← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
Today on the sand in the Great Books podcast, we are discussing Plato and education, particularly the teacher as a lover of the soul, and we'll be contrasting this ancient pedagogy with our more flat modern understanding of education. Today we'll be leaning heavily into Plato's first Alcibiades and the principle of Know thyself and take up the problem of how does the soul come to know itself if it has no mirror by which it can look into how? How does the soul come to see itself? And how does that principle inform how we educate our young? We'll also discuss the role of eros in beauty in education and the problem of the unerotic and ugliness in modern education as well, and much, much more on the subject of teaching in Plato. Also, remember that next week we start Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for our Christmas read. It is a beautiful poem in four parts. If you're not familiar with it, you are in for a treat. We've already recorded next Week's episode with Dr. Justin Jackson out of Hillsdale Chivalry Guild and Banish Kent off of X. It was a fantastic conversation. I learned a lot. It's a poem that I've read several times because I love it, but I've never read it in a group and iron sharpens iron and I learned a tremendous amount in that conversation. So join us next week as we start Sir Gawain in the Green Knight for our Christmas read. But today join us for a conversation on Plato and education with a wonderful group of men as we discuss the role of the teacher as a lover of the soul.
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Welcome to Ascend to the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father of five and serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. I'm recording on a beautiful evening here in rural Oklahoma. If you're new to Ascend, we're a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the Great books. It is our goal to be like a small group to people, especially first time readers. We have podcast videos and written guides to help you read the Iliad, the Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, and many more great books. Check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters and visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our upcoming reading schedule and more information. Today we are continuing our study of Plato by looking at lessons on education from First, Alcibiades and the Meno, particularly looking at the teacher as a lover of the soul. What does it mean to teach like Plato? We have a wonderful panel with us tonight. First, welcoming back to the podcast. We have Dr. Frank Grabowski, a member of our Sunday small group, a diaconate candidate, third order Franciscan, and big news, the new dean of faculty at our local Classical Great Books High School. Welcome and congratulations, Dr. Grabowski.
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B
Deacon, I, I was made an offer that I could not refuse.
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A
We're delighted.
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B
I'm very glad. Yeah. And grateful to what everyone has done for me with the Great Books Reading Group Deacon formation. I mean, everything really has, all the pieces have fallen into play. So I'm excited and I'm really looking forward to continuing to work with these wonderful, beautiful students at Holy Family.
- [03:30]
A
That's good. We're excited to have you. We really appreciate you being there. We Also tonight have Mr. Thomas Lackey of Back to the Podcast, our friend, our member of a small, our member of our small, member of our Sunday small group, independent scholar Thomas. Welcome back to the podcast.
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C
Thanks. I'm glad to be here. And I'm especially glad that Dr. G.R. is going to be at Holy Family. Our kids go there. It'll be a while before they get to, to be in his classes because they're too young.
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B
So I hope to have all of your children.
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C
Yeah, I, I, I hope so as well.
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D
That, that, that's going to be, that's my goal.
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C
Good times, especially literature. That's going to be a lot of fun.
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B
So I can corrupt them. Just like Socrates, right?
- [04:12]
A
Yeah. Sometimes I think about what I was doing in high school and I'm like, man, my kids are going to be so far ahead of me. Like, my daughter's 10 at the moment, and we're reading Dante's Inferno together. We've read a lot of the great books together, and she just finds it normative, and I just, she's like, leagues ahead. Where I was as a child, I didn't discover these texts, so I was in, like, graduate school. So I don't tell them that. That's just the norm for me. It's always been like this, but trying to raise my children to be much more intelligent than I am, which might not be too hard of a goal. But setting that aside, we have a new guest on the podcast. We have Dr. Brett Larson, who is the assistant professor of political science at Tulsa Community College, who also has joined our Sunday small group. I've greatly enjoyed his comments and his insights there, so we're having him on the podcast. So welcome, Dr. Larson.
- [05:04]
D
Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. And I will try to heed Socrates's wisdom from the first Alcibiades, where he says, if you don't know something, don't think you know it. In other words, that's the worst type of ignorance there.
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A
Exactly. Can you, can you tell us though, a little bit maybe just about your background and like your own, your own academic scholarship?
- [05:27]
B
Yeah.
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D
So right now I teach at a two year college and most of what I do is teach American government courses, basically. Stuff like there's a congress, there's a court system, and so on. But occasionally I get to teach a course called Introduction to Political Thought. And I teach this course like a history of political philosophy. I start with Plato and then we wrap up with Nietzsche and we cover 11 other thinkers between them. And so today's class I covered the second half of Edmund Burke, and so we're going to dive into Mill and then Marx, after that, finally Nietzsche. So broadly speaking, my interests are in the history of Western political thought from pretty much Plato onward. And then more narrowly, my scholarly interests involve conservatism in a philosophical sense. So one of the things I've been looking at somewhat recently is what is conservatism supposed to conserve? Because kind of like the, the mainstream academic branch of it now is a form of skeptical conservatism which denies the existence of something like a universal moral order. And so I find this version of conservatism rather insipid. So I would prefer one that seeks to conserve something like a universal moral order. And that kind of leads us to Plato, which we're talking about today. I think he's part of that tradition that ought to be conserved. But anyways, that's kind of an overview of one of the projects I'm working on at the moment.
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A
No good. I appreciate you sharing that. The mention of Plato and the skepticism, I think is a good kind of dovetail into even my own thoughts, I think. So we've been reading Plato, we've been on our study of Plato here on Ascend, and we've gone through seven of his dialogues. So just as a reminder. Right. We've gone through first Alcibiades to Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Meno, and the Gorgias on the podcast. I think what I'm interested from the panel is just one takeaway. What has stood out to you as we've done this study of Plato? Anything new that's stood out and as you mentioned, skepticism, Because I'll sally forth first. I think one of the things I'm still wrestling with is how to read Plato. And we've talked about this on the podcast before and obviously there's some broad principles that I think we've applied that have done really well. So for instance, we've pushed that we need to read Plato in kind of a dramatic way, that the narrative is part of the pedagogy. And so if he includes details, much like scripture, right. If he includes details, these details are informative according to his, you know, philosophical principle. And so we need to pay attention when he says he goes up somewhere or they have wine or they do these things. These things are all instructive in part of the overall philosophical principle. Maybe a clarification by contrast, you know, we don't read first Alcibiades and just extract the principle of know thyself and say, hey, we have conquered the dialogue. We, we, you know, we set aside all that dramatic stuff that doesn't help us. We've got the principle, we're ready to move on. I think we've applied that pretty well. That's been kind of a guidepost if we've moved through. But one thing that, that has stood out to me just as we've had different guests on and things like this is I never really understood how a study of Plato could leave to skepticism because Plato to me seems so rich and just thick. There's, there's this, this focus on a certain realism, an intelligible reality. But I've noticed that there's like a certain way to read Plato that seems very hyper focused on Plato's intent, like what did Plato actually intend? And this is, I have learned, is an incredibly dangerous question that immediately collapses into skepticism because, you know, a certain way there, there is no Platonic teaching. But you'll see that because Plato never actually puts anything in his own mouth. He always speaks through his characters. He speaks through a drama. And so it gets very difficult to say no, Plato actually intended this type of philosophical thought. And I've noticed then that this skepticism, which can become very deep. So like Plato, you know, didn't. We can't say Plato really held to the cardinal virtues. So we can't really say that Plato held to the tripart soul. We can't really say that Plato held to the ideas. Any kind of positive teaching that we might see in Plato collapses into kind of a broad skepticism. And the reason this has kind of caught my attention as we've kind of moved through and I'm still kind of wrestling with it, is because it then runs very contrary to how the early church picked up Plato and how you see Plato get adopted into Christianity, because Christianity doesn't adopt Plato and broadly Platonic philosophy through skepticism. It actually takes several of his claims to be philosophically valid and to be good observations on an intelligible reality. And so, for instance, the early church fathers, particularly on the Greek side, will pick up the tripart soul. They'll pick up his understanding of virtue. They'll pick up the four cardinal virtues from Plato. They'll even pick up his ideas, right? St. Augustine puts them, gives them a new metaphysical, metaphysical address by locating them in the Logos, the divine mind. And so this is like something I've been wrestling with, is how to address this type of skepticism. And I've even come to a certain realization that I think I believe in a lot of Platonic things that I'm not entirely sure Plato did, if that makes sense. And I mean that in two ways. Like, in certain ways, if I see truth in the dialogue and that truth, particularly if that truth then is also confirmed through revelation through Jesus Christ, then in a certain way, like whether Plato intended that or not, I'm not sure how much I lean into that because it always leans into a certain skepticism. And so, like, for instance, like, I really like the tripart soul, obviously, the cardinal virtues, things like this, I think. I think are excellent, even the ideas being, you know, even the ideas to a certain extent, I believe in. But then there's also, like, Platonic things, like I mentioned earlier. Like, I would say that St. Augustine rooting the ideas in the divine mind is a Platonic teaching. It's certainly not what Plato taught, but it's in that realm of Platonic philosophy. It's a Platonic teaching. And so as I talk to people, and not everyone on the podcast is Catholic, which I think in certain ways has been good as a kind of a clarification. By contrast, this is just one thing that I'm currently wrestling with is this type of skepticism and how you can read the dialogues in a very skeptical way.
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B
Well, then, yes, Deacon, I can. I think maybe I could just briefly respond to what you're saying. And that would be to caution against those who read Plato of adopting, you know, one of two extremes, which is, on the one hand, a kind of dogmatism, and. And that would take Plato to be effectively writing treatises in disguise, that these dialogues are actually just treatises. And so you just strip away all of the. The dramatic clothing, and you just want to expose the arguments. And that's kind of how I was brought up. That's how I was raised to read the dialogues that we really want to try to get to the. The pith and marrow of the argument. Then the other extreme is the one that you just mentioned, which is kind of skepticism that suggests that we can never really know what Plato believed himself because he never tells us directly. But. But I do think that there's a middle way, and that's the one that I would advise those reading Plato take, and that would be to acknowledge that Plato remains hidden, that he hides behind the masks of all of these characters, but that fundamentally, he is speaking to us. And really, it's no different than reading any of the other great works that you've discussed on your podcast, Deacon. Whether it's Aeschylus or hopefully at some point or other Shakespeare, you're going through Dante. I mean, you know, so, you know, fundamentally, authors are trying to get a message across, and sometimes that message is more explicit than others. But I think Plato loves to play this game with us of trying to find Plato. It's like a, you know, a find Waldo or Spot Waldo, where you do want to try to work it out. But I think fundamentally, he did believe.
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D
In the cardinal virtues.
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B
And fundamentally there is a theory, theory of forms, even though he may not have fully fleshed it out in his dialogues.
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D
Yeah, and just to kind of add to that as well, I mean, one of the things that is so wonderful about Plato is his works are beautiful to read. They are really works of art in a way that, like, if you read, say, Aristotle, that's not really the case. Aristotle tends to be very technical and kind of dry there. So I think it's easy to kind of read something like Plato and then imagine that, oh, it's. Well, it's missing that technical precision or rigor there. But I don't think that's necessarily the case. I mean, for plato, like. Like Dr. Grabowski was saying, Plato does have very clear ideas that he wants you to get across. Sometimes you just have to look for a little more nuance there. And also, I think just the fact that Socrates as the main interlocutor just keeps showing up over and over again in the dialogues, not necessarily in every single one, but he is pretty much the main spokesman in every dialogue is a pretty big hint that what he says is likely a lot of what Plato actually believes. And also, just look how he's presented. It's very favorably. He's usually the one who's winning the argument, winning the debate, insofar as there is a victory in These debates and. And so on.
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A
Yeah, that's a good. I appreciate that. I really do. That clarification, I think too, I don't mean this as a pejorative. In certain ways there's a. How I took you, Dr. Grabowski, is there's a very simple answer to this. It's like, you know, when we apply that same hermeneutic to any other narrative. So if you read like when we read the Oresteia, did we tell ourselves that we have no idea what Aeschylus believed? Because Aeschylus did not write a treatise on that. Like, that seems to be an insane premise to me. When we read Dante's Inferno, would we say that we actually have no idea what Dante believed because he's always speaking through the mouth of Dante the pilgrim or through Virgil. So no, I appreciate that because I think it maybe sometimes Plato is treated differently for some reason than these other narrative texts that does lead and collapses into a certain skepticism. So I appreciate that. To kind of push on us and say, you know, are we actually having more of a universal standard when we approach texts that are presented in a narrative? Because I think this is important for two reasons. One, because we're going to start preparing ourselves to read the Republic. And I think it's very important at that, that have a really refined hermeneutic of how are we approaching Plato when we kind of work through that. But also in a lot of ways, a lot of these same standards of interpretation are the same ones that we apply to scripture. And you can see there too where that skepticism can be very corruptive and basically deny the reader, you know, pulling out anything that's true, good and beautiful from Scripture. But I appreciate those clarifications. You know, I'm still wrestling with it. It's something that I think I want to work through. But on the panel side, like from you guys, like any other kind of like just quick takeaways that you've picked up from reading through our study of Plato.
- [16:29]
D
Well, one thing that continually stands out to me from Plato, and one reason I really love Plato so much, is his robust defense of the idea that virtue brings happiness. I mean, this is kind of the basic premise of virtue ethics. And he makes this argument in a lot of different ways in a lot of different dialogues. So I would say the. The gorgeous is the one that comes to mind at the moment because we just re read that couple. Couple months ago, if I remember correctly. Then also it comes out somewhat in the Phaedo as well too. And there's bits and pieces in some of the other ones. And so it's this idea that, look, if you want to live a happy life both here on earth and then after death, once the soul is separated from the body, virtue is the only way that you can attain that. And then, of course, Plato follows that up by saying, look, even if you suffer on this earth, being a virtuous person here on earth is going to be the happiest life, no matter, you know, no matter what kind of suffering you face. And in the case of. Of Socrates, he ultimately ends up being executed in Athens through drinking the hemlock. But nonetheless, Plato would say, hey, he lived a. Ultimately a happy life. And I think one of the. The formulas that Plato gives us is that the unjust person cannot do any wrong or any actual harm. I shouldn't say wrong, any actual harm to the just person. And that's because of that connection between virtue and happiness.
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C
There's strong value to the dialogue and dramatic form that Plato is using there because I think he allows us to dim. Instead of simply bringing that out in a dialogue, he can bring it out in a dramatic way in the life of Socrates himself. So that Socrates then stands in not just as making an argument for the virtuous life, but as living the virtuous life and suffering injustice. And yet being what Plato and Socrates would both say is a. Is a blessed and happy man in spite of these things. And so that. That dramatic presentation adds an extra punch to the argument that you would have laid out elsewhere. I mean, also, it actually happened so that you always get that.
- [18:44]
D
Yeah, that's a nice contrast with a lot of, I don't know, say, modern and contemporary ethics, which kind of views the ethical life as, okay, I have to do this to make political society possible. Kind of like social contract theory or these are restrictions I have to accept in some manner to avoid greater evils. But if I could somehow escape these things and just do as I please, that would be the happiest life. Whereas Plato is like, no, that's not at all what's going on here. It's living according to the virtues that brings the happiness.
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C
Well, I think there's an underappreciated aspect of Plato's metaphysics there that it's so baked into what Plato is doing that it's. It's almost taken for granted that he's looking at the natures of man, the natures of political society, all of these. This language gets fleshed out somewhat more in Aristotle, but Socrates is obviously saying that the happiest way to be a man is to live the way that a man ought to live. Right. I mean, it seems like a almost tautological type thing, but that there's a whole host of metaphysical presuppositions baked into the idea that you can tell what a man is, that all men are alike in some important ways and that therefore they all have an end that is alike in certain ways. And then therefore the one's behavior should match those sorts of end. That's actually a very metaphysically rich claim. And I think to read Plato and to take Plato in is to, is to step into that entire metaphysical worldview. There's a top down metaphysics, this kind of bottom up way where it's like, well, I guess we need a society. And if we need a society, then I guess we'll have to be able to trust each other. So trust must be like. And you kind of like work out from the bottom is not at all what Plato is doing.
- [20:28]
D
Yeah, it's kind of a good contrast with like Emmanuel Kant's deontological ethics or those who follow him.
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A
I wonder, I wonder too how much we've incorrectly abandoned the concept of happiness. What I mean by that is typically like if we're going to evangelize or even just talk about the good life, how often we don't tether that to happiness, we tether that sometimes to redemption, we tether that to self sacrifice, we tether that maybe to the cross. But I recently gave a homily at the cathedral on the woman at the well. And I think if you read that passage from Scripture, it's very clear that when Christ evangelizes the woman, you know, he doesn't tell her like, here's the cross, like I'm going to die for you. Because what that does is it presupposes that she knows that she's a sinner. That's one reason I think the cross doesn't make a lot of sense in today's modern world is because it presupposes that you know that you need a savior. And maybe this kind of will go well into tonight's conversation of why I think even Christianity very much agrees with the principle of know thyself. I think to a certain degree you have to know thyself to understand the need for a savior. So notice that the woman of the well our Lord evangelizes by telling her that basically her restless heart will find rest, right? Which is happiness. She will actually be satiated in living water in which she will never thirst again. And so I think I appreciate your thoughts there because I think in certain ways, I wonder how much we should reconnect with the concept of happiness, particularly when you try and evangelize people in the good life, that this is actually the true path to happiness, and we can't abandon that term to say, like, hedonistic. Dr. Kabowski, what do you think?
- [22:07]
B
Well, no, I was actually going to just make a slightly different comment because I think you asked us, you know, what, what. What's our takeaway from having read these dialogues? And I guess, I mean, I've been reading. Gosh, I've been reading Plato now for decades and decades, and. And every time I. I read Plato, I'm. I'm always trying to compare. I'm. I'm setting it beside other. Other texts that I'm reading. Um, so when I was young, I would read Nietzsche, so I'd always try to read Plato beside Nietzsche, thinking that they could help illuminate each other. And I think. I mean, throughout all of these various stages of my life, I'm. I'm constantly struck and spellbound by this figure of Socrates. He emerges almost like a mythological figure, because we know that, well, he didn't write anything, or if he did, none of it has been transmitted to us. And so what we know of Socrates comes to us via his students, his biographers, Plato, Xenophon. And so I guess recently, you know, thanks to the Great Books reading group, you know, I've been really interested in Homer, and I'm constantly struck by this interesting.
- [23:21]
Parallel between.
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Socrates and Odysseus.
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Where they really do seem to be very similar. And I know I'm not the first to make this observation, but, I mean, one could almost argue that Socrates, in a sense at least the fictional character that emerges or that appears in these dialogues is somehow modeled on the Odysseus. Because when we open up, and I won't take. Take up too much more time, but I'd be interested to hear what you guys think about this. I mean, the one word that is used to describe the one word that Homer, the one that sticks out most in the Odyssey, is Polutropos. This. This idea of being a man of many twists and turns, and he. Only. Homer uses that word only once, and it appears in the very first line. And so this question then kind of hangs over the whole epic poem. What does this word mean?
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And so I think in a way, one can characterize Socrates as being Polutropos, as being a man of twists and turns. I mean, we see how he winds his way through Athens, asking these questions he encounters, just as Odysseus does in his travels, various friends, various enemies. Right. And so, you know, I think Palatropos, at least one way of understanding it is a kind of growth that Odysseus undergoes in his second sailing. Right. There are two sailings to Odysseus. There's the one to Troy and the one back. And you know, if, if your readers are familiar with Phaedo, Socrates talks about a second sailing as well, where he rejects natural philosophy and turns instead to, you know, the theory of forms, this new way of understanding essences. And so, yeah, I do think it's sort of an interesting, an interesting point to explore how Plato, you know, he writes the Republic. And the takeaway, a literal reading of the Republic is that he hate, you know, that Plato hates Homer, that he despises Homer, that Homer is just a confector of lies and falsehoods. But I tend to take the opposite view. I think that he greatly admires Homer and is, you know, that he was heavily inspired by Homer. And I do think that there is a parallel to be drawn between Socrates and Odysseus. But I'm not sure what you guys think of that, if that's far fetched.
- [25:44]
D
Or if you think there's something to it.
- [25:47]
A
My quick comment on that would be, is that if I had to compare those two characters, the first thing that came to my mind was actually the pursuit of knowledge. That's actually, for me, what characterizes both of them, which I don't, I don't think precludes what you're talking about. They're probably intermixed to a certain degree. But I think about, like when we read Dante's Inferno and where Dante and Odysseus are compared to one another and they're compared in their pursuit of knowledge, right. Odysseus has this kind of restless knowledge that isn't satiated and isn't satisfied with the natural boundaries of what man should have. And so he pushes those boundaries. We see that in Dante's story of his death, but we also see it, I think even in the Odyssey, like when he ties himself to the mass to hear the Sirens. It's not simply the experience of hearing the sirens, but it's also what the sirens were offering him, right? They knew him and their song was tailored. It's a tailored temptation, right? They offer him the knowledge of the gods and the knowledge of the cosmos and these types of things. So I would, I think it's a fascinating comparison. I think My, my knee jerk reaction is to look at both of them as lovers of knowledge and a pursuit of knowledge. But then how did each one go about that? Why does Odysseus have this negative connotation of maybe pushing the boundaries and never find all the stories about Odysseus and his death, no matter what tradition it comes from. He's always restless. He never can actually stay settled on Ithaca. He always has to go do something else. How do you compare that restlessness in pursuit of knowledge with like a Socrates in the apology who sit like as Dr. Larson kind of already mentioned. Right. Is holding that no one can actually do him harm. I think there's two really interesting contrasts there. That'd be my quick add to that. Anyone else want to comment? All right, let's dive into the actual subject for the evening. So, looking at the teacher as the lover of the soul, who's Plato the teacher? What does Plato teach us about education from the dialogues that we've already read. Right. Looking at versus Alcibiades and also the Meno. And I think that certain conversations that we'll have tonight are going to set us up well to read the Republic, which has so much to do with education. So my, maybe just to throw out a thesis here, my concern, my skepticism for several years now has been that we've almost completely lost the art of teaching. Whether it's in rhetoric or dialectic. Our culture has almost completely lost what it means to educate someone. And also then not simply the purpose of education, but if the purpose of education is lost, then also like the teleology, the purpose of the teacher seems to also be lost. Like how could you recover one without the other? And so it seems to me that we've reduced the teacher. Right. The radius of what it means to teach. It seems that it's been reduced and kind of thinned to maybe the conveyance of knowledge. Like I, I just help pass on knowledge to the students. That's, that's my goal.
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B
Or just information.
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A
Yeah, maybe knowledge is a strong word. Maybe it's just information. Like I'm just kind of an enfleshed AI. I'm just trying to actually just, you know, Google would probably do a better job than me, but I, I get paid to stand in front of you and babysit you. And so I'm kind of passing this along. Um, and also I think too, and these probably aren't separable is that our education is also a training. So even the information that it gives you, it doesn't seem to be a holistic Formation, but rather it's typically a training for some type of economic function, right? So you're a cog in the machine. It's not about whether you're a good person or a bad person or formative of you as a human being or what it even means to be human, you know, to live a good life, to pursue the true good and the beautiful, but rather simply, we train you for a purpose. I remember when this really struck me was actually in law school, is when it struck me because I, I had this interesting juxtaposition of going to graduate school at Iva Maria and reading the great books. I'm reading the Republic alongside St Thomas of Summa Theologica, and I'm just immersed in this culture that's trying to form my entire intellect. But also my moral life can't be separable from this. Like, I also have to be a moral person. Like, it's, it's, it's inviting me to a transformation of the whole person is what this education was. And then I went to law school. And here's. We view ourselves as the best and the brightest, right? Here's all these people from around the country. And I remember, like, halfway through law school realizing, like, I'm just being trained, like, I'm going to go through all of law school and we're never going to talk about what justice is. We're never even going to talk about what a law is. I mean, in a theological way, right? We're basically just taking, like, who's the best at taking these logic games, right? Who's the best at taking complex fact patterns and applying them, you know, to these somewhat difficult laws to read, and who can come out with the best outcome. And so I think that what Plato, what I have found, and particularly for salsa in the meno, is a really refreshing invitation to reconsider what it means to be the teacher.
- [30:51]
D
Yeah, a couple, couple of thoughts on that there. So I've definitely noticed that same thing in my experience, both as, I guess, a student and then also as a teacher. And that comes out really strongly at the type of institution that I'm at. And so I think one of the root causes of this disagreement between, say, Plato, on the one hand, and I think you could say, broadly speaking, the classical tradition that we preserved, I think you'd find this in, like, Aristotle and Cicero and certainly Augustine, Thomas as well, too.
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B
And.
- [31:22]
D
And then on the other hand, kind of the, you know, modern and contemporary approach to education is that Plato thinks that there is a universal standard of happiness, like Happiness for me is, is the same as it is for you. There's the same virtues that bring us all to the supreme good, if you will. Whereas the assumption behind so much of modern and contemporary thought also say education too, is that there is no universal supreme good. I mean, you read Thomas Hobbes, for example, and I know I like to use him as the kind of the paradigm of this, but he says good is what we desire, and happiness is the satisfaction of one desire after another. And of course, our desires vary, so what makes us happy varies from one person to another. So if you take that approach and you apply it to education, it's very difficult for the teacher to actually try and teach you virtues and ultimately the means to getting to happiness. Because if I teach my students what I think is the universal conception of happiness, well, what if that's not what actually makes them happy? So you drop that out of education. Whereas for Plato, the reason he can focus on virtue, the reason he can focus on happiness, is because for every person he teaches, there is one conception of it, and he's trying to lead them towards, whether it's Alcibiades or Meno or anybody else he encounters. And then the other thought I had here is again, a lot of modern thought has, has taken the idea of the intellect, and instead of that being the highest faculty of the human, as Plato says in first Alcibiades, the divine faculty within the soul, it's become a tool to help us satisfy something else, like our desires. I mean, you see this in Hobbes, you see this very strongly in Hume. He really pushes that idea and you find it elsewhere as well. Whereas for Plato, when we're educating the soul, when we're trying to direct reason towards its proper end, we're not making it a means to satisfying some desire. No, we're actually trying to discover something like the form. So, like the form of justice. You talked about, like you went through law school and they never talked about justice. Well, Plato would say the reason we can't talk about justice is there's a form of it, and it's a universal, unchanging standard that can be discovered through that highest faculty of humans.
- [33:53]
B
Well, I can add to that a bit. Yeah. I, I, for me, one of the big takeaways.
- [34:00]
If we could call it Plato's epistemology, is the inseparability of knowledge and love. That there, in other words, is no such thing as the dis, that the, you know, the dispassionate pursuit of truth, because truth is beauty and because Truth is beauty. It insists on, on being loved. And of course this, this comes out wonderfully and beautifully. And the exchanges between Socrates and his interlocutors that, you know, the teachers that you described, Deacon Harrison, teachers that I had that just throw information at you that just want you to learn, in other words, becoming these AI chatbots or these, you know, these, these, these utilitarian, these perfect utilitarians.
- [34:47]
True teachers love their students and they want to be loved in turn. And so it's that I think, loving relationship that was lacking at my old job that really enticed me to pursue what I hope to be a very, very fulfilling new job at, at, at the Classical School. Because the love that I was seeking from my students, the love that I hope to return to them, I have there with those high school kids to.
- [35:17]
C
Follow up a little bit. I wonder where we would trace the hesitancy to make these kind of metaphysical claims. Right. So the, the, the idea that for example, that happiness and truth and goodness and they are one for all men and that therefore there's a sense in which I can, I can because, because I love you and want to share this information, this knowledge with you about what is your true good, your true end, et cetera. We, the, I think the retreat into saying, well, I'm not going to do that, but I will teach you how to write your letters. You know, is, I think it's, to some it's an over reticence to commit to these kind of, of deeper propositions. It's too controversial. I don't want to get into it. We're not going to talk about the good. I'm just going to make sure you know how to do arithmetic and education done right. And I think that's, that's something that's, that's not purely. I say that that's not just.
- [36:22]
At, at the sort of like the, the, the least committed public school that you can imagine. It seems like an across the board inside private education. Public education. It seems like it's been adopted as an almost universal principle.
- [36:37]
A
Yeah, Two, two thoughts that occurred to me on, on all the comments which I thought were all very good. I, I very much appreciate kind of tethering education back to concepts like happiness and love. Right. These, these are not normative when we talk about education, I think in the public square. Right. This is something distinct that we're trying to set forth. But two things that occurred to me. One is that so much of our logic is predicated upon our grammar and this is why so much of the modern culture tries to change our grammar. Because when you change your grammar, you, you naturally change your logic. It's really occurred to me how much I hate the term AI Artificial intelligence. Like, it's just the worst term. I mean, even, even setting aside, like, LLMs and like, whether they're functional as a tool and how we could use them, setting the term, the name, it's an oxymoron.
- [37:22]
B
There is a state.
- [37:23]
A
Yeah, thank you. Because I agree with you. Yes, it is an oxymoron. But the reason we can call it AI is because we have such a flat understanding of the intellect. Right. The intellect really is. Right. So we've, we've educated kids by passing on information. And so now we just believe intellect is simply this receptacle for information that then, you know, kind of just vomits it back out. And that's intelligence. It has nothing to do with, I think, you know, the noose that we would see in Greek thought and then even in, like, the Greek church fathers. Right. This deep understanding of, of an intellect. It's certainly not the intellect that is an appetite for truth that we see in Plato and St. Augustine.
- [38:01]
B
Well, it's disembodied. Right. Thanks, Descartes.
- [38:05]
A
Yeah, it's very dis, it's very disembodied. And so one thing that occurs to me is, is how much I, I, I dislike that name and how it's another way. I mean, you can, it's a mirror. So it shows, because when we make comment about intellect, it's making a comment about our anthropology. And so when we call something artificial intelligence, what we're actually making a claim is about ourselves and how we view ourselves. And that is a very warped, monstrous, very unfortunate view of ourselves. The other thing that occurs to me too.
- [38:33]
Is how much of modern education is terribly unerotic. And we talked about, I mean, Thomas kind of mentioned, like, why is this so ubiquitous in our culture? And it seems like that passing of information has become something that's very cold. It's not predicated on happiness. It's not predicated on love. And so you have this, as we talked about on the podcast, you know, multiple times, you have this eros, this natural love in you. And I think in a certain way, you can read that each part of the soul has its own eros, right? It has its own erotic longing. And so the, the soul has this erotic longing for truth. It wants to satiate in truth. It wants to find it and be happy in it. And in a lot of ways, we just Rob kids of that, right? We have this just, I mean all of us have been like this, right? We've been in a class, even a class that we've been really excited to be in, like, oh, this guy's gonna teach about Plato or St. Thomas or Dante or something great. And somehow they can make it the most like unerotic, uninspiring, terrible subject matter ever. And I think that's one thing we have to think about is that there has to be a connection between our natural eros, that natural love and the education we receive and our teachers then finding ways to inspire that and maybe, maybe to give a tethering to the text. I think First Alcibiades is just a master class in being a teacher. And I am so thankful that we read it on the podcast. It's something that I come, I am coming back to time and time again. I would really recommend those who teach like if you incorporate first Alcibiades, which was the historical, kind of Neoplatonic introduction to Plato. But notice at the beginning, for sale. How does Socrates hook Alcibiades? He doesn't say, oh, do you want to be a philosopher? Do you, do you want to love what's true, good and beautiful? What's he say to him? It's like, hey, do you, do you want to conquer the world? Do you want to have the most glory? Yes. Well, you need to listen to me. Why? Because the teacher sees in the student the erotic longing of their soul, right? Now, Sabites, he hasn't, he hasn't grown to longing for wisdom. So he longs for chaos, right? He longs for that glory. But notice that just master turn of the teacher to see in the student what are they longing for and use that as the lure to come into a true education, to come into kind of a formative experience with wisdom.
- [40:49]
B
Unfortunately, Alcibiades fails to cooperate with this teacher, right? And so, I mean that's the other, that's the other thing that we have to acknowledge is that teaching isn't just this sort of one way street where the teacher throws a bunch of information at the student like a spongebob. The student just simply sops it up and then rings it out on a test or on some writing assignment. Rather, that student needs to lovingly receive it and then return that love. So yeah, Alcibiades doesn't quite, it doesn't work with him, sadly. Although we've seen other instances in which it does seem to work. Like for instance, Euthyphro, he does have a Real impact on euthyphro. At least he gets euthyphro to turn around where he has a kind of metanoia, where he's on his way to the courthouse and then before he knows it he's heading somewhere else, as he said. So yeah, true education isn't just simply the teacher throwing a bunch of stuff, a bunch of facts at students, but yet that's what education seems to have evolved into.
- [42:00]
C
Hold it. Take that backwards just slightly. To the comments about AI. I think there's also a question there about the use of symbolic logic versus what might be older, what you might call just older forms of logic or in the, in this context I'm just going to call Socratic logic because in symbolic logic, which seems to have taken over, obviously it's the logic also used by computers. So there's a, there's a point to, to the connection that um, the truth claims regarding the various propositions are immaterial, right? I mean they just don't, they just don't matter at all. Well, in, in, in Socratic logic it's tethered inherently to the real world so that it, it's not merely a propositional form, right? That the, the, the effect of this is that if, to put it, if intelligence can be reduced to something like symbolic logic and symbolic logic doesn't have to operate as regards the truth or falsity in the real world of its various component parts, then intelligence doesn't have any inherent connection to reality. It only has this sort of symbolic propositional content. And therefore you can make the claim that artificial intelligence is very much like our intelligence because you have first made the move of abstracting it from reality entirely. And I think that, I mean the obvious pushback against that is. Well, just don't do that. I mean there are, there are mathematical reasons to use these forms of logic, but the normal day to day logic that human beings should be using as they think about the world and think about their place in it is logic in its old form, in its Socratic form. And the best place to, you know, sort of see that is, is in Plato. I think on the, to Follow up on Dr. Grabowski Though, I think Meno is the kind of haunting dialogue about what does it mean to be a student as well as a teacher. And, and, and how do you find this, this, this like you have a sort of a graph where you have an able and willing teacher that must find an able and willing student, right? That you've got able and willing on both sides and, and any, if if those don't line up, it's not clear that this sort of spark of transmission is, is going to happen.
- [44:26]
B
Thomas, can I ask you a follow up question? Because I really liked what you said about symbolic logic, modern symbolic logic, just being pushing around P's and Q's and it sort of, you know, reminds me of John Searle's Chinese box and how. Yeah, yeah, we're kind of turning our children or you know, young students into these Chinese boxes that are capable of sort of manipulating simple. So like they have the syntax down but, but as, but they're totally absent of semantics. But that leads me to my question that is, you know, where does rhetoric fall into all of this? Because again, I think what is so compelling about Plato's dialogues isn't just the logic, the argumentation, but the various rhetorical flourishes that Socrates often uses. And so that to me is, is so important. You know, just in my, my experience at the high school, you know, we've been listening and reading through great speeches. Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail. We just listened to John F. Kennedy's first inaugural address, you know, the ask not what your country can do for you. And it blows these students minds because they're like, we've never heard anything like this before for. And so I'm just wondering, Thomas, I mean, where's, like, where does educating, you know, young minds in rhetoric have. We. Do you think that we, we've dropped the ball in that, in that respect that we should really be educating students not just in the P's and the Q's of modus ponens, but also giving them like, access to various figures of speech and introducing them to the importance of ethos and pathos as well as low.
- [46:01]
C
Well, I'm going to say, you know, absolutely to, to the latter. I mean, the, the idea of rhetoric, I think, connects the, to beauty and it, it, it's it. And I, I will say this. There are mathematical concepts as well and sometimes they're difficult to communicate. If you're sort of, you're not in the engineering or mathematical sphere, you will have an idea that once you get it and you're just, you know, staring at this equation or whatever and, and then all of a sudden there is that sort of light bulb moment and you see that it's a beautiful idea. And that I have to admit, is one of incredibly difficult to sort of communicate because it's one of these aha. Type things. But rhetoric, I think, to move that over. Rhetoric also has a tether to Beauty. And it's.
- [46:47]
B
The.
- [46:48]
C
It is the ability to communicate a beautiful idea beautifully. And the. The idea.
- [46:55]
B
It.
- [46:55]
C
It isn't. When something is. Is good and true, it doesn't have to be made dull and uninteresting in order to communicate it accurately. In fact, I think the better argument is to say no, to get the full resonance of the thing. You should see all these transcendental sort of come forth in the, In. In I think Eco's phrase, almost that beauty as the. As the splendor of the transcendentals. And I think that that would. That is the. In. In human communication. Rhetoric is the art by which, you know, when done well, we can go into all sorts of things about, you know, whether the Gorgias, for example, is. But when done well, it is.
- [47:38]
A
It.
- [47:39]
C
It's. It's the truth and the goodness of the idea now represented with the beauty of the.
- [47:46]
D
Of.
- [47:47]
C
Of. Of. Of human interaction, you know, in its. In one of its highest forms.
- [47:53]
A
Can I, Can I jump on that? Because I think that the lesson from the Gorgias is really important here. So maybe they tethered in earlier to what Dr. Krabowski said. There's, I think, a poor reading of Plato's Republic, that Plato is contrary to Homer and even worse, contrary to the entire poetic tradition, which is incredibly nonsensical when you realize that you're reading a dialogue full of narratives.
- [48:15]
C
Right.
- [48:15]
A
There's certainly a Socratic poetry that seems to come up, and we'll see that when we read the Republic, that it seems to be that there has to be a poetry that is subject to philosophy and that they actually benefit from one another. And there becomes a Socratic poetry which is deeply philosophic. The same dynamic, I think, is very present in the, in the Gorgias. A misread is to say he's against rhetoric. And when he says that rhetoric is just pastry baking, that he means all rhetoric. But as we kind of saw on the podcast and even in our small group conversations that we had on this, I think the same dynamic exists that it is with poetry. Is that what Socrates is critiquing is he's critiquing a rhetoric that is divorced from philosophy, which means it's divorced from the true good and the beautiful. He has a really interesting line in there when he says that your rhetoric should know the nature of things and its causes. Well, that's weird because that's not the point of rhetoric. That's the point of philosophy. And so I think that Socrates has a somewhat subtle but really beautiful lesson there. And on the podcast, one of the things that we kind of set forth as a thesis was that when rhetoric is divorced from philosophy, it becomes tyrannical. It becomes just about satiating your appetites. It becomes callicles. I mean, calicles is, is kind of this without the veneer maybe of polis and even, even Gorgias, depending on how you read him. But I think also though, philosophy without rhetoric is impotent. And that was one of the thesis, that was one of theses that was thrown out on the podcast, is that a philosophy that doesn't have good rhetoric is impotent, or maybe to put in a different way, is unerotic. And so even if you have something good to share with your student, if you're so terribly dull that you can't actually express it, right, Your wor, your words, if you're trying to express beauty, should be beautiful. And so I don't think maybe sometimes we have the skepticism against rhetoric that maybe because we're, I mean, maybe to throw a grenade out, we're so used to St. Thomas Aquinas, right? We're just read the summa, like that's, that's what teaching is, right? You just have this like, very Aristotelian kind of systematic treatise. So I think there really is room if we're going to say like a teacher is a lover of the soul. I think there has to be room for cultivating a rhetoric that draws people out of themselves. I mean, again, think of, think of Socrates just hooking Alcibiades right there at the beginning of first Alcibiades. He does that through a rhetorical flourishing. He hooks him, and then it's through that hook that he's not exposing him to it radical rhetoric. He's actually saving him from a path of tyranny and inviting him to love what's true, good and beautiful. But it's a rhetoric purified by philosophy and a philosophy that's perfected by having good rhetoric.
- [50:57]
B
I agree 100%, Deacon. I, in fact, I thought you were about to say that philosophy divorced from rhetoric is also tyrannical, because in a way, it can be. And, and, and the, the, the book that immediately came to mind was something like Brave New World, sort of these technocratic sort of very utilitarian governed societies where it may not look as tyrannical as, you know, some other sort of political arrangement, but, but it's just as oppressive and it just sucks the life out of the desire out of the people who live there, and they become complacent and they lack care. And so, yeah, you really do need both. And so that's why I'm really happy that Thomas brought up logic because it really made me think. Yeah, I mean, logic is great, philosophy is great. And this is kind of my evolution as a philosophy philosopher. I was raised, I was brought up an analytic philosopher. I studied, you know, modal logic, mathematical logic and. And then what? You know, there came a point in which I really sort of fell in love with, with Plato. And it was very curious as to why. And I do, I think it has to do with this wonderful wedding or this blending of both logic and rhetoric. It, it's, it really makes for sort of. It's sort of like the body and the soul. You can't, no one can't exist without the other in completion.
- [52:23]
D
Yeah. A couple of thoughts on your comments here. And by the way, I really liked everything you all were just bringing up here. So a couple things here. So on Plato in particular, in his view of rhetoric, I think it's really interesting that in the Republic, when he describes the education of the philosopher Kings, the first 18 years is in what, it's literary and musical education there, you know, so if you think about Plato and he's prescribing this for the people who are going to rule the best society that's possible, he really thinks that something like literature and I guess music. There's actually a couple reasons he likes music. Some of its connection is to mathematics, but some of it is the connection to beauty. So he certainly thinks we need to appreciate that. So that's the first thought. There's another one that comes to mind is I wonder if, and I'm not asserting this as something that I would say as fact, but I just kind of wonder about this. If you look at a lot of modern philosophers, I'm thinking like Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, maybe you could throw Heidegger in this as well. They've kind of. Not kind of. They've more or less dropped this idea of truth as kind of like a universal standard. So once you drop that, speech is just a means of gaining power over other people. I mean, think about, like Nietzsche, he talks about the different forms of morality. He talks about a master morality and then he talks about a slave morality. And really what these are just attempts to gain power over others by using the veneer of morality. Instead of saying, I have a desire for X and you ought to give it to me because, well, you won't give it to me on that reason I say X is moral and that's my way of manipulating you into doing that. So that was, that was the second thought there. And then the last one I had here is I wonder if a lot of this is tied to the loss of appreciation of beauty in the modern world. I mean, just think about like the buildings we build. I teach at a two year college and classrooms are ugly. The exterior of the building's really hideous there. It's just like a, you know, square city block. And so if you lose this appreciation for beauty, wouldn't that also apply to language too? Like if you don't care about beautiful painting, beautiful, beautiful architecture, why should we care about beautiful speech? Whereas if you come from Plato's perspective where beauty is one of the transcendentals, you would care about it not just in your architecture, not just in your, your poetry, but also in your speech as, as well. Oh, and the last thing I have to throw out here is I read a while ago there was a banana that was duct taped to a wall that got sold for like 6 million bucks. I don't know if any of you have heard of this, but that was just another example of this. Just that I'm the one who bought it.
- [55:17]
B
So I hear you have to change.
- [55:18]
D
It out every couple weeks so it doesn't rot.
- [55:20]
B
Well, I think everyone deserves a man hut like Thomas's. So I agree every with everything you've said about, you know, beauty. It, you know, it sets the soul in order.
- [55:31]
D
You know, the place.
- [55:32]
B
You know, this is something that Thomas and I have talked about extensively about how place, how space is so vital to our person.
- [55:40]
C
Yeah. You can't really make. Is it, is it really a hobbit at all if he's not in the Shire?
- [55:45]
B
Right.
- [55:46]
D
So that's right.
- [55:47]
C
Or at least longing back for the shire. And so on the, on, on the. One of the last points, I think, I think there's a question being also relegated into this subjective category, right. I, I think one of the dangers, not the only danger of subjectivism and relativism and depending on which one, it doesn't really matter at the moment for, for this point that once something is moved into the subjective, beauty becomes taste, right. Truth becomes again just but true for me. And at that point there, as the old phrase goes about taste, there's no disputing, right? So there's literally at that point, not only, not only does beauty lose its sort of explanatory power and its attractive power, it, it's really incommunicable because all the. At the most, once you accept this premise, I cannot say that anything is beautiful. All I can say is that I like it, and there's no way for me to communicate the actual beauty of the thing to you. Then at any point, the very best, if I'm at, you know, the highest of. Even if we grant rhetorical flourishes here, the best thing I could get across is how much I like it.
- [57:05]
A
I think one thing maybe to kind of step back and look at, are there patterns of thought here? And one thing I think that's interesting as I listen to you all, which I very well said, I appreciate everything that you guys have mentioned is how often, like, if. If we're trying to habituate our minds to thinking like Plato, we're going back to the telos of things. We're going back to their purpose, right? So Dr. Larson, right. What he brought up was, is there not a purpose to speech? Is there not a purpose to beauty? Is there not a purpose to place? And I think this is something like, if we're really trying to form the mind of the young, right? So again, we're kind of coming back to this theme of. Of being a teacher. It seems so simple. Focus on teleology, focus on explaining what is the purpose of things. But so much around us has slipped into a meaninglessness, and we're just. We're habituated to it. We're very. It's ubiquitous, and so we don't even see it anymore. And so, like, you know, I see this all the time. If. If we're going to build a building or do these things, like, does it really matter, you know, what the inside looks like? Does it really matter if we use a real material or, like some kind of faux material? Do these things actually matter? I think one of my favorite examples in the Diocese of Tulsa is our Catholic Charities that we built in North Tulsa. If you know anything about North Tulsa, it's a very suppressed socioeconomic area, and we built an absolutely gorgeous campus up there to serve the poor. And our previous bishop, Bishop Slattery, was very big about this, that the poor also deserved beauty. And if they were going to come, they didn't have to come to a big Walmart box. They should come to a beautiful place. And at the most beautiful place they might come to all month is going to be our Catholic Charities. And it has one of the most beautiful little chapels. And even when they were building the chapel, there was a lot of debate, like, hey, if we just use, like, a faux finish, and this isn't real Marble, like we save 30 grand. And part of the rationale there, which has always stuck with me is they said, no, we want everything around here to be real. Like we're real, our love for the poor is real, the things around us are real, all of these things are real. And you kind of just to kind of tether together many of the things that you were saying about the purpose of beauty, the purpose of place. How does this communicate to us? Kind of to push into though a concept in First Alcibiades, let's talk about know thyself. So this is one of those principles that I think at the very beginning of this journey into Plato that we're trying to understand Know thyself. And I think there's two general reasons that Plato sets this forth through the mouth of Socrates. One of them is that he invites Alcibiades to a life of virtue. So it's a subject that we probably need to take up. What's the role of virtue? You know, if we think education is reducible to training, virtue is not part of it. So if we take up a more classical approach or a Platonic approach to know the teacher's a lover of the soul, then what is the role of virtue? And so the student has to know thyself because you can't self cultivate, you can't improve yourself if you don't know who you are. The second thing is, is a concept I've really come to love, which is this kind of beautiful deconstruction. You have to know what you don't know. You have to come to understand that you really actually don't know these things. Remember in First Alcibiade, he's, he's trying to convince this young Alcibiades not to go talk about justice to the assembly. Why? Because you actually don't know anything about it. It's, and it's wonderful in that dialogue that when he finally kind of deconstructs Alcibiades and Alcibiades, it's just like, I have no idea, I have no idea, I have no idea what justice is. As a first time reader, you're like, oh, this is where he's going to explain justice to Alcibiades. And he doesn't, he just moves on. Why? Because the purpose is just to show you, by the way, you don't know what you're talking about and why. I think that, and obviously we, you know, you guys are excellent teachers, so you guys have seen this in your classroom. But there's a lot of ways in which students could become very defensive about this. Right. That my ideas are being deconstructed and we feel like it's an attack or it's. Or even offensive to use a very modern word. But we have to kind of use it as this beautiful deconstruction that you have to make room for what's real by kind of deconstructing what's unreal. You have to unlearn certain things. And so as I look at the principle of know thyself, these are the two things that come to my mind is what is the role of virtue or arete in education? And also what is the role of, of knowing what we don't know?
- [61:18]
B
Well, I can take, I could take up your question, Deacon. Yeah, so, so the. Maybe a couple thoughts. I mean, you mentioned ignorance. And so of course this is the first. Well, hopefully the first step in the direction of, of knowledge or enlightenment, which is a recognition that you're, you're lacking. You know, this is a point that both Plato and Aristotle agree on, that all humans by nature desire to know and that philosophy. But really any intellectual pursuit begins with wonder. And, and, and what, what does, what does wonder teach us? Well, wonder is this recognition that, you know, something strikes, strikes us as peculiar or odd. But, but it's again, this recognition, the self awareness that one is lacking, that one is ignorant and that one doesn't, it doesn't, that doesn't sit well with us, that we're ignorant or lacking. But then this just kind of leads to another point which, you know, to educate, you have to know what you're educating. And so this, I think raises this, this important point about human anthropology and how education, modern education rests upon a false understanding of human anthropology about how humans are put together spiritually, how the soul is put together, how the intellect works in conjunction with the spirit and the appetites, you know, adopting the Platonic.
- [62:36]
D
Model, the, the soul.
- [62:36]
B
And so, you know, if you sort of start with just these are, you know, blank slates that we're just going to jot a bunch of symbols down on. And if that's all intell. If that's all education amounts to, then then you're going to educate students a certain way and it's no wonder that they leave school lacking in any sort of appreciation of the arts and really lacking in sort of action.
- [63:01]
So yeah, yeah, this idea I'm interested to hear with what Brett and Thomas have to say about like the know thyself. But yeah, it's such a fascinating image that Plato evokes in Alcibiades, where, you know, basically what we're to imagine are these two people who are so close, face to face to each other that they can actually see each other in the other person's pupil. And that's pretty darn close. And that almost kind of reminds me of the relationship that Moses had with God in Exodus, that they were so closely in contact with each other that they, their mouths were touching or close to it.
- [63:47]
D
Yeah, let me take this the metaphysical route again here. So it seems to me that one of the obstacles to knowing ourselves properly is a materialism that's really common among many people in the 21st century. I mean, think of what Plato says about the person in first Alcibiades. He says the soul is the person. It's not specifically our body. Even says it's not specifically like the body plus the soul. No, it's specifically the soul. Well, if you put forward the proposition in, you know, modern education or contemporary education that the soul is real and that it matters, and that's where the highest, most divine faculty of the person is. You're running into all sorts of metaphysical problems here. And, and I think that's a huge obstacle to that. And then also just the idea of like any faculty of the human being divine in a sense, that it, you know, participates in the existence of a, you know, a creator who is, who has made us in his image. I mean, that's another set of, you know, metaphysical and theological propositions that become really, really controversial there. I guess another metaphysical proposition. And I, I won't say much on this one because we've already kind of talked about it, but just think about the idea of the universality of truth. You think truth is universal. You can tell a student, hey, you don't know something. Whereas if you deny the universality of truth, then, well, can you really tell your student you're ignorant? I mean, who's to say the student isn't right there? So at least those are three, like metaphysical propositions that I think kind of get in the way of what Plato is trying to say for a, a 21st century audience and why I think it's really important to kind of, I guess, to, to really start reestablishing them in, in many ways if we're going to get to this idea that students can actually benefit in a holistic sense from education, like an education of the soul.
- [65:39]
C
Yeah, I, I, I, I really like that. I, there's in his dialogue, the sophist, he makes the distinction between two groups of people. The Friends of the forms, who have this immaterial view that acknowledge the existence of. Of the forms, souls, things like that. And those who try to reduce everything to material or mechanistic causes, who we call earthbound giants. And he has this. This ab. I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I had to look at this. Look up this passage while you're talking because it's perfect. So this is the Athenian stranger talking. This is. Socrates is there, but it's someone else. And he's having dialogue with Theotetus and he brings up this group, the materialist. So he. I guess it's a. It's a debate he had in his day. It's not like these are new concerns about materialism and stuff like that to that Plato's already dealing with or with this. And he. This, this. This part is so great. He says one group drags everything down to earth from the heavenly region of the invisible, actually clutching rocks and trees with their hands. When they take hold of these things, they insist that only what offers tangible contact is. Since they define being as the same thing, as body. And if any of the others say that something without a body is. They absolutely despise him and will not listen to him anymore.
- [67:03]
D
I have to admit I've had that experience when I've tried to explain Plato to some of my students. And one student this semester said Plato was on drugs.
- [67:14]
Actually, really sad.
- [67:15]
C
But I think what. I think what you are. What this does bump into is that to come to approach Plato in this way is to approach again this kind of. This network of metaphysical concepts that are all intertwining about that. That, for example, material causes are not sufficient to explain all that there is like. Or to use later Aristotle language. Material and efficient causes are not a sufficient explanation for everything. You need formal and final causes. So we have telos like. Like Deacon was talking about. I think also you. You've got questions there about nominalism. Like, again, we have to have something to have these. These ideas of. About good and true and beautiful and. And about what know thyself. But also the idea of a single sort of teleological happiness for man and all these things implies that we are not in fact sort of individualized to that extent. There are things we can say that are common about our nature that is shared. And there is any sorts of thing as a shared nature. And you can kind of like keep pushing this all the size. You've got things about nominalism and about materialism and mechanicism and. And other things that I think are at Least this to. Well, it's like rewinding all the way to the beginning. What sometimes Plato advances ideas that he does not completely flesh out, but he's actually extremely consistent in the things that he critiques. And he is constantly rejecting this sort of reductionist materialism, nominalism and other things, although they don't necessarily even have those names yet. And he's absolutely consistent in his rejection of him. Lloyd Gerson writes about this as. As well, I think more, you know, more in greater detail.
- [69:00]
A
Yeah, I really, I really appreciate that. One thing, I guess one thing to look at is there's really nothing new under the sun. And that's something that, when I've read Plato, I've talked about this previously, the materialism is there, the nihilism is there, even if it's untenable, because I think nihilism as an ideology is ultimately untenable. You can't really live like that. But I think Callicles tries really hard to be.
- [69:24]
C
Yeah, and I think that's ultimately the refutation of Callicles that kind of peters out there at the end is when Socrates does demonstrate him. You do not live by.
- [69:36]
What you're claiming to preach, which is a pretty strong indictment of a philosophy of action. Right.
- [69:43]
A
So what's funny there, because Socrates the teacher actually uses vulgarity to push Callicles into shame. A shame that he says he does not have to show that actually if we push far enough, you actually do think there are things that are shameful. And so there, even though it's not a beautiful example, you do see the purpose of that rhetoric with Callicles to kind of draw him out into.
- [70:08]
C
Chesterton does this greatly at the beginning of the man who has Thursday as well, in the dialogue going back and forth between Gabriel Syme and Lucy and Gregory, where Lucien's one of these, you know, atheistic.
- [70:22]
Anarchists with no limits and he essentially. And crave your sign embarrasses him with the example he chooses to use. Right. And so it.
- [70:33]
Worth reading if you.
- [70:34]
A
Haven'T, I want to know a couple.
- [70:36]
B
Of minutes, just maybe drilling a bit deeper into this, this dictum, know thyself. Because I think that what Plato or what Socrates meant by it isn't necessarily what people today might mean by know thyself or how one goes about knowing oneself. So I was wondering if any of you would like to maybe distinguish sort of the contemporary understanding of knowing oneself, which seems to involve just a kind of self reflection, you know, thinking to oneself. I, you know, I, I know my own personal identity and nobody Right, but, but, but it seems like in Alcibiades, know thyself isn't just the indiv, just an endeavor by an individual. But, but there needs to be a kind of partnership.
- [71:26]
A
No, Yeah, I, no, let me maybe sally forth into this and then, and then we kind of can parse it out. No, I agree. I think that one of the things, I think that is most radical in first Alcibiades is that the pursuit of wisdom, the pursuit of the good life is communal. He does not, when he says know thyself, it's not navel gazing, it's not Descartes. I'm going to go, you know, sit on an oven in the middle of the woods or whatever he did. Right. Like you have to have another. And so maybe let me kind of just map this out as I understand it. So how he plays this out is like, you have to know thyself. Okay, cool. Great. Fantastic. How do I do that? Well, if I wanted to see what my body looked like, if I wanted to know my body, I look in a mirror. That's what I do. So what do I need? I need a mirror of the soul. That's what I need. That's, that's what we have to have. We have to have a mirror of the soul. And this, I think, is what just captures my imagination, is that the mirror of the soul is the eyes of one who loves you. And particularly in this context, I think it is that, that teacher, right, because it's not simply just like a familial love, it's someone who actually wants you to become better. In this context, it's Socrates looking at Alcibiades. So when Alcibiades needs to know himself, he looks into the eyes of, of Socrates, who loves him not for the sake of using him, but for the sake that he wants Alcibiades to become a better Alcibiades. He wants Alcibiades to experience what's true, good and beautiful. And so it's the eyes of the teacher that become a mirror of the student's soul. And I, I, I probably could not make a statement that shows the dichotomy between the teacher as like the flat passer of information, the trainer, compared to the teacher whose eyes are the mirror to the student's soul. These two things are completely different from one another and completely predicated on two very different realities, not simply of education, but of anthropology, of what we think the purpose of life is. Everything the teacher is ultimately predicated upon what we think the good life is because the teacher is then trying to convey that. And certainly in Plato, you don't get that the teacher's trying to make you a good economic cog in the machine. Right. So, no, I. I think that this is a radical claim that it has to be communal because we forget this. So even when we talk about being a philosopher or these kind of things, like, it's. It's. We're so easy as moderns to slip back into an. Atomize, like, you know, autonomy, because that's what everything around us is. But I think there's a radical claim of community here. I think you can play that, and I think you can play that out in many different types of relationships. So, for instance, I think when we talked about First House of Bodies on the podcast, I talked about, like, I see this when I talk to my sons, when I talk to my, you know, I. I have four young sons. If I pull one of them aside, maybe he's done something wrong or maybe he's done something. Well, I pull him aside and I look him straight in the eye and I tell him, like, you're a smart boy. You're a good boy. Like, I see him and his eyes, drinking that in, he's coming to understand who he is through how I see him. And I think this is an incredibly powerful tool that if we can translate this to the classroom, where the classroom is not a insipid, like, you know, unerotic place, but a place that actually inspires the soul, then how. How can we as teachers be lovers of the soul and have eyes that serve as a mirror to our students?
- [74:59]
B
Yeah, I mean, just to add one thing to what you said, Deacon. Yeah, I love, I love your. The emphasis you gave to the communal nature of education, that this isn't just something that, you know, you can do as a philosopher, as you said, sitting. Sitting on a stove or in an armchair. Buddies. But the other thing, too, that I think is worth noting is that, you know, in Alcibiades 1, there's also a radical shift in the kind of love, because, you know, as you know, your listeners may well know, the. The relationship that Alcibiades would have had with an older man would have been of an erotic nature. And at one point, Socrates actually uses the word agapetas to refer to the kind of relationship that he wants to have with Alcibiades. And so we get this sort of early pre Christian understanding of love not as an erotic union, but as this deeply, almost divine union between the teacher and the student. And so, again, I think it's just, just remarkable that, that Plato is in a way accessing these, these Christian ideas some 350 years prior to the Incarnation.
- [76:19]
A
Well, I think too, maybe to kind of play that out because you, you present the teacher then as this lover of the soul who provides a mirror to the student's soul. And the teacher then wants the student's soul to become beautiful. So we invite the student to. Into a relationship with beauty. And insofar as they pursue beauty, they become beautiful. And you see this picked up by the Greek church fathers say, like Dionysius in Saint Maximus the Confessor, Saint John Climachus, that God is beauty itself. And the more we pursue God, we become godlike. The soul becomes beautiful. And so I think this kind of goes back to the conversation of where's beauty as a transcendental in the classroom? And I think it's that if the teacher is a lover of the soul, we're inviting them into beauty. And ultimately, you know, even though it's. It's probably a Neoplatonic gloss on first Alcibiades, right? But usually it's. It's either bracketed or in footnotes. But there's a second step there that the, the teacher's eyes are not the ultimate mirror, that ultimately education terminates in the divine. And so the teacher is looking at them and providing a certain intermediate mirror to the soul, their eyes. But ultimately what they're inviting the student to is that the greatest mirror of the soul is God. And it's hard to explain how much that dovetails into Christian thought, that I come to know myself by coming to know and love God, even if it's in that eros, that natural love, right? That erotic longing of the soul to satiate and what's good, true and beautiful. Then I come to see God then as that mirror, and I come to see myself and become more myself. And that's really interesting because it's, it's Plato and Christianity that make this claim that the more I draw towards God, the more myself I become. That's not a typical claim in religions. Usually you become less yourself, right? Or you even might lose your identity completely if you would, say, be absorbed into the divine. But here we come to be more of ourselves. And I think that's really the art of teaching, is how can I convince my students to see themselves in my eyes. But I'm also seeing them hopefully as God sees them. And then I'm also inviting them to have their own relationship, their own ascent up the ladder of love to God. Beauty itself so hopefully they can see that and have that relationship themselves. And we get all this in a pagan text and it's really, really remarkable.
- [78:53]
B
And this is what I'm hoping to achieve at the Classical School, Deacon, is not just to expose these students to these great works written by these pagans, but to show the students how they can be read through a Catholic Christian lens. And it's only by reading these great texts through that lens I think that you really begin to see what makes them so wonderful and so great.
- [79:17]
C
Of course, Augustine picks up, I mean not. It's not terribly surprising a bit, but he had the famous prayer.
- [79:24]
Let me know thee, let me know me. And if you. So that's obviously the short version, but as you tease apart what he's talking about is what Deacon's saying here, that it's precisely in coming to know God better that you also come to know who you really are. And there's a.
- [79:43]
Hiccup as well within the context of the Apocalypse where you see that this, this, the. The saints given a little a stone on their, their name which no one else knows but the Fathers as they comment on this. The idea here is this is that on almost a kind of seal that you have become the saint that God always intended you to be like you've become yourself. Right? So that, and this is the, the final, the final marker of that, that victory. And, and again, like Deacon was saying, that this is a somewhat unique notion that, that it's it that the saints become. As they become more like Christ and are. Become more like God, they're also become radically more themselves and differentiated from others. Right? So there's this kind of strange sense in which their, their resemblance gets. Is nonetheless makes an even starker contrast, letting the paradoxical goal going on there. But I think you can even pick this up in a few different ways. Like Chesterton reference him again, you can't really imagine two people in styles much different than St. Thomas and St. Francis. And yet both are, are about as Christlike as possible.
- [81:01]
B
No, Thomas, I mean, I can agree with everything that you said. I mean as, as, as my life becomes more fractured and disoriented, you know, as my, as my soul becomes more disoriented, I become less happy. I mean, so, and so this is the beauty of the sacraments or beautiful churches or beautiful music. It just suits the soul so perfectly. So this is why, you know, ugly buildings, ugly homes tend to make us miserable and dislocated.
- [81:35]
But you know, you surround yourself with beautiful books, beautiful art, beautiful smells, smells from the kitchen.
- [81:44]
Flowers. Again, simple things like that. It really helps to reorient the soul and internally, but also to reorient it towards God.
- [81:53]
C
Well, there's a. If one ever wanted to sort of descend into the dark side of this, you can. There's studies you could do on the architecture and tyrannical regimes and things like that, where the architecture was meant for precisely to reinforce this kind of domination and power and all the rest of it. And the sort of ironic idea that we have sometimes done that to ourselves without the dark, without the sort of the intentional overtones. It's like, oh, we'll just build one of those very depressing, oppressive things and work in it for, you know, 12.
- [82:22]
A
Hours a day with no windows. Yeah, I think, you know, one other concept that I think is really fascinating and I'm not sure I have, like a totally refined thought here, but obviously there's this, like, very anonymous statement at the end of First Alcibiades, in which Alcibiades does have this, like, transformative aspect. And this is why First Alcibiades is kind of a beautiful dialogue because, you know, we kind of see it in Euthyphro. I agree. At least that's the positive read of Euthyphro that I like to see, that he. He kind of has a certain metanoia and turns away. But in like, First Alcibiades, Alcibiades is like, oh, Socrates, you're amazing. And I'm going to follow you and I'm going to find out what justice is like. Is this, like, incredibly explicit transformation? We typically don't get them. Yeah, we typically don't get them that explicit in the dialogue. But what's really fascinating to me at the end is that when he's had. He's kind of had this metanoia, to borrow that phrase, this transformation. Notice that Socrates then warns him that the city is going to be antithetical to this type of life. The city is going to be out to get me and to get you. If we go down this path, it's, you know, there's a lot of ink that gets spilt on this. And obviously both Alcibiades and obviously Socrates, historically, both are basically done in by the city. Alcibiades is a little bit more roundabout, but. And he's kind of fantastic. Crazy life that he lived. But I was wondering about the parallel there between when I read that, particularly in kind of coming back to this podcast about the city. Right. And what he's saying. There is. There's this thing the crowd, the mob. There is this thing that will snuff this out in you if you let it. And I'm warning you about that. What really jumped to my mind was how St. John in his Gospel uses the term the world over and over again, using the world as something that will come in and snuff out this divine life in you and offer you something different than the Christlike path. And that was a parallel that really stood out to me as we kind of looked at the teacher is like this warning of the city, of the world, of the popular path, the broad path, the mob, that if you listen to them, they will make your soul ugly. It's a really fascinating warning.
- [84:42]
D
Yeah. So what you're referring to with Socrates, Plato's warning here against listening to the multitude and how kind of the city is an obstacle. That's definitely a theme that Plato returns to in many of his dialogues. So we certainly have this in the Gorgias, where he talks about we should listen to the many. And then he talks a lot about that in the Republic. And then you even see the more political implications in the Republic, where he actually goes and talks about what he conceives of a democracy to look like. And one of the. As kind of an aside here, one of the things that is particularly relevant to education in a democracy, says Plato, is there's kind of an inverted hierarchy. Like the teacher now fears the student, you know, rather than the student respecting the teacher. But all I have to say is, is, yeah, that's definitely very strong within Platonic thought. And it seems to be because of his. His kind of. His anthropology in a lot of senses. I mean, he talks about the different character types, you know, what is the one that's common in a democracy? Well, it's the democratic character. Well, what's the democratic character marked by? It's service to the. The appetites, particularly the unnecessary appetites. And so I think got the echo.
- [85:56]
A
Again, one thing that's just as a side note, one thing that's helpful is if you're not talking is actually just to mute yourself. I know mine doesn't pop up, but I actually have a button on my mic that I push. So it's just kind of helpful if you. If you mute yourself when you're not talking, then sometimes it helps. So, anyway, I apologize. Go ahead.
- [86:13]
D
Yeah, no worries. Yeah, so it's. It's a theme that I think comes up a lot in Platonic thought there. And it's because he assumes a lot of people are gonna ultimately follow the. The Easy path of trying to pursue appetite. And so when he's trying to get Alcibiades to, to move away from that, you think about, that's kind of what education is, right? It's pulling us away from the world of, I guess, physical objects, images, illusions, and it's directing us towards that world of the really real things, the things we can have knowledge of, you know, like the forms, for example, the form of beauty, the form of justice and so on there. That's a hard path for Plato and probably most people don't travel it, which is why you can't really trust the many. And I don't know, one, one thought that came to mind, it was, I was kind of looking over first Alcibiades today was if Plato were living in the 21st century, you know, maybe his stand in for the multitude would be social media and people listening to that as a, you know, as opposed to actually interacting with the real mob in the way that Socrates did, you know, before he was found guilty of the, the various, the various transgressions that the mob, the mob accused him of.
- [87:31]
Or Socrates got canceled. Yeah, there you go.
- [87:36]
A
I'm a little late to ask a.
- [87:37]
B
Question though, if I may, and that is, you know, listening to the conversation. I'm wondering though, if there's a danger, if we're drawing this distinction between, you know, the philosophers and the many.
- [87:53]
If, if, if, you know, we're not descending into a kind of, or ascending into a kind of elitism. Right. I mean, at some point the philosopher needs to go out. No philosopher needs to convert. The philosopher needs to be part of the solution and not just isolate himself like a hermit. And so what I'm wondering is if, if there's a way of.
- [88:19]
Of, of sort of resolving this, this, this paradoxical situation where, you know, we can't allow ourselves to be influenced or subject.
- [88:31]
By the world, but then at the same time we still have to enter the world and be part of it.
- [88:36]
D
Yeah, I think, I think that's a very well taken point there. And I think in Plato it's kind of difficult for him to resolve it in a way that Christianity can. So what I mean is, is for Plato, it seems like there is a very hierarchical view of humans. Only a very few, few are going to make it to be those philosopher kings. And you see this probably even more so in Aristotle with his view that many, probably most, even lack the, the rational part of the soul, whereas Plato probably doesn't go quite that far. But you think about Christianity, it, it has the idea of the imago dei, you know, we are all created in the divine image and, and two, you know, two faculties of the, of the person that are divine are one, the rational faculty. And then. And the two, we also have the will. And so I think Christianity, because of that idea of the, the imago dei, helps guard against a type of elitism that maybe it's. It's more difficult for many of the classical thinkers to avoid. You know, whether it is Plato or Aristotle or even Cicero. Cicero certainly has this as well. Tune it. So when we go out as, as say, educators, we can look at our students and say, you have the divine image in you. God made you in his image. So when we talk about like the, the teacher, you know, being the mirror of the soul of the student, we can be that, you know, because of that, that divine image, we can say your rational faculty is there and we are helping to, to properly form that.
- [90:11]
A
Yeah, that's a good, that's a good point. I think too, to Dr. Grabowski's question. What occurs to me is that hierarchy is natural to man. And so I. We shouldn't expect grace to destroy that. In fact, grace should actually perfect that if it's actually a natural attribute of man. And actually, I think you see the problem of the one and the many very clearly in the Gorgias because. And maybe the Gorgias in comparison to the apology, because in the Gorgias, what do you get? You get very talented young men who think their relationship to the many is to become a tyrant. That's the relationship of the one to the many. It's the tyrant to the mob. That's what Callicles is trying to do in polis and Gorgias. To a certain extent, however, in the Apology, we definitely see the relationship between the philosopher and the many. And this is a different relationship. So in both capacities, you see men who have the capacity to be great souled, to be philosophers, right, to have a great amount of arete. And then they seem to be set on two paths. Are you going to become the philosopher in relationship to the many or the tyrant into relationship with the many? It's not entirely clear to me, and maybe it's my own, you know, like malformation, you know, to what degree does, does the philosopher say, we'll take this up in the republic, right? What, what degree is the republic or the philosopher in his role as, say, like a philosopher king, beneficial to all the stratas of society, Right. Is there, does he have a tyrannical streak to him or like Is it beneficial? Is he really the benevolent king? How does that work? But I think that no matter. I'm painting with a broad brush there. I think we see this perfected in Catholicism because what Catholicism allows us to do is we don't actually destroy the natural hierarchy of man. What we've done is that the Church invites everyone and everyone to participate according to their own capacities. You see, the early Church fathers talk about this all the time. It's even baked into some of our devotions, where you can have some giant intellects like St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine, where you can see some incredibly spirited men, right, like our crusaders or Charlemagne, that can participate in the faith and participate in it fully and not exhaust it. But at the same time, it also invites the very simple souled, the very simple life, to come in and participate in the faith. And so this is that kind of statement that I've shared before. I think it's from St. Gregory, in which he's talking about Scripture, but I think it applies to the faith overall, in which the Lamb can go out and wade, but then the elephant can go out and swim in the same pool. And so I think this is one way that Catholicism and our Lord of the Church starts to try and address the question of the one and the many, is that it allows all the parts to work together, even though it doesn't. And I think this is a misread. A misread is that I actually would say a lot of versions of Christianity today think that faith, or, excuse me, grace, destroys the natural hierarchy of man and brings in kind of a false equality. Right? They kind of import that fictitious equality from liberalism into Christianity. Right? And they kind of. They kind of smuggle it in through this kind of conflation between liberalism and Christianity, which is incredibly common today to conflate those two. So, no, I think it's a great question, certainly not one that I've. I've exhausted. But I think that Catholicism, the Church, allows for both. And you see this online today. There's a lot of antagonisms of, you know, whether whatever you want to call it, a far right or a Nietzschean right or whatever name it goes by online, where I think you see the same dynamic happening in which you have young, talented men, men that maybe have a lot of capacity and, like, what is their relationship to the many? And a lot of times it becomes one of tyranny. I just simply use the many to satiate my own appetites. I owe them nothing, right? I'm better than them. I owe them absolutely nothing. I think Catholicism come in and create a beneficial relationship between the two without destroying that natural hierarchy.
- [94:22]
D
Yeah, or maybe St. Thomas is particularly helpful on this. If you look at his kind of description of the different regime types, you know, whether it's monarchy or aristocracy or democracy, there the distinction between the different types is really one, how many people rule? Is it one, is it several, is it many? And then two, what do they rule for? So in, in Thomas's case, he argues that, okay, monarchy is ruled by one for the common good. And monarchy is appropriate, says St. Thomas, when you have one person who is supremely gifted in rule, this person has the virtues that make him a good ruler. And in that case, it's a matter of essentially justice that that person ruled. But that person is supposed to use his talents for the common good rather than to promote private interest. And so we see tyranny as kind of a perversion of that. That's where that supremely gifted person is now ruling for, for self interest there. So kind of like what you were saying there, Deacon, is that Christianity, particularly Catholicism, allows on the one hand, for a natural hierarchy, but it puts it in the service of the common good. Those who have been given much, they must also give much. You know, perhaps those who've been given less, you know, the reason others maybe have been given more is so that they can, they can benefit from that, that extra, I guess you can say extra. Natural gifting.
- [95:51]
A
Yeah. In Catholicism, right. The, the higher always perfects, the lower that relationship always holds. And maybe, maybe then, maybe. Can we put this then inside a classroom?
- [96:01]
C
Right.
- [96:01]
A
Because our focus is on the teacher. And so I think my, again, these are kind of raw thoughts, but what seems to be the import for that is that the teacher has to understand that unlike maybe the pagan philosophers that would be weeding kids out saying, nevermind. You, you think of Aristotle like, wait, you're, you're like, you know, you're, you're too old or you didn't grow up in the right house or, you know, you had. He also, he has all these stipulations like, nevermind. Like one in a thousand might come to me and I'll teach them to be a philosopher and you get to live the good life. Everyone else, I don't know, you're just out of luck, right? You get to live whatever life you can. But the philosopher's life, the good life, is reserved to an elite few. I think at Catholicism, what we do is as a teacher, everyone in the classroom is invited to live that good life. But then at the same time, we have to realize that that doesn't mean that we equal them all out, that they're all invited then to participate according to their capacities. And I think that one of our temptations today is to impose upon the student either or impose upon the class either the lowest common denominator or some kind of, like, equaling effect. Because I would say in a lot of ways, hierarchy still makes us very uncomfortable. And so I think one thing that I would be kind of challenged, even my own, in my own teaching, is that then if you have, like, a highly spirited student, you have someone of high capacity, the. The option there is not to try and, like, push them down back into kind of the common strata. But how can I then invite that soul that has maybe a great capacity for greatness? How can I invite them through my eyes, which is the mirror of the soul, to see God as a mirror, and then invite them to something that would be truly great in their life? And I think that's really what's so hard about being a teacher, maybe particularly in a modern context, is, you know, I might have, you know, 12 kids in my class or 25 kids in my class. How do I meet each one of them, where they are and invite them? And that. I think that's a real struggle in modern education. Not. Probably not one that's. That's easily solved.
- [98:03]
B
I think it's. I think it's a lot easier in a classical education, though.
- [98:07]
D
Deacon.
- [98:07]
B
And actually, I would really like to hear from Thomas and the decision that he and his family made to send his children to a classical school. And, and, you know, what. What. What their considerations were, because, you know, I've certainly grown as a teacher myself. And, you know, this expression, meeting where. Meeting students where they are, that may sound like a cliche, but you can't meet students where they are when you go. When you. When you don't allow them to respond, when you just basically talk at them for an hour. And so I've discovered in just my short time at Holy Family, that, you know, many of my students who, who may perhaps struggle with reading comprehension or with writing are blessed with other gifts, amazing gifts of humor and. And other ways of communicating. And so you really, I mean, you have to just get them to show you what these gifts are. And, And. And that's really only done, I think, in a Socratic way, where you allow them to confront you face to face, where you look at each other as Socrates and Alcibiades do. And so I Just wanted to ask Thomas because, you know, this is really. I would love to have the opportunity, you know, to educate his children in that way because I know that he and his wife themselves at home do the same with theirs.
- [99:29]
C
Yeah, I mean, that's interesting timing too, because of course we just, we just started. I don't know when this will air exactly, but we came in mid year and we had been homeschooling. And I'll set the context for people that don't know. Of course, our oldest one going in went into third grade and our youngest one going in went into kindergarten. So we put in three kids, third grade, first grade, and kindergarten. So quite, quite young still. I think part of what we thought about going in was that while the parent is the primary educator of the child and always will be, that's an inalienable role. The role of a teacher is somewhat different than the role of a parent. Right. So the, the, the. And I think there are times when a child can have that sort of. I think I'll. I'll choose our oldest daughter for an example right off the bat.
- [100:25]
She has taken a great interest in poetry, but only since being at school with poetry class. My youngest son. I mean, my youngest son at school. Right. So.
- [100:40]
Has suddenly taken a great interest in music class. These are things that. And my wife is a choir director. So I mean, this is not, it's not like we don't have music around the house. You know, this is the, the. These are, these are things that. They blossomed into much more fully under the tutelage of an inspired teacher that loves that subject. Even though these are things that we care about too. There's something about seeing that and interacting with that in an environment where, where that can be nurtured in a more direct way. Then, then sort of there is something mundane about being at home. And there is something about having your dad explain something to you that is different than having an engaged and excited teacher on that subject. Engage. You know, explain the same thing to you. Now, obviously, I don't, I don't want to in any sense.
- [101:38]
Push against the role. One, homeschooling can be excellent. So one. Let me throw that out there right now. It can be, it can be excellently done, especially if that's what you really feel called to do. I think secondly, there are, there's simply an irreplaceable role for the parent as teacher. But I think anyone that's had kids, you know, get up beyond just a certain age will sometimes see that spark. Okay, I, I Can't go anywhere without making an 80s movie reference. So you've got to have this sort of like, Daniel, Mr. Miyagi kind of thing going on at some point. And that's not always a familial relationship. In fact, it frequently isn't. And I think that, that, that has the opportunity to blossom in a, In a. In school, especially a school that approaches things in this classical way. I think additionally, of course, you have just have the iron sharpens, iron aspect of being around other kids engaged in the same task. And that has two aspects. One, it's the children reinforcing them, each other in this pursuit. There's also certain things that you simply can't do easily without that, like sing in a choir right there. There are aspects that are. That. That are maybe less in that sense. So just about everyone being in. Heightening each other in a. In a. In this sort of quasi adversarial way, like a dialogue. And instead you move it into the. The heightening of working together to the same goal in the case of things like wire. And again, I think these are things that are that, that. That we have sort of wrestled with a little bit because there's certain. There's certain lovely aspects and there's things that you miss if for anyone that's homeschooled, they know. I mean, there's so many opportunities that you have to see your children and there's a piece of that that you. That is lost in going to. To school outside the house. And so we. We had to go back and forth. But I think ultimately this has been very good for us. It's been very good for our kids. And I just hope that. I hope that that continues to blossom the way it already has. Just the few months that we've been. We've been there and they all. I think it's. It's been very good for them and also to have a little bit of time to grow without their parents or siblings quite so hovering, you know, to spread their wings just a little bit. There's enough time with them together, but also enough time for them to, you know, just to work apart a little bit. So that's, that's my quick thoughts.
- [104:03]
A
So let's talk about the MINO and our. Our final, final stretch here. So, no, I. It was already mentioned, but I, I just want to reiterate it that I think it's. It's haunted a lot of this conversation. I think maybe Dr. Grabowski mentioned it explicitly. Is that seeing the MENO as a. As a dialogue in it on education. And I think it really is interesting to read that alongside first Alcibiades, because Meno, the character is so recalcitrant to Socrates teaching, as opposed to Alcibiades, who has this, like, transformative effect. But I do think that one of the big questions there is really the relationship between the student to the teacher. So we've had a lot of conversations about the movement of the teacher to the student. But then what is the movement that has to occur from the. From the student back to the teacher? It's interesting because I would. I would probably argue, at least now in a preliminary stance, that the Meno doesn't actually answer that question that the Meno really kind of digs into, is virtue actually teachable? And he critiques a lot of things. We don't really get, like, a clear answer, but obviously, like, historically, right? So I guess maybe to put a clarification, by contrast, you know, is the teacher. Is the teacher guilty for a bad student? And the only way this seems that that would be correct is if teaching was really just explaining the things correctly. So if you explain things and transfer that knowledge correctly, then the student will always take it and live that life. And obviously, like. And there's a way to read the Meno that. That seems to be what he's saying, but I think he's really actually setting up a critique that then allows the reader to kind of finish the argument, if you will. Because clearly the problem is, right, that Socrates has Alcibiades. He has a student that then did not follow him correctly. And even, I mean, not to be impious, right? But even our Lord has Judas. And this gets very difficult if the fault is always on the teacher. So it seems that there has to be some kind of, like, malleability, some type of, like, reciprocity in which when the student looks into the eyes then of the teacher, that there has to be some movement on their part, right? They have to actually, you know, bridle those erotic longings of the heart correctly and be receptive to those teachings. You can't force as a parent. You can't force as a teacher, either a student or a child, to be virtuous or to take up the life of the true good and beautiful. So I just want to kind of sketch that because I think the Meno raises that in a really powerful way and doesn't really even give us the answers. And maybe I'm too much on Team Plato, and so I'm trying to finish his argument for him there. But I think if you look at the dialogue as a whole and also just Socrates's historical relationship with Alcibiades, which is then captured in first Alcibiades and then book ended in the Symposium. It's hard then to see this, as always the fault of the teacher. There has to be a movement on the side of the student.
- [106:59]
D
Yeah, I mean, just a little bit on the, on the context of the meno. It seems like when Plato, or in this case Socrates is talking about how virtue maybe can't be taught, it seems like there's a critique going on of the sophists in his day, and I forget which dialogue it is, but he mentions that the sophist would educate someone for money and then at the end of providing that education, and I use that term kind of loosely here. The, the person who is supposed to have benefited won't pay the sophist. And then the sophist would complain that my student has wronged me. And Plato says, well, if you're a good teacher, wouldn't you have successfully taught your student virtue? So your student would pay you what you are owed here? So I think a lot of what he's doing there is kind of taking a shot there at the, at the sofas. And if you look at some of his other dialogues that deal with education, I mean, the, the Republic is, is one that we can certainly look at it. He does seem to think that, yes, virtue can be taught in a sense. Just think about like the, the education of the philosopher kings. You know, it's this lengthy. It's about 50 years. Right? It's about a 50 year process. And it starts with the literary, musical education. There's various physical education, mathematical education, eventually dialectics and so on there. So, yeah, so I think, I think Deacon, you're, you're absolutely spot on. You can read it as kind of like a claim, okay, virtue can't be taught taught and everything is, you know, on the teacher. But I think a more proper, more holistic reading of Plato suggests that's not really what he's trying to say. Perhaps the meno is best understood as a partial statement of his more complete theory. So read it in the context of multiple dialogues. I think you get the full statement.
- [108:56]
C
I mentioned earlier, this kind of matrix of able and willing between teacher and being able and willing and, and student being able and willing in the context of the maino. I'm not, I don't. That is one. A lesson I take from the main. O. I don't know that that's actually in the main O because I don't think Plato fully fleshes out the idea of the will either there or potentially anywhere else. And I think that that leaves in the maino this unresolved tension that.
- [109:28]
What if someone has a bad will? So there'd be the idea of, of being of unwilling in a neutral sense. Like my will needs to simply be sparked into action so that in that sense you could elicit the will by simply a sort of an enticement to the. So I think this would be coming at something like the, the opening of first Alcibiades, right, that hook and it. And through the good, mind you, a lower good, but still a good that Alcibiades desires. Socrates draws him into higher desires. I, the, I think the, the open question and I, I think this is to me a haunting question. I was very much haunted by. The maino this time when we read it is what if the student simply desires the bat the wrong things.
- [110:20]
A
I think, I think one way to phrase that is that education, the teacher is really an education in erotics. It's, it's actually an education in what is beautiful and how, how should the soul satiate in beauty and be happy properly. And so I think you're correct. I, I talked about this previously on the podcast and it's an, it's an unrefined thought for me. But there Plato doesn't really speak about the will and we're, we're kind of downstream from Augustine and a few other thinkers that, that really bring the will in. I think for a lot of times in Plato it's, it's erotics, right? So your, your appetite, you know, just like to sketch this out, right? Your intellect has this kind of erotic longing for truth. Your spirited part, the thumotic has this erotic longing for nobility. Your appetitive part, which is not bad, right? Your appetitive part has an erotic longing for pleasure. But we see very clearly in the Platonic dialogues that sometimes these characters are real kind of clear stand ins for different people. And Socrates is often in dialogue with young men who have deep seated, great thumotic appetites. They want that nobility, they want that glory, the victory, that human excellence and everything that comes from that. And so I do think that in a lot of ways teaching is a certain tutelage of the soul and proper erotics. How can the intellect properly satiate in truth, how can the spirited properly satiate in nobility, in glory, in honor? Again, that's a natural thing that can't be suppressed. And so I think there's a Lot of questions in a Christian context. What does that look like? Is that contrary to our understanding of humility? How do I cultivate that. That type of greatness, that spiritedness in young people? How do I bridle it but not break it? I think is a. Is a really important distinction. And then even like the. The appetites, how do you. The appetitive power, how do you properly train that erotic appetite for pleasure? And I think Catholicism does this really well, right? We're in, like, we have our. Our fasts, but we also have our feasts. There's a way then that we come together and understand proper pleasures, right? We praise marriage. We praised the dinner table. We praise the family stories. We praise many, many good things that we can find pleasure in. But we also have our fasts to help kind of bridle that appetite and not allow it to get under control or to not get out of control. And so, no, I think there's a lot of ways to look at education as simply a tutelage of the erotics of the soul. And trying to get students to love what is beautiful and to love it properly.
- [112:54]
B
Well, this is really the distinction, or at least the different experiences that I've had teaching in higher ed and teaching in high school.
- [113:03]
I walk into a college classroom, and they are entirely unerotic. They.
- [113:12]
Often lack any sort of desire. It's the very first thing that we read in Intro to Philosophy is Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book one, which opens all human beings by nature desire to know.
- [113:27]
And then my students caused me to question the truth of that statement.
- [113:33]
But when I walked into the high school, I mean, it's. It. It. It's. It's wonderful, but it's dangerous too, because they have so much energy. And so the challenge isn't to inflame their passions because they're already a raging inferno, but it's to direct that passion towards the true, the good and the beautiful. So it. It's a different challenge, you know, with. With my college kids, I have to somehow spark or re. Spark that love of knowledge that they once had before it was beaten out of them by public schools.
- [114:12]
Whereas at the classical school, the challenge is again, somewhat different, where I don't have to ignite, but I have to somehow contain it. And so that's really afforded me, again, this wonderful new challenge because.
- [114:30]
And. And, you know, it's. I'm not saying it's easier or. Or more difficult, but. But again, just trying to get them to contain their th. Their thumoi. Their spiritedness and to get, to get their spiritedness to work in conjunction with their noose.
- [114:51]
I, it, to me, it's, it's, it's really giving me a whole new lease on being an educator.
- [114:56]
A
Well, gentlemen, any, any kind of like, final thoughts on just the teacher as a lover of the soul? Just as we kind of had this conversation tonight, which I have deeply appreciated, I think you've certainly given me more things to kind of contemplate and hopefully put into practice. And in my own teachings, anything, any kind of like, final thoughts.
- [115:14]
B
I'll make one final thought, and that's just one last pitch for your listeners and your viewers to, to reread Homer, in particular the Odyssey, and to bear Odysseus in mind as they're working their way their odyssey through Plato's dialogues. Because again, I think that there are really interesting parallels that remind us that, you know, Plato is writing with the great shadow of Homer, I think, looming above.
- [115:46]
A
I think it's a fascinating parallel.
- [115:48]
D
Yeah. I think one thing that comes to mind is this discussion of education seems to point to an education that looks a lot more like what Christ had with his disciples. You know, where you have 12 men who were called and they lived with Christ for a period of time. You know, it wasn't just, hey, I show up in your classroom for a couple hours a week, and then probably something similar happened with maybe Socrates and perhaps with, you know, Plato and his students as well, too. But that seems to be the, the model, or at least one obvious model of how you could pursue the type of education as being like a mirror of the soul between student and teacher. It's kind of hard to do that if you, you know, have my. I have my students for two and a half hours a week. I've got like, you know, six, seven classes of them.
- [116:37]
B
So.
- [116:39]
And Brett, let me just add one point, and that's really. It's another interesting something that I've been thinking about, and that is, you know, like you in a college classroom, I see my students for no more than two and a half hours, whereas at the high school, I see them for better or worse, four days a week, or I'll be seeing them every day. And it's that sort of repeated exposure to these texts and to each other where I think the relationship that I forged with my students.
- [117:10]
Develop more quickly and is a great deal stronger than the relationship that I could ever hope to have with my students and much less my online students, whom I never see.
- [117:22]
D
Very true. And I think that, well, that, that sparks another thought Here, and that is for Plato, there is no shortcut to education. It's not a, it's not a quick process. It's something that takes a long time. You know, hence the philosopher kings take 50 years and you know, I think you can, I think that's very true. Education is not something that can happen quickly.
- [117:43]
C
I think one thought I would toss in is Eve Simone says something to the effect, and this is not a quote, the idea that one of the most important and faithful decisions a student can make is to find the right teacher. And I think, I think there's two ways to connect that. One is that Plato should be re regarded as a teacher. I think the other. And, and, and so that, that's, that's, this is one teacher to come to. And the second is something that, that you were just saying about looking.
- [118:19]
You can see that effect in the lives of the life of Plato himself is that before he learned, learned all the things he did learn from Socrates, he somehow made the very fateful decision to become Socrates's disciple. And.
- [118:38]
Exactly how to finish that thought. I, I'm, I'm gonna just kind of let it trail off, but the, the student finding the right teacher is a, A, a task for our, for each soul.
- [118:54]
B
And the same goes for the teacher finding the right student balance and, and.
- [118:59]
A
Maybe the tie in then the role of the parents and the obligation the parents have to try and put their children in an environment that have teachers that actually truly love the student and want them to become beautiful as God is beautiful. And that's a, there's a richness there, there's a thickness there that I, I can't even actually really comprehend being exposed to as a child. And I, I really find it fascinating to think about what our young people could become even with our city, the world around us kind of being a distraction, what they could become to be exposed to that type of good life at an early age. I think there's something beautiful there. This is why I actually think classical education, whether it's great books based or liberal arts based, whatever you want to call it, is probably actually our best hope for our republic is actually creating a new class of student that takes the true good and the beautiful into society, into every single strata. So no, I think here, as we all kind of live together, this type of teaching is incredibly vital for our community. All right, well, Thomas, Dr. Grabowski, and particularly Dr. Larsen, your first time on the podcast, we deeply appreciate it and I have appreciated all of your comments tonight. Again, you've given me a lot to think about. I think given everyone, our listeners, a lot to think about. And I, yeah, I just really appreciate, I think, the insights that you've brought to the teacher as a lover of the soul. So I want to say thank you.
- [120:25]
B
And I want to return the thanks, Deacon.
- [120:27]
A
Thank you. All right, everyone, next week we are actually starting Sir Gowan and the Green Knight. We're going to be reading that for Christmas and New Year's, so you can pick up the Tolkien version of it or the Armitage version of this. I think this might be the first time I've ever said this on the podcast, but you also might want to think about getting the audiobook. And the reason I mentioned that of both either the Tolkien one or particularly the Armitage one, it's really beautiful, is because since these things were typically read out loud and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is alliterative in how it actually does its poetry, hearing it is also incredibly important. So buy the book, read the text, but also listen to it in your car, and I think you'll kind of get the full experience. And so we'll be reading that for Christmas and New Year's. Visit thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have lots of guides to the great books and podcasts and videos and things that help you. And we will see you next week.