to be effective, typically, there has been that connection made with philosophy. So it’s really just cultivating this ability and possibility of deliberate navigation.
Wolf: Yeah. Actually, this is an interesting angle to pull on a little bit more. I think we should wrap up soon. But I remember reading Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He’s a French Catholic priest and scientist.
Stephen: Great.
Wolf: Has this great kind of exposition of, well, “The Phenomenon of Man” is the title of the book. And he’s trying to get at what is this thing that we are? What is this thing that we rep—what do we represent in the big story—of the cosmos? And one of the things he emphasizes is the growth of consciousness as life develops. That life develops at higher and higher forms of consciousness that kind of take more and more responsibility for the whole situation that they’re in—and are able to respond to more and more of it.
The most primitive life only has this rudimentary consciousness of the next meal and the immediate threats and opportunities in its environment. But as we develop Man, and as we develop what he calls the noosphere—that sort of sphere of ideas where we talk to each other, we’re taking on this role of higher consciousness and taking on ourselves more of the role of shaping our environment and shaping our destiny that previously would’ve just been this dumb brute kind of chance and faction and war, right? As you’re saying, right? And that kind of rising to the challenge of raising the level of consciousness of mankind is something that inspired me.
We can’t be going backwards into, “Oh yeah, we’re just going to submit ourselves to the whims of war, and faction, and politics and so on, without any sort of conscious element.” We’re going to do this consciously. We’re going to do this deliberately. We’re going to do real philosophy. Yes, it’s going to be dangerous.
Yes, we’re still taking a leap of faith. That’s the thing about kind of elevating consciousness and taking on more responsibility for our situation, is it is in fact dangerous because you can get more wrong.
You’re really putting yourself in a tough position, but it’s also necessary to achieve the higher form of life, right? And if we look at the kind of vector of the development of life, the development of man—the development of societies, it’s towards these higher forms that are more conscious, taking more responsibility, more aware of what they’re doing. And that’s an ideal that’s really appealed to me. And so I kind of fit this philosophy idea in with Teilhard’s ideas. And I just wanted to note that there’s this element of by doing philosophy, by refusing to submit ourselves to just the brute stupid process of political decay, we’re actually participating in a very large story, which is the development of higher forms of consciousness.
Because if we get philosophy right, if we learn to do philosophy, if we learn to have a society that is compatible with philosophy, that’s this incredible advance that we could undergo. I don’t know how you feel about that.
Stephen: No. I think that makes a lot of sense. Philosophy is the deliberate pushing forward of consciousness in a way that takes responsibility for the environment. And another thing I would add in there is probably a good topic for another conversation, is the role of technology in that. That technology is the thing that man does to better interact with the environment and therefore, any true philosophy is going to have a critical role in examining that, understanding that, guiding that.
And it also, I think, even sheds light on some contemporary movements, like the degrowth movement. You could see that in a way as a refusal of this development, of the development of consciousness—of philosophy, of technology, the whole matrix. It’s like, “No, this is scary. We don’t want that. We’re going to pull back and try to return to some earlier way of life,” which seems like it would not go well.
But I think the way of philosophy would be to say the only way out is through. We have to push this forward in a very deliberate and deliberative manner.
Philosophy as cognitive accelerationism (1:08:19)
Wolf: Yeah. And philosophy is very much on that thread. Philosophy is somehow a species of cognitive accelerationism. It’s intellectual accelerationism.
Stephen: Oh, there’s a provocation. Yeah.
Wolf: We are going to throw ourselves into the dangerous future. And yeah, the degrowth kind of reflex is to look at what man has done to the world, look at what man does to ourselves, sort of through the power of philosophy and through the power of technology and so on, and say, “Wait a minute, that’s all dangerous. Let’s retreat from that.” But you’re retreating back, you’re not retreating into something that’s safe. You’re retreating into something where you no longer have responsibility.
I think that’s really the psychological impulse or the thing actually happening there is it’s not even about whether it’s safer, because I don’t think it is.
Stephen: No.
Wolf: I think it’s about whether you have moral responsibility for it. It’s like we don’t have moral responsibility for the ongoing chaos of war and death and genocide that’s going to happen in nature. Not that those things will ever be eliminated—but if we go forward, if we raise our level of consciousness, if we philosophize more completely, we absolutely are going to be responsible for those things. And we may not be able to eliminate them, but we’re going to be responsible for them. And that itself, it’s a morally scary thought.
And I think that’s, as much as anything, what people are retreating from when they retreat from the future.
Stephen: Yeah. To some, degrowth is comforting, even if it ends up involving more suffering. And this gets back to that notion of courage. That—philosophy necessarily is an act of courage, in part because you’re stepping back from the polity, but also because it has this very forward-looking, future-looking, responsibility-taking aspect, and necessarily that involves courage. So you could say degrowth is kind of an act of cowardice.
Wolf: Right. Yeah, and just one final point on kind of the fruits of philosophy. It’s not an accident, I think, therefore, that science and mathematics, in particular Western mathematics—came out of the philosophical tradition. In particular, Plato’s provocation that the guardians must study military-grade mathematics, basically—as part of their training as warriors and as philosophers. That these things go together in a very close way.
That is one of the major reasons why so many people studied mathematics in the early modern period—and took it so seriously. And mathematics is this very precise language that enabled science, another philosophical project, natural philosophy, to really turn from sort of mere alchemy and mere thinking into technology and industry and all these things that were unleashed on the world. And so, does philosophy have a good track record? Yes, it’s dangerous. Also, it is the foundation of everything that we now do, and it starts with the Greeks.
Stephen: Yeah. Mathematics has to be core, and natural science as well, to any renewed liberal arts. The liberal arts have fallen into this state of very sad decay, and I’m very interested in efforts to try to revive them. But to revive them, they have to be reconceived much more along the lines that the Greeks conceived of them—which very much included mathematics.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. Well, I think that’s a good place to end the conversation. We’ve covered some really interesting stuff here about the relationship between philosophy and courage and sort of regime overhaul and the processes of decay and so on. These are the reasons to engage in philosophy, because this is what it actually is.
And the Greeks were there first. They started it. We kind of continue in their tradition. And so that’s, I think, why we read them.
Stephen: For sure.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, all right. Thank you so much, Stephen, for coming on. This was a lot of fun, actually.
Stephen: All right. Good conversation. Thank you.
Wolf: And thank you for watching. We’ll see you next time.