← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
First Alcibiades by Plato Part One with Alec Bianco and Athenian Stranger
01:58:10
Loading summary
Transcript82 lines
- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend in the Great Books podcast, we are joined by Alec Bianco and the Athenian Stranger to discuss the first half of First Alcibiades, a dialogue of Plato that is said to be the beginning and the summation of all Platonic philosophy. It is exactly where first time readers of Plato should start their journey. It tells the story of Socrates attempting to convince a young Alcibiades to make his soul beautiful by pursuing a life of virtue, the life of the philosopher. Alec, Athenian Stranger and I go almost line by line discussing the dialogue with a particular focus on Socrates the teacher and Plato's philosophy of education. I'm a first time reader of this dialogue and I am in debt to Alec and Athenian Stranger for their guidance through this text. Again, a big thank you to all of you. To everyone who has made this an incredibly successful launch into Plato, go check out our reader's guide to First Alcibiades and and join our community chat of all those reading Plato with us both on our Patreon page. So join us today for the first half of First Alcibiades, this historic start for new students of Plato. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father and serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We're recording on another beautiful evening here in rural Oklahoma. You can check us out on Twitter or X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. Thank you to all our supporters. You can go to thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have guides and articles and things that help you understand the great books. Today we are discussing First Alcibiades by Plato. We are kicking off our studies into Plato. I'm terribly excited for this evening's episode. We have some excellent, excellent guests. We have Alec Bianco who is the Director of Curriculum at the Searcy Institute, an organization that provides a wide range of services to classical educators throughout the US And Canada. Alec previously joined us on the podcast to discuss the Odyssey and helped us unravel the mysteries of the loyal swineherd. Alec, welcome back to the podcast.
- [02:19]
Alec Bianco
Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
- [02:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
We also have the Athenian Stranger who runs an excellent account on X exploring the wisdom of the Great books, which includes hosting really intriguing conversations via Spaces on X. On his website athenscorner.com, you'll find an in depth discussion of philosophy, political philosophy and education at every level. Athenian Stranger, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:47]
Athenian Stranger
Thank you guys so much for having me. I really appreciate this this is an honor.
- [02:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So, Athenian stranger, your website has a lot of really good material. I appreciate following you on X. I do think you host a lot of good spaces on X, a lot of good conversations. How did you kind of peel back the layers here a little bit for us? Like how did you fall in love with the great books and decide like the wisdom that you found was worth sharing?
- [03:12]
Athenian Stranger
Really? It happened more by accident than anything. I was in a math PhD program and there were a number of things that happened. I became very interested in what's known as set theory, which becomes very philosophical very quickly. And so I started reading some books that had quite a bit of philosophy in them. And then there were just other things going on in my life that weren't exactly necessarily great. And coming home every day, seeing all those math books that offered me no answers whatsoever started causing me to have resentment towards the books themselves. And so I found myself wandering around in Barnes and Nobles throughout their various sections of history, philosophy, psychology. And then one day I just decided I would start taking some courses, some undergrad courses in philosophy. And I enjoyed it so much and I was fortunate enough to have a few great professors that I just woke up one day and said, I really don't want to do math anymore. And I didn't have anything else going on. So I dropped out of the PhD program and I just started taking philosophy from the ground up. And then when I had exhausted all the courses that they had to teach in the philosophy department as well as the philosophy courses in the politics department, I wanted to go study it further. And they were, a few of those great professors were kind enough to help me in getting into an amazing program. And then I just philosophy program elsewhere. And then I just took it as far as it could go. So that's my story. And it just happened to be the case that these professors, they had much, much deeper interests in the pre moderns, ancient philosophy. And so I guess probably because they made that world so beautiful, at least to me, I ended up specializing more so in that topic. I also specialize in some postmodern stuff, but really only insofar as it critiques the pre moderns and ancient philosophy in particular. So that's sort of me in a nutshell there.
- [05:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, that's beautiful. Was there a particular ancient text that first captured your imagination that really sparked that wonder that you're like, yes, this is what I've been looking for.
- [05:41]
Athenian Stranger
You know, probably the apology really got to me because we spent so much time on it. And it turns out that it's so much deeper than it first seems to appear. And then probably because it was sort of in that first introductory course, Plato's Symposium, in conjunction with Plato's Phaedo, those two texts together just sort of infinite. And it's probably no exaggeration to say I've spent more time reading Plato's Phaedo, maybe the Laws, than really anything else in many. At least a decade. So it's sort of like I've had to replace them many times. The pages just start falling out.
- [06:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, that's beautiful. Yeah. It's always amazing to me how providence kind of brings us into these things. Because I was raised not in classical education, not in the Great Books. It kind of stumbled my way backward through looking at kind of Kierkegaard and into like, Camus and Sartre and even Nietzsche, and then kind of tumbled my way back into finding Plato and Aristotle. It wasn't really until I found Plato that then I think that wonder really awoken me and I was able to find that. So I actually have a deep debt, I think, to Plato. So I'm really excited to actually to continue to read him. Alec, what about yourself? Tell us a little bit about, like, how you fell in love with the Great Books and your work with the Searcy Institute.
- [07:05]
Alec Bianco
Yeah, so I was. I'm one of the few, I think, growing fortunately, but few people who was kind of raised in the classical tradition as a part of this renewal that's occurring now, which I'm eternally grateful to my parents for and many others. And so it was, you know, it's a growing, maturing renewal, you know, within the private school and homeschool world. So the class education I received in high school is still very much growing and maturing and. But it allowed me to move. It made me realize rather that I needed to continue this. And I'm so thankful that we're discussing this dialogue in particular, because I think it's one of the best dialogues for college age students or high schoolers looking into college, because what Socrates gets at with Alcibiades, I ended up going to St. John's College, the Great Books College. And that really sort of profoundly affected me in a way that it taught me to appreciate the texts and the authors who wrote them in the Great Books tradition as teachers and mentors to myself. And so that was a really profound experience. And then I think one thing that's really shifted for me in my later years now, and I can say that because I just fell through my deck yesterday and I was not able to bounce back as quickly as I was. So I can tell I'm getting old. But a few years ago, I started reading closely the collected essays and lectures of Jacob Klein, who was at St. John's and the way that he thought. And I'm interested your thoughts about this stranger because he was a mathematician as much as he was a philosopher, and the way he looks at the world and the way he views it is so incredible that it really awoke something in me about how I view the ancients with respect to the moderns and sort of just the course of history and understanding how to look at history and the great Books in that way. It was pretty amazing. And it's still very much congruent with the classical tradition and the Great Books tradition that Adler kind of proposed here in the United States. But it's a more refined way of viewing the Great Books. So I'm excited to revisit. I'm just. I mean, even just this past week, I've just been poring over so many dialogues of Plato, just trying to read it correctly, you know, or rather, more openly is a better way of putting it.
- [09:56]
Athenian Stranger
Yeah. Let me just add here real quickly that first of all, if you're old, then I have two feet in the grave. Second of all, St. John's is one of the very few, and I mean, you can count with on your one hand of the truly best schools for the great books. Genuinely outstanding work that gets done there. And they seem to be doing as much as they can to fight a lot of the other kind of nonsense that's going on in academia. But with regard to Jacob Klein, I would say that when everything is said and done, I really do think that Jacob Klein will be remembered as a philosopher in his own right. His works are very seldom read, which is unfortunate, because they're just about some of the best things that anyone could possibly read. There's a great case to be made that Just One of his essays on liberal education is itself a great book, but particularly his work. He was a student of Husserl, and what he did with Husserl's work in his own research with mathematics is just simply profound. It's almost universally ignored, unfortunately. It's very, very complicated. But it is some of the best stuff that anyone could spend their time studying if they want to really get a grasp of what genuine philosophical research looks like when you encounter it. So, yeah, Klein is just outstanding.
- [11:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I appreciate that. So let's kind of look inside some of those brass tacks of first Alcibiades just to like put a little bit of context on it. So my understanding is like the dramatic dates, when we talk about dialogues, a lot of times we talk about the dramatic date. Like when did this happen in Socrates life? Not necessarily when did Plato write it, but where we are in his life. So the dramatic date is approximately 433 B.C. so that puts Alcibiades around 20, Socrates around 40. So it's a relatively younger Socrates than maybe we're used to. Actually running into the composition date is a little bit complicated and I think we have to address that. So first, Alcibiades is considered by many to be a spurious dialogue, actually, like in most of all the things that I find, you know, it has a little asterisk next to it and they've kind of said, you know, this probably wasn't written by Plato, et cetera. And so they say usually, you know, some maybe like a second generation or first generation Platonist wrote it, or even there's some theories that maybe Plato wrote some of it and then it was added to. And it's more of like kind of a composite text. These kind of range from like maybe 390s B.C. to a 350s B.C. you know, I'll just throw this out there, you guys, you know, feel free to push back. This came down to us from antiquity as a dialogue of Plato. That tends to be how I want to receive it. Right. Also, I think it was universally understood to be from Plato until the Germans attacked it in the 1900s. And that doesn't do a whole lot for me. And so, I don't know, I think as we kind of receive this dialogue, my default, I think is to take that the author is Plato and that's how I receive it.
- [13:12]
Alec Bianco
Yeah, I would just add that I think it's extremely important to understand. I'll say this with a caveat, but it's extremely important to understand Plato and Socrates within the Pythagorean tradition. They were students of Pythagoras, and at that time, but especially with the Pythagoreans. But at that time, the student and master relationship was not merely. It's nothing like we understand today. It was not merely oh, so and so taught me and then I developed my own ideas and I did my own things. No, first and foremost, you. You knew what your master said and you could recite it. And you see, encounter this often in the dialogues, but in the meno in particular, that Socrates is engaging against Mino, who's merely regurgitating what Gorgias says. So we know that these disciples could recite from memory entire speeches, events, everything. My point being that these, this relationship with, when it comes to education was so, that relationship was so powerful and we see that in this dialogue. I mean they call each other lovers to a certain degree, like it's a new power, it's a powerful relationship. And I. So all that to say I don't have a problem even if it were written by one of Plato's students and not him himself. Not because it's not important to have the writings of Plato himself, but that if a student were to write it, that doesn't mean it doesn't entirely reflect what Plato and Socrates thought. So I do think it's a valuable conversation. But I think that we, in the same way that we call proposition 147 of Euclid the Pythagorean theorem, you know, that's, it's good to ascribe that honor to him. It doesn't mean he necessarily penned it by hand.
- [15:12]
Athenian Stranger
Yeah, let me just, let me just add something here for people who might be listening. The various claims of Plato did write this, or no he did not write this. These things are grounded in a kind of philology that is very dubious at best. It's the way that I like to explain it to people is in the same way that the so called higher biblical criticism says oh well, you know, we've got all these various authors of the text. So it's really just this hodgepodge of things that man has, you know, written throughout the ages, blah, blah, blah. There's when you know the language and you, you see what they're weighing their conclusions on, it's almost always a house of cards. And also I would just sort of add that we, I mean we have it on the authority of who's considered to be just about the greatest of the first generation of really philosophers who received the texts after the fall of Rome and sort of preserved these and handed them off that slowly made their way to Christian Europe of Al Ferrari who says that of, of, of the entirety of the Platonic dialogues, not only does the first Alcibiades take pride of place, but it is to be considered the first dialogue that one reads within the so called cosmos of the Platonic dialogue. So it's considered by Al Farabi himself to be the entryway into Plato's thoughts.
- [16:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, wonderful. That's giving me some like post traumatic stress thinking of my undergrad and the JEDP theory of breaking through the Old Testament and Genesis. And all the different authors through German higher criticism. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up that point as a comparison because a lot of people might be more familiar with that. You know, if you apply that, you know, the somewhat famously people point out that if you apply that same theory, Tolkien could not have written the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, Right? Those have been two, two different authors. I think famously here it's not going to occur to me. Maybe one of you know. But one of the dialogues that they originally labeled as spurious according to the same concept was later retracted when they realized that Aristotle had cited it directly. And so it's not. I agree with you. I agree with you 100%, Athenian stranger, that I want to receive what antiquity has given me. And I think one thing, like when we went through our year of Homer, we really stressed that Homer is a teacher and we have to be receptive and somewhat docile to him, right? We come obviously with criticisms, things like this, and pushing back, but there's certain malleability to us that we actually come ready to receive, to learn. And I think a lot of times these type of things of casting doubt on the authorship is a real shame because what ends up doing is it kind of robs people of taking the dialogue on face value and robs them from actually learning from the lesson. You kind of see this in biblical studies where they can't ever actually get past the historical level. They can't. They just study the Scriptures, but they don't ever get past the literal. They can't do it. And so you think of like the four senses of Scripture, right? The literal, but then we also have the allegorical, the moral and anagogical. They don't ever get to the other three because they get tied up on historical. I think the same thing can happen with Plato. We sit here and spend all our time worrying and wondering about whether or not he wrote it. That then what I think the beauty of first Alcibiades is it's like completely missed. So, no, I appreciate that we're on the same page of receiving it from antiquity. So maybe you've already kind of alluded to this. So maybe deferring back to Athenian stranger, both of you already comment on this, but why do we read this first? And actually I'm in debt to both of you because I think, oh, six or eight months ago from the date of this recording, I think I posted on X because I was thinking about how to do these studies in the Plato, how to do this on a sin The Great Books podcast. And I had posted like, where should I start with Plato? Because my own introduction to the Great Books was very good. It was at Ave Maria University. I'm heavily in debt to them. I have a lot of gratitude for that program. But it was very, very Thomistic. And so we spent a lot of time reading Aristotle and a very short period of time reading Plato almost on the edge of Aristotle's the more improved Plato. So why spend a whole lot of time reading him? And so I really appreciate it because both of you actually, which was in my head actually some of the impetus of this discussion both of you had actually commented on there. Oh, you can start with first Alcibiades. And I don't even think I recognize this as a dialogue. So in a lot of ways I'm coming as a first time reader to this text. So maybe Athenian stranger, can you kick us off and just say, like, why is this the dialogue? Like, why do we start here?
- [19:56]
Athenian Stranger
Well, in full disclosure, while I say that I myself in my own education did not have the good fortune of starting there so Well, I mean, there are reasons, for instance, why Alpha Robbie says to start there, but I personally think it's a great place to start because the difficulty with Plato, it can very easily become a kind of logic chopping, lexicological warfare. And that is very difficult for it's. Look, we live at a time when people don't really like reading books anyway. And when they do read especially philosophy, they expect to be reading a treatise. Some they want to know what the thesis is, what the claim is, and then they want to see it argued out. You have none of that with Plato. It's something very similar to, for instance, like a Shakespearean play, you have to wrestle with the characters etc to find out what the teaching might be. The Alcibiades is friendly in that respect. You simply have sort of the philosopher Socrates speaking with the most, in many cases notorious youth of Athens. And of course everyone knows that Plato, soccer or Socrates was put to death and the charge being something to the effect of corruption of the youth. So okay, we've got that on full display right here. For us, we have Socrates, we have him with the most talented and ambitious of all the Athenian youth who did end up going astray. And so now we get to see for ourselves, according to Plato, what their first encounter looks like, how he did in fact go about attempting to lead this very talented youth towards philosophy and hopefully away from, or at least certainly within the dialogue, away from the kind of really a tyranny but what's so beautiful about it is that you do have also all of the great themes come up. Right. He specifically mentions all the great things, the beautiful, the good, the just having knowledge of these things, what it would mean to have them, where does one go to find teachers for them? And so all of these things come tumbling out. And again, it's not going to be like some of the other harder dialogues, even including book one of Plato's Republic. That is not at all an easy read. Once you get past book one, of course, it's great. Right. But book one itself is very difficult, following along with a lot of those, like I said, lexicological warfare that takes place in those, as is the case in many of the dialogues. And this one is. This one's very friendly. I like to think that most people want to relate to it, particularly students. They want to see in themselves a kind of Alcibiades, this man who has all the potential in the world to become whatever he wants, and yet somehow he does not.
- [22:58]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No. Yeah, very good. Yeah. Just like to add on to that, you know, the traditional subtitle of this is on the Nature of Man. Right. Which. Which kind of broadens its scope a lot. And one of the Neoplatonics said that First Alcibiades contains, quote, the whole philosophy of Plato, as in a seed. And then you also mentioned Al Farabi. And so he's actually just to share his quote, that all Platonic questions are raised as if for the first time in First Alcibiades. So I, you know, again, I'm deeply in debt to both of you for kind of showing me this, because once I realized this particularly, what caught my attention and my imagination on it is this is not the first dialogue that most people read from, like, an academic sense. Okay, What's Plato like? I just want to abstract his principles from the dialogue. Like, let's just read this real quickly. And like, what's the philosophical principle? And just like cold abstraction. It's like, well, he believed this, this, and this. And let's move on and read someone that sounds more like an instruction manual. We don't really need all these narratives and stuff like this. What I love about First Alcibiades, in starting, like, a Platonic formation, there is. It really is like, I guess to use this word, almost like a moral formation. It's like, no, you have to know yourself. You have to know the soul. And I just think there are so many antecedents here to Christ into the. Into the gospel. And you see here According to nature and man's reason. This, like, beautiful kind of unfurling of who man is and what man needs to kind of start this, like, philosophical journey. And I just loved it. I can see very clearly why, if you wanted to have philosophy not as like an academic discipline, but like philosophy as we see, like with Justin Martyr, where it's like, no, this is a way of life. This is a way that I'm going to live. The first house of pioneers is beautiful to start this journey into Plato.
- [24:42]
Alec Bianco
Yeah. I would add not very much, because this is. What you both said is very beautiful. Yeah, I would just say that. Personally, I am a Plato rigorist and censor, so I. I tend to think that there are certain books that you must be sort of spiritually experienced to read, if that makes sense. I don't know. I mean. And feel free to reject everything I'm saying. But I. I do think that in order to understand Plato, you cannot just start with the Republic and think, you know, anything. It's. It's so enormous in its depth and richness that it. You cannot. You're more likely to come away from it knowing something wrong about it and coming up with wrong conclusions than you are something right until you've worked through that. And I do believe that there's a reason the tradition has suggested that Akibiades is the first. Sorry, I tend to use the modern Greek pronunciation of the names, so you can slap me if I do that. Alcibiades. I do think there's a reason that the tradition has given that to us as the first, because of exactly what you just said, Deacon. The moral formation is so important to Socrates, and when he ends his life, when his life has ended, that's where he ends, with a moral formation. And so, yeah, it's interesting to look for in this dialogue, but in others as well, how the moral formation still is a current that keeps the ship afloat in every dialogue, even the more sort of academic and heady ones.
- [26:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I do think, yeah, there's like a spiritual strata in Plato that I think even if I read Aristotle, I don't find it there. When I read Plato, there's something very spiritually moving and you can see a lot why, like, the Greek fathers pulled heavily from him in attempting to kind of explain the Christian condition and the spiritual life and the ascent of the soul to God as beauty itself. You know, one of the things too, that both of you have kind of talked about and to kind of segue into the text itself. Is like, how do we read these? And I have a strange suspicion that we're all pulling from a similar school. But, you know, is this dramatic reading, right, that you take the narrative as a whole, Right. So we're not just reading Plato to kind of, like, coldly abstract some kind of, like, principle from it. Like, okay, skip the pages. Like, if. If we were to do that, I feel like what we do is we just skip to the part where he says, know thyself, and we kind of talk about that. It's like, okay, what's the dialogue about? Well, know thyself. I got it. Like, good, great. We just, like, move on. But rather, like, the narratives themselves offer insights and kind of help us to unpack the truth. And I think that, you know, one thing that's often mentioned, Peter Kreef brings us up, is that Plato was a playwright, and he burned all of his plays upon deciding to follow Socrates. But he brings in that dramatic skill set then into the dialogues. And so we have to read them in that context as a drama. And this is one reason I really appreciated on Ascend, the Great Books podcast, in between Homer and Plato, we read a lot of the Greek plays. We talked about that. That served as, like, an intellectual bridge between Homer and Plato. And I think moving from Homer directly to Plato is really jarring. Like, how. Wait, how did we get to this? How did we get to having these dialogues that are about philosophical principles? But when you read the plays, you can see very clearly, or at least I took it this way, you can see why someone like Plato pops up. You can see why someone decides to write a dialogue, this drama, over a philosophical principle directly. And so, kind of looking at this play, one of the things that Erks play one of these dialogues, I think one of the reasons, too, that it tends to be a good one for beginners is that the narrative is not terribly complicated. So if you compare it to something like the symposium that has all of this movement and, like, where people are and where they're sitting at the table and, like, who's drinking wine? Who's not drinking wine? Who becomes drunk? Like, you have all of these little analogs throughout the entire play that are little signposts to you trying to understand what Plato's trying to teach us here. I feel like first, Alcibiades is much more straightforward. But one of the questions that I had as I was trying to reflect on this, and I was like, okay, what am I missing? Or what do I need to question here to try and kind of mine some richness out of what Plato has to offer. I think my preliminary question is just why Alcibiades? Why is this not between Socrates and Plato? Why is it Alcibiades? Because obviously Plato, you know, you can take these as historical events, but also Plato reproducing them as a dialogue means that there's an artistic veneer on all this that he's trying to teach us. So, like, one of my preliminary questions is just why Alcibiades? Why not a different interlocutor?
- [29:40]
Athenian Stranger
I can take a stab at it, but I don't. I don't want to be a spoiler. We're getting getting into the text here. Look, this is what I would tentatively suggest to hopefully entice the listeners to want to read this for themselves. What we have with Alcibiades, and this is going to become very clear in the dialogue very quickly, is first of all, we need to. It's not immediately clear what philosophy is. I mean, this is sort of the question that people are always asking, but what is philosophy? You know, I mean, that's philosophy according to Plato, but what about philosophy according to blah, blah, blah. Now, on that respect, I would say, you know, Plato's Socrates in the Republic and throughout various other dialogues is clear. Everything concerns one question. What is the good life and how do I live it? And that's why, for instance, philosophy is a way of life. Now, what becomes very problematic with philosophy is it requires certain preconditions of the human soul. And those preconditions are very often blurred because we don't necessarily recognize them as such. In particular, we as human beings. And this also is absolutely coordinate with the biblical teaching. We as human beings are prideful. It is simply a fact. We love to be victorious in things. We also are drawn towards honor, right, honor and victory. These two things are part of the crooked timber that is man. And the study of philosophy, particularly as we see it in the Platonic dialogues with the interlocutors that Socrates has and chooses is in order to be a good student of philosophy, on the one hand, you do need to have this inner thumos, right, the spiritedness to sort of break free of whatever your ignorance is, to recognize it as ignorance and how to break free of it and how to stay on track of hunting down whatever the means are right, whatever the what is questions are, because these things are not immediately clear or obvious or easy once you've found them. And so the issue of philosophy becomes very complicated and sometimes very difficult to even know the difference between it and the other the other philosophy, philo Taimia, love of honor, and philo Nikea, love of victory. And so within those two things, what you have are, for instance, the sophists on the one extreme. You also have the great politicians, the statesmen on the other extreme. And so you have this competition of very, very powerful and in many respects all respectable ways of life. Love of victory, love of honor, love of philosophy. And so we're going to. Alcibiades is exemplary. He is the classical Athenian representative of absolutely intoxicated with the love of honor, absolutely intoxicated with the love of victory. And even more so, he has that most important prerequisite of the kind of nature that is needed in order to be successful at all these things, right? I mean, we see this, for instance from the Republic, is the process of education is to discern who has philosophical natures. Not everyone has philosophical natures. And Socrates, at least in the house of Ide, seems to have found the person who could, if properly educated, if his Eros is properly educated, his love of, is properly educated, to be an amazing student of philosophy as he's headed down this road, a very dangerous road of love, of honor, love of victory.
- [33:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I agree with you. I, I appreciate you really unpacking that. I think that you can reverse engineer it or. That's my inclination, right? It's like, okay, well, Alcibiades isn't just someone, right? He is this highly spirited. So therefore he's, he's chosen for that reason, right? That's, that's what he stands for, is this spirited life, this love of victory and honor and glory and fame. And so like the things that occurred to me which feel free to push back, but as I was just trying to explore this question was one, because it's Alcibiades and not someone like Plato, but actually Alcibiades, someone who's, who's known for being spirited. Like how much of the dialogue then can be read as some type of analog between the intellect and the spirited of the intellect trying to invite the spirited into this greater life, right into this life of the mind. For Socrates represents this intellect. Alcibiades represents the spirited life. And a lot of them going back and forth is sometimes even analogous to what happens inside of us as well, right? Inside our own souls of what we actually love and can we actually pursue higher things? The other thing too that I thought about was that it's really fascinating to me that first, Alcibiades, the summation of all Platonic thought, right? The seed and this understanding of know thyself. And starting your philosophical life is completely intertwined with the political. And Alcibiades makes it that way, which is something that I'm not entirely sure if Plato was the character he'd bring in the same way. And so you talk about, you know, Athenian stranger, you talked about, Alcibiades has this great potential. Like something that I was entertaining is like, you know, is he a potential philosopher king? Does he has the spiritedness. But Plato's, excuse me, Socrates is trying to get him to love these higher things, this wisdom that then kind of cascades back down and orders his spirit to, you know, to order his appetitive as well. And so there's. I just find it really fascinating that the dialogue to start your philosophical life is intertwined in a way with the political, that it just really can't be separated.
- [35:57]
Athenian Stranger
Well, I mean, I agree 100% there. And the way that I would phrase it is sort of what. What's helpful for a lot of people to sort of recognize is that we have this thing called philosophy, whatever it is, we have this other thing known as politics, political community. What happens when those two things collide? Well, at least for Plato, what that collision becomes, and Aristotle is 100% on board with this is that is where we get education. Education is understood to be the way in which one properly interweaves the nature of man as having speech, logos, right? Man is by nature the rational creature, to borrow phrases from Aristotle. And then also man is by nature a political creature, political animal. Those two things come together, and when they do, they come together of necessity, because all of us as man have those in us, those needs and those desires, well, those have to be educated, right? In other words, what I like to refer to as the various philos in front of those words, right? Philo Sophia, philo Nytia, philo Taima, that philo eros has to be educated, has to be properly educated. And so this collision is always going to take place most spectacularly, writ large across the Polish political community. And so the question is, how does, how does a city, Socrates says in the Republic, how does a city take philosophy into its hands without destroying itself? Well, that's the purpose of institutions of education. And so what we have here with Alcibiades is that Socrates has to. He goes through a discussion of Alcibiades, his own education, and what constitutes various educators. And so that's always going to be looming on our horizon is how can you write large this problem of Alcibiades. In other words, take the Extremes. Because once you have the extremes, you're going to understand how to handle everything in between. And the extreme is going to be this person Alcibiades. And so, of course, it's going to involve this very serious and very dangerous aspect of the polis. Right, Because Alcibiades is about to go give a speech in a few days. And just think, for instance, your listeners just think of, for instance, Thucydides. What is in many respects the most important thing that happens in all of Thucydides? Well, the city itself, as Thucydides says, becomes enchanted. They become intoxicated by eros, literally. And who's the one who's, you know, peaking all of that or managing to orchestrate it? Well, it's Alcibiades. He's the one who's able to get a good grip on that. And so another way to phrase it as well is that this confrontation, this collision that we're seeing happening is going to fundamentally concern this other great theme of philosophy, which is unfortunately not a great theme anymore, but it should be of rhetoric, the role of persuasion that is absolutely inherent and fundamental to the philosophical life, particularly because educating the masses. Enlightenment is such a very dangerous and absolutely crucial aspect of any serious statesman or lawgiver or something like that.
- [39:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I, like. I very much appreciate kind of the Platonic picture of education, of habituating the student to love what is truly beautiful, right. To actually help them control and bridle and kind of form their loves, that kind of erotic appetite towards what is actually beautiful. And maybe just for like, those who are kind of new to Plato, if I can offer just maybe like a crude sketch of the soul, because I think this actually helps, like, in the Platonic concept. So, like, Plato's running off a tripart soul. He has his. The intellect, right, which typically seeks after truth. Underneath that, you have the spirited, which we've kind of been talking about with Alcibiades, Right. It loves a certain nobility. It produces victory, honor, glory, fame. You know, I always think of Achilles like an Achilles character, but Alcibiades is. Is very much this in real life. And then you have the appetitive, which loves, you know, pleasure, which we're all kind of more familiar with, right? So you kind of have this, like, as a simple sketch, like, you have this kind of three parts of the soul. And I think that all three parts actually pop up in this dialogue in, like, particular ways. So I really appreciate what you said about education. One thing too. I think that here in the Opening, particularly if you're not familiar with Plato, that is somewhat surprising is Socrates reference to God or his divine sign or his daemon, which I think can be really kind of jarring for some people. So a lot of people I know, particularly in like Catholic circles, have read a lot of Aristotle a lot. And so they get used to reading that the pagan, pagan philosophy is like almost, well, sometimes unerotic, right? It's, it's very much an instruction manual. Here's how this works. God is like the unmoved mover. He doesn't really care about you or what you're doing, etc. And then it's like somewhat surprising to them that all of a sudden you come into first Alcibiades and not only is Plato talking about, or Socrates is talking about, that there is a God singular, but this is a God that like interacts with people, that actually has given a daemon, right, A spirit to Socrates that never seems to tell him what to do, but seems to check him and tell him no, which almost gives an implicit yes. If he doesn't actually come in and check him. And we see this, we'll pick this up in the apology as well. But you know, as you kind of play this out, even in like, you know, Catholic circles, a lot of the Neoplatonics in the Renaissance are very comfortable saying that this was an angel, that this was actually God's providence given to Socrates, like playing this out like they're really comfortable with that argument. I mean, any kind of, any thoughts on a, like a preliminary thought on this, on this daemon of Socrates?
- [42:20]
Alec Bianco
If I could just really quick, kind of go back to a couple of things you guys just said that was really beautiful and I don't want to forget it, but I love that this point that you just made Deacon about and earlier about the intellectual and the spirited, or the noetic and the spirited. I think in the Iliad, the story of Odysseus and Diomedes sneaking into the camp is exactly what you're describing. It's the noose leading the thumos into battle and those two working together to conquer the carnal. So I don't know. Homer, I think, is just as much a philosopher as he was a poet. It's really interesting to think about, but just quickly about why Alcibiades. I do think that it confirms for us that Socrates truly does love the city of Athens, that he wants to teach and form those who he knows are going to be movers and shakers within the city of Athens in Greece. And even in parts of Asia and kind of going along with that. I think that Alcibiades is. It's really interesting when you're reading this dialogue, that Socrates is constantly trying to get Alcibiades to not believe in himself as a good politician, to not be so sure of himself. But this is really interesting because the dialogue begins and is permeated throughout with Socrates saying, I have never left you and I have never not loved you. In other words, he believes in him. He knows that Alcibiades. Alcibiades is going to become a prominent politician. And that's exactly why he's trying to get him to not believe in himself so that he can. Well, so what? So that he can cultivate himself, whatever that means.
- [44:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right, Yeah. I think that, you know, some things that struck me in that opening dialogue. I read it this month with my son. I have a Sunday small group of men that meet at my house. We read. It's their Sunday Great Books group. We read once a month. And so we read for salsa this month. And I also teach in our diaconate formation program. We happen to be in our year of Ancient Greek Thought. And so I read first Alcibiades with them as well. It was really interesting for them. One of the things they noticed is how heavy Socrates comes on here at the beginning, particularly those that had read a little bit of other dialogues, that all sudden, here comes Socrates just right off the gate, highly pursuing someone. And it's kind of an interesting. I mean, it's something to take note of. Right. Again, that's that dramatic form, these details that we have to take note of. And I think one of the things that, particularly when I was teaching the diaconate candidates, is this dialogue is such just a master class on how to be a teacher. And I think that the Athenian stranger has pointed out too, by an earlier reference to just rhetoric and the importance of rhetoric. Because notice here, like at the beginning, it's kind of an odd beginning. So you try and unpack, like, what's going on here. One, Socrates knows Alcibiades better than he knows himself. And so what you see then, at least how I read it, is this is why you have to kind of reread the dialogues, because sometimes the philosophical principle of the dialogue is being enacted before it's explicitly told, assuming that it's actually ever explicitly told. And so here, like, you have Socrates helping Alcibiades to know himself by showing him that he knows who Alcibiades is even better than Alcibiades does. And what I really enjoyed here at the beginning and kind of mentioning that divine sign is that Socrates is able to look at his soul and know that he loves victory and honor and glory. He's that spirited man. And notice that, like, Socrates doesn't come in and say, like, you know what you need to be? You need to be a philosopher. You need to love wisdom. Like, that's what you need to be. This isn't as good. What's he do? He steps into the love of his student and says, oh, do you like victory? Like, you like nobility? You like all of these things? Like, I and my divine sign, right? Me and my God, we can give this to you. Right? Like, he steps into what Alcibiades loves and says, I can give you. At least the way I read it was, I can give you what you love better than you can even achieve it yourself. And Alcibiades, like, that's when that hook kind of gets put in Alcibiades, where he starts paying attention to this weird old man that's been, like, staring at him. Right? And I just. I just really appreciated that because I think it's a masterclass in rhetoric. It's a masterclass in being a teacher of noticing, well, what does my student love and can I step into that love to then invite them to something greater?
- [47:09]
Alec Bianco
Yeah. I think a person in the Christian Catholic tradition that really exemplifies this is Pope Gregory the Great, who in his pastoral care, emphasizes the point that you have to know the soul of the person to whom you're speaking, to whom you're mentoring and pastoring. And Socrates, all throughout the dialogues, is preaching the exact same thing. I have to know the person. And you can see that, not always explicitly, he doesn't just say, I'm talking to you because you're a different person than somebody else. But he. The way that he interacts with. With Mino, you know, versus Gorgias versus Thrasymachus, versus Glaucon, you know, he's. He treats each of these interlocutors very differently and does things that exactly what you said are sort of bizarre. Like, why are you trying to get this person to think this way? I think another spurious dialogue, Rival Lovers is a really interesting one to think. It's very short. It's a really interesting dialogue to read alongside this because it's very similar. There's a young man who's very full of himself and seems to be saying all the right things. And yet Socrates gets him to the point where he literally blushes, he breaks down because he knows that he's too full of himself. And that's a good teacher knows what a certain student needs versus another. So it's really beautiful Athenian.
- [48:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
What do you think?
- [48:37]
Athenian Stranger
Yeah, look, I agree with exactly what, or I exactly agree with what you guys are saying. The way that I would phrase it is that very, very often and particularly in academic settings, you'll hear people talk about we teach in the Socratic way, the Socratic method, the Socratic dialectic. Well, then you ask them what they mean by that and they might have sort of a vague idea of it or something, but we are seeing it on display in the drama here. Socrates has these love charms. We could say that's what Xenophon Calton. Socrates has these love charms and it turns out that you can't speak with everyone the same way because everyone's soul is so unique, particularly when you're talking about the things that matter the most. The things that matter the most to everyone individually are very often going to be radically different or radically different in how they're grounded or founded or understood by those individuals. So for Socrates to have these sort of love charms or this art of speaking, this art of logos, means that he has to fundamentally be what we would think of as a psychologist, but in the etymological sense of the word, he has to know the logos of the particular speakers interlocutor soul, in order that he's able to tailor the kind of logos that he wants that soul to take. The opposite of this, of course, would be for instance, what we have in for instance, the Republic Thrasymachus flatly says, should I give your soul a forced feeding? And Socrates says, no, you better not. The point being, of course, that you can't give a universal logos to everyone. You have to know these people individually. Again, this gets back around to the issue of rhetoric. Socratic dialectic is fundamentally a recognition of the role that rhetoric has to play in philosophy. Of necessity, Socrates is going to mildly flatter, but in of course the case with Alcibiades, he's going to use a little bit more than we could say mild flattery. He has to flatter the person based upon what he knows their vanities already are. And once he's got that, that's how you open up a soul or make it, if it's even possible, receptive. They're already pre established beliefs or what have you. Because the goal always with Socrates is to get people. The imagery of course is. And we see it, we're going to see it in this Dialogue, he's going to say at one point, the logos itself is accusing alcibiad societies, not Socrates, it's the logos. So the imagery always is to follow the logos. In other words, the logos is not something to be manipulated simply based upon self desire. That's rhetoric, that's sophistry, Socratic dialectic, or as he says in the Gorgias, he's the only one who practices rhetoric. Socratic rhetoric is that which follows the logos where it goes. But in order to get someone to be able to do that on their own, right? It's not enough to just simply get them to agree on the spot, you want them to be able to follow it on their own. That's what Socrates has to do by knowing the soul of his various interlocutor in order to play upon those vanities, in order to get them to hopefully, if it's at all possible, turn away from their mere self interest and have a serious interest in their own good.
- [52:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Simply no, I think that's beautiful. I think it's interesting how much Socrates being a good philosopher is his capacity to interpret people's loves, to see like, what actually like motivates them, like what is their soul actually in love with. And to kind of step into that and use it either for their benefit or use it against them, right? To kind of like leverage that. You know, the thing here with Alcibiades too, I love it too, because it just rings with that kind of like young angst. So it's like, you know, I'm going to go and I'm going to go talk to the assembly in Athens. It's like, oh, really? What are you going to talk to them about? Right? You're an advisor, you could teach, so you must know something. Oh yeah, well, you know, it's war. And then as soon as like justice came up, which was like, what is that, 109B? I was like, oh, this is going to be brutal, like there's no way. But like Alcibiades, I really love this because I think that it really does keep it political with him. And so it's like, oh, you know what justice is? And he gives the example of like, well, maybe when I was a child or et cetera. And I thought Alcibiades had a good response here. It was like, well, maybe I just learned it. Like I learned Greek, right? Maybe the, maybe the people taught me, right? The crowd taught me. And for those that are familiar with Plato, like, there's no way the crowd is going to be the teacher Right. There's no way this is going to work out well. And I love like the political ramifications of this where he's like, no, like, well, people who teach, right, they, they have to know what they're talking about, right? So if they agree, yes. Okay, great. Well, do people agree on justice? Oh, well, no, actually they disagree. And actually they disagree, you know, violently. And he actually gives a little commentary there on Homer, which I really appreciated that, you know, the Odyssey or the Iliad and the Odyssey are both actually about justice, which I thought was really fascinating. But what's interesting here, I think is that, is that you see part of this master class with Socrates and this was something that I think bothered when I read it with either my Sunday great books or I read it with the diaconate candidates, particularly first time readers, is what they then anticipate is Socrates is going to then tell Alcibiades what justice is. Right? You don't know what justice is and therefore I'm going to tell you. But he doesn't. He pivots away from that. And I think that's one of the things too about this master class and rhetoric and being a teacher, he knows that all things are judged, good or bad, according to their end, like what's their purpose? And I think a lot of times we have to ask ourselves in this dialogue is like, what is the purpose of Socrates bringing up this grammar? Like what is justice or what's advantageous or these types of things. What we see is that it's not actually for Socrates to teach Alcibiades what the thing is. It's actually for Socrates to show Alcibiades that he doesn't actually know what the thing is, which I think is again, part of that kind of needing his soul, opening it up a little bit to be receptive, that there is a wisdom that he does not know.
- [55:20]
Alec Bianco
I think that's absolutely right. Although I will say a small theory of mine is that he does not tell him what justice is because Alcibiades already does know what justice is. The problem is that he doesn't know himself, which is exactly what you said. And so he can't actually talk about it. But he does know it. And I do think the reason he knows it is because of another thing that goes back to your earlier question of why this daemon, why the God? Why does Socrates keep saying it? And Alcibiades basically ignores that all of the time, except for at one instance where he says, where Socrates says that he has a better teacher than Pericles. Because he's taught by God instead of Pericles. And Alcibiades responds with saying that you're teasing me, Socrates, you're teasing me. And I took that very seriously. I don't think Alcibiades is a pious man. I do not think that he believes in the gods or respects them when it comes to the life that he's trying to live. And Socrates, in all of his infinite wisdom, doesn't try to press him on that point and try to preach the gospel to him, quote unquote, or try to get him to believe that. But I do think that he consistently says, reminds him, I'm taught by the gods. You're taught by men who fail, who are failures. And that kind of answers the question of something that you brought up earlier, which is that discussion about how could you possibly know something. Well, you must have been taught by somebody or how did you come up on your own? And Alcibiades gets all, you know, wired around and is cross wired and he doesn't know what he's thinking or what he's doing and he doesn't know how he knows these things and eventually admits that he doesn't know these things. But then later, again, my theory is, I think he actually does know what justice is, and he knows it why? Because the gods taught him what justice was. But he won't admit that because he doesn't know himself and doesn't realize that he can ascribe that to the gods.
- [57:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's fascinating. One of the things that occurred to me on that same point, not that I necessarily disagree with you, but as I was trying to understand Socrates's point is, I also had the thought that Socrates isn't going to spoon feed these things to Alcibiades, because if Alcibiades can get the benefit of knowing certain philosophical principles without having to do the work of wisdom and to actually have that labor of love, I actually think it would probably make him more inclined to be a tyrant, right? To go off and try to apply these things without the virtue. Virtue is probably the dispositive word there, right? Like to have the truth, but not to have the virtuous soul to be able to actually handle that truth. Well, what do you think, Athenian stranger?
- [58:15]
Athenian Stranger
Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a number of things here. I think I agree that I don't believe that Alce is pious. I think Alec is exactly correct there. Now we have to infer that to, from the dialogue, but I think it's pretty clear. So it's it's not a difficult conclusion. And just think, for instance, of what the problem of all of the most talented youth is at this time in Athens. It's represented, of course, by Glaucon and Adeimantus, as they say explicitly in the Republic. Our ears have been talked off, that's what they say. Our ears have been talked off by the sophists that tell us the just life is for suckers and the truly just life is really the unjust life. So classical Athens is already well down the road of what we would otherwise refer to as degeneracy, or really it's just a kind of nihilism. And that's what we're in the realm of is nihilism here. When all of the fundamental concepts like the good, the beautiful, the just are considered to be merely words, nothing grounds them. So I think that that's what's going on here with Alcibiades. I had something else that was going to. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just as regards sort of the rhetoric here, I mean, and with the question of justice or something, and whether or not Alcibiades knows it, what you see happen very quickly just in the opening lines of the dialogue, which is hilarious. I mean, I always tell people when you're reading truly great books like this, if you're not laughing, then you're not reading carefully enough because there are all kinds of things where you could be sort of shaking your head going, there's no way he believes that he's toying with this guy. What Socrates says at the opening of the dialogue is, he says, look, and this is just like what you guys have already said previously. He says, look, I know what you really desire. In other words, I know your soul. And he flatly says, I'm not guessing either. And he says, here, I'm going to tell you what it is. In other words, I'm going to show you what your soul is. And he, he says that he has overcome all his lovers. Alcibiades has overcome all his lovers. And of course what this means ultimately is that Socrates is going to prove to him that he hasn't overcome Socrates. He's going to get Alcibiades to fall in love with Socrates. But the kind of love that is of a noble quality, right? In other words, a love of wisdom and wanting to know more. And he says, he goes, I'm going to tell you what's so great, what you think is so great about yourself. So of course self knowledge is immediately looming in the background. And he says, I'm Going to start beginning first with the body, and I'm going to go all the way to the soul. And you can itemize these things as you. As you should. Right. Whenever you're reading these things, right, you never even want to blink because you might miss something. And he runs down this list. He says, you know, you're the most beautiful and the greatest. The translation I have used is the word tall, but just keep in mind it's the word. And also with handsome, it's beautiful. It's cologne. Then he says, you also have a great family. Through your father, you excelled friends and relatives. He says, to serve you right. And he says, nothing short of your mother's side, too. He says, greatest of all of these things is your guardian, Pericles. And then you've got wealth. He says, but I can. I already know that you don't really think too much of wealth. And then he sort of. That's where it ends. Right. And then they go off into a discussion. But wait a minute. He promised us that he was going to tell us everything from starting with the body going to the soul. He never got to the soul. There was no mention of the soul. There's no mention of the soul. Right. And so, in other words, he's got to get Alcibiades to be as concerned with what truly is the nature of his own soul as Socrates is sort of psychoanalyzing him, saying that I've understood your soul, and it turns out, look, you don't even know what your soul is. Shame. Shameful. That's sort of, as he says, the greatest ignorance, the greatest stupidity is to want to talk about these things and govern other people about them, and you don't even know your own.
- [62:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that section right there that you just mentioned, I found that to be wonderful, particularly because, going back to, like, Socrates as this, like, master teacher at about 116E, I loved it because, you know, first he says, what's justice? And basically Alcibiades ends up not knowing. And then Alcibiades tries to pivot and say, okay, well, there's also the advantageous. And so Socrates, like, plays him right down the same road again, which I thought was really brilliant because he points out, like, why would you do this if you already know? There's a whole series of questions I can ask you. Like, you're just throwing out a different thing here. Like, it. What? So I really thought that was good because I was actually talking to some of my friends at Wyoming Catholic College, and they have all their incoming freshmen read first Alcibiades. So some of this too is not. Just. Is not Alec.
- [63:25]
Alec Bianco
I said, do they really?
- [63:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah.
- [63:27]
Alec Bianco
That's amazing.
- [63:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah.
- [63:28]
Alec Bianco
Every time I hear something about this college, it just gets better and better.
- [63:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. So they're actually going to. Actually, that's what I have planned. After we talk about first, Alcibiades is. I'm talking with one of their professors that teaches all their freshmen and trying to teach their students throughout 1st Alcibiades, all these incoming freshmen to Wyoming Catholic. So one of the things that I think is really beautiful in this is also how you see the. The soul of the student. Right. Trying to make arguments and trying to squirm. And Socrates is really just kind of following them along and showing, no, this isn't the right path. But so again, what happens is he has the advantageous. And once again, Alcibiades basically just throws his hands up and it's like, I don't know. I have no idea. I have no idea what I'm talking about. What I loved about that was because we've already talked about the purpose is not Socrates then coming and explaining what advantageous is. What I liked about this as this, like, master class in teaching is that then at 100 and it's about 116E. And he says, you know that feeling you have right now? Let's talk about it. Like that feeling of bewilderment, let's talk about that. And I loved that. I'd love that as a teacher, that in that kind of. I don't know what I want to say there. Like, you're exposed, you're vulnerable as a student. Like, you've really, your argument has fallen apart. You've admitted that you have no idea what you're talking about. Like, Socrates doesn't come in, like, as a triumph, if that makes sense. He says, okay, that feeling, that feeling of bewilderment, like, let's talk about that. And that's what you were mentioning, Athenian stranger. Because right after that is when he talks about what is the greatest stupidity, right? Well, the greatest stupidity is, is thinking that I know something, but I don't. Right. I'm actually ignorant of it. And then the worst type of stupidity is that I'm going to talk about the highest things, the greatest things I think I know about them and I'm going to teach others when in reality I do not know about them, but I'm actually ignorant. And then obviously, like, you kind of see where this slow train wreck is going for Alcibiades, because he's wanting to go talk to the Athenian assembly about justice. So then he becomes the example, right, of like, the worst type of stupidity, to go in and talk to the Athenians, to talk to your countrymen about some of the highest goods that you think you know, but you actually don't know at all.
- [65:40]
Athenian Stranger
Yeah. Let me, Let me just sort of add. Because that's. That's so important to focus in on that. That experience that he induces in Alcibiades. The imagery that Plato, Socrates, uses very often is just so beautiful, which is to say powerful, right? What he says to Alcibiades is that you're wandering in the soul. I mean, just think about that for a moment, right? I mean, this. We often speak of things like, you know, the dark night of the soul or something like that. Well, Socrates gives us an even more beautiful image, is that we're wandering around in our soul. In other words, we're lost in it. We. We. We want to find something in it, but it turns out that we are, in very important respects, strangers in it. And yet it is us, right? We're. That's the sort of the meaning there of the knowing what you don't know. The, the kind of fundamental stupidity there, which, I mean, this is not a bad thing, right? I mean, we're on the precipice of. Well, I mean, we could always. We could otherwise refer to it as redemption, right? I mean, you're. You. You have found that which you're unable to give a logos or articulate your experience in it. He calls it strange, right? It's a strange condition. I mean, and Socrates, yeah, you're wandering in your soul, my friends. You need a guide, and I can help you. And in fact, Socrates's rhetoric is so successful at that point, having played off of his vanity throughout that he's able to get Alcibiades himself, who has, we shouldn't forget, bragged about having overcome all his lovers. And then he immediately asks Socrates, let's take counsel together, you and me. Let's take counsel together on this. I mean, that's as. As Deacon's been emphasizing here. That's the true goal. That should be the goal of great teachers, right? That's. It's very, very powerful.
- [67:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So maybe on that point of like great teachers, you know, something that I, I kind of had to wrestle with, and I think it was mentioned earlier, it's kind of towards the end of this section because I'm following Stephen Forbes. No, Fords. Yeah. His essay. I should have mentioned what kind of translations we're Using. So I read.
- [68:04]
Athenian Stranger
Oh, Stephen. 40. Yeah, I.
- [68:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Okay. Yeah. You pronounce the e okay.
- [68:10]
Athenian Stranger
Without getting too much. I studied from him.
- [68:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, you did? Okay, good. Yeah. So I. I picked up this text, the Roots of Political Philosophy, ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, which includes first Alcibiades, translated by Carnes Lord, and then has the interpretive essay by. What was it? 40. Is that what you said?
- [68:29]
Athenian Stranger
And so, yeah, the temptation is pronounced it Ford or something. But it's. It's. It's. It's actually with it more with the sound. With a U. Ferdy is how he pronounces it. So. Okay, one of those weird things.
- [68:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I'll follow your lead on that one. So he. I should mention that, like, one. I think this is a really good text. If you're looking for a text to follow along with two. He breaks down first Alcibiades into three parts. And so the. The first part is really this opening introduction. And the last part of the first part is this conversation about the teacher in which he talks about Heracles. And one of the things here that I. I didn't quite understand or I was wrestling with is that, you know, Socrates basically makes this argument of like, well, the teacher has to know, okay? And he has to be able. Because you can't give what you don't have. And so the teacher, you know, how do we judge the teacher? Well, look at his students, right? Do we have. Where he's, you know, has the. Has the teacher been able to communicate these things to his students? And so he points out, well, Pericles, like, you know, did he teach this person? No. Did he teach his own sons? No. Did he teach your brother? No. Well, then he's. He's, you know, he's not a good teacher. He didn't teach you either. But isn't this. I struggled here because the question then is. Is like, is al. Is Socrates a good teacher based off how Alcibiades turned out? Does that make sense? So, like. Like what? But it's not like this was happening at the same time. Plato's writing this in retrospect with, like an artistic veneer on it. So it's interesting me that Socrates makes this argument that he seems to. And maybe I'm misunderstanding it. He seems to critique the teacher based off whether or not the student, you know, he actually has a good student. In that regard, Plato seems to be the proof that Socrates is a good teacher, but Alcibiades is not. Actually, as was already mentioned, I think Athenian stranger, you mentioned it. Alcibiades becomes like case study number one for Socrates corrupting the youth in his own trial and condemnation. So anyone want to take a stab at like, what's happening here?
- [70:30]
Athenian Stranger
Yeah, I mean, I'll. I don't want to, I don't want to monopolize this. Please, Alec, go ahead. If, if you wanted to take a stab at there first. All right, then. No, I, I would simply say that. Look, he's saying this tongue in cheek, of course, because then the question becomes, well, who taught you? Socrates? And of course no one taught Socrates. In fact, Xenophon in the Memorabilia is going to say that Socrates educated himself. Now, this is simply just part of the pedagogical process of leading a student who clearly doesn't know what they're talking about in a way that you don't simply destroy them. Right. You slowly get them to agree with you along the way as you're trying to fill in the details of what they seem to be wanting to say, but aren't necessarily able to articulate it. And then as you're able to do that, then you can sort of begin to go further and see what might be problematic about those beliefs. So insane that you know, as he does, that one of the characteristics or the signs of an educated person is to be able to point to those who have taught him. That's just sort of a tentative stage right there. Because in many cases, yes, it is true. I mean, we, many of us, you guys certainly have all had great teachers and so, yeah, we love to point back to them, but that doesn't, that's not of necessity, right? It doesn't of necessity mean that that's the case. And so that's, that's going to be a lot of what's going on here. And that also, I think, has that particular instance of it. It's also, you'll notice it occurs in the context of speaking of various parts. So what is an art? Right, because he's going to claim, Alcibiades claims that he has the art of being able to govern others in their affairs or the art of justice. Right, Politike. And what is characteristic of an art is that it is an organized body of knowledge that can be taught. Right. Demonstrated. So that's step one, or maybe even two or three, or something of what Socrates is getting Alcibiades to recognize that he doesn't have yet, that he needs to take more seriously. Right. In other words, you might very well be either reinventing the wheel that others have already done more successfully. So you need to read Them, which I always say that should be the motto of the great books. But also, if you yourself can't give an account of these things, then that's also problematic. So not only can you not even point to anything that you've studied to qualify you to speak of these things, but you yourself don't even have an acceptable alternative or replacement of them at all.
- [73:40]
Alec Bianco
Yeah, that's beautiful. I think that the only thing I would add is that I think that if you look at it sort of from a literalist perspective, and that the students are the product of their teacher, which I do think there's. It's a question worth asking, like, because Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth at the same time, this dialogue ends on a kind of melancholic note in which Socrates does not believe Alcibiades when he says that he's going to cultivate virtue in himself, cultivate justice, and believes that, or is afraid, rather, of the corrupting power of the city of Athens. So he seems to be willing, Socrates seems to be willing to admit that a teacher can only do so much for a student. And he says, I think earlier in that, that toward the end of the dialogue as well, that he will continue to love Alcibiades forever unless the Athenians corrupt his soul.
- [74:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very beautiful. I also think too, from the student, or excuse me, from the teacher standpoint, is that Alcibiades is worth the risk. What if he does convert to the philosophic life? What if he does become the philosopher king? What could he do for the Athenian empire? What could he do for the entire Mediterranean? Right? Like, what if our, you know, he's like a proto Alexander the Great? What would it mean then if that guy was a philosopher king? So in certain ways, too, I thought it's worth it for Socrates to take this risk. It's. In a lot of ways it reminds me of, you know, the corruption of the best is the worst. And so you're taking a risk when you try and teach Alcibiades because he has like this massive natural potential, right? I mean, he's tall, he's handsome, he's a good rhetorician, everyone loves him, right? And so to try and step in and teach him is a risk, right? The higher the angel, the greater the demon. And so, you know, he's, he. Alcibiades. I guess maybe this is too simple, but in certain ways he's on path, you know, to either become like a philosopher king or to become a tyrant, right? He's going to become something, and it's going to be great no matter what it is. So I think in certain ways you could defend Socrates, that it's worth reaching out to someone and having a risk on Alcibiades because if he does convert and he does become good, like think about what he could do, you know, for the polis. And not just for the polis, but also like for the entire empire.
- [76:21]
Athenian Stranger
Yeah. One thing I would add too, in many ways building off the great insights there that Alec provided, there's something that Socrates says right there at the very end. And this gets back to sort of where we began. Right, how do we read this? Right, how do we read this? And I think that this is one of those timeless teachings. And what makes these books so invaluable. He says. Socrates says, but before one has virtue. And again, let's emphasize. Right, irritate excellence. Before one has excellence, it is better to be ruled by one who is better than to rule. Now that is in many respects everything. Take for instance Aristotle in the politics. What defines a citizen? Those who have a share in ruling and being ruled. There's something about wisdom that requires a kind of experience. Experiential knowledge doesn't. You can't just read it from a book. Also, one could say that that applies to how we do in fact read books. You have to have a kind of modesty. You have to believe that there is something that these can teach us that we don't know yet. That's one of the greatest problems with people reading today is that they simply just look at these old books and say, yeah, yeah, okay, whatever. Yeah, well, look, I mean, that's just because, you know, he was a product of his time. You know, it's just Plato and all the. Look, those guys even had slaves. So it's really not worth reading them or anything. We don't have anything to learn. They didn't have our modern science close the book, end of story. But yet there we have it right there is that before one has excellence, simply it's better to submit oneself to the rule of someone who has more excellence. I just think that that is such an incredibly powerful principle to even live your life by. So I think that's also what's going on here, is he's trying, he's really trying to get Alcibiades to realize. Look, you think that because Alcibiades has already said very early on that he will defeat anyone because he has a better nature than them. Well, okay, the problem is your nature, your talent is going to take you places where Your character is not going to be able to sustain you. You will be corrupted. So learn how to submit yourself to people who are, in fact, better in some particular way.
- [78:56]
Alec Bianco
Yeah, I was just going to say on that point. It's so beautiful. And Socrates really develops that idea in the Republic when he talks about the Sofraniste. These, what would be translated should be translated as virtue enforcers. That's what the job of the Sofranista is to do. Oh, man. So beautiful. There's a great essay on that by Eva Brand, which is posted physically, a printed out copy of it, the only one on the gymnasium at St. John's College. But I hand typed it, I took pictures of it and hand typed it, so I have a digital copy of it. So if you're interested, I'll send that to you. But it's a beautiful essay by Brand on the sofa. Nista. This concept of enforcing virtue, which you're pointing out, strangers, absolutely critical.
- [79:48]
Athenian Stranger
Yes. She. I believe she wrote. And this might actually be what you're referring to, she wrote the. The statement of purpose for the college and what it means to be liberally educated. And it's a masterpiece. It absolutely is. A complete masterpiece of writings.
- [80:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, that's wonderful. So that, that conversation then leads into kind of part two of the dialogue, which is. I really loved this pivot, because I thought this was. I don't know, I thought this was very natural of Alcibiades to push back and just simply state, like, well, you know, I'm just better than everybody. It doesn't matter, right? Like, I'm just better than everybody. So, like, and I, I loved it because it just, again, that kind of angst as a student and things like this, like, I'm already better than everybody. Like, who cares? Like, I'm gonna do this. But what was really interesting to me, though, just like my expectations and where Socrates went and that I had to kind of challenge myself, is what I expected Socrates to say, right? Is like this kind of. I mean, not to be trite, but this kind of like, no, you need to be the best you can be, right? You need. You need to be the best that Alcibiades can be. You need to actually actualize your own potential. That's what you actually have to do it by. But he doesn't do that. We get this whole story, right, which is called, you know, a royal tale, or it kind of stands in as a myth in this dialogue, right? Because Socrates, excuse me, Plato, a lot of times will use myths to explain things, give us a narrative within a narrative. In this one we don't necessarily get a myth per se, but we get this kind of story about the queen of Persia and even the queen of Sparta. So he has this like these natural abilities and he says that, you know, I'm just better than everyone. And so what I expected was, is that he would just be like, you know, we'll be the best you can be. But then how I interpreted it was is that the reason he gives us the myth is because the whole point of the dialogue is that Alcibiades doesn't know himself. And if he doesn't know himself, he can't actualize his own potential. So telling him to be the best that Alcibiades can be doesn't make any sense because he doesn't know himself. So it seems like what Socrates has to do here in this, this kind of second part of the the Queens is he has to give him some type of external standard that he can understand. And in a certain way it strikes me as him being another master teacher. Right. He contextualized this as another spirited, victory loving kind of militant context and says, no, no, you have to adhere to and see who your true competitors are. Right. The Persians, the Spartans. But really what this is doing is, is trying to force Alcibiades to actualize his own potential. But he can't do that yet because he doesn't know himself. And so these kind of serve as like external agitators to try and move him before he can undergo a certain maturation to actually know himself.
- [82:37]
Alec Bianco
I ask a question kind of related to what you're saying that maybe you two could help me understand is right as he's going into this tale, this. Yeah. Pseudo myth, it begins with Alcibiades talking about the fact that he's descended from the gods and Socrates, I think. Right. Am I right about that? Yeah. And then Socrates says, oh, so do I, I also come from, from Zeus. And then Socrates proceeds into this path. I'm just wondering why he begins that way. And if it has something to do with what you're saying, Deacon, when you're talking about Alcibiades knowing himself, this concept of knowing yourself and then beginning with this sort of the sureness of, oh, and by the way, I know I come from this family that happens to be descended from the gods and I'll name my grandparents. So it's kind of an interesting way to begin passage.
- [83:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Which, what's the line number on that one? Alec, do you remember?
- [83:44]
Alec Bianco
Yeah, it's 121, 121 in my edition, translated by Hutchinson. So 121, 121B.
- [83:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, yeah. So Socrates, you know, is claiming that he goes back to Daedalus and then Daedalus goes back to Hephaestus, right?
- [84:04]
Alec Bianco
Yeah, exactly.
- [84:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And Alcibiades goes directly back to Zeus. Yeah, that is interesting. Is that an aspect of Know thyself? Is that, Is that an aspect? Or how do you, how do you square the understanding that Alcibiades is impious, but then he seems to be the one that wants to appeal that he has this family tree that goes back to, to Zeus. Like, is that a true pious statement or is that just a statement about his own family? Or he's trying to contextualize this insofar as, like, because there's lineages here, right, that they're comparing between Sparta and Persia and themselves. And so he's kind of claiming that he has this like divine. Right. I almost found like Socrates. This is just like what occurred to me as I read it kind of on a surface level, is that Socrates. I'm not sure I took him quite seriously when he talked about his lineage. So Alcibiades seems to throw out this thing where I'm descended from Zeus as some kind of defense against the examples of Sparta and Persia. And I almost took Socrates as being like, hey, aren't we all? Like, I'm down, you know, I'm downstream from Daedalus and you know, Daedalus is downstream from Hephaestus and almost like made that point moot, if that makes sense. And then I think, like, even in the footnote, I think we have the same addition in the same footnote, it just says like, you know, all the people who had a similar craft would see themselves as downstream or descendants of like that particular God. So there's probably something more there. But like, what I. My first take on it when I read it was that Socrates is basically canceling out Alcibiades comment there. That that lineage of saying, oh, I'm descended from the gods isn't really that unique amongst the Athenian aristocratic class. And it's not actually going to benefit you in the actual comparison between you guys in Sparta and Persia. That's just my hot take.
- [86:01]
Alec Bianco
Yeah, I'd be interested in what you think, stranger, because I wonder too if it's. It may be like a kind of inversion of, you know, oh, I'll admit to you that you do descend from the gods, but by the way, all the things you actually care about in life, you know, material wealth, family, you know, acreage. I mean, I love the point in the speech where he points out how many acres he owns. Alcibiades owns this like, tiny portion of land compared to the Persians and the Spartans. Right. So all the things that Alcibiades actually cares about, he then just rips him apart with his story with the Spartans and the Persians. But. So I don't know again, yeah, I don't know how this, this God thing fits into it. I mean, what you're saying tracks, Deacon, but.
- [86:51]
Athenian Stranger
Yeah, yeah, one, one of the things I would add there is this is where you need to be laughing. Socrates is hilarious when it comes to myths. When you look, for instance, in the Gorgias, we get this presentation of these obscure poets and Socrates goes out of his way to say, yeah, you know, I mean, I don't really, I'm not a myth maker. I don't know too much about these poets. But what about, you know, we can think about that poet you're mentioning here, but then let's also bring up this other poet and then he goes on for passages and passages of doing this incredibly complicated exegesis on a poet simply to show Gorgias that he's outdone him. He does something very similar in the Protagoras. What, what I would suggest is going on here is in many ways exactly what I think. It was Deacon who had mentioned this. He's just, he's just throwing out there that if Alcibiades is going to start having this reference to these, any kind of divine lineage, Socrates can conjure up his own divine lineage as well, that competes for it. Which is to say these things matter, right? They, we could say they cancel each other out. Because, I mean, as Socrates flatly says later in that passage, he says, you would be ashamed for yourself when you observe how far you fall short of them. He's, in other words, he's saying, look, and this, this is an important role of shame when it comes to educating, right? I mean, you, you don't destroy them, right? But if they're going to try to rub it in your face or something like that, that you can sort of politely pull a Socrates and say, well, I'm pretty sure all those people you're mentioning would, they'd be ashamed of you. You would actually, if you're going to be honest with, with me here, you would be ashamed of how far you've fallen short too, because. Exactly as, as Alec was just mentioning, he's got just a couple acres compared to those and he's already said early in the dialogue, Socrates has said, I suspect that you, Alcibiades, really only care about these two people who have existed, Cyrus and Xerxes. Right. So that's, that's going to be how much he has this great esteem for these tyrants, by the way, who owned all this stuff. And he's, Socrates is saying, look, I know you only think about these tyrants and stuff, but you should be ashamed at sort of the, the paltry pittance that you have compared to them.
- [89:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
On that note, in the myth, like in the, this kind of pseudo myth, the royal tale, like what is the role of community in actually cultivating virtue? That was something that really stood out to me. And it doesn't seem to me you always have to be careful when Socrates gives these stories, like what's his pedagogical purpose for actually saying these? And is this what he actually believes or is he kind of using it as a rhetorical device? But he seems to make it very clear that the community has a very strong role to play in the upbringing of young men into the virtuous life. And we even get, we get in 121E. I think that's where it is. We get the, yeah, 121E. We get the mention of, you know, the natural virtues or what are later known as the cardinal virtues, right? They cultivate in these young men by having them be taught by the wisest, the justest, the, the most self controlled and the bravest, right. Which tracks with prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. And so like, what is the role of the community in raising young men? Because I think, I think in the third part, this comes in, in a really beautiful way that I didn't appreciate until I read it my second time. But here it seems very clear that the community has a role in helping young men to be virtuous. And Socrates, in another line that you knew, just had to get. Alcibiades, like Socrates kind of pivots and is like, yeah, so you've, you've been wasted. Like you think you can compete on this level and like you, before you even know there's a game, you were supposed to be being trained for it and you haven't been. And so you've kind of wasted all of your upbringing. You're not. Again, it's that kind of almost comical dethroning of Alcibiades pride when he compares himself to the Persians and the Spartans. But I think taking a step back though, like the community here is supposed to help cultivate virtue in People, Yeah, I mean, definitely.
- [91:22]
Athenian Stranger
I mean, this gets to the meaning, the significance of the imagery of the gadfly, right. And the apology. Socrates notices that his fellow citizens believe they're acting. Virtue, right? They've got the virtue signaling going on, I suppose. And he takes it as his task to be the sting fly, right? The gadfly that stings them to remind them he's got to bring them back down and say, no, you think this is virtue, but it's not. I think that's certainly what's going on here. I mean, there are a number of other places in the. In the dialogues where this is brought out very explicitly. Also in Xenophon as well, Xenophon's memorabilia, in other words, the recollections that Xenophon has of Socrates. Trying to. I'm trying to think how. How I could specifically say. I mean, this is one of the areas I find the most difficult in Plato. The myths are never as easy as we would otherwise want them to be. My reading of these is that generally speaking, it's the myths that end up being the most complicated. Because perfect example of this here is going to be the phaedo. Once Socrates realizes that he cannot give a natural logos, in other words, he can't use nature as the standard by which the logos is to be measured. That's when he has to apply myth. And an even deeper way of understanding this is that the relationship between the being of something and its becoming becomes very problematic in the sense that a logos of the being turns out to be rather, not easy, but more doable, whereas the logos of the becoming, the genesis, turns out to be extremely complicated. And that's usually where Socrates will invoke myths. And so, of course, here we're talking about the becoming of men, right? Of man. And throughout, through his education. And that's, I think, not to say that that's complicated, but it's just one of those indications where it's like, okay, well, hold on. Socrates mentions specific gods and specific myths for very, very tendentious purposes. And it ends up being one of those moments where you have to sort of put everything down and say, all right, hold on, let me do a little list here of all these people he's naming, because I'm gonna have to go to the original sources now to double check to see what he's saying. Squares with this, because this guy could be messing around with us. I think, though, in. In the larger respect, at least, with regard to here, without overcomplicating it. Daedalus. This, of course, is going to be the artisan. And so what's happened throughout is that Socrates keeps asking Alcibiades, well, what's the art? You say that you know the art. What is the art that you know most especially, what is the political art? Politicate. And so by saying that, he's got this lineage to Daedalus, which is interesting because Socrates usually always refers more heavily to the lineage of his mother than his father. But what he's saying is that, look, my. My lineage goes all the way back to the artist. So I think I have a claim to purchase upon this knowledge of the arts or something like that even, and especially this art of speaking well about all things.
- [95:05]
Alec Bianco
Right?
- [95:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. What occurs to me there, and kind of what I think resonates with what you're saying too, is that Alcibiades being kind of the best of the Athenians, but then shown to be wanting because the polis has not instructed him in virtue, then again, shows the need for Alcibiades to convert and become like a philosopher king. Because if we had someone then that was running the polis, if we had someone that was a leader or could convert the empire to philosophy, to a philosophic life, then we could teach our children virtue when they are young, before they even know to appreciate it. So it's interesting to me that it seems that in showing Alcibiades defects, he shows also the need for someone like Alcibiades to convert to a philosophic life and then in turn convert the polis, if that makes sense.
- [96:02]
Athenian Stranger
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's either true or certainly plausible. One thing I would also add, though, is that, and these are not at all mutually exclusive, keep in mind the urgency with which Socrates has turned to Alcibiades. He knows Alcibiades is about to go speak to the people. He knows how incredibly talented Alcibiades is. In other words, he knows that Alcibiades will be successful. And so finding a way to rescue Alcibiades from himself at this point is of great urgency. And I think that also would go a long way in explaining why it is that he's playing with fire here. Because as a teacher, it's difficult to imagine any circumstance, perhaps, except something like this, where a teacher would simply and flatly promise a student, oh, you want to make everyone your slaves? I can show you. In fact, not only can I show you how to do it, but you won't be able to accomplish it with anybody else. Only I can do that. So I think that there's that urgency there of he recognizes the great danger for Alcibiades. And I think he knows that as Alcibiades goes, so too goes the rest of the entire political community of Athens.
- [97:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That seems to make sense for both ways, right? So sometimes he seems to throw out these kind of dangerous promises, which is like a positive. But then he also seems to throw out very trenchant critiques of Alcibiades which seems to do the same purpose, right? Like please don't address the assembly because by the way, you're the most stupid of people because of how you do it, right? So he seems to again as that master teacher, he seems to be able to know when to offer something to Alcibiades that might get him to pump the brakes a bit or also when he can cast doubt on Alcibiades own self knowledge and get him to not address the assembly. So again it's, it's a weird, maybe not weird, but it's, it's a masterful because it's very intentional kind of coupling of two different movements Socrates seems to use. And so I think here in the myth, him saying like, by the way, like you're, you're really up a creek because you should have been formed in virtue as a child and now you're here and you're almost, you know, really, you went from like, you went from being like, you know, I have natural abilities better than everyone to you're kind of a waste, really. Like you, you've wasted all your potential, which really I think again is that, that kind of trenchant. He's trying to undercut him so he won't go address the assembly and then seek a wisdom that gives him that self confidence, if that makes sense. What did we think? Oh, go ahead.
- [98:45]
Athenian Stranger
I think that's, I think that's exactly correct. And we should, we should add, I think that this is not ancillary or tangential to philosophy as such. For Socrates, in other words, the Socratic dialectic, and what I mean by that is something like this Socratic dialectic is a double movement. On the one hand you are lowering yourself. That's the whole purpose of Socratic irony. You are lowering yourself condescending. And I don't mean that in a pejorative sense whatsoever. You're lowering yourself to the level of someone who doesn't know as much as you do. And at the same time you are trying to pull them back up to a higher level where you are. And in fact we see this for instance, none other than in the divided Line. When you, when you look, Alec will have some fun with this. When you look at the Greek, you will in fact see that he calls it a double motion. It's a double motion that's going on there. You're going down and up at the same time. So. And I think that that's fundamentally the very nature of philosophy in the sense that we have it as kind of Socratic dialectic or something like that which Socrates is showing us here.
- [100:03]
Alec Bianco
That's so good. And I was just, I was going to say to you, kind of going. Pulling all that stuff together. I think this is for people who may be listening, who are sort of newer to Plato, but when you're reading Plato, there's. There's so much of it is dialogue and words. And you can kind of glaze over when you're reading it sometimes because it's just this constant movement. But it's really critical in my mind to remember that the word logos in Greek is not just word, although it most often means that it also has this mathematical connotation of denotation, rather of ratio or proportion, which is really important to Socrates's understanding of justice, which permeates not only this dialogue, but all of the dialogues. And so if we're thinking so, in other words, Socrates is extremely mathematical and there's a lot of math all throughout the dialogues. But one thing that I think is really fascinating, you'll see this intersection is here in first Alcibiades, but in the Meno in particular, when he's drawing the square and asking the slave boy all these questions, eventually the slave boy comes to a sort of unrecognition, which is where he realizes that he has been wrong. He's come to know himself, right? He's recollecting knowledge, so he's knowing himself. And yet there's a point at which, or a line at which rather there is no logos, which is the line between the line that is disproportionate with the sides. It's what we would call the hypotenuse. But really that's. It's a misnomer because it doesn't have a name because it's disproportionate. It can't be. It can't have a logos in that sense. There's no name. And so it's a really, really, really interesting thing to think about in the context of Plato, which is, what is the purpose of the logos and the purpose of words? And in particular, where can they fail? And so, going back to this dialogue I think, or really all of them. That's where the myth really serves to show that there are certain points where words sort of qua. Words don't really do anything. Instead, you need something that's more, well, effective, at least in the context. And although Socrates is using words, he's not using logic, the dialectic in that same exact way. He's doing something that's kind of unnamable, which is why we have these myths and these stories that you can neither prove nor disprove. They're sort of unlogical in that sense. And I think that that's kind of what happens here, is that early on in the dialogue, Alcibiades says, well, Socrates, go ahead, just tell me what it is that I need to know. Why have you been following me around all these years? Interestingly, Socrates says right at the very beginning, I have not spoken to you in years. Which I think is really fascinating. Goes back to what stranger said about the urgency of this. So he hasn't spoken to him for years. That's a question to think about. Why, why not now all of a sudden, I'm going to speak to you. And then when he said, okay, so give me the speech, give me the spiel, old man. No, I'm not going to. I'm going to engage in this dialectic with you instead. And then ultimately, the thing that causes the metanoia, the, the turning back for Alcibiades, the changing of his mind is this story, this pseudo myth, I'm calling it. But yeah, this, this myth that's. That's not quite logos, but almost is.
- [103:59]
Athenian Stranger
One of the things that's, that's amazing to keep in mind. And again, you guys can have, you guys will have so much fun with this, looking at it in the Greek. Very often you see this, especially in the phaedo, you see it in the laws. There's a number. Well, I mean, it just sort of goes on and on, but it's lost in translation because it's usually translated as story or tale. But the Greek word that Socrates often uses is it's not myth, it's not logos, it's muthologian. It is a combination of both. And it's. When that word pops up in the dialogues, in fact, use like Perseus or one of these other digital archives to search it, because when that word pops up, that's when you need to come to a full stop, circle it and say, all right, what has happened? What has happened to where we can no longer give a logos and we're now in this mysterious realm of the muthalogian. In other words, what has happened such that the need to provide another soul. Soul with the logos that it needs. Department of Redundancy department there. But the, the need to provide the soul with what with the proper logos can no longer be accomplished, strictly speaking, through the logos. It requires a muthologian. Right. And that's, by the way, that's the verbal form of it is the muthalu guan. But it's, it's makes for some really fascinating, fascinating reading of things.
- [105:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Can you reiterate the etymology of that? It's a compound word between which two words?
- [105:37]
Athenian Stranger
So the verb for logos is to speak logian. Right. And so muthologian is a myth speaking myth that involves, of course, the etymology of logos, right, in terms of the noun. So. But yeah, it's compacted there together all in one word.
- [106:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, that's fascinating. I appreciate you kind of pulling back the veil there and sharing that because that definitely gives us a lot to think about. The other thing too, here in the Greek that's really fascinating is. I don't know if you guys looked into this because you would know it better than I do, is the tracts of land, right? The land, the acreage for the Persian queen. Like, it's kind of a funny narrative. And why is he sharing this? But the Greek word there underneath it is cosmos. Like she has cosmos. This comes from Stephen's interpretation or interpretive essay in the Pink book that I shared earlier. And so it's really interesting because he makes this. He kind of makes this argument of, yeah, at one hand it's. It's surface level, like her girdle and et cetera. This is where we get like words like cosmetic. But it also then has this like, philosophical depth to it of being cosmos, being like this order, like the cosmos. And so I think it's really interesting here. Maybe I'll just kind of throw out an idea to the group. I thought it was really interesting here to say, like what, like what's the zenith of this kind of pseudo myth? Like, what. What is it that's actually put in front of Alcibiades? And it's interesting that it, it doesn't seem to be the myth. It's not like you need to be better than the Persian king in the Spartan king. It's actually the women that are put in front of him. And so the Persian queen, you know, has these cosmos, right? This, this cosmos around her. And then there's this kind of also with the Spartan queen, there's this interesting thing of like, well, what would Alcibiades have to be to gain the favor of these queens? What would he have to be for the queen to give herself to him? And it's. I thought it was really fascinating because it. What Socrates seems to be doing is he seems to be now appealing to Alcibiades appetitive side. So not just his spirited side, but his appetitive saying, look, look, here is this beautiful woman that has like the cosmos around her. Who are you? That would even be able to court her? Why would she, why would a woman of this caliber ever give herself to you? And it's interesting though because it's appeal to his petitive that then goes back into the spirited, right? Like, who are you? Like, do you have the nobility? Do you have, you know, this kind of missing component that I don't think he knows what it is yet for her to actually pay attention to you. I found this really fascinating because it seems to mirror or run parallel to the beginning of Dao Tema's ladder of love in the symposium, right? Here's this like feminine form that unlocks the eros and at first it's just bodily, but then there's this idea of them moving from the bodily beauty to the beauty of the soul, which then, if I remember correctly, Dao Tema, it serves well, to borrow a phrase from this dialogue, it serves basically as a mirror back to the lover being like, well, wait, who am I to love this person? And what does my own soul look like? I start to love the soul and the other. But then what does my soul look like? And I really think that there's parts of this dialogue, this being one of the first ones that tracks really well with the symposium, and that this, this Persian queen, I guess to borrow from another text, is almost like a, like a Beatrice figure, right? It's like, listen, this is the, this is the woman, this is the, the female form you have to ascend to, and you're not worthy yet. And so you have to learn how to gain virtue, you have to learn how to mature, you have to have this ascent of the soul until she will actually consent to you. And so I found it, I just found it fascinating because the first time I read it, I really got lost. I was like, okay, why are we talking about Persian queens? And like, like, you know, the bridal and her land and whatever. And then like the second time I read it, particularly after reading the interpretive essay, like, in that she actually plays a very specific role in trying to motivate him into virtue. I found this really beautiful and I, I did find it parallels the ladder of love to a certain degree.
- [110:13]
Athenian Stranger
Yeah, one thing, one thing I would add there is note again, remember at the very beginning, Socrates is the one is reminding Alcibiades that he's overcome all his lovers and in many respects he is the non lover. He's used to being the beloved of everybody else. And what's going on here, at least partly, is that. And remember he's already pointed out that Alcibiades has this fascination with the Persians, Cyrus and Xerxes in particular, he's pointing out that their lovers, right, in particular this queen would not be in love with Alcibiades. In other words, he would not be able to overcome her. She wouldn't even love him. He would not be her beloved. How could he become her beloved? Well, as he's pointed there to a number of the virtues and of course simply being knowledgeable as well, he's going to turn that into this occasion to broach again this topic of self knowledge, in other words, in order to know his own soul. Because I mean he's already said this a number of times in the previous section where he's spoken about the beautiful things are the good things, right? And he says yes, and he says, but not all of them, right, Just some of them. Yes, yes, that's correct. And so the belief, the hope, our default is always that the beautiful be the skin of the good. Now it doesn't always work out that way. In fact, Alcibiades himself is going to be proof of that. Socrates has already explicitly referred to Alcibiades as the beautiful. But what he's saying is how shameful that your mind, your soul does not match. In other words, its goodness does not live up to the surface of its beauty. And so the real task, or as he says, the greatest contest, right, because remember, he's trying to pique his vanity, his love of victory and honor. The real contest, the greatest contest in life is going to be this accomplishment of knowing yourself. So he's, he's trying to turn Alcibiades not simply into a lover, or we could say a better lover, but a noble lover. But in order to do that, right, Alcibiades is going to have to realize that he, while he's beautiful, he doesn't have purchase to noble beauty. And noble beauty is going to come from this self knowledge that's going to of necessity, I guess we could say, make him virtuous excellence in the noble sense. Right. The true virtues. As opposed to simply wanting to tyrannize over others with his vulgar beauty. Something to that effect.
- [113:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, I really like that. I think it's a really excellent tie in back to the beginning that Alcibiades is used to being the beloved but not the lover. And then what. How Socrates is turning that on its head in this kind of pseudo myth, royal tale. I think that's excellent. And again, that kind of goes back to. Stranger your point of Socrates being a phenomenal psychologist in the true sense of that word. Right. Knowing the soul and being able to step it. It's just another. It's just another masterstroke of him being a teacher. Well, the. The end of part two is the end of the end of the myth, the royal tale. Any other thoughts on this, on this royal tale and the pseudo myth?
- [114:06]
Alec Bianco
I was just going to add that. What you guys just said that. And I'm going to do this because Socrates himself quotes the poets throughout this dialogue that in the Odyssey, if we think of Odysseus as this sort of noetic kind of character, that his wife Penelope, who he's constantly thinking of and trying to get back to one, she is a woman and therefore embodies beauty, which pulls him toward back home. In other words, toward truth, the divine, at least in philosophy, in theological terms.
- [114:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And.
- [114:47]
Alec Bianco
But also, Homer brilliantly connects wisdom with Penelope. She's circumspect Penelope and she always has this sort of prudence and wisdom about her. And I think that's exactly what Socrates is doing here. He's putting these women forth in the tale to Alcibiades, but he's connecting it ultimately to wisdom or self knowledge and to pull his soul out of the carnality that he sort of seeks.
- [115:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I like that. I like that a lot. Particularly then if you. If you compare that. Because I still think kind of the zenith of the Odyssey in a lot of ways in my mind is Odysseus declining Calypso's offer. And in that he. Because I think that's. In certain ways, that's when he's at his best and like, most impressive, like how is he able to do this? But yeah, in that it's really interesting when he compares Penelope to Calypso, he. He calls her wise Penelope. Right, My wise Penelope. And yeah, I think there's something there that you almost see like a cascading where Athena loves Odysseus because of the intellect and she. I think that he reminds her of herself in a Lot of ways. Then I think you see something similar cascading down between Odysseus to Penelope that you have the man of twists and turns. Very noetic, if you want to use that term, within Penelope, this matchless queen of cunning. I think that's beautiful. And I think how the feminine form is used in this ancient literature is really important. And I can't wait until we get the symposium because it's one of my favorite texts. Any other thoughts on this kind of rural tale?
- [116:31]
Athenian Stranger
At least on my end over here, I would just. I would just say that it's going to be something that I'm going to be thinking of because I want to have more thoughts on it, but I'm still trying to make sense of it myself.
- [116:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, there's a certain beauty here, I think, when you look at the role of the Persian queen in this, that I think merits more attention. It's something that I certainly want to think about further and even go back and kind of read the symposium because actually, we'll see in this third part. I really thought that there were parts of First Alcibiades that started to fill certain gaps in the symposium in Diotima's Ladder of Love. All right, my friends, that is the end of our first conversation on First Alcibiades with Alec Bianco and the Athenian Stranger. I hope you enjoyed it. It's a conversation that I have returned to time and time again, particularly on the teacher as a lover of the soul. It's an idea that has certainly captured my imagination. Next week we'll have our second and final conversation on First Alcibiades with Alec Bianco and the Athenian Stranger. If you're following along in our written guide, the conversation will start in the dialogue at 1:24B and is the third part in our outline. If you do not have a written guide, you are missing out. Go check out our Patreon page where we have a written guide to First Alcibiades and to many other great books. Check us out on X, Facebook, YouTube and Patreon and visit our website at thegreatbookspodcast.com and we will see you all next week for our second conversation on First Alcibiades. Thank you.