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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend, the Great Books podcast, we are discussing Plato's Hipparchus, a short, strange, somewhat forgotten dialogue about what is love of gain. And we are joined by the always wonderful Dr. Frank Grabowski to help us see why this somewhat unremarkable little dialogue
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is actually quite remarkable.
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You know, for example, the dialogue's interlocutor is actually nameless. It begins in media res, we have almost no context or setting. And then the dialogue ends in aparia, in it ends in bewilderment. We have no positive definition to what
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is the love of gain. But when you push into this dialogue
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one that's, that's again often forgotten, we see that it's really the namesake of the dialogue, Hipparchus, the so called tyrant, that actually unlocks a very simple short dialogue into a blistering critique of the democratic man, of the ordinary citizen of Athens, which is incredibly applicable to our day and age.
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And all of a sudden this little
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simple dialogue becomes one of great worth and one that is certainly worth your time and attention.
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And as a reminder to help you
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dig deep into this dialogue, we have posted a question and answer written guide onto our website, thegreatbookspodcast.com we have 15 questions on Plato's Hipparchus, which includes an introductory letter, an outline, an introduction to the text, and and then 15 questions and answers to help you really dig deep into the richness of this short little dialogue.
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So today join us for an episode
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on the Hipparchus, asking the question, what is love of GAIN? With Dr. Frank Grabowski.
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Welcome to Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I live in rural Oklahoma with my wife, five children. Serves as deacon, Holy Family Cathedral, and as chancellor and General Counsel of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. My free time, I like to help people read the great books. That's the purpose here on Ascend. We can be like a small group for you helping you read the great books. We're a weekly podcast and we have YouTube videos, all kinds of stuff. We've covered the Iliad, me and the Greek plays, back to Plato's Dialogues. Today we have lots of those. Go check them out. Also an intro to Plato, some short stories, Dante's Inferno and much, much more. We can be a small group as you read through these texts together. Go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Patreon. We appreciate all our supporters and visit theweerybookspodcast.com also thank you to everyone who read the Odyssey with us. We're actually recording this in the Middle of the Odyssey episodes coming out. But right now we have over 3,000 people who have actually started reading the Odyssey with us, which is incredibly humbling. So thank you for all of you who completed that journey with us. And today though, we are reading Hipparchus, this kind of short, esoteric, forgotten dialogue of Plato. So we're going to dive into it today. As always, we have a wonderful guide and mentor. We have Dr. Frank Grabowski, who is a member of our diaconate formation program. He is, well, diacon candidate. You're a third order Franciscan, Dean of faculty at the Classical School. All kinds of accolades. Welcome back to the podcast.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Thanks, Deacon. Yeah, it's great to be back. Yeah. These are fun little dialogues we'll be looking at over the next several weeks. These are short. You could read them easily within maybe half an hour, maybe an hour or so. But yeah, they contain an awful lot of meat despite their diminutive size.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. And I'm actually just play my cards. So I'm a first time reader, I think of all of these. I might have read Ion in graduate school, but I don't really have a great foundation for it. So let's talk about what we're doing for the next couple weeks. So today we're talking about the Hipparchus. Next week we'll be doing Rival Lovers. The week after that we have Hippeis Minor. And then after that we have Ion. So four short, somewhat forgotten dialogue. So maybe just to pull back the veil a bit, you actually selected these for the podcast. You said these would be good because we have kind of a gap before we dive into Plato's Republic. So why did you select these dialogues particularly?
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, I selected them with your help, of course. But you know, these are dialogues that I have long been meaning to get around to reading. You have a good book I think that you can plug. This is Pangal's Roots of Political Philosophy. Ten Forgotten. Is that what it is? Ten Forgotten Socratic dialogues. These are all relatively short and certainly the commentators in the Pangle edition like to frame these as dialogues that take up political issues or political philosophy. I think that's certainly a good way of approaching them. A good Astrasian way of approaching them. The nice thing, Deacon Harrison, is that you and I are actually using different translations. So whereas you'll be using the translation from the Pangle edition, I'm using Big Red. Yes, The Cooper edition. And my translator is Nicholas D. Smith. So there's a very interesting translational decision that Nicholas Smith uses right off the bat. And so we'll get to that. But yeah, briefly, I chose these because the way to understand is through conversation. And I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to discuss them with an intellect like yours. So it's pure selfishness.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, that's good. You have a love of gain.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
I have a love of gain, and
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
you have a desire for gain. And we'll see if that aligns with your good and for the common good. So, yeah, I read it out of this translation. I know you read it out of the Cooper one. That's great. I think a lot of people that are reading along with us read it out of this one. If you guys do want to pick up another book, I would suggest this one again, the Roots of Political Philosophy. Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues. The Strassians usually just call it the pink book. The nice thing about this is after each dialogue it has an interpretive essay. And so it actually gives you a lot of food for thought. The one thing I would note at this juncture is just Alan Bloom did the interpretive essay on the Hipparchus. But the beginning of it, he gives a little bit of commentary on why these kind of quote unquote, short, forgotten dialogues were selected. And probably no surprise, it has a political bent to it. But he says that the question here is trying to return to the subject of political philosophy, trying to step out of our kind of modern presuppositions and ideologies and recapture maybe a true political philosophy. And to do that, you go back to Socrates. So he says a return to the origins of political philosophy, that is, a return to Socrates, is requisite if we are to clarify the nature of political philosophy and elaborate its intention and possibility. And so he. He accuses us, right, him being in the same boat, modern man, of being very myopic when it comes to political possibilities. And we see this today, right, Everyone basically is dominated in their political imagination by liberalism. Left or right, right, conservative or liberal. We all kind of share now the same presuppositions of freedom, egalitarianism, you know, individualism, rights, things of this nature. And how do we step outside that? Which is what the great books always do for us, which is incredibly helpful, is to help us see where we are in our own culture and add some clarity. It's a big claim, I think, for that. How you do that is to go back to these short little dialogues, which he actually says. Each of the smaller dialogues has this strange character of pulling out something that's actually incredibly significant but often overlooked. And the thing he also warns us about is that a lot of the dialogues that we like to read today and many that we've read already on the podcast is we like them because we see something in them that we think is familiar to us. And this is incredibly dangerous because then we run the risk of misinterpreting it because we project a certain meaning. So the nice thing about the short dialogues is that they tend to be. They don't give us that foothold, they tend to be somewhat strange, and they challenge us because we don't immediately understand what's going on. Which I will admit, when I first read the Hipparchus, I. I think I kind of understood what's going on, but I had to reread it. I had to look at commentaries, I had to do some stuff to try and figure out where that was. So I actually look forward, over the next four weeks of reading these short dialogues of hopefully being kind of like, challenged in my own presuppositions.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I mean, the name Alan Bloom should ring a bell in the. In the minds of your. Of your viewers, because, of course, he very famously translated Plato's Republic, which is right behind you. And of course, you'll be diving into the Republic very shortly. I understand.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, we have, yes, we have these four dialogues we're covering, and then we're going to have basically short story September. We're going to cover five short stories, and then we dive into Players Republic after that. So four people that want to look ahead, go check out our Patreon page. Also, just for the record, I did publish on our Patreon page an early access to our episode on book one with Alex Preux. So for those who are interested, you can go check that out and see how he frames the Republic, maybe even get an early start, et cetera. The other thing that I would mention too here is we might have a lot of people listening who actually just read the Odyssey with us, and they're like, whoa, wait, who's Plato and why are we discussing this? And et cetera. So I would just say you can certainly read. Park is with us. You can read these four dialogues. That's great. You're welcome to do that if you're like, I really need, like, the ground up start. I really need my handheld. Like, pedagogically, how do I even start with Plato? Go back. So before we read the Odyssey, we actually had already covered several of Plato's dialogues. We have an introduction to Plato posted, and then we actually start with first Alcibiades, which is a Wonderful, wonderful dialogue to start your journey on Plato. So if you want to start with Plato, but you think the Hipparchus are jumping in kind of in media res here, midstream is too much. Hey, just join us. Go back and start the introduction to Plato and read first Alcibiades. And then we have things like the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito, the. What is it? The Phaedo. And then Meno and Gorgias are the Plato's dialogues that we've already covered. And then these four short ones. And then we get into the Republic, which is probably the most important philosophical text in the Western tradition.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, that's. That's wonderful. The other thing I would just mention before we dive into the text is that, you know, Hipparchus, even though it. It's included in the Platonic corpus, is generally considered by scholars to have not been written. So it's among the spurious dialogues, which doesn't make it unimportant. Which doesn't, you know, mean that it doesn't contain, you know, you know, interesting, compelling arguments. But I think it is worth noting right from the outset that it's unlike the Apology or the Republic or Timaeus, all of which are widely, almost unanimously considered to be authentic dialogues written by Plato. Hipparchus is among those that scholars have considered to be very likely spurious.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a good distinction and a good reminder. And I would just say simply the. The approach that we've taken on the podcast is a certain humility and piety towards the tradition and towards the ancients. So Hipparchus and many of the other dialogues today that are marked spurious, that was not how they were received in antiquity. They were seen as being written by Plato a lot. If you go in, I mean, if you're interested in that, you can go in and look at some of the language games that they play, particularly from the Germans, to announce that certain dialogues are not written by Plato, which is the same process they use to announce that, you know, certain books of the Bible are written by different authors or, however those, you know, the JDP theories and things of that nature, I typically don't put a whole lot of stock in those. I also think that to your point, whether it's written by Plato or it's written by a student by Plato, I really wouldn't let those literal conversations of whether or not it's spurious, et cetera, rob you of the intellectual fruits of taking these dialogues seriously in working through them.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
And that's the point that I I. I'd like your viewers and listeners to appreciate is that the author in this case is irrelevant to the content. That. That the. That the dialogue stands on its own as this wonderful little morsel that contains all these complex flavors, and that, you know, whether Plato, in fact, wrote it really doesn't affect its quality.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very good. Okay, let's look at the text and maybe just some preliminaries on the text itself. So one of the things that we notice. I think there's two things that are noticed immediately as you engage this text. One, it has no dramatic setting. We have very little context. You know, you think about something like the symposium we have going in and out of buildings. We have where you sit, we have what they're drinking, who's drinking, what, how much they're drinking, things of this nature. Think about the Republic and how the Republic starts here. We don't have anything. We have no drama. We have no dramatic context. We have no preambles. We just immediately go into a question. I think that's. I think that's worth maybe taking seriously for a moment. My understanding is that there's only two dialogues that really start like this, The Hipparchus and then the Minos. Plural, the Minos. And I don't know, there's different ways to look at this. Some people look at these as, like, well, these small dialogues are really kind of just stripping out a certain core question in the larger Platonic corpus and just digging into them. And so they're just. They're not really. There's not a larger dramatic setting because they're just trying to answer this one kind of definition. I liked. I listened to the old New Thinkory podcast on Hipparchus, and one of the things that Dr. Gregory McBrayer said, who's been on the podcast several times, and we always appreciate his insights, is he. He liked the theory that this really represents kind of that normative thing that we always say Socrates is doing, which is just engaging normal people in the marketplace about definitions, which. It's interesting that that's the perception that we have, because that's what's talked about in the apology. But that's not the context for the dialogues. So here then, when we have one that just starts abruptly with no kind of dramatic setting, and then the other shoe to drop is that the interlocutor has no proper name. It's just in this one, it's a friend or a comrade. And so we don't even get. We always talk about that. One of the things on the dialogues is that the dialogues themselves are tailored to the interlocutor. Being robbed of kind of a proper identity, I think is interesting pedagogically, inside a dialogue that we're. That this person doesn't really merit, in a certain way, a particular historical kind of concrete anchoring into anybody. And that also raises questions about why would Plato do this? And so I also like tethering that back. As Dr. McBrayer said to well, maybe this is just some guy in the marketplace. It doesn't matter. It's just. It's just he represents the kind of just normal, democratic man in Athens.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. Something else to note, too, Deacon. As you mentioned, the interlocutor is nameless. He's just referred to as a friend or a companion. People who are familiar with Plato's dialogues will note that, of course, many of the dialogues that contain proper names, the name is the name of the interlocutor. Interlocutor, whether it's Mino or Euthyphro or Phaedrus, Theaetetus, Hipparchus doesn't appear in this dialogue at all. He couldn't, because, as we learned, Hipparchus had been long dead. He's one of these tyrants that lived in the 6th century. So the name of the dialogue, I think itself, it's interesting, and it's worth raising the question, why does the author, whether the author's Plato or not, why does he choose Hipparchus as the title? So our attention is drawn to this person who doesn't really speak for himself. He's using it as an example to illustrate a point. What that point is, you and I could debate. But, yeah, it's a very odd dialogue, as Alan Bloom notes. It's just. It's strange all around.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. The other thing that I would point out before we maybe look at the first line to try maybe get a foothold there, is I find Socrates. The other thing about this, maybe being in, like, the marketplace setting that I. I tend to like, at least on. From an imaginative level, is that I really do find Socrates to be a gadfly in this. I actually find him to be somewhat annoying that he. I think we can talk about this. I think he very clearly knows what end he is trying to bring this interlocutor, but he does it through almost like. I mean, Bloom actually uses the word brutal. Like, he's just kind of brutal to his interlocutor and how he pushes back on him and et cetera. And again, if you take the idea that this is just some guy in the marketplace that probably just had like some poor exchange and is now angry about this love of greed that seems to your love of gain that loves to cheat people. And here comes the gadfly, like, well, do you really know what that word means? It's like, no, this is annoying. Go away. So I like the idea of seeing Socrates in this type of setting because then maybe we can get a little bit of a insight or a window into why he did start to have some antagonisms with the polis. Right. What was it that he was known for in the marketplace and what was the attitude and dispositions that he brought to those conversations?
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Excellent.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
So let's look at first line. So in this one, the pink volume by Pangol, this one's the interpretive essay is by Bloom, but the translation of the dialogue is by what looks like Ford or Fordy. I'm pretty sure it's pronounced like fjord or something like that. Has an interesting pronunciation. But regardless, the opening line in this one is, so what is love of gain? Just what can it be? And who are the lovers of gain? So a few notes. One, this is going to be a definitional dialogue, so we're trying to find the definition of something. But two, I think yours has a very different opening and I think that sets a very different tone.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
It does, yeah. I mean, the Greek is philokerdea or kyrdeia, and that's like philo. To be a lover of kaerdas is gain or profit. So the translator in the Pagel edition is translating the Greek quite literally. It just means to be a lover of gain. Nicholas Smith here, however, opts for greed in. And in our pre podcast chatter, you know, you noted there is a Greek word planexia, which is very often translated as greed. So Greek has these two words that carry with them this connotation of being greed or being selfish. So I mean, this, again, it goes to show you how translation involves interpretation. And so Smith takes the dialogue to be about greed and whether greed is a good thing or a bad thing or sometimes a good thing and sometimes not. So, yeah, the tone in this particular translation in Big Red, the Cooper edition, is very, very different.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's really. I did not look at the Cooper translation beforehand, but translating as greedy certainly gives a different tone to the dialogue because I think the lover of gain, I actually took that to be the main pivot of the dialogue, that the phrase lover of gain, the two interlocutors, right, they equivocate on what this actually means.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
It's neutral, it's Very morally neutral, right. To be a lover of gain. And I think what Socrates wants to know from his companion is whether being a lover of gain is always a bad thing. And the lover of. Or the, the, the. The friend seems to think it is.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's right. That's what it seems to be, is that you have a more neutrally or more neutral term lover of gain, the nameless man, the comrade. It seems to interpret this, I, I think very basically so he interprets it having to do with money. He has an interpret. This way the marketplace setting kind of makes sense. He seems to interpret it as what we see, I think, in the Republic is the appetitive. So this is like, think of like the merchants buying and selling, trading in the marketplace money. This kind of just like basic pleasure, et cetera. This is how he sees gain. And this just like to be a lover of gain, somewhat unqualified, cannot be a good thing. And the first thing, it seems like what he tries to give like a definition is he tries to pivot on the fact of they gain worthless things. That's at 2:25 a, I think, or so. Yeah, that's the beginning of the dialogue. His answer is, in my opinion, they are those who think it worthwhile to make a gain from worthless things. I didn't actually find that to be a bad definition at the beginning. I think the problem is what does he mean by worthless things?
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, and that's the. I guess that's Socrates invitation to really drill deep into and to understand. Well, these people who pursue profit is what Socrates ultimately argues is that everybody does this. Doctors do this, farmers do this. I guess to some extent, scientists, philosophers do this. We all are pursuing gain of some sort or other. And so if that's the case, then we're all greedy. And then greedy either turns out to be not a bad thing or it turns out to be nothing at all. Because it's something that applies to everybody universally.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, we get this first definition of worthless things, and Socrates somewhat unties that by basically saying no one knowingly gains from worthless things. This is not something that people do. Again, I think what's the dialogue, what we're needing there is a qualification, a modification of what worthless actually means. But again, the comrade, and I think this is a big part in the dialogue, is what does the comrade have the capacity to offer? Like, what is it that he can't see? Like, why does the dialogue. Overall, this is a definitional dialogue. They're seeking definition of a term. It's also operatic. It's not going to actually give us a clear answer. So the interlocutor is going to end up being perplexed and then we just kind of simply move on. I think one of our questions to ask is what is it about the interlocutor that kind of impedes him from being able to expand this definition? Even though I will say I agree that I think Socrates pedagogy here was pretty rough with him, because I think Socrates could have made some distinctions. If he really wanted to hold this guy's hand and lead him to a conclusion, I think he could have done so. But he tends to pivot off his interlocutor's presuppositions that he knows he's having to lead him into kind of a more confusing route where he really can't. He can see that he has that somewhat beautiful deconstruction where he can see that his answers are not fulfilling, but he can't really come to see the positive side, the truth, if you will. Because what we transition to is the worthless no one seeks out. There's worthless goods to all gain is good and all men love gain. And it's actually loss that is bad. That's at 2.26d. That's kind of our second thesis, if you will.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. To return to your point about his. His approach in that it's rough. I think. I think that's true. I'm not sure how different that is, though, from other dialogues. I mean, I'm thinking in particular of the Meno, where Meno accuses Socrates at one point of being the stingray or this torpedo fish that stings interlocutors and puts them almost like in a state of paralysis, that this seems to be part of the Socratic method, that there is a. Like, he does shepherd them towards the truth, but there's a moment where they need to be stung. They need to realize that they are following the wrong path or that they hold on to false opinions. And so I wonder how much of the roughness. Because he does tailor. He will tailor his questions to the interlocutor. I think very often we see that how he approaches a thrasymachus is very different from how he approaches a Polemarchus or a Cephalus. So, you know, we don't know who this friend is, so it's deliberately made or left ambiguous to us by the author. But we're assuming that Socrates knows this person better than perhaps we do. And so, yeah, his approach, though rough, may be appropriate to this particular interlocutor.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's good. That's a good defense. Yes. He is the torpedo fish, the numb fish that comes in that aporia. Right. That aporetic kind of confusion is actually a benefit. So, uh, it's like the via negativa. To know something is not something is a step forward in knowledge. Right. I know this thing is not this. Therefore I. Can I step closer, hopefully to a positive definition as well? Yeah, I guess I don't mean to be overly critical of Socrates, but that. And maybe it's too alien to the text, but the idea of this like taking place in the marketplace and Socrates, like sideswiping some individual, this is not. This is not callicles. This is not the Gorgias. It's not him coming up to some professional that's presented himself in some way. This seems to just be a normal. And we'll get into this. But I think it's right to read this as like, this is just like the normal Athenian citizen. And I. And I think that's important. Who. What is the normal? Because we get a lot of dialogues with like Euthyphro and again, like the Gorgias or Meno, we get all these dialogues with these kind of like special characters. Was this like the rank and file democratic man of Athens think? And what's his capacity to engage in a conversation like this?
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, and I'm very interested to hear this more Straussian or political reading of the dialogue. So I hadn't read Bloom's essay prior to nor subsequent to reading the dialogue. So my takeaway is, I would say more epistemological. And once we finally get around to Socrates, description of Hipparchus and the Herms and the inscriptions on the Herms. I'll share my thoughts. But yeah, I'm really interested in hearing more about Bloom's interpretation of this dialogue as being a way. It's really more about Socrates and trying to show the reader who the true Socrates was by way of this reinterpretation of the figure of Hipparchus.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, well, let's look at that. So Hipparchus then is introduced down at 228B. Yeah, 228B. This definition puts the citation numbers on the opposite side of the text, so I find myself somewhat bewildered. So this is also part. So, golly, there's so many layers here. So here's what's. So let's just talk about this maybe first. And just like the dialogue itself, the back and forth with the nameless interlocutor. So first off, like, this is again part of that kind of like, brutal, just yanking of the chain. The nameless interlocutor, maybe the normal Athenian democratic man is just trying to keep up with the conversation. And then Socrates throws out what is going to seem like an absurd example to him. So keep in mind, we are trying to critique love of gain. The normal rank and file definition of this is clearly some type of greed, something very similar to this pleonexia, this just like, constant desire for more, even though that's not the term that's used, which I think is important. And Sartes decides to throw out, as a positive example, a tyrant. You have to take a moment and just step back and realize what kind of whiplash the nameless Athenian has here. That in defending love of gain, and as a positive example, Socrates throws out a tyrant. So who's Hipparchus? So, and this has layers like everything in Plato, but in Bloom's essay in other places, it explains that Hipparchus is this kind of like, ancient understanding of this tyrant that oversaw Athens. He was a tyrant, had a tyrannical rule over Athens. And there is this, I don't want to call it democratic myth, fable that Hipparchus the tyrant was killed by these two individuals out of their love, their noble love of freedom, democratic freedom. And so, you know, we have these, these myths in our own Americana as well. So this is when the democratic Athens looks back in its history, it sees the downfall of this tyrant being assassinated by these two individuals for this noble love of freedom. And this is some beautiful political myth that they have. The problem is, is that historically, that's not even how it played out, for multiple reasons. One, Hipparchus was not even the tyrant his brother was. Hipparchus was assassinated, but he wasn't assassinated out of some democratic love of democracy. He was assassinated because one of his assassins was a pederast. And the young boy that that assassin favored favored him back until he talked to Hipparchus, and then he lost his allure of the assassin and decided to love Hipparchus. And so the two assassins killed Hipparchus over it. Very different than, say, the noble love of the democratic man. So what's here then is that what's really interesting is with that back context, is that Socrates then throws out Hipparchus, stepping into the myth that he was the tyrant, but then presenting him as a noble soul. And so we get this narrative where, so those of us who have been on the podcast for a while, reading Plato with us, you might remember the Herms, because this was actually a really important aspect when we read First, Alcibiades. So the Herms are like you have, like a pillar, and on top you have Hermes. So you have like this head, say, or bust of Hermes. And then down at the bottom of the pillar you have a phallus. And then what's interesting here that what. And these are, you know, sacred objects that are placed around, you know, the city. And what's interesting here then is Hipparchus, Socrates presents him as having a love of wisdom. And so what does he do? So he has this love of gain, but his gain is wisdom. He has an erotic appetite for wisdom. And since he is the ruler, he decides that this love is going to be diffusive. So he sets up examples of his wisdom, his own poetry, kind of mimicking, I think, that the oracles at Delphi, things like know thyself, things like this. And so he writes these things like walk thinking just thoughts, or don't deceive a friend. And so he puts these by the roadside and in the city and things like this. And so he tries to get the populace to think about wisdom. And then out of this, then he is still killed. In Socrates's account, so this is at 229C, and he is killed. Then Socrates then adopts the narrative that basically you had a boy or a lover that turns to Hipparchus, away from his assassins, and therefore the assassins kill him for it. So, I mean, what do we even begin to unravel this, where Socrates has taken a tyrant from this, like, democratic mythology and turned him into a benevolent ruler whose love of gain was wisdom, knowing that this entire myth is going to be somewhat unpalatable to the normal, nameless Athenian man.
- [33:21]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
That's a good question. And so this is what really, this, this part of the dialogue really drew my interest because, I mean, I had to look up Hipparchus. I didn't know who Parkus was. You know, I learned he's this horrible tyrant. And Socrates is giving this sort of revisionist history of who this person was. And so I try to imagine, you know, what if. What if someone tried to do the same with, like, Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler? You know, they said this guy was a really great guy, right? The trains ran on time. And you hear this about Benito Mussolini. And so the initial response from the friend or the companion should have been, what are you talking about? Hipparchus was a horrible man. How could you possibly be attributing all these good qualities to him? And so we have to ask ourselves, what. What good quality is he attributing? To Hipparchus? Well, like you say, he's a philanthropist. He is constructing these herms, and on these herms he is writing these slogans, these little one line bits of wisdom. But the thing that really sticks out to me, Deacon, is what else he writes on these herms. And so he does, he doesn't just say know thyself or walk with justice in mind, but he writes, this is a monument of Hipparchus. So there's a certain ownership that Hipparchus is taking in this wisdom or in this knowledge. And so the direction that my mind then took was, okay, what is the author? What is Plato? The author, Pseudo Plato, if we will. What is he trying to get us to think about? And so my mind instantly went to the Republic and book seven, when Plato is laying out the allegory of the cave. This is all sort of this pedagogical allegory of how we come to know things. And one of the points that Socrates makes when interpreting the allegory is, you know, a lot of people think that knowledge is a possession, that knowledge is something that can be transferred from one person to another, like a commodity, and then you have it. I think he uses the image of like pouring, pouring knowledge into the. Or pouring wisdom into the mind of the student. And then for Plato, knowledge is not necessarily a possession, although it can be understood that way, but it's something formative. Knowledge isn't what you have, but who you become. And I'm just wondering here, Deacon, if, if one of the points, and there again, these, these dialogues operate on so many different levels. But if, if one of the points that the author is trying to get us to think about and discuss is, well, what is the true nature of knowledge? Is it a possession? Because Hipparchus clearly is presenting this knowledge as his by, by. By signing his name to the Herms. And of course, that brings us back to the question that kicks this dialogue off. What does it mean to be a lover of gain? And is, is being a lover of gain or being greedy? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? And so being greedy isn't just having too much, but, but taking what isn't one's own. Or in other words, this knowledge is not Hipparchus. Right. Walk with justice in mind, that doesn't just belong to him. That's a timeless truth.
- [36:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very good. Yeah, man, it's just, it's, it's thick, I really think. I mean, my, my own kind of like how, like where's the foothold? Like, where have you started to Wrestle, like, particularly with this dialogue, it seems then just to kind of like play cards, is that the nameless interlocutor really does represent this typical Athenian citizen who is very appetitive. And what I mean by that is, you know, the. If we can take Plato seriously, the tripart soul of you have this, this noose, this intellect, as the highest part of the soul that loves truth. You have the thumas, a spirited part that loves nobility and particularly then everything that's the fecundity of it, of glory and fame and honor. But then you also have the appetitive, which loves pleasure. And the appetitive that loves pleasure tends to dominate. And we always are having to rein it back in. The intellect needs to rule, the spirited needs to assist it. And we're just trying to bridle the appetitive. So it's very interesting to me that, that the normal Athenian citizen seems to just be the appetitive man. And his imagination really does not seem to be able to follow Socrates into why there can be a love of gain that is good, that is, say, in the higher parts of the soul. So you have a love of gain for the thematic. Do you not want to do something noble with your life? Do you not want to win victories? Do you not want to have glory and honor? Or what about a love of gain, of the noetic, of the nous, of the intellect? Do you not want to understand truth? Which then I think has a certain fecundity into wisdom and philosophy and all these things. He can't see any of this. It just. He can't do it. And you mentioned the Republic. I think the Republic is very descriptive here as well, because in the Republic it makes a very clear distinction that the section of Athenian society, the section of the polis that corresponds with the appetitive, is the merchant class. It is the business class. This is what they're focused on. They're focused on that gain, that money. And you see this in the nameless interlocutor. He can only filter these things really through money. That's the object when he says love of gain, gain, there is money. And that's how he interprets everything. So to your point, now we have him using this tyrant, so called tyrant, and he is sharing this wisdom. And it's interesting because to what degree is he actually set up as a positive example? Is he positive per se? Or is he positive as just a rhetorical device to try and yank this nameless citizen out of his kind of myopic view of love, of Gain. But it does seem that, because it is a charged example, but it does seem that what we at least have here is a tyrant who also is pursuing wisdom. And then that becomes like diffusive to the polis as a whole. So he wants people to know that it's him. Which seems to be some kind of like thematic love of honor, glory, something like, I'm smart, I'm here, I've done these things. This was me that did this. But in his, I guess to put it this way, in his self interest, in his own love of gain, it is actually oriented in such a way in which it is beneficial for the polis. And Socrates seems to throw this out of like, well, wouldn't it be great to be ruled by someone like Hipparchus now? Which is obviously a huge claim to welcome back in the tyrant into the democracy, because the. The democratic man is constantly concerned about those who might rise up and become tyrants to a certain degree. That the democratic man then creates a great egalitarianism where it really doesn't want great men, it doesn't want those men to rise up. Everyone just becomes the same. And this is kind of the democratic nature tends to flatten the soul. I think we saw this very clearly with Alcibiades. So your question of like, epistemology, I think, I think is really fascinating. I'm not sure I have like a great answer for it. I think part of it is how do we see Hipparchus being used in the dialogue? And it seems like he's still a flawed example, but at least in this case, look how his self interest, his love of gain, not only benefited him, but also benefited those around him. I guess one way to look at it is, would there be any bridles on this type of love of gain? Could Hipparchus just keep doing this without limits? And would that actually be bad? Does he ever. Can you seek too much wisdom and could you share too much wisdom with those around you? Would there ever have to be a bridling of this particular love of gain? And I think the answer to that is no.
- [41:33]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. I want to return to your observation that the friend, the companion, is a representative of the democratic Athenian. So your average bloke on the streets. So, I mean, what if. If the companion is the appetitive man, I would have expected him to actually think of love of gain as a good thing.
- [42:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [42:02]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
You feed your appetite, you pursue wealth. In fact, if you go back to Republic. Thrasymachus. And I was curious. So thrasymachus does talk about pleonexia as being something that is natural. Greed is something that is natural. And it's good wanting to have more, have more power, have more wealth, have more pleasure. But this particular individual, the individual here in Hipparchus is, Is. Is very much against the pursuit of gain, or he thinks the love of gain is. Well, love of gain, of things of no value is a. Is a bad thing. And so, yeah, it's a very peculiar. I mean, I, I agree with you that reading him as the representative Athenian or the representative democratic man is very compelling. It's a very compelling read. But then his response is quite peculiar because if he thinks that the love of gain, of things of no value is a bad thing, you'd think, well, isn't that what a philosopher would say? And he's clearly not a philosopher. He's clearly not a representative of Nous, who presumably would be Socrates. So in a way, you do get the tripartite soul. You get Socrates, who represents the intellect, you get the friend who is the appetitive man, and then you get Hipparchus, as you say, is the, The Thumas. So the dialogue then sort of becomes this, almost this literary representation of the tripartite soul.
- [43:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's very good. On your pushback, I think what I would articulate of, like, does the nameless man represent the appetitive part? I would say yes, but on the notion that the appetitive part is not disordered, per se. Right. So the appetitive part of the soul is a good part. It's good to seek pleasure, but you have to seek it in moderation. And I think we see that. So maybe to articulate this, maybe this unnamed, you know, kind of democratic man, he can see certain things that he sees are unjust, a gain of worthless things or things that are not good for you. He does try to throw qualifiers onto this, but it seems to never leave the realm of the appetitive. So he can be, in a certain way, maybe he's a well ordered appetitive part where he. But he's mainly just focused on money, but he can't see anything above that. He can't see the thematic, he can't see the noetic, he can't see the fullness. Because I think one of the parts, maybe to be more clear why I found at times Socrates to be hard on him, or be a gadfly, or be somewhat brutal, is that I actually do think the nameless interlocutor made or tried to introduce good qualifications into what it Means to be love of gain. But it's not what Socrates is trying to get him to understand. We're not trying to understand certain qualifications on the appetitive part in the love of money, but rather that there are loves of gain in the soul that transcend it. And the thematic for nobility or the noetic for truth. That's what it seems like Socrates wants to lead him to. And he's not brokering any kind of conversation on the qualities of the appetitive parts. Love of money, which I think is a legitimate conversation, but it's not what Socrates wanted.
- [45:40]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I mean, would you care to maybe go into a little bit about Bloom's interpretation? Are you, are you prepared to do that?
- [45:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I, I would say that my, what I've shared is, is my takeaway from it.
- [45:54]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Okay.
- [45:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I'm not as confident in it to say this is exactly what Bloom says. I think that, I think that Bloom does very much focus on the interlocutor as the democratic man. So one thing I haven't articulated that helps See, Bloom's point is that Bloom then sees the introduction of Hipparchus also as a analogy to Socrates himself. So let's see if we can play this out. So Socrates is like Hipparchus because he seems to be like a tyrant, he seems to be disordered, he seems to be not good for the polis, but he has a love of gain, of philosophy, of wisdom, and he's trying to bring that to Athens. So just like Hipparchus is erecting these herms with these, you know, quotes on them, these little proverbs, so too is Socrates going around the polis trying to build monuments, I guess, in the souls of the Athenians to philosophy, to love of wisdom. And two, you can keep playing this out where? Okay, well, who, who likes Socrates? Well, again, it's the youth. So just like the youth had an attraction to Hipparchus and that pulled him away from others, so too does Socrates pull in the youth to teach them about these things. And that spurns, if you will, the people of Athens. Right? They don't want the youth. They want the youth to love them. They don't want the youth to love Socrates. And so just like Hipparchus was assassinated, so too was Socrates assassinated. And so this is a controversial, somewhat huge claim on Bloom's part. I think it lines up well. But you then see how Socrates then just, just like how introducing Hipparchus, the so called tyrant that is a tyrant under the mythology, the democratic mythology of Athens is unpalatable to the Nameless interlocutor. So, too, in a lot of ways, is Socrates just simply going to be unpalatable. And maybe I. Maybe I share too much with democratic man. Maybe my own soul is too disordered. Because I also find that Socrates, to use Bloom's word, is a bit brutal in this dialogue. Right. He doesn't really give a whole lot. He really. There's a lot of whiplash in this dialogue. Socrates really knows when his interlocutor tries to give qualifications on love of gain. He knows the path he's trying to take. The guy's not malicious. He knows what he's trying to describe, which I actually think is true and good, but it's not what Socrates is trying to get out of him. And so there's just a lot of yanking him out, which then we don't get. Right. It's an operatic dialogue. We don't get the interlocutor coming to an epiphany. We get him kind of acquiescing. I don't know where to go, but I'm not really convinced.
- [48:47]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I like that interpretation a lot, Deacon. I mean, leave it up to Alan Bloom, of course. Leave it up to a Straussian to turn what I thought on the surface was an epistemological dialogue into a dialogue about political philosophy. But what I think, why I find that to be a compelling reading is how well it aligns with other dialogues where Plato is very clearly trying to rehabilitate the figure of Socrates and engaged in a critique of Athenian democracy. So, I mean, the apology is a great example of this. But Republic, I mean, one could say that all of the dialogues are an attempt by Plato to try to represent the figure of Socrates to an audience that did not know him personally, but may be laboring under the misapprehension that he was a radical, that he was justifiably executed. And so the dialogues then become not a hagiography per se, but they do become an opportunity for a man who knew the man to set the record straight, so to speak. And, you know, one might say the Gospels play a similar role to, of course, take a man that was viewed as perhaps a political radical or a heretic of some sort or other, and for the apostles who knew him, who knew him as the Christ, to set the record straight. So I like that interpretation a lot.
- [50:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, you see that obviously, you know, one of the clearest texts there is the man who was crucified right after the narrative of Guy just ring in the Republic, who has a reputation for being unjust, but is actually perfectly just. And you see that clearly there are Christological allusions there that Christians are apt to make, which I think is fair and good. But you also see that in the text qua Plato here where say, Hipparchus suffered under this kind of liberal, not liberal, under this democratic myth of, you know, look at these guys who killed him for the noble love of freedom. Well, so too does Socrates suffer under a so called myth. We saw this in the Apology. He suffers too from, whether it's from Aristophanes or his actions in the marketplace, etc. He also suffers from certain myths that have skewed his reputation. Bloom even takes it further by adding that there is a history or a claim that Antinous, which was, if you remember him, he was one of the accusers of Socrates in the Apology was actually originally a lover of Alcibiades. And so Socrates comes and pulls Alcibiades away from him, like Hipparchus pulled the young boy away from his assassins. And so then Antinous plays that Harmodius role, right? The role of the assassins, bringing then these claims against Socrates, basically as, you know, a scorned lover, if you will. So Bloom really takes it, you know, deeply. And again, like, like a lot of Straussian things, the political philosophy and the deep reads I deeply appreciate, I don't think they exhaust the totality of, you know, how to read these dialogues. But I think that the introduction of Hipparchus seems jarring the first time you read it. And so we have to take it slowly, which I think we have to then understand pedagogically, why is he introduced here? And I think that the different things that we've said here show that he does have a very strong rhetorical value in the dialogue itself. And then I think there's also a foreshadowing to Socrates, which, you know, Plato is apt to do in his works.
- [52:41]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
So to, you know, bring us back to your initial question, which is, you know, why did, why did we select these dialogues? You know, there's this long standing question among Plato scholars or those who just enjoy reading Plato, how do you read the dialogues? And certainly they can be read as being principally philosophical. The philosophical questions are raised that Plato is wrestling with these and that he's using Socrates, you know, a man that he knew, he's using this man who has this very unique method in order to wrestle, right, to wrestle with interlocutors. But sometimes what we lose, especially with big grand dialogues like the Republic, is that Socrates was a man that Plato personally knew that personally he personally loved, and that had perhaps earned for himself unfairly a bad reputation. And that the dialogues are then an opportunity for Plato to present Socrates in a more favorable light, perhaps a maturer light. And so the shorter dialogues, I think, allow us to maybe grapple with that question a little bit more intimately, whereas with the Republic, you just get lost in the weeds because there are just so many characters and there are so many people, and we become so entranced with the philosophical content that we lose sight of the character of the man. And so I think the beauty with a lot of these shorter dialogues that we'll be reading discussing together over the next several weeks is that Socrates does become, I think, a little bit more prominent in our minds because of just the size and the scope of the dialogues themselves. He becomes more pronounced. And so, yeah, I think that this Bloomian interpretation or the Straussian interpretation is quite valid. I like it quite a bit. But again, I do think that there is this epistemological question about, well, what is wisdom and what is knowledge? And is it something that we can rightly consider to be a possession, a commodity that we can come to have, or is it rather this thing that we become that forms and shapes us, which, of course is. Yet, I mean, that is something that we read throughout the dialogues. That's really something that Plato seems to be kind of obsessed with, which is his wisdom something that we have, or is it something that we are.
- [55:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think your. Your point too, is. Is well taken. If we take seriously the character of Hipparchus, like, where is he in his own. Like he's not set up as a. A perfect image, right? He's not the philosopher king. But here you have a thematic man that is starting to show a real interest in wisdom and wants that wisdom to be diffusive with inside the polis? And that's a huge step forward. I mean, that's better than Alcibiades got. That's better than a lot where you have this rising of the soul. So you have the appetitive, you have the thematic. Can a thematic take that leap? And sometimes that's difficult, right? Can the young man who loves victory and loves glory and honor see the wisdom or see wisdom as a beauty worth pursuing that's not always immediately apparent, if not apparent at all? So I think at Parkiston is set up as maybe a nascent philosopher king, someone who has potential, right? We have this demonic man who wants wisdom to be shared. Now, yeah, like you, like you said, he's marking the Herms with his own name. So that's interesting. But it's, it's, you know, it's a journey, it's a, it's a certain maturation. Because I think too, if you, I like, I like the, the question of epistemology. I think that's very good. If we go back to Bloom's comment that, you know, why is, why is this listed in the roots of political philosophy, then I think you lean heavily into, you know, look at the difficulties that Socrates has as philosophy to try and get the rank and file, appetitive democratic man to lift his head up and not even see philosophy, but even see the thematic, even see the nobility, the glory, the honor, but rather their heads tend to be down like cattle and they just see these things. Now this interlocutor, like you, I think aptly pointed out, it's a good distinction, is not Callicles. He's not arguing for unbridledia. He's not arguing for unbridled gain. He thinks that there should be limits. It's interesting, the dialogue, that one of his main limiting factors is shame, that this is just shameful. It's shameful to desire a certain amount. And that's really fascinating to me. The democratic man seems to have an ethical morale that's kind of based off consensus, based off shame. And Hipparchus, I think, is in his mind a shameful example. And is there something somewhat similar, I think, to the philosopher and the tyrant that they both are willing to throw off shame for the sake of gain, but then they take very different routes. And that's where I think I would point to maybe a comparison between Socrates and Callicles on those two types of routes. But a democratic man just seems to be somewhat quiet. He seems to be somewhat shame based and a decent fellow. But is he going to live a thematic life? Is he going to live a philosophic life? Maybe not. And you might say, well, is that bad? Not everyone's going to be a philosopher. Well, the problem, I think is that they killed a philosopher. That tends to be the negative here, right? And as you alluded to, they also killed Jesus Christ. So the problem with a democratic man and this inability to look up and satiate, I think, the erotic appetites of the higher parts of the soul, like the somatic and the nous, is that they don't like other people doing it either. It seems shameful to them. They don't understand it, it's weird. And you just kind of think of the claims that they made against Socrates. He's corrupting youths, he's Suppressing the gods. He's making new gods. Like, we don't really know what he's doing, but he's things that are not us and he's annoying and so he's got to go. And so I do think that there is a certain leveling effect that democratic man brings to the polis. There's a certain egalitarianism that you can kind of be, you know, up and down with democratic man, but you can't be up here. You can't. If you come, if you pop up like this, you're going to get exiled, you're going to get punished, you're going to do something. People start to worry that you're going to rock the boat, you're going to become a tyrant or you become what, what Socrates is. And you quote, unquote, corrupt the youth and you're killed for it. And I think people misunderstand how the shame based, somewhat timid, pusillanimous existence of the democratic man can all of a sudden turn very ferocious and violent when that egalitarianism is threatened, which is why we need philosophers.
- [60:10]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
But then this of course brings about or this raises the question that I think Plato struggle in a way, struggles to answer. Or at least he, he says you might not like the answer. And that is, how is it, how is, how is it possible for the philosopher to exist within a democratic, liberal society? Right? So what, what you're doing, Deacon, with your, with your substack and, and, and with your YouTube channel, your podcasts, is that, I mean, you're, you're trying, you're inviting people into this community, you're inviting people, I mean, you've created a space where these conversations can take place because it's widely believed that these are, are not conversations, these are not questions that want to be dealt with, with, out there sort of in, in society, because these are dangerous questions. The philosopher is a danger. And as you say, Plato, by a Socrates, tells us what happens to this person in the ship of the state, right? He gets thrown overboard and I mean, he's viewed as a threat. And so, I mean, I think that this dialogue, as with all the dialogues, force, forces us to really confront the question about how is philosophy possible? How can there be philosophers? Even though in a democratic society we believe in freedom of speech, we believe in the free exchange of ideas, but is that really true? Especially when someone like Socrates is shaking us to the core and causing us to call into question all of our preconceived ideas and notions. And so, yeah, I think this Dialogue does pose that very question in a much more, perhaps more subtle and microscopic way, whereas the Republic does it in a far more grandiose way.
- [62:06]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I very much agree. I was looking for where to try to just find a somewhat conclusive element. I was looking for where our interlocutor says that he. That he hasn't really been convinced, that he agrees, but he has not been convinced.
- [62:24]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I got it, I got it. It's B. Let's see, 232B. Doesn't the argument now force us to agree that all gains small and large are good? And the friend says, it forces me, Socrates, rather than persuades me.
- [62:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, this one says, for my part, Socrates, it has compelled rather than persuaded me. I wonder, like, how to take that. We've already mentioned several times that, you know, it's a aporia, right, this being confused and that it really is actually a legitimate step in the journey towards wisdom. Somewhat of a beautiful deconstruction of your presuppositions that you have to be open to. I wonder too here, you know, Fiordi, the translator, or however you pronounce his name, he uses the word compelled. And I think that's really fascinating because, you know, in Bloom's translation of the Republic, in the allegory of the cave, which is, you know, everyone knows, is like, oh, this is, you know, the allegory of education, et cetera, a lot of people skim over the violence of the cave narrative of how the citizen of the cave has to be compelled. They basically have to be dragged out of the cave because it's so confusing to them that they really just cannot ascertain what is happening. And I can't remember, but if you go back and read that passage, he uses the word compelled over and over and over again. And so here too we see the word compelled. And I wonder as well. It's easy to say, well, Socrates, you didn't get it done. Like, you didn't convince this guy, right? The normal Athenian, appetitive democratic man is just going to go on living a tame and timid life and you didn't do anything. But I think we should take seriously that sometimes that first brush up against truth and wisdom, like the citizen in the cave that's in that darkness, you're not going to be able to ascertain what's going on. You're just compelled. And you see then that something is wrong. You see something is amiss, but you really couldn't articulate it, nor could you really understand it. And so again, just like the aporia is kind of maybe a legitimate step in the journey towards wisdom. So is, I think, being compelled towards something that is true even if you don't understand what it is.
- [64:38]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. Another reading, Deacon, would, would be to apply this interpretation that the author is. Is really trying to rehabilitate Socrates and to try to argue that Socrates isn't the tyrant that many took him to be. And so then that would make sense because, well, Socrates says, doesn't the argument force us to agree that all gains are good? The friend says, well, it forces rather than persuades. So force, again, would mean that there is some sort of unwillingness, like I'm not willing, but you're forcing me to accept it. Or. Or the argument is forcing me to. Which is. Which is what we would expect from a tyrant, you know, a strong man. He says, well, it doesn't persuade me. Persuade would mean that you are willingly coming around to accept the argument on the grounds of the argument rather than because the person is compelling or forcing you against your will. And then what Socrates says, well, perhaps later it will also persuade you. So then perhaps the author is saying, well, Socrates really isn't the tyrant that many have taken him to be, that Socrates is actually more concerned with allowing the argument to melt away the hardness of the heart or to disperse the fogginess of the intellect. And that Socrates isn't railroading people into positions, but he's trying to guide or steer them based upon the strength of the argument.
- [66:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I just want to say, I don't know, I read this dialogue the first time and I was like, okay, great. I think it's a love of gain on the appetitive versus I think a love of gain of the soul. Overall, great, I think, wonderful. And so I just want to say thank you to you for picking it and then for your comments here and kind of forcing me into this because now it's like, oh, yeah, no, the Hipparchus. That's a wonderful short dialogue on like, you know, democratic man versus the philosopher and the problems, you know, with the appetitive part and trying to ascend and et cetera. It's amazing how much these flourish. But just to greet books in general, but particularly Plato and reading them in a group and iron, sharpening iron and allowing other people. We should plug it. You have a good article on Hipparchus on your substack as well.
- [67:05]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I do. Hipparchus in the possession of wisdom. So, yeah, this has been yet another excuse for me or an invitation for me to work out my thoughts in Writing. I mean, I think my advice to anybody is, you know, if, if you're struggling to articulate your, your thoughts on a dialogue or your really thoughts about anything, keep a diary, keep a journal, start a sub stack and, and work them out in writing. Because that allows not only you to see and hear your thoughts, but it exposes them to others so they can offer feedback, positive or negative. And so, yeah, it's that creative process of writing that I think really leads to wisdom.
- [67:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No. Very good. Any closing thoughts, comments, anything on the Hipparchus?
- [67:55]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Again, I would say these are short and they're considered minor dialogues, but they're not insignificant because I do think that they invite a more intimate relationship between the reader and Socrates, which I think in many respects is Plato's goal, that these aren't just philosophical treatises, but these are love letters to a man that he knew, a man that he loved very dearly, who was misunderstood. And so, yeah, I think that these are fun. They're short, but they're so incredibly deep. And so they do allow for repeated readings.
- [68:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very good. No, I'm very happy and grateful that you selected this dialogue. I appreciate you guiding us through it. Any thoughts though about like next week, Rival Lovers? Any preliminaries?
- [68:54]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, yeah, here. Okay. So in selecting these four dialogues, I really didn't think about how the dialogues have a kind of like inter dialogical connections where how are these dialogues talking to each other? And so, you know, in reading Hipparchus and in formulating my own ideas, I was very surprised that Rival Lovers seems to take up many of the same questions, namely knowledge, wisdom. Should we think of knowledge as a possession of sorts, as something that is tradable, a commodity, so to speak? Or is it something that's formative again, which is. Which is a theme that occurs through really all of Plato's dialogues. So yeah, it's a very short dialogue. The main question has to do with philosophy, which I think is very, very appropriate.
- [69:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Just like today with Hipparchus, I'm a first time reader of Rival Lovers, so I look forward to reading it this week and then discussing it next week on the podcast. Dr. Frank Grabowski will be back to lead us through that. We'll be joined by Dr. Brett Larson, who was also on our Introduction to Plato episode. Great mind. Very happy to invite him and have him back. Dr. Grouski, again, we always appreciate you joining us.
- [70:24]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
God bless. Deacon, thank you for having me.
- [70:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Not a problem. All right, everyone. Read, read. Rival Lovers read Hippias Minor, read the Ion. It's gonna be a good month of these kind of shorter, strange platonic dialogues. And go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram and Patreon. We've read on our Patreon page and we have all of the books we've covered in collections with our guides, articles, etc. A whole resource library. Go check it out and we will see you guys next week.