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Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we continue our journey through the short, strange and somewhat forgotten dialogues of Plato. And today we are discussing the lovers. It's operatic, it's erotic, it takes up the question what is philosophy? And deals deeply with the soul and its different loves and also the role of education. Socrates very much steps in as an analog to philosophy, to a love of wisdom that knows how to order the soul in a beautiful manner and and how to educate the young. It's a not often read dialogue, but it's certainly a dialogue that is worth your time and attention. And I'm very much in debt to Dr. Larson and also to Dr. Krabowski who joined us for our conversation today. And as an aside, I want to tell you that this week we are celebrating one year since we launched the Ascent, a sister company to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. It is a top 100 substack in faith and spirituality. It's been humbling to get that project off the ground as well. There's a lot of cross pollination between the Ascent substack and Ascend the Great Books Podcast, so if you haven't checked that out, I'll put it in the show notes. But please join us over there as we celebrate our one year anniversary. But today we are jumping into the short, strange and somewhat forgotten dialogue of The Lovers with Dr. Larson and Dr. Gobowski.
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Foreign
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A
welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father of five and serve as Chancellor General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. In my free time like to help people read the great books and that's the goal here on Ascend. We're weekly podcasts that helps guide you through the Great Books. Join us and we can be a small group for you on Plato particularly we have read first Alcibiades, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Meno, Gorgias. Last week we did the Hipparchus and we have Hippeis Minor next week and Ion after that. So many good things on Plato. Then we're gonna do some short stories and then we dive into a very long, slow but beneficial read of Plato's Republic. Go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook, Patreon and Instagram and also on Patreon. Just thank you to everyone who supports the podcast. It's 100% listener supported. If you support the podcast you get access to written guides. So we have question answer guides on these dialogues. We also have a community chat where you can chit Chat with other people who are reading Plato. So please come check out our Patreon and our library of guides on the great books. And visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for a reading schedule and more information. Okay, so today, today's a good day. We are continuing our studies of some of Plato's so called forgotten dialogues. Dr. Krabowski helped us pick a few out. They are fantastic. They're strange, they're short. They're very much worth your time. And today we are looking at the lovers. I am reading from the Pangle Little Pink book. A lot of people are also using Plato's complete works. Either one is fine. To guide us through this text, we have, returning to the podcast, Dr. Frank Grabowski, who helped us throughout the entire odyssey. And what are you? Diaconate candidate, third order Franciscan general, mentor to the podcast. Dr. Grabowski, how are you doing?
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B
I'm doing well, Deacon. Thanks again for the very generous introduction. So I try to wear many hats, perhaps too many. But I'm really looking forward to discussing with you and Dr. Larson this dialogue. Very short dialogue. It's very strange dialogue, I think, in many ways. So I don't think that we're going to arrive at any definite conclusions about what the author's trying to get at. But that's part of the fun, I think.
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A
Dr. Larson promised me that he was gonna get it all figured out, that he was just absolute clarity on Plato. So I'm very happy that Dr. Brett Larson has joined us again on the podcast. A member of our Sunday small group also teaches in our diaconate program now, which I'm very excited about. Dr. Larson serves as the assistant professor of Political science at Tulsa Community College. He holds his master and PhD from Catholic University of America. A PhD in politics. Dr. Larson, welcome back to the podcast.
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C
Thanks for having me be here. It's awesome to have another opportunity to talk about Plato and all things awesome with you. And I think you set me up for disappointing your listeners.
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A
Yeah, I am, I am not managing expectations well. Okay. Before we dive into this. Yeah, very strange short dialogue, which I very much appreciate. Dr. Larson, just kind of tell us a little bit about, like your scholarship and if you have a particular love of Plato.
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C
Yeah. So my focus is, broadly speaking, the history of political philosophy. So starting with Plato and going through, say, Nietzsche, maybe a little bit, maybe a little bit into the 20th century. John Rawls, for example. One of my particular areas that I enjoy focusing on within political philosophy is conservative, conservative political philosophy, which some listeners might kind of chuckle and say, isn't that kind of an oxymoron if you read, I don't know, Russell Kirk for example? But nonetheless, I'm trying to work on in my spare time, which seems to be shrinking all the time, somewhat of a more philosophical defense of conservatism, broadly understood. As for love of Plato, I really like Plato. I think it's really Plato who initially got me into political philosophy. I read the Republic and I must add, horribly misunderstood it in high school. But ever since then it started for me with Plato and I had some great professors, both in undergrad and grad school who really appreciated Plato and helped me to understand him better. And so I'm definitely excited to take a look at another dialogue of Plato, one that I've not looked at previously. So I guess you could say I'm sort of a first time reader in the sense that I read it like, I don't know, four times the last couple of days. But, you know, nonetheless.
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A
No, that's very good. I appreciate you playing your cards there. I am also a first time reader of this dialogue, So I blame Dr. Grabowski for getting us into this mess. But I, yeah, I find, I mean, there's lots of questions, I have lots of questions about the dialogue, which I think might be its point overall. So maybe just some preliminaries, we can start kind of working on the edges and kind of set up the conversation. So this dialogue, the lovers, what can we say about it? So first off, Socrates narrates it. It's only one of four dialogues that Socrates actually narrates. And the other thing is that we don't know who he's narrating to. We don't have a whole lot of context. Just like the Hipparchus, it just kind of starts so we don't know who he's actually speaking to, which robs us a little bit of understanding his rhetoric towards his interlocutor, if you will. What else can we say about it? It's another definitional dialogue. Last week with Hipparchus, we looked at what is love of gain. Now we're really looking at what is philosophy. And also like the Hipparchus, it's an aporetic title, Aporea. It ends in being perplexed. It's, you know, the Thomas in me wants to say the via negativa. We kind of learn what philosophy is not, but we don't necessarily learn what philosophy is. I mean, what are some things that we can say to kind of set up the conversation? The preliminaries of this dialogue.
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B
Well, Deacon, you and I, we were chit chatting before the recording and I think one of the questions that the reader has to ask himself is for whom is this dialogue intended? So there's, there is within the framework of the dialogue itself. So is he trying to appeal to the two young men, the so called rival lovers, or is he trying to appeal to the boys because they're also witnesses or spectators of this exchange. But then there's of course the interlocutor outside the scope of the dialogue, the person to whom the dialogue is being narrated. And so I think that this, this, this does raise this question, okay, who is this? What is Socrates really trying to do? Is he trying to convert the rival lovers to philosophy? Is he trying to convert the boys whom we meet early doing these little scientific drawings? Is he trying to convert them? Or is he trying to convert the, this unnamed interlocutor? One other thing I would mention too, and then I'll certainly hand it off to Dr. Larson, is the title itself is interesting. I've given this a lot of thought and I don't want to read too much into it, but the title of the dialogue is not Rival Lovers, but Lovers. The word rival lover does appear a couple of times. The word for lover is arastes. And deacon. I'm sure you may have something you want to say about that, but within like a Greek cultural context. But, but the one thing I wanted just to mention is that in, in Greek, so Greek has not only singular and plural, but they also have this number called dual. And so if someone wanted to refer to two eyes or two arms or two spheres or even two warriors, they would utilize this particular number in, in terms of picking out just how many things are being identified. What's interesting about this title is that the author doesn't use the dual, but uses the plural. So instead of saying arasta, he says arastai. And so that of course could mean the two rival lovers, the, as we'll see, the jock and the nerd, or the, you know, the athlete and the wise men. But it does raise the question whether there is perhaps a third lover in the midst. And that's what I would suggest is that perhaps Socrates is this in fact third rival lover who's trying to persuade the two boys or perhaps this unnamed interlocutor to the nobility of philosophy.
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C
I think one thing that kind of stood out to me in reading it is the anonymity or the lack of names of anyone except for Socrates. I mean the two lovers who are the, the interlocutors they aren't given names at all in this dialogue. One of them actually refers to Socrates as Socrates early on, but other than that, they don't really use names much. And then the two boys who are kind of the spectators, one of which is the, I guess, beloved of these two lovers, they are not named as well. And then I don't think anybody else is mentioned here. So I kind of wonder what is Plato trying to communicate by doing that? One interpretation I ran into is that he's attempting to say that philosophy is something that should engage pretty much anyone. So rather than name naming a specific person or group of people, he's just leaving the names off and saying, okay, anybody could sit in like the. The two beloved boys are, or could sit in and participate like the two lovers who are arguing to some extent with each other in that sense. And then I think there was a. Another interpretation that I heard. And I don't know, this one seems a little bit less, I don't know, less esoteric. But it's just that Socrates is trying to remove any particular personality from getting in the way of the actual discussion and getting us to think more about, okay, we're cheering for this particular person to win the dialogue, as opposed to just thinking through the questions that are presented. You know, what is philosophy, what is justice? And so on.
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A
Yeah, very good. Very good thoughts all around. Yeah, we have a dialogue called Lovers about philosophy, which is love of wisdom. So those two, I think, have to be connected. Socrates is also a very erotic figure. So we have Eros, as we know from the Symposium, this kind of like primal desire of the human soul to satiate beauty and be happy. And we see in the Symposium that we get kind of the normal normative understanding of Eros, which is. Which is very much like contextualized in a sexual component. But then we get an Eros that is much thicker, one that actually leads you up from lesser beauties to higher beauties. The beauty of, say, not just the appetitive with pleasure, but also the thematic with nobility, fame, glory, honor, but also then of the mind or the noetic of truth and wisdom. And so I'm very skeptical of the erotic context here. So as we've kind of sketched around, you know, the dramatic setting is that there's this grammar school of Dionysius in Athens. There's these elites kind of youths, and they're older male lovers, or it might be that only one of the boys, and that's why the rival lovers, so the two are competing after. After one of these younger boys. So typically, you know, a lot of, a lot of this setting is not palatable to us, but I think we have to take the context of Eros seriously and also how Socrates uses Eros for a culture that had this kind of pederastic element in it. And so the older boys are probably somewhere between 16 and 18. The younger boys are probably around 12. And so they're sitting in this grammar school and you have the older one supposedly vying for the favor of one of the younger ones. And the two younger ones are sitting here discussing astronomy. They're, they're making kind of ellipses with their hands. They're doing these things. They're kind of doing natural philosophy in a lot of ways. Yeah, two, two thoughts on this. One is that, you know, there is a theory that one of the younger boys is Plato. Plato had a teacher named Dionysus. Dionysius. And so maybe this is a story that Plato was borrowing. His stories always have a poetic veneer on top of them. But maybe this is a story of Socrates coming in that, that he's borrowing. Dr. Browski had had mentioned to me previously before the podcast started that Dionysius is sometimes just a stand in name for a teacher. So maybe it's again, just like you mentioned, Dr. Larson, it's, it's meant to be generic. Maybe that has something on the philosophy on the erotic side, the Eros. Yeah, it's. And we can let this develop as we discuss. But it seems to me that here, like what I want to do, because I will admit that the dialogue has me somewhat stung right by the torpedo fish. I'm somewhat operatic myself and perplexed about this dialogue, but I'm very skeptical. Not skeptical. I'm very suspicious of what's happening here because think about what we have. We have two older lovers, but one loves music and the other one loves athletics. A gymnast. Well, anyone who's read the Republic and will be reading the Republic this fall knows that music and athletics this like, you know, gymnastics are the two means by which the guardians of the polis, the city and speech are going to be educated. They're both very beneficial for the soul music, at least as they start music, is good for learning moderation. And obviously then athletics, the gymnasium is good for cultivating the Thumas, the thaumatic, this bravery, the spiritedness. And so we have those two components right there, which then those two, those types of education are both analogous to two parts of the soul. So the music helps with moderation, which helps then with the appetitive part of the soul that loves pleasure. And then you have the gymnast, the athlete, who represents the thematic, which is perfected by courage. And this then represents the spirited part of the soul that loves nobility, and then everything that's fecund from that, glory, honor, fame, et cetera. And into this context walks Socrates, who is going to represent true philosophy, this true love of wisdom. And they seem to all be vying then for the attention of the boys, the attention of the students. How. How am I going to be formed? So it's interesting to me that there's an image of the soul here, I think, in a lot of different ways. And actually, I think you could splice that different ways. I don't think that's the only way that you can try and find the tri. Part soul in this dialogue. But it's all set then, in an erotic setting, which I think education itself is deeply erotic of the soul trying to come and understand then what it is that it loves. To love pleasure, to love nobility, to love truth, and to love those in a virtuous way. The education of the soul, its formation is deeply erotic, that your eros has to be bridled and perfected and led towards proper beauties. So I'm very skeptical of the whole seen, if that makes sense, of what is that we're supposed to pull out of that. I. I find it. The theory that it might be Plato as a young boy, I think is absolutely fascinating. I mean, anything else, like on the preliminary, the setting, anything like that?
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B
Yeah. One more thing, just to add to the peculiarity of it all, is that this is taking place presumably in a grammar school, says Dionysius the grammarian, but they're doing astronomy. And so at least it raises in my mind the question as to whether there's a kind of misplacement here of what they're doing. Like they shouldn't really be doing astronomy at a school that is devoted to grammar. Astronomy is presumably something that comes after grammar. And so are we to then conclude that they're engaging in a form of, I don't know, intellectual hubris, that Socrates needs to rein them in somehow? But, I mean, this just goes, I think, to support your point, Deacon, which is that it's very odd beginning. And also to go back to Dr. Larson, the anonymity of it all. It's a very unsettling opening. And so I. This just, of course, I think, begins to snowball as the dialogue proceeds.
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C
Yeah, two quick thoughts here on that. So, one, if you look at kind of Plato here, if he's perhaps representing something in his biography, another way to kind of think of it is these two kind of rival lovers, they might represent kind of two sides of Plato as a youth. So Plato, when he was young, was known for, for his physical ability as a wrestler, but he was also known for his love of like, poetry and music. So you could think of these, these two different lovers as kind of like two sides of his personality. And you might even say perhaps in some sense they represent kind of body and soul, you know, so you have the, the athlete who trains the body and that seems to be pretty much all he does. And then you have the, whatever we're calling him the polymath or the, the lover of music. He seems to train more of the, the soul than the body. And he's accused of being kind of small and, you know, underfed and things like that by his, his rival lover there. And then the other thing I would mention here is there's a lot of references to ignorance or perhaps confusion at the beginning. So we start out, and this is just in like 132B, and there's two boys, they're talking about astronomy and geometry and things like that. And Socrates says, I couldn't quite make out what they were saying, or at least I couldn't hear much of what they're saying. And so then what he does is he turns to the, I guess the athlete and he's like, what are they talking about? Must be important. They're arguing about it, but I don't know what they're saying, you know. And then we have the, the athlete give his kind of harsh response. Ah, they're just talking about stuff up in the sky. And so that kind of sets the tone here. This lack of knowledge, this conflict, confusion. And then this theme kind of repeats itself, I think, a couple more times as well. There's the point, it's not far into the dialogue where Socrates essentially argues the, I guess the music loving lover into silence. And then there's kind of this situation where they're all stumped, they don't know what to say. Socrates says, well, should we ask some of the boys who are watching us? Maybe they'll have something to say. And so, yeah, this theme kind of keeps coming back in this dialogue. And at the end, of course, we don't get a definite answer as to what philosophy is. We just have the, well, we know it is not, or at least one thing that it is not.
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A
I think all very good points, I think, to stack on to Your comment and Dr. Grabowski's There's a strangeness to the dialogue. So why are the boys discussing this two? It seems to be, it is an elite school, I guess, per se, because they do seem to discuss something that is very impressive for their age. As they discuss these things, they are having recourse to natural philosophers. Also, why are the lovers there? Like the athlete, who very clearly doesn't seem to have any kind of like life of the mind? Noetic just dismisses philosophy. Why is he even in the school? Well, he's only in the school because the boys there he's attracted to. And so. And then also why does Socrates come in? So it's a very strange setting and it's not clear to me too, like, are these five people the only people here? Because I agree with Dr. Grabowski, who mentioned earlier that I. My intuition is that the. We don't know who the dialogue is being narrated to. But the purpose of the conversation in the dialogue, I think is for the benefit of the boys listening. Because once you say that they have an openness to philosophy because they are doing a preliminary to philosophy. They are, they have this natural philosophy. They're talking about the world around them and it's intelligible and you can understand it. There seems to be something nascent in them that can grow, that could be nurtured if nurtured correctly. So it seems like, you know, the athlete dismisses this at the beginning. The musician, the lover of music, this kind of pseudo philosopher has a very inadequate understanding of what philosophy is. And so I find it to be the boys that Socrates is actually trying to teach indirectly. Some somehow similar to when we read the Gorgias. I think a lot of what Socrates says, the callicles who was so recalcitrant to him, is actually for the benefit of Gorgias and for all the young men standing around listening. So one question I had is like, is this school full? Are there other people listening to this or is it just these five off in a corner? And it's really just for the benefit of the two boys?
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B
Well, I mean, just briefly, I think there are other people there because at the very end of the dialogue, in my translation, Socrates says the others approved of what I said. Now if it were just the boys, he would have just said the two boys approved. So this general reference to others suggests that there was a crowd of how many? But this is, this is the way that Socrates operates. Usually he starts talking to one person and then other people notice and they start gathering around.
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A
Okay, so what do we take then, of course, the kind of. The first definition. So we get this is at 132d or so.
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B
Well, can we back up a second? Because. Because the question that prompts. Or the. The first question raised ends up segueing into the what is philosophy? Question. The very first question to be raised is whether it's in my translation. It's at. Is philosophy admirable, Deacon? Brett, which. Which translations are you using? I know, Deacon, you're using the big pink. Yeah, the.
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A
The.
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B
The Pangle. What are you using, Brad? Are you using a big red?
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C
Yeah, I've got the complete works by John M. Cooper. So there's a variety of people who translated the different. The different dialogues in this one. I think it's mishling. Is the.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This particular one the translator of. Of your translation used, Deacon, is it admirable or is it noble?
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A
Well, hold on just for a second so I can figure out. So which question are you discussing? So at 132B, he says, you know, presumably it was something great and noble on which two have bestowed such great seriousness.
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B
Right. And then 133A is when it comes up.
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A
Yes. Okay. So there he says, I ask you the same question I asked him, whether it seems to you to be noble or not to philosophize.
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B
Right. So, yeah, that's the word kalan, and it can be translated as noble, admirable, or even beautiful. But as is so often the case, and we've seen this in the meno, where the dialogue opens abruptly with the question, is virtue teachable? And Socrates says, well, I can't tell you whether it's teachable or not teachable unless I first know what virtue is.
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C
Well, then he also wants to push on a distinction between what is admirable or noble and what is good. Now, I think it's interesting that when Socrates asks this lover of music about this, he says, well, do you think philosophy is admirable? And then he says, well, do you think it's also good? And he says, yeah, yeah, it's both. And there's not really any attempt by the lover to say, well, okay, when you say admirable or good, what do you mean by that? What's the difference there? He just kind of, I guess, assumes that there's a meaning that they both share. And I wonder if that's intended to show that this. This lover here is interacting with Socrates, or at least the one who does most of it. He doesn't really think very deeply about many of the things Socrates asks them about. He's very much on the surface, he has knowledge of presumably a lot of things, but he doesn't know any of them very deeply. And of course, that comes out more when we start talking about his first definition of philosophy and his first definition
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A
there, because he has, you know, what is philosophy or what is it to philosophize? That's down at 133C. And we get this definition. It's always learning to learn many things. I asked him whether he held philosophy to be much learning, and he said certainly so is the first definition of philosophy. Is that what you take it to be, Brett, that it's this polymath? It's just that you. The philosopher just knows a lot of stuff. It's just constant learning. That's the. To be a lover of wisdom is just to be a forever student.
- [25:09]
C
Yeah, I take that to be his. His general meaning. And I think that's bolstered kind of when we talk about the second definition as well, of the pentathlete. But yeah, it seems like it's okay, I know something about poetry and music. But then he expands it beyond that. It's also knowing something about various crafts or a techne, if you will, here, like being a doctor or a ship's pilot. So if I just know a lot about that, or I should say I know something about a lot of these things. I know more than like the average person who doesn't practice these crafts would. But I don't necessarily know more than a professional who actually practice these crafts would. That would qualify me as a philosopher in the mind of this liberal learning lover or whatever. Whatever we're calling him.
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B
Right. And the knowledge in what sense too? So I'm glad. I mean, thanks for that, Brett. Yeah. Knowledge in what sense? I. I'm reminded, Deacon, of our conversation last week about Hipparchus, where knowledge seems to take the form as a. As a kind of possession or a commodity. Right. So here it's just trying to accumulate or to assemble this encyclopedic understanding of things. Things. But then, as we'll soon find out, we've got these two different ways of understanding knowledge. Knowledge as a kind of possession and knowledge that someone become. So there's this formative understanding of knowledge. And so I think what Dr. Larson was getting at is absolutely true, that knowledge here is understood as a kind of possess possession and the more of it, the better.
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A
Okay, so that's a great segue because my understanding then is that this gets into this analogy between philosophy and the Athlete. And so this gets into, he says, down at 133E. Do you hold that much? Exercising is love of athletics. So philosophy is just love of learning. So isn't athletics then just love of exercising? And you just do it as much as you can? So this is interesting. I mean, I mean, I don't know if we, if we track this to be a fair analogy, but you know, what's his point here? His point here is that if you, if you just exercise, because you just love exercising, you do it all the time, you actually wear the body out. That's not the point of exercising. And we get this word which I think is important, which is a measured amount. That's the word we keep using. Is it a measured amount? And that's around 1 34C, I believe, or B, that he introduces that. And measured there is like proportionate. Is it a proportionate amount? And so we get this analogy to the athlete of like, well, isn't it better to then work out proportionate to what you should and then you grow and you don't strain the body. Is that not then analogous to the mind itself?
- [27:51]
B
Yeah, and this is very consistent with the Greek understanding of virtue as being a kind of mean or a balance between these two extremes of too much and too little. Yeah, our translation, Dr. Larson and I, the one we're using, translates it as moderate. But it's this, the, the sense is the same that it's something that you don't want to do too much of because it could potentially be detrimental.
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C
So I guess the question that came up for me when reading through this is whether or not it's a good analogy to go from say, things that are good for the body to things that are good for the soul in this case, because Socrates kind of just makes that leap there. He says, all right, so when it comes to things like food and drink and exercise, moderation makes a lot of sense for the body. And I think that's probably pretty self evidently true. But when you get to the question of, okay, what about something like knowledge or learning, is that really analogous there? Like, would we say that the person who has the best properly formed intellect or mind, or maybe we say soul in this case here. Would we say that is the person who knows moderate amounts of things? Because that's what they ultimately argue to. Well, actually, I should rephrase that differently. They don't argue to it, they just agree to it. There's like no actual explanation of why the, the lover just accepts this. Like Socrates is just asking a Question. Socrates is not making an assertion here. He's just saying, tell me, do you think it's the case that moderate amounts of. Of learning would be appropriate for the soul? And he goes, yeah, of course. That makes sense there.
- [29:29]
B
Well, the lover accepts it because he's bullied into it. Socrates actually initially appeals to the athlete and gets the athlete to agree that, yes, it is indeed moderate exercise. And so when he eventually turns back to the musician, what the musician says is interesting. Let me see if I could find it. Give me a second here. Right around line 134C in my translation, the musician says, with him, I would very happily fight it out. And I'm sure that I would be able to support the claim I made even if my position were far weaker than it is. For he's no competition, but there's no need to compete with you about my opinion. So he completely collapses or folds to Socrates. Right? I mean, so he's. He's willing to put up a fight with this other guy because they're rival lovers, but he doesn't see Socrates as competition, so he's willing to backpedal.
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C
Yeah, and I think that says something interesting about him. Is his goal in this conversation to seek the truth of the matter about philosophy, or is his goal to one up his competition or to, as he suggests, philosophy's purpose a little bit later on, it's to gain the appearance of wisdom or perhaps fame or just maybe to have all the things that you'd want a free man to have, which in those days an aristocrat in Athens would want to have political power and influence and things like that.
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A
I want to go back to Dr. Larson's point because I think, I think this is, this is certainly pushed by the dialogue itself. Is then what is the measured amount for the soul? So for the body, it seems to be, oh, okay, well, if you, if you work out too much, then you'll get fatigued, you could get injured, you could do these things. The body provides a certain measured amount. But this is what I think that we're missing in this. And he, I mean, he basically asked them this question, not necessarily what is the measure, but who could tell us the measured amount? Because in certain measurements, like say, the farmer, the athlete, et cetera, the expert could tell us this. Well, who could tell us the measured amount of the soul of learning? And I think this is really fascinating because this, I think this is very telling for our own age as well, of, like, what actually constitutes education. And we typically tend to view education as a Data transfer. I'm educated because I know a lot of things, and particularly I've been trained to do something. We have a very economic, capitalistic understanding of education. I think then here, and you see, like, things like classical education pushing back on this. But I think the question then is, well, what is the standard of education? What does it actually mean to be educated? Or we could say another way, what is the measured amount? Like, what is it that actually sets the standard by which one becomes educated and is considered educated? And that's what I find him to be asking here, which they really just can't. They don't have the capacity to answer is, what is the measured amount of the soul? But again, measured there can't be seen as like an argument of volume, but rather of, like, proportionality, structure and order. Like, what is the ordered way by which the soul comes to know things?
- [32:42]
C
Yeah, and we don't really get a clear answer in this text, but if you think to say, I don't know the Republic, you look at the education the philosopher goes through, and as you mentioned earlier, it does start with things like music and poetry and literature and gymnastics. But then it ascends up through studies like geometry, astronomy, let's see, harmonics is another one, and eventually to dialectics. And it's once you get past that, you are then able to attain what Plato thinks is true knowledge, which is knowledge of the forms, these eternal, unchanging ideas that are there. So perhaps, maybe that's the answer to your question is like, okay, what is this kind of structure, if you will, this kind of measure of learning and knowledge? Well, perhaps it's the philosopher described in, say, the Republic and elsewhere in Plato's works. And so that's kind of what's missing, I guess you could say, in this conversation. The lover of music has absolutely no clue that this could be a possibility. So hence he just falls silent when he's asked, who would you look to? Who would you ask about this? And I think Plato of the Republic would say, well, the answer would be the philosopher. You know, it's the person who has gone through that, you know, that ascension upward to eventually seeing the forms, things like the form of, you know, goodness and beauty and truth and so on.
- [34:08]
A
Okay, so our lover of music seems to think that philosophy is basically polymathy, right? It's. It's knowing many things. So someone explained to me then this interesting example that Socrates gives of the athlete, the penta athletes who compete in many different things. What's he trying to do here?
- [34:26]
C
Well, Pentathlete was somebody who would have participated in something called a pentathlon. So I guess you could maybe say it's sort of analogous to what we now call a triathlon, but it's basically a competition. It has five different competitive events in them. And I wrote this down somewhere here, but it's things like a javelin throwing, discus throwing, there's a short foot race, there's wrestling, and I think I'm missing the fifth one. But there's basically five separate events. And so a pentathlete was somebody who would compete in all of these. Now, in comparison with someone who specialized in one of those particular competitions, like a wrestler, the pent athlete wasn't as good as the wrestler. But if the wrestler competed in all five of these, the pentathlete would easily win simply because he was better at the other four of these competitions than the wrestler was. So that. That's the rough idea behind a pentathlete. You could almost say it's kind of like a. A polymath for athletics as opposed to like a, you know, polymath for learning stuff about, like, philosophy and music and literature and so forth.
- [35:32]
B
And to answer your question, Deacon, based on what Dr. Larson just said, the point of introducing this example of the pentathlete is to illustrate that the philosopher
- [35:43]
A
isn't really a useful person.
- [35:46]
B
Because if you were running a relay race, you would select a bunch of runners, right? Or, you know, if you were having some sort of archery competition that required multiple archers, you would pick the archers. You wouldn't pick the person who was good at a lot of things, a jack of all trades, but master of none, you would pick the master. And so this is all, then to illustrate, back to the philosopher this point that, well, if philosophy is polymathy, then you wouldn't call upon the philosopher if you ever had a problem, if you were sick, if your house was falling apart, if you needed to plant a garden, you would. You would hire a farmer, or you would hire a carpenter, or you would hire a doctor. You wouldn't call upon the philosopher because the philosopher is a rather pointless person.
- [36:33]
A
Yeah. So the philosopher in that setting is always second best, which means that he's not very useful.
- [36:39]
B
And the.
- [36:39]
A
The, as Dr. Larson said, yeah, the penta athlete does. Wrestling, jumping, running, throwing discus and boxing are the. The five that they do. So this pushes back then against the. The polymathy, because if the philosopher just knows a little bit about a lot, he's some kind of like a Renaissance man, then he's never Actually useful, you would never call him if you're sick, you would call the doctor. You don't call the philosopher. If you need a chair, you call the carpenter. You don't call the philosopher, even though the philosopher might know many different things. And then this leads into the dialogue is around 136e. This leads then into kind of a conversation between usefulness, goodness and self knowledge. Does anyone want to take this on? Like how does it, what is the role of usefulness here and how's that connected to like the good?
- [37:26]
C
Well, in this case here, Socrates asks the polymath if he thinks that good people are useful people and then if bad people are useless people. And then of course, kind of like earlier when, when he's being asked about is philosophy admirable, is it good, is it both or just one of them, he just very quickly says yes, of course, of course good people are useful, bad people are useless here. And what I think was again struck me about this is how little he dives into what goodness means, badness and usefulness. And then of course uselessness. Like you can think of all sorts of examples of what usefulness might be like you could be useful as a doctor because you're good at curing disease, but you could also be very useful as like a ship pilot. And Socrates brings up these examples, but that's not the whole range of usefulness. Like usefulness could also be something like the ability to speak well in front of an audience, which I think is kind of what the polymath is sort of getting at here by philosophy. What I can do as a philosopher is I know more than my audience does, even though less than a professional does. And I can act like I'm wise, I can appear to know what I'm talking about and I can convince them to do what I want them to do. And again, this would be really useful for somebody who was living in Athens and the aristocracy at that time there. So anyways, usefulness has kind of a broad range, but it's not really explored. And then kind the same for goodness. I mean, somebody could be good in the sense of hey, I'm a good doctor. But someone could also be good in the sense of hey, I'm a, you know, I'm a virtuous person because I have moderation or courage or something like that. Or maybe it's I'm a good soldier. So yeah, none of that's explored here. But the idea is that once he accepts the premise that hey, good people are useful, bad people are useless, then he's lost the argument. Because then Socrates can come back and say, well, wait a minute. At least in comparison with like a skilled craftsman, like a doctor or ship pilot, philosophers are really useless because they don't know as much as they do here.
- [39:40]
A
Yeah, it's very interesting to me that Socrates the philosopher is like calling into question whether his love of wisdom is noble, good or useful. So he has someone who actually says, yes, I like philosophy, philosophy is good. And then Socrates is able to somewhat untie, you know, his kind of false definition, because there's a really good summary in the text at 137A, which is the pivot, Dr. Larson, that you were just talking about. Socrates says, you know, we agreed that philosophy is noble, that we ourselves are philosophers, that philosophers are good and good are useful and the wicked useless. Again, we agree that philosophers are useless as long as there are craftsmen, but there are always craftsmen. Haven't these things been agreed upon? Yes. So then it leads to the conclusion that then philosophers are wicked because they are useless and therefore they're not good or noble themselves. And this leads into, I mean, what is his pivot here? So then he says, our next question is, this is at 137C, but we shall know with more certainty whether what I say is true. If you answer this, who are those who know how to punish horses correctly? Is it those who make them best or others? What is, what's the pivot that he does here? Like, what is he trying to parse out? I mean, I love in dialogues where he asks us some, like, random question, and, you know, there's hopefully some kind of brilliance behind it. But why are we talking about punishing horses now?
- [41:11]
C
Well, I think at least part of this here is he wants to lead into a discussion of. Of who is most qualified to rule. And this would have been really pertinent for the lovers here, because these are members of the aristocracy who presumably want to rule. And so he's eventually going to get to the conclusion that the polymath's definition of philosophy makes him completely unqualified to rule. Not just to rule like the city of Athens, but also to rule his own household, his own slaves, and just any other ruling function that he would have. So I think that's kind of the pivot he's doing. He's asking that question because he's going to set him up for yet another
- [41:54]
B
slam and to govern himself too. I think that's very important. Yeah, I mean, because what Socrates has done here is he's. He's performed A reductio on this initial definition of philosophy as a kind of polymathy. The musician has proven himself to be somebody who can, who is ready to give answers, but who's incapable of raising questions. And Dr. Larson, that gets to your point, which is, well, why doesn't he. Why does the musician pause and ask Socrates, well, what do you mean by good? What do you mean by useful? But when you're a know it all, or when you're representative of a know it all, you always have a ready answer, but you're never in a position to admit that perhaps you don't know what you think you know. And again, I think this is all for the benefit of the two young boys. And to get back to Deacon's question too is I wonder, so these two young boys initially were performing these exercises in astronomy. And not to say that these are worthless endeavors or that they're not important, but we know that Socrates love is within the political and the moral domain. And as I was mentioning to Deacon for the podcast, there's Socrates himself admits as a young man to have dabbled in, in these natural sciences. We read about this in the Phaedo where he says when he was younger he in fact studied Anaxagoras, but he was disappointed because all that Anaxagoras spoke of was mind and he really wasn't able to give an adequate explanation of cause. And this leads to Socrates so called second sailing. And so I wonder if this is all connected, whether he's trying not to necessarily to steer these young men away from the natural sciences, but to show them that there's something of a far greater existential importance than just drawing circles in the dirt that has to do with governing the home, governing the state, but also governing the self.
- [43:55]
C
Yeah. And I think Socrates elsewhere, not in this particular dialogue, would like to take things like geometry and arithmetic and astronomy and other similar natural philosophy or natural sciences and try to put them in the service of helping us to move towards true knowledge, which is knowledge of the Forbes there. Now I think another thing that's kind of interesting is so you have these younger boys, I think Deacon, you'd speculated there was somewhere around what, 12 or so towards the beginning here they're dabbling in things like astronomy and geometry at this age. Now Plato says the correct order of education, at least in Republic, is you wouldn't get to that till you're about 30 to 35 somewhere in that area. So they're doing it less than half the age they're supposed to. So in some Sense there's a wrong order going on. And I think his fear in that case is that if you study these subjects in the wrong order, you do. Don't start with, you know, forming the soul and the body through physical training, music, literature and whatnot. These could be very counterproductive. And perhaps we're seeing that play out in the discussion with the Polymath who's, as Dr. Grabrowski just pointed out, he doesn't ask any questions. He thinks he knows everything. He clearly doesn't know much of anything. And so as a result, he has this really bad view of philosophy and he ends up looking really ignorant at the end of the dialogue. At the end, the conclusion is that. And the lover of liberal studies or music, he's ashamed of his views, he falls silent, he has nothing to say.
- [45:35]
A
Yeah, I wonder a few thoughts there. I wonder if the boys practicing, because he's very specific about what they are doing, if that's supposed to show a certain disorder in their education. I wonder if then that is linked to the argument about the measure of things, that they don't understand the measure of things. Because I think you would argue that the boys like. Why is he focused on the boys? Well, because they clearly have, in the best sense of the word, an erotic desire for truth. They're sitting here discussing deep things, beautiful things about the world around them. The world's intelligible, they can know astronomy, they can know wonderful things, wonder about the world. So they seem to have that erotic appetite. But we could ask, is it measured? Is it what they're supposed to be doing? And we could even ask then I think in this section particularly, do they have self knowledge of what they're doing? Do they see themselves as practicing natural philosophy? Or are they just. Is it. You know, we might talk about the sin of curiosity, of just like this, just interest, these random kind of amalgamation of interests and things. But your education is not ordered, it's not structured. So I wonder too if there's a way to link the beginning of the text within what is said here. And that would be incredibly Platonic, because we see this in dialogues where the opening setting, et cetera, is showing you something and you don't get the commentary on it till later on. You really have to reread, then understand what is going on. Because this right here in the dialogue, in my opinion, we have a lot of vibes that resonate with first Alcibiades, where Socrates is trying to get young Alcibiades to understand what it means to know thyself if and he wants you similarly, what's he wants to do? He wants to govern the city. He wants to go and give a speech about what justice is because he can be a good ruler. And all of a sudden when he realizes he doesn't actually know anything. I think that's what we're seeing in Socrates's leading of the older, the older youths, the lovers is the beloved are starting to understand that they don't really know anything either, but neither do their lovers. And that's really fascinating because that Dr. Grabowski is very analogous to Hipparchus last week, where it's Socrates, Socrates. There's a Diotima in the Symposium makes this argument where she basically uses pederasty as an analogy to education. What's a true love of the soul? Right? Not this pederastic sexual body concept that we have, but what would be a true love of the youth, a true love of the soul. And last week in Hipparchus we saw like, okay, well, Hipparchus was assassinated because he, the young boy favored Hipparchus and lost interest in these other so called lovers. But why did he become interested in Hipparchus? Well, because Hipparchus was trying to share wisdom. He loved truth. He's erecting these herms with these quotes on them and things like this. So I wonder too, like, you know, who are the boys? This goes back to Dr. Hrabowski's preliminary question. Who are the boys falling in love with here? I think they're falling in love with Socrates. And I don't mean that in a sexual manner. I mean that their wonder, their. Their actual erotic appetite for truth is being quenched by someone who actually knows what they're talking about. And I, so I wanted going back to like, who are the lovers, plural? I think there's a great thing here that Socrates, as someone who is quote unquote, skilled in erotics, as the Symposium tells us, is becoming the lover of the boys and practicing a true pedagogy on them, which is to lead them towards what is true, good and beautiful.
- [49:04]
C
Yeah, well, I think you could find some textual support for that if you go to. It's basically the last sentence of the dialogue. It says, when I, Socrates said this, the wise fellow was ashamed at what he'd said before and fell silent. Well, I. The unlearned ones said that I was right and the others, which certainly includes the young boys, as Dr. Grabowski mentioned, it likely includes more people than that approved of what I'd said. So you kind of see the focus is shifting Here from. Okay, you have these two lovers who are kind of battling it out. And I forget where exactly it is in the dialogue. It's earlier on. It's when the athlete and the polybath are trading barbs. And. And so the. The two young boys, they stop discussing geometry and astronomy. They start listening. And then at one point, they start laughing with one of them, you know, lands a rhetorical blow. Well, at this point, we see that the two rival lovers have become silent and the focus has shifted from what they're saying to what Socrates is saying and its approval of what Socrates has said.
- [50:11]
B
And just to tag. Just to piggyback on what you said, Dr. Larsen, I love what you said earlier, how these two that. Well, the two rival lovers, the. The athlete. Right. The jock and the nerd, the musician, that they. They do sort of represent, in a way, body and soul. But I think, like, one of the takeaways from what you just said is that the philosophical act isn't just a mental act or an intellectual act. It's very much a physical act. Right. So how does. Because he. He elicits a physical reaction from the two boys, right? They begin to laugh. And then there's the one moment where the musician blushes when the athlete gets one up on him. And that's something that comes across vividly in all of Plato's dialogues, because these dialogues aren't just essays, but they're these dramatic reenactments. And so it shows us that, yeah, that there's a real rhetorical aspect to philosophy, that it isn't just drawings in the dirt, just what these boys are doing at the beginning, but it is this erotic exchange where you elicit real emotional responses from your interlocutor.
- [51:21]
A
And I want to go back to this comment at 1:37e. He says, if then one were a horse and were ignorant of the good and wicked horses, would one also be ignorant of oneself of what sort one is? And it goes down to this at 138A. What then? When one who is a human being is ignorant of good and evil human beings, isn't he ignorant of himself as to whether he is good or evil, since he is himself also a human being?
- [51:53]
B
There's your first Alcibiades.
- [51:55]
A
Yeah, I mean, so this is. This is a. Know thyself. This is. And this is also teleology. So how can you judge whether a thing is good or bad unless you know its purpose? You can't do this. So this is the pruning knife at the beginning of the Republic Can a knife be good or bad? Yes. Okay, well then what constitutes a good knife? Well, I know that the purpose of the knife is to cut. Therefore a good knife has to be sharp and a bad knife would be dull. And then I also know, according to the telos, the purpose of the knife. I know what is good or bad for that knife itself. Does it help it accomplish its purpose? So I would know that the wedding stone is good for the knife. And I would know that, you know, dragging it on the concrete or whatever would be bad because it would dull it. And so here, what's really fascinating is for him, there's two things that are really interesting. One is when you ask the questions of humanity, it shows them that you're actually ignorant of yourself. You lack a self knowledge, which I think is a fantastic point. How can you start to think you can rule others if you cannot rule yourself? You don't even know what it means to be a good or bad you, much less other persons. Two, you know, this is kind of set in the context of justice and political rule. So I think you could ask a lot of questions of, well, what does it mean then to be able to, you know, punish or improve a horse? Is he kind of saying that, you know, is the horse punished for its own sake or for the sake of the owner, the person that's like training it. And so I think you could have. This is where. This is why I think it's also in this text. So this is a political philosophy. Where does the political philosophy come in? Well, philosophy also has to be useful, and it's useful particularly for the governance of the polis, according to wisdom. We think of Hipparchus last week as well. And so here it's like, okay, I'm governing people. Do I govern people like horses? And I punish them and improve them for really my sake? I'm the owner and, you know, the elite, and I punish and rule people according to what is beneficial to me. That would, I think, be somewhat of a negative read there. I think another read could be that the good owner, the good master, the true horseman, is really actually just punishing and, you know, benefiting the horse according to the horse's own teleology of hoarseness. And that happens to also be a benefit to the owner. Right? The owner actually is benefited when the horse is perfected in its own hoarseness. Is that not what the ruler is supposed to do, is help people be perfected in their own teleology, their own. What it means to be human. And just because we Read the Hipparchus last week, it's still on my mind. You know, the Hipparchus, even in his own kind of nascent way, try and do this by erecting, you know, these herms around the city with noble, wise sayings that he ascribes to himself. So he's not perfect, but he's trying to diffuse that wisdom. So I think there is a strong political, philosophical bent here into the text that again isn't really answered, but I think it does, like for Stalcibiades, start to invite these young men, particularly the beloved, that knowledge and wisdom really begins with knowing thyself. That's where the self rule has to start first. Soul craft comes before statecraft and I think that's what these young individuals have to understand.
- [54:59]
B
You know, gentlemen. There's always this tension though in the dialogues where Socrates emphasizes the importance of the polis and one's relationship to the polis. But then very explicitly in the apology, says that one should not live a public life because it will ultimately corrupt you. And so he always has recourse to these arguments that lay great emphasis on political philosophy and the importance of a well ordered state and one's place in this well ordered state. But then there is this reluctance at least for Socrates to engage in political discourse knowing full well what that could potentially do to him.
- [55:40]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a theme that really has played out a lot in the Republic as well too, where he basically says that if a just man enters politics, he won't be willing to do all the unjust things that his peers want to do, and he'll be like a man thrown among wild beasts and he'll get torn to shreds by them. And so of course he'll reckon this all up and he'll, he'll shelter himself under a building from a storm and stay out of it. But on the flip side, he also tells us that it's highly unlikely that a person would become an excellent individual like the philosopher is, unless that person grows up in a just political society and has the benefit of the educational system of that society as well too. So he likens the just person coming into existence in an unjust society kind of like to divine intervention or, or some type of miracle. This sets. And of course, you know, Socrates talks about, he has this, this daemon that sometimes tells him to not do certain things. So perhaps you could read that as kind of like a form of divine intervention in Socrates own life that kind of helped him grow up in a society that clearly, according To Plato at least, was not just in the sense that he understands it, but yet Socrates somehow is able to. To attain a much higher degree of justice than that his contemporaries.
- [57:03]
A
Very good. Yeah. And just the comment on the end of the dialogue, I mean, it's already kind of been sketched, but, you know, it has that aporia that to be perplexed. And those who are kind of new to Plato, maybe a lot of people are joining us coming off the Odyssey, you know, the aperia is not bad. I think we have to understand that a lot of moving towards the truth is actually an unlearning. You have to unlearn what you think you know. And so a lot of the dialogues do start with Socrates tying people in knots, perplexing them. They know, they think they know. Like the musician here, the lover, the nerd. As Dr. Hrabowski said, you know, the philosophy can't be polymathy. It doesn't make any sense. And that's how the dialogue ends. Like that's our overarching kind of definition, is it? Just knowing a bunch of things? No. Well, what is it? Well, we don't get a positive, we only get a negative. But even like I mentioned earlier, for St. Thomas Aquinas, the via negativa, the way of the negative, is a path to true knowledge. To learn what something is not, is actually a step towards wisdom. I think here, the more I've contemplated this and listened to both of you, which I deeply appreciate. This dialogue, which seems to be somewhat, very simple on its face, short, strange, forgotten, whatever you want to say, seems to be a very good little appetizer for the Republic. A lot of the questions that are brought up here, and I think some of the images of the soul that are very subtle that Plato's playing with in this dialogue, the music, the gymnastics, the erotics, like the question of what is philosophy. A lot of these are kind of a foreshadowing or a foretaste of the conversations we get in the Republic. But then they take on a much more robust and dare I say, positive reading. So any other kind of final thoughts on the dialogue as a whole or the conclusion here at the end?
- [58:44]
B
I would just make one brief comment, Jens, and that is these short dialogues. Obviously there are other, you might say, more insignificant, more important, more pressing dialogues that people who are approaching Plato for the first time should expose themselves to. You know, obviously Republic, that's a huge mountain to climb. But, you know, apology, Euthyphro, Crito. I wouldn't necessarily recommend they begin with rival lovers but for those who have read those other dialogues and who still have this thirst for Plato, Hipparchus, rival lovers, as we'll discuss next week, Hippias Minor, and then Ion, I mean, these are not to be overlooked. They are short, but they are just so rich with these savory philosophical bits.
- [59:33]
A
All right. And I appreciate it. I appreciate both of you deeply. I do want to tell everyone that if you are new to Plato or you just need a refresher, we did a whole introduction to Plato. Like, how do I read Plato? What should I know before I study him? And. And actually, both Dr. Grabowski and Dr. Larson are on that podcast. So that is very, very helpful if you're kind of new to platonic readings. So, Dr. Grabowski, thank you so much as always, for joining us. We look forward to you being with us next week. Remind us where people can find out more about you and your work.
- [60:02]
B
Yeah, so I've got a little substack that I started a couple of months ago called the Porch and the Altar. I spent the last few months writing little articles on Plato, but recently I've turned my attention to Russian literature, so I've got a couple of articles up on Tolstoy's death of Ivan Ilyich and Father Sergius. And so next week, I'll have one coming out on Kafka and Morgue's the Immortal. So, yeah, just dipping my toe into some of the short stories before I reach out into something more significant, like
- [60:35]
A
Moby Dick, you know? Very Good. All right, Dr. Larson, again, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Dr. Larson's actually going to join us next week week for Hippeus Minor. So we deeply appreciate it. We'll welcome him back to the podcast. Do you have a secret substack or anything? Or how do people find out more about you and your work?
- [60:51]
C
I'm pretty much invisible. I have about zero online presence, and that is by design. But if you actually want to encounter me, you can stop by Tulsa Community College. I'm usually on the west campus. Sit in on one of my classes or something.
- [61:05]
B
Or join the Diagnostic formation program.
- [61:08]
C
Yeah, that's true. Sometimes teaching that, I think, what am I doing next? I think it's Hobbs and Locke, I'd like to say in October.
- [61:16]
A
That's right. And that makes it even. We're even more grateful for you to come on the podcast that you leave your life of online secrecy and come and join us for a public discussion on Plato. So now we are deeply appreciative. All right. Everyone, I hope you enjoyed this conversation on the Lovers. Again, short, strange but beautiful dialogue. Next week we are discussing Hippeis Minor. Another short dialogue, so not forgotten because we're bringing it back. But read it and come join the conversation next week. In the meantime, go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook, Patreon and Instagram and we will see you next week.