Reza Negarestani/Audio/Seminars/The New Centre for Research & Practice/Plato, a Reality Game in Four Levels/Plato, a Reality Game in Four Levels (Session 1).mp3
Hello and welcome to the first session of Play-Doh a Reality Game in Four Levels with Reza Negrestani. Thanks Reza for teaching the class. This is going to be an eight session course. And I'm going to pass the mic off to Reza right now. Thank you so much. Okay, as usual, the first session is the first couple of sessions will be just introductory material no nitty-gritty philosophical stuff before I start asking you why you
are actually interested in this course because nobody should be actually at this time interest be interested in Plato I would like to just a little bit talk about Plato and what I'm going to do. So obviously, simply the name Plato is usually equated with the concept of philosophy, with the concept of philosophy as something that has only history and no nature. And we will talk about this. Philosophy as something that has only history and no nature whatsoever. And Plato represents this, Plato encapsulates
this. But from a historical perspective, I would like to make this claim that Plato absolutely represents what is the mightiest in philosophy, probably the only person can ever get to the same level of Plato in the history of philosophy is Hegel. And of course they have something in common. They are arch-idealists. They believe only in the ideal domain of thought, without which nothing can be said about anything. And
And for Plato this is even more prominent than Hegel, I would say, because the realm of ideas, the realm of forms, which we'll talk about in that arena forms, is something that posits the existence of things, posits being. Simply there is no being, there is no existence ever without the formal domain of ideas. So how can this be? I mean that obviously from a realist perspective sounds such a preposterous, dubious claim.
But we are going to talk about this, that it is in fact the case, and how Plato formulates it is absolutely sound and valid. So we will start, but before moving forward, another thing that I wanted to talk about is that why do we need to really look at Plato other than he represents one of the mightiest moments in philosophy, if not the mightiest? It's because I think other than the significance we'll talk about, and that significance is
the idea that Plato is the first philosopher of intelligence, is the first philosopher of intelligence. Other than that is because I think this idea that we should read philosophy according to the contemporary moment, the Hegelian thesis of how to read philosophy, how to do the practice of philosophy, can be applied to Plato. There are so many interpretations of Plato in the history of philosophy, from Aristotle
to no Platonists, then late Scholastics, and then in moderns, Kant, Hegel, and then later on. And all of these interpretations give one aspect of Plato and not the other one. They usually tend to either emphasize on the ontological aspects of Plato's project or epistemological aspects of Plato's project or the so-called axiological, namely value-laden, ethical aspects of Plato's project.
When you read Plato, you see that you can't really separate these issues from one another, epistemological, ontological, axiological, that they are part of the same woof and yarn, of the same fabric. Now, apart from the fact that Plato is essentially, from a philosophical perspective, is the first
system maker in the sense that I mentioned. He creates, usually his philosophy is a very dense fabric in which different issues are tied together and it's really, really hard to separate out and single out one, to overemphasize one over another. Other than that, another Another interesting aspect of Plato's dialogues is that they are rife with ambiguities. They are extremely ambivalent, and this ambivalency, this ambiguity is completely, basically,
He uses, he injects this ambivalence into his texts. And this is also responsible for these diverse interpretations of Plato that can absolutely diverge from one another very drastically. So you get, for example, from a no-Platonistic school, Plato comes off as this Christian fanatic, whereas in Tubinjin's school he comes as this mysterious person who thinks
that humans can rise to the status of gods. Or then you get, for example, in 20th century the interpretation of people like Sellars or Blastos who talk about these deep epistemological problems inside Plato's project that are directly connected to some sort of a cosmological system making, what is usually known as demiurgic
thought. What is demiurgic? Demiurgic is a craftsman. It's the idea that mind crafts itself. Mind is the only object that can craft itself. And from a no-Platonistic perspective, for example, this craftsmanship, this demiurgic aspect of mind is usually attributed first and foremost to God. God is the creator of its own mind. But for people like Selares and Blastus and Tobinjan School, no. In fact, they try to show that human mind has the capacity to craft itself and rise to the status of gods, and by gods we do not mean the Christian god, the monotheistic god,
but simply a principle, a principle of intelligence, the so-called nos intellect. So there is this problem of ambivalence, and this ambivalence coming from the structure of the dialoguing itself. In the sense that when you read the dialogues, the first thing that you notice is that Plato never talks about anything. There is virtually no instance that Plato comes to the dialogues and says something. So simply we do not have something called philosophy of Plato.
We have Platonic philosophy, but we do not have, like other philosophers, philosophy of Deleuze, philosophy of Hegel, philosophy of Kant, so on and so forth. We do not have philosophy of Plato, because Plato never says anything. Anything that he says is neither from the mouth of Socrates nor his adversaries, but simply the integration of these voices together that creates a fundamental ambivalence as what he exactly wants to talk about. So he is essentially a philosopher that he, and this is documented in his so-called, I
forgot the name of it exactly, it's the only time that Plato talks about his philosophy, it's outside of dialogue, it's a letter actually, where he believes that philosophy is something that cannot be written. What does this mean, philosophy cannot be written? Philosophy cannot be turned into treatises. Because philosophy is a dynamics, is a dynamics that only arises from the interaction of thinking subjects. Philosophy, as a program of thinking, does not belong to thinkers, to philosophers. And that's why Plato always tries to withdraw himself as much as he can from how the dialogue
moves forward. And instead, emphasize on the interplay between these players in the dialogues whose interaction is exactly what philosophy is. So philosophy is understood always as a dynamics for Plato, as an interaction, as a dialogue, as a general dialogue, as a game, as a game that assembles itself from its participants, from its interacting participants. And obviously for this reason, from the perspective of us, the students of philosophy, who are So acquainted with the idea that philosophy always belongs to a philosopher, this creates
a massive ambivalence as what Plato exactly tries to say. Because we always try to pigeonhole thought to thinkers. But the only locus of thought is the operation of thinking itself. this operation is always intractional, that there is no such a thing as a private thought. Thought is a deprivatized public domain. And Plato simply tries to encapsulate this deprivatized dimension of thinking.
So this is, we will go with particularly emphasize on some examples as we move forward to underline this ambiguity that arises precisely because of this intractional dynamics, the so-called dialogue in Plato's thinking. So I think precisely because of this ambivalence, Plato is one of those philosophers that you can never say that he's outdated.
Every time that you plug yourself into the dialogue, you start to think about these interactions, you get a different interpretation, a fundamentally different interpretation. That's exactly what philosophy is supposed to do. Philosophy is supposed to diversify cognitive blueprints, modes of thinking. But you can only do so by creating a situation in which the reader is immersed in some sort of a space of thinking in which it is fundamentally deprioritized, it's the dynamics, it does
not belong to this person or that person. So as I said, because of this I think Plato remains and will remain a philosopher who can always be interpreted radically different, radically new. But other than that, of course, he does represent what is most gloriously haughty about philosophy, that philosophy is the only thing that matters, nothing else matters. And he defends this, he adamantly
defends this. And the only person who does this is of course Hegel as well. And usually these kinds of thinkers, when you read them, particularly for us who have somehow acquainted with this idea of liberal continental philosophy, to stop basically to hate the haughtiness of philosophy, these kinds of thinkers create a fundamental disturbance for us. And of course, this kind of disturbance is always something that once you take a thinker as someone who fundamentally disconcerts you, is going to hound you for the rest of your
life. And this is really what the mystery of Plato, that Plato is someone who really is not shy about the haughtiness of philosophy, not his own haughtiness, haughtiness of philosophy. The philosophy is the only thing that matters. He brings it to the foreground and he disturbs his readers. He disturbs his readers by moving them to come up with their own counter-oppositions, their own oppositions. But this is the whole trick of the dialectics, that once you come with your own position as opposing this haughtiness of philosophy, you are essentially being lured into the game
of philosophy. So of course these kinds of thinkers like Plato I think have much more power to become reinvented and be reread as the time passes than people who explicitly disconcert you, like Nietzsche, like, I don't know, like Hobbes, like these kinds of people who come up with
something explicitly disconcerting. Rather than Plato, he basically tries to disconcert you by simply the idea that philosophy as the organ of thinking is the most superior mode of thinking. And regardless of the content of philosophy, simply the activity of philosophy from a Platonic perspective is presented as something that always insinuates ideas outside of this world
to our worldly domain. And this is, again, we will see that this is a recurring theme in Plato. Plato's, and that's one of the reasons that Plato is really a philosopher who believes that thought is not of this world. Thought is something that is alien, is some sort of dark force, completely unapprehensible, who through some acts, which is an act of philosophy, can insinuate itself on the worldly domain.
And as soon as it makes this insinuation, it sets some things in motion in human mind. So from this perspective it's obvious that why is that because of this otherworldly aspect of Plato, he can be appropriated falsely of course by Christians, by religious people, by mystics. But there is virtually nothing mystical about Plato's philosophy. And that's what we are going to look at, to look at how he presents this otherworldliness, this radical alien-ness of thought, which philosophy can...
Philosophy is this intermediating structure that can bring these insinuations into our worldly domain, disturb us, set us in motion, and ultimately free us. So this is a very broad reason as why Plato is never going to go away. So many philosophers have gone away, but Plato will absolutely never go away. So, before I start to talk about what we are actually going to present and study during this course, let us just very briefly hear why is it that you have taken this course
about Plato, and what do you really think about Plato, and how much do you know about Plato's work? Christian, would you like to learn? Sure. I've always just recently began reading Plato, but I'm drawn to Plato for a couple of different reasons. I think that the whole issue of a sort of mutable, like, cognition or mutable, like, inferential matrix is, like, an important horizon for philosophy. And I think Plato
really intervenes there. And yeah, I guess that's why I'm interested in Play-Doh. I don't have too much to say about Play-Doh yet. I've got certain things at certain points of what I think about Play-Doh, but I don't really think I have anything to say right now besides that. Thanks. Maria, do you want to go? Sure. I actually haven't even started reading Plato, although I did start reading some of the dialogues, and I get what you're saying about it's a very different experience from reading other philosophers. I've played out to me just as a concept I understand it feels very native in
terms of the art of thought what I'm just naturally drawn to is like thinking about modes of thinking and a practice of thinking and ever since reading like a glass beat game I'm just fascinated by this like pure academy of just thinking on like severed just the art of it in itself severed from I guess like everything else and like the idea of levels of reality and like rising to the status of gods is also exciting to me Sure, I think this is one of the things that, I mean, people just really sometimes I think
content of philosophers are really deeply suffering from cognitive liturgy. They usually come up with these most mundane interpretations of Plato and particularly this idea of academia. No, Plato's academia is not our academia. It wasn't supposed to be a bureaucratic regime. is absolutely the encapsulation of what you call thought disinterested from human experience. Let's think about what is thought in itself rather than subjugating it to the interests of subjects. And this is a very, again, a Hegelian gesture, you know, that Hegel's critique of Kant is the idea
that transcendental, why is it that we have always to subordinate the transcendental to the I, to the subjective I, which is ultimately a subject of experience? Thoughts. You can have experience because of thought, not the other way around. And if you really want to unbind the subjective experience, if you want to know what is it to live a good life, then good life then you need to unbind thinking in itself you need to come up with the logic of thinking Oliver would you like to introduce yourself
Yeah, hi. Hi. I'm very interested in learning and improving my understanding or knowledge or abilities with using a Lencus in a therapeutic manner. manner. So that's really one of the main reasons. I've always had an interest in Plato. But also I'm really interested in the prophetic potential and aspects and possibilities that
that learning this course seems to implicate it may have to offer I think this therapeutic aspect is absolutely one of the things that you see from a perspective of history or philosophy historians usually regard Plato as someone who's dry just like you know He doesn't give a shit about the therapeutic aspect of philosophy. And usually they attribute these therapeutic aspects of philosophy to a different brand of Socrates' students, the so-called cynics and historics, who were developing philosophy
as the art of living. Well I think Plato absolutely captures the Socratic, namely the therapeutic aspect of philosophy. Because ultimately, we will talk about this, ultimately the main concern of Plato, his entire project boils down to two concepts, eudaimonia and the good, happiness and the good. But this good is not our good. The good is the principle of intelligence, thinking in itself.
And so we will talk about some of this, I think, the practical aspects of Plato and how he tries to formulate what it means for us in fact to think about, rather than just to be happy, to think about what a good life consists in, rather than simply trying to grope in the dark searching for happiness, for eudaemonium. with a concept in which even in our most basic activities we can find ourselves happy. This is basically a part of Plato's philosophy that is extremely close to those sects that
that I was talking about, cynics and the historics, who see philosophy as this almost a street practice that is supposed to address the issues of happiness, of a good life, of basically to be content, you know, with fate and with nature, so on and so forth. I'll just briefly introduce myself. My name is Theodore. I'm going to help moderate this course. And I have to admit, I'm not that familiar with Plato.
I've only read him a little bit on my own and not with other institutions. And he is sort of a troubling figure for me. and especially I think the way that he's been adopted by other schools of thought Neoplatonists and Christians like this question of thinking is really central for me I guess too Superb, superb Excellent I think this troubling aspect you need to be Be very careful, as I mentioned. As soon as a thinker becomes troubling for you, you are susceptible to be abducted into
his world and never return again. This is exactly, you know, really the power of Plato and Hegel. And any continental philosopher that starts to mess with them, try to push them back, hold them at bay, is going to come under their influence. Not in a good way though, not in a good way. So you might as better just start reading them in a friendly manner, very liberal way, and see them, who they are. But I think Plato is a very different thing than Hegel, precisely because of that ambivalence aspect that I told you, that he always withdraws.
He's not present in the dialogues, he never says anything, everything is basically only Socrates does not represent the Socrates of the dialogue, does not present Plato. So many people think that Socrates is basically what Plato is in the dialogues. No. Plato's philosophy is the interaction between usually the Eleotics or the Sophists and Plato's favorite player, Socrates. This philosophy assembles itself from the interaction between these two forces. And this is exactly a technique because you see Plato's philosophy ultimately, or Platonic
philosophy, is not something totally new as opposed to pre-Socratic philosophies like Parmenides, Heraclitus, but he has created a technique by bringing these oppositions together, these opposing cognitive blueprints together, creating a form of combinatorial machinery that can create new thoughts, new cognitive blueprints out of what is interacting in the dialogue. And this is exactly what academia is for Plato. It's an Agora of thought. What is Agora of thought? What was exactly Agora?
Agora is basically an open space where philosophers make their stands, literally like supermarkets, like selling their fruits. They sell you cognitive blueprints, modes of thinking. But unlike sophists, they do not ask for money. What they ask is the price of your life, namely your intellectual commitment. Because once you commit to one of these modes of thinking or cognitive blueprint, once you start to implement them, then you're basically, the very idea of who you are will change. And this is basically, and Plato really wants to present academia as this combinatorial
machinery for thinking, where philosophers can come up with new modes of thinking, with new programs of thinking, and they can freely sell them to people. So should we have a very brief break and then come back? That sounds great. Like a five minute Sure. Drink a smoke break? A smoke break. Sounds good. All right. See you in five minutes. I've recently quit smoking. Good for you. Lethia, this isn't helped. You're not helping us.
Is it on? Oh yes, it's still recording. Okay, okay. So what we are going to do throughout this course is that, I mean the framework will be extremely liberal, we will try to be as casual as possible in terms of how we are approaching Plato and comparing him with other thinkers of his own time but also later times generally we are going to look at certain specific works of Plato for
For those of you who are not familiar with the configuration of Plato's dialogues, they are usually divided into three categories. The earlier work, the middle work, and then the later work. The early works are what you might call to be where Plato is simply trying to emulate Socrates and he fails and he actually realizes that Socrates is not as great as what he thought he was. But he is enamored by Socrates, by actually what he has stood for, maybe the trial of
Socrates, because he was scarred by the trial. So he moves when the Middle Period, where for example works like Republic, Republic is a Middle Period work. is where he tries to, rather than simply emulating what Socrates said, recrafting what Socrates can represent, even though Socrates absolutely has no connection whatsoever to the historical figure of Socrates, which we absolutely don't know anything about him.
So we are going to start looking at some of this middle period work dialogues, particularly Republic. Then after this we are going to look at an intermediary phase between the middle works and the later works, in which there is only one single dialogue written in this intermediary face, where Plato starts to question himself, to question the topics and how he addressed the problems in Republic, this dialogue is Theatetus.
Theatetus is basically where you can see that there is a fundamental shift in how Plato starts to address the problems of philosophy and also how to solve those problems which he thought he had solved already in Republic. These problems are the problems of forms. At the pinnacle of these problems is the so-called enigma of the good. What is the good? Then we are going to move toward the most mature dialogues, particularly Philippus,
Timaeus, and the Sophists, where Plato unleashes his philosophy in full force. So this is the chronicle of how we are going to approach Plato's work. Starting from the Middle Period, then going to the Intermediary Phase, looking at Theatetus, and then looking at his later works, particularly Philebus, Timaus, and the Sophist. The general theme of the Course will be centered around what I just mentioned, the enigma of
the good, which is the central pillar of Plato's project, the most enduring theme running from his earlier works to his late works. So very briefly, as I said, this session will be just introductory materials. We will just start to look at these closely and not so casually from next session. Very briefly, Plato in Republic, he comes up with something called the Doctrine of Forms.
are ideas or idos. What you might call, you might call them the eternal and infinite planes of thought. They are idealities, things that never change. From a contemporary perspective, might call them the true transcendentals. That everything else that we talk about the world simply rests on these forms, these ideas, these ideologies. They are the grounds from which we can say or do things.
Without them we couldn't say or do anything. But also the exploration of these forms enable us to address the most central concern of philosophy, what to think and what to do, what should we think and what should we do. So this is the doctrine of form which we will elaborate in the next sessions. At the base of this doctrine there is something called the good, what Plato calls the form of forms.
So it's the apex of all forms. This is the enigmatic part of it, that the good transcends beauty, transcends truth, transcends justice, transcends everything else that you can imagine as an ideality. If the good didn't exist, there wouldn't be any other ideality. justice, knowledge, truth, so on and so forth. How many of you have read or know about Badiou's recreation of Plato's Republic?
It's something that I only know peripherally, sort of, I haven't read it. Neither am I. I'm familiar with his work more generally, but not that piece. Okay, you should definitely read it. It's a fantastic novel. He has updated it. It's quite actually entertaining. And you can get a grasp of Plato in a very casual manner, is not watered down. But one of the things that is wrong with Badiou's recreation of Plato, which encapsulates so
many other philosophers' interpretation of Plato, is that Badiou, in his recreation of Republic changes, completely gets rid of the word good, the good, and replaces it with the word truth. So Plato, from a contemporary perspective, but also in a scholastic sense, in a traditional interpretation of Plato, Plato is usually considered to be the philosopher of truth. But this is absolutely not the case. Truth is simply secondary for Plato.
The good is the primary. So simply by discarding the idea of the good and replacing it by the idea of truth, you completely maim the project of Plato. Precisely because if there is no good, and we are going to talk about what is exactly the good, there wouldn't be truth. And the good for Plato is the principle of intelligence. And this principle of intelligence, depending on how you read it, with what kind of bias
you read Plato, it can be interpreted differently. So for nooplatonists, the good becomes the god as a principle of intelligence. For Tobinjan school, it becomes simply human mind which is in the process of completion, full logical autonomy of itself. So as I said, the central theme will be the idea of the good as the ground on which every
Every other idea, every other theme or topic in philosophy of Plato is grounded. In order to address this idea of the good, first, as I mentioned, we will look at his his middle work, middle period work, Republic, which Plato, I mean, Republic is a work that usually people associate as his magnum opus, you know, as the best work of Plato, the most famous one. But strangely, in that letter that I mentioned, that Plato writes, actually writes something
as himself, as he's saying something, and it's not a part of the dialogue. In that letter Plato thinks that Republic is the most vulgar work of philosophy that he has ever written, because it tries to reduce the idea of the good to something that commoner people, students of philosophy and normal people can easily relate to, and that's the idea of the good life. But the good is irreducible to the good life. The good is a principle that drives the good life.
So in Republic he makes this lavish scenario where throughout the dialogues you see a What is the good for a citizen? What is it good for a statesman? What is it good for a philosopher? What is it good for the soul, for the mind? And this question of what is good for such and such entities is always being approached through the idea of a good life. And the idea of a good life for Plato is just ultimately the interest of the subject. But as I said, for Plato, thought should not be reduced to the interest of subject.
So he tries to simply in Republic creates some sort of exemplary, a collection of examples, an exemplary disquisition on the idea of the good to which normal people can relate to. But then, you know, as he later comes back and reflects back to Republic, he actually sees that it has done this idea that he has tried to water down the idea of the good as
the principle of his philosophy to something that normal people can relate to, had much more detrimental effects than positive ones. He goes on in his late, basically, life, to make one single public lecture, one single public lecture, that's the so-called lecture on the good, the only public lecture Plato ever did. Here he goes on and he tries to devulgarize the idea of the good and completely disengage
it from that kind of vulgar dimensions of the republic. By vulgar I do not mean in the sense of negative sense that we are familiar, but in the Latin sense of vulgar, namely popular, something that can, populations that the people can relate to. He goes on in this lecture, starting to elaborate the idea of the good in terms of something that he calls the one. The one is the good. And the one that equates with the good is not the number one, nor is it God.
It's a principle, a cosmological principle, which you might call it in Platonic terms the cosmological principle of intelligence, through which everything else, every other intelligent act or thought can come to existence, including secondary forms like beauty, like justice, like knowledge. He then goes on to elaborate how is it possible for the One as a principle to create this multiplicity of forms.
Then he goes to some sort of metaphysical mathematics in this lecture that tries to elaborate what is exactly the forces that allow the One to express itself into existence, into multiplicity. No one gets this lecture, everyone hates it. Because they have come, all the audience for this public lecture have come to this lecture on the good with the expectation that he's going to talk about the themes of the republic, how to live a good life as a citizen, as a statesman, as a soul, as a mind, as a god, as a divine,
on and so forth but he comes with some really torturous mathematical lecture that tries to elaborate what exactly the good is as a principle of intelligence I just like love that picture of like Plato coming in everybody's expecting it oh the good life's this good life's that he's like math math that's what you get math. And the letter that I mentioned where he, for the first time, he talks about his work is succeeding, it's right after this public lecture, where he had been disillusioned
that philosophy in its true sense is something that maybe you can't relate it to the normal people. It requires an assesis, an initiation into the philosophical praxis. not every forms of thought can be brought down from the cosmological stratosphere of forms to the interests of subject. So he gets this illusion about that he had done everything wrong.
That the very fact that the dialogues that he had written, they were in written form, That had created some illusion for people to mistake philosophy in the written form as thought itself. This has created a controversy in a study of Plato, that people say that there are some scholars particularly connected with the tobingian school that they say that there is in fact according to later commentators at the late period of plato's work there are in fact unwritten works
by plato where plato stopped to give the most in his most important idea in written form and and I started to give them in oral form, to simply converse with people, what dialogues gesticulated only in written form. Simply interact with people and bring them and show them how thought emerges through this interaction in real time. This is the so-called unwritten doctrine, which is a field of study of Plato, which attempts by gathering evidences of later commentators to reconstruct these lectures, these oral lectures.
Nevertheless, even though, you know, at his late life, Plato was extremely suspicious of writing down philosophy, presenting philosophy in written form rather than in an interactive form, he wrote some dialogues. But the interesting thing about these dialogues is that they do not have your typical middle period dialogue structure. It's usually a speaker who recollects a conversation, for example, between Socrates and someone else, and then he tries to explain to someone else
what was his dialogue about. So even the structure of the narration changes from simple dialogue format to a recollection of dialogue format. And I think the most prominent example of this structural transformation in the dialogues is Philebus, which I personally think is the richest dialogue in the entire body of works of Plato. And reading Philippus, you can see that he has already discarded some of the main themes
in Republic that he no longer believes in them. And one of them is a Doctrine of Forms. He no longer believes in a Doctrine of Forms. Instead, he talks about something called tachoma, or categories, in a very literal Kantian or Sotelian sense of categories. There are no longer forms, there are no longer metaphysical objects, but simply categories of thought. What's the Greek for that? could you maybe type it in like use Latin characters? I think... That's strange I haven't seen that before.
So, he starts, you know, he abundance that idea that forms have metaphysical status and instead uses categories, tachoma. Of course he switches back and forth between the word idus and tachoma, but idus from now on are associated with categories of thinking. They're basically just thoughts. They don't have a special metaphysical status in the traditional Platonic sense that you think that forms on some metaphysical objects in some, you know, Platonic heaven.
No, they are really thoughts. They are concepts. They are categories. Nevertheless, he reserves the metaphysical, the primary metaphysical status of form for one form only, the form of the good. The form of the good is still a metaphysical form in the traditional sense of the republic. any question any discussion anything that you want me to a little bit elaborate on this how you know Plato's war can be chronicled you said the good is still a metaphysical form after he yes yes it is it is and it is
is basically what you might call to be being as such, but not being in the sense that we know of being. You see, so we will talk about these when we are reading The Republic or discussing with Thiem's address in the Republic. So Plato, so many philosophers say that Plato endorses a two-level world ontology. What does this mean? So this two-level world ontology,
And this is true in the case of Republic. The doctrine of forms in Republic has a two-world ontology, in the sense that you get two levels of being, levels of what is. are eternal forms, justice, beauty, the so-called idealities or ideals, idoses. And then you have also what you might call to be beings of objects, like in a more contemporary sense of being, more materialistic sense of being.
And it seems that the people who accuse Plato of two-level world ontology, they say that he never manages to bridge the gap between the being of forms, whose being is completely different from the being of objects with the being of objects, being in the more mundane worldly sense. But nevertheless, starting with T.I. Tetris as the intermediating work between the Middle Period and Late Period, he starts to develop a system that drops altogether this two-world ontology.
only one world ontology and this one world ontology is the ontology of the good, the being of the good, the being of the one. One is the principle of intelligence, what you might say in a Hegelian sense the true transcendental dimension of thought without which you cannot structure anything in the world Hence, you cannot deduce the existence or being of anything. And then you see that basically this is the core of an idealist project. By idealism, I do not mean idealism like a transcendental idealism,
but a fundamental idealism that idis take charge of reality in every respect. There is no reality without idus. But this idus is no longer the multiplicity of forms of justice, beauty, so on and so forth, but only one and only one form, the form of forms, the form of the good. So does anyone want to ask any question before I move forward? Well, what you said makes me really question what I originally understood to be the one
in Play-Doh. I mean, here, it kind of seems almost like it becomes similar to Laurel's one. And the reason why I say that, because you said that it becomes a one-world ontology and the one-world ontology becomes the being of the good. And to me, this gets into the problem of the fundamental ambiguity that you're talking about in Plato's works. And it's beginning to seem to me that, I mean the reason why I made the reference to LaRail is because the forms become the mechanism by which the being of the good occurs.
Like it's, you see what I'm saying? It's the… Yes. Yeah, that is absolutely true. And I will start to talk about this. This is the idea that... So the good, as I said, the good in Plato is a source of knowledge, is a source of justice, is a source of beauty. It's the most beautiful thing. Beauty without the good is not beauty. And let's completely suspend our idea of what we understand by the good. Plato does not mean what you think about the good. Plato means something else. It's a principle of intelligence, a principle according to which you can gain traction
on the multiplicity of beings in the world, of which mind is a part. Mind itself is an object. Now, the principle by which the one can gain traction on this multiplicity is something that is called the indeterminate diode. So you have one as a principle. One is no longer a number, nor an ideality. It's a principle. So you have one and the principle of the diode.
The principle of the diode is something that is capable of working on the substratum of the one and multiplying the instances of one to measures. Let's make a comprehensible example of this. So, why is that this all matters? You see Plato after Parmenides, but also the Parmenides and also, you know, Eleatic philosophy's
opposition with Heraclitian philosophy, he had already seen that Heraclitian flux, Heraclitian multiplicity and Parmenidian one, they are part of the same reality, of the same principle, that they are not disconnected, that in fact they need to be joined together. As I mentioned, Plato is not someone who comes up with an original idea, a third alternative from what had previously been occurred in history of philosophy, the pre-Socratics. But he tries to pit what had already been there against one another to create these combinatorial compositional ensembles.
So he pit multiplicity against the one of Arminides. The one in pre-Socratic philosophy is called apyron, to apyron, the limitless, the limitless, the infinite. The dyad, the multiple, the flux, the changing of things, the multiplicity of beings, is what is represented in pre-Socratic philosophy by a principle called toperus, or to limit,
Sorry, to delimit. Peras, basically, best way to, from a contemporary perspective, see them. Apeyron is the infinite. It's something that expands infinitely. You might call it the domain of being, with capital B, okay? a pirate, the infinite, the one. The paras is the multiplicity of particular beings which partake in this infinite domain
of being. So Heraclitians say that all there is are instances of Paris, of multiplicities of things, of being, of particular instances, concrete instances. Whereas Parmenidians say that you cannot have this if you do, you cannot talk about the multiplicity of things you cannot identify things as how they ascend in this universe without having an a pyron a domain a general domain of being the
one so Plato and these are all completely metaphysical in pre-socratic these topics of discussion a pyron and Paris are both metaphysical categories So Plato sees that if he clashes these two sets of worldview together, what he gets is not just a metaphysical category, but a fundamental epistemological and axiological category. because once we oppose peras and apiron together in the sense of an interaction
that they can be interacting with one another you create a system through which you can talk about the knowledge namely the epistemological dimension the knowledge of things in the world by virtue of the knowledge of being the universe as a whole as a totality unrestricted world and similarly you can talk about the knowledge of being the knowledge of entire unrestricted world or universe by looking at particular instances
of things that belong to this world. So you see, this is already a germ of a Kantian thesis. Concepts are general thoughts into which we can plug particular objects intuitions of objects. But also, in order for this generality to become, to be possible, we need to have particular instances of objects, of items in the world. In order for us to know what being is,
we need to know the instances of being. And in order for us to differentiate and to know what these instances of beings are in the universe, we need to know a general concept of being, a general domain of being. And you get that simply from the clash of two metaphysical theses, it creates a new thought that is no longer just about ontology but has a fundamental epistemological input. It is the clash of the Apiron and Paras,
a principle through which mind can lift the restriction of the world around it, but also by investigating the examples of things in the world make this world intelligible. So essentially, this clash of Apeyron and Peros, which Plato calls the Dyad and the One, represent a fundamental, systematic principle
through which we can talk about anything. Because without this clash, without the identification of particularities and identification of generalities, we cannot distinguish anything from anything in this world. We cannot separate things from one another. nor we can unify them into higher order generalities. Like for example, saying that there is this tree and there is a grass. These are fundamentally different things, but nevertheless they belong to the same general.
They are plants. So, as I mentioned, that Plato essentially resurrects the apironic and pyronic doctrines of pre-Socratic philosophies, interact them with one another, create a new system, a new principle and this principle is called the principle of the one and the
diode. The one is something that limits, that limits. So it is infinite but it also limits. The diode is something that creates instances of the one and these instances can be indeterminate, can be very very different, multiplicities. The interaction of this process of limitation and delimitation creates what you might call a dialectics in which you have
multiplicities and identities. But it also does something else. And we will talk about this very in detail in next courses, next sessions. Plato shows that once the one is coupled with the diode, the one has a process that limits multiplicities and gives them identity, and diode is something that creates multiplicities
out of identities, out of the sameness, out of oneness. So he shows that this process is essentially something that creates a fundamental aspect of reality through which we can talk about the existence of objects, but not only the existence of objects, but also we can talk about values and disvalues. Not only values and disvalues, but also about the order of the universe, what is.
So this thing, which is a product of the interaction between these two principles of multiplicity and oneness, is called a metron, a measure. Multiplicity, when works on the oneness, creates differentiation. Oneness, when works on multiplicity, it creates distinction.
Once you have this process of separation and differentiation, distinction and multiplication, Then you can attribute, you can see, talk about objects in the world, values and disvalues, according to their own measure. In order for me to talk about a glass, I need to have a measure of separating this from the table on which it stands, a measure. And this measure can be understood ontologically, epistemologically or axiologically. The more fine-grained I can make this measure, I can structure the world around me, namely
We talk about not just this glass, but what it is made of, what it's supposed to do, what it can do with it. So this idea of measure, which is again a very pre-Socratic idea, essentially comes naturally out of the dialectics, out of the interaction between Apiron and Perus, one and the dyad as two principles that interact with one another. Essentially what Plato wants to talk about is that is the system of intelligibilities.
That in order for us to access the intelligible structure of the world, not only at the level of ontology or epistemology but also at the level of axiology namely values and disvalues we need methods of fine-graining how to separate and combine things together according to their own rules or their measures, namely the metro. But how does all of this fit into the idea of the good life and ultimately the good? Well, for now, what we can talk about is that the good life, according to Plato, is a whole,
not a part. It's a mixture of different parts. It's an intelligible life, just like the world that if you cannot distinguish and separate out things from one another, is an intelligible, is an empty thought according to Kant. Simply you cannot talk about anything. There is nothing, you can't even talk about existence of things. So if and the separation and differentiation, separation and integration of things in the world allow us to make the world intelligible, and in the same way differentiation and integration according to their own rules or measures of activities in life can make a whole life,
an intelligible life, as an intelligible unity. And essentially the essence of this life is a mixed essence in the sense that it not only has knowledge, justice, beauty, so on and so forth, but it has pleasure, base material activities, so on and so forth. And basically for Plato is that how can we craft an intelligible life? With the understanding that you can't make an intelligible life without first making the world intelligible but you can't make the world intelligible without this is the
loop platonic loop without participating in the craft of a good life as a life that is not only capable of addressing the concerns of knowledge, but also the concerns of pleasure. The concerns of objects, the mundane items in the environment, what you can do with them, what they are, but also the concerns of the forms, namely ideals, justice, beauty, so on and so forth so it's initially this is what is called a mixture a mixture and mixture for plato
is is the result or the product of the interaction between the one and the dia the paras and a pyre and the import of it is that it can make the world intelligible the word intelligibility for Plato simply stands for the war for the relation between part and whole what I just said about that you can't talk about for example different particular items in the world, render them intelligible without having access to some general form, a general concept,
a general category, or a general idea. And similarly, you can't talk about a general form without being capable of differentiating items in the world, particular instances of that generality. What Plato calls dialectic in Republic stands for the method of crafting this form of intelligibility in which the relation between parts and wholes, multiplicities and oneness can be fine-grained.
Nevertheless, as I mentioned in Theaetetus, he starts to revise this idea of dialectics as proposed in Republic towards something else, which we will discuss by putting the emphasis on the function of the language. That language captures the language of the language, the true transcendental dimension of thought precisely because the nature of language is capable of expressing both a pirate and Paris limitation and delimitation it is something that is capable of freezing the flux of change
and becoming so you can see it as instances and again saw back this flux talks into generalities. We'll talk about this, how about Plato's theory of language as put forward by Theatetus, and how it captures the mechanism of dialectics in Plato. So, have some questions and I know that because as I mentioned this is completely an introductory session so many of things are still extremely dense of pop concepts nevertheless we are going
to one by one trying to unpack them what they are but nevertheless if you have questions that would be great to share them I just have a logistical question today I have to end promptly at one but maybe next week we can start a little bit earlier to make a picture a little bit of last time. Is there any way that we can develop sort of a week-by-week syllabus so we can make sure that we're keeping up with the... Yes. I think the best... So we are going to, as I mentioned, everything is going to be
centered around the idea of the good and how all of these other ideas are actually encapsulated ultimately in the idea of the good. The first instance of the good presented in the work of Plato is in Republic, which all of you I think know because of the math class. It's the analogy of the divided line. So I think the syllabus for next session would be reading analogy of the divide line the Republic plus the allegory of the case so we can see how these two are actually working together there's also that um that
article isn't there um on the epistemology of the divide line yeah That's a good one, but yeah, okay, sure, you can, I mean if you have time, you can look at it. But I think basically the entire conversation about what Plato is up to, what he's trying to do, can be really encapsulated in the most enigmatic diagram of all philosophy, analogy of the divided mind. I'll do that. Yeah. Great.
Thanks. Well, one immediate thought I had regarding the, this concept of the good life being both a combination or a mixture of the base pleasures and the ideals, is that correct? Yes. Do you know how much he's taking from, is this some combination of the Epicureans and the Stoics, perhaps? You see, the thing is that Plato was completely, I mean, the Stoics come far later than Plato. I mean, during the time of Plato, they were cynics, and cynics didn't have that kind of
sophistication of the Stoics that, yes, the Stoics have absolutely this mictum. But the thing is that for the Stoics, they pigeonhole the idea of this mixture simply to the good life. But the idea of mixture for Plato is the idea of intelligibility, that the good life is an intelligible life. Intelligible in the sense that you have differentiation and separation, the measures of differentiation and separation of things from one another. And you see that how it converges upon the most fundamental questions of Platonic philosophy, what to think and what to do. I cannot think or do this versus that if I do not have the measure
of how to combine them or how to differentiate them from one another. If I cannot make rankings, rankings that are not personal but are intelligible precisely because they enjoy a position without the coherent system of this life as a whole. And this is that principle that allows for this intelligibility, namely the good life, is the good, the good as a principle, as this vast mechanism through which intelligence assembles itself, basically, by living a good life for itself, understood as an intelligible
life. And this is really a very kind of mundane reminder that there is a connection between the word intelligence and the word intelligible. You can't have one without the other. They feed off of one another. And Plato's idea of the good is simply this ramification of how they interpret between what is intelligible and what is intelligence, and how they unbind one another. Are these rankings you're talking about are evaluations?
or valuations that can be that can be that can be interpreted either ontologically epistemologically or plain axiologically in terms of simply value and disvalued yes maria you have a question yeah i think this could co-continue from what was previously discussed i was just curious about whether plato or like um thinkers in the time of plato had had like a science or mechanics of how the one comes to be everything everything in the world you see the thing about the one as I mentioned the one is not being in the sense that it's not an
existence it does not as I mentioned being for Plato first and foremost is being of form thinking thoughts thoughts have their own ontologies everything about what it is in the world originates from this being of thought and this is really the idea that this the thought of the being for Plato and that's really part that as you might say you we we can't talk it on the same level of ontology that we say that something came to the world. So essentially this is really a tricky aspect of Plato that you see the forms
or the being of forms are essentially foreclosed to the discourse of the world world of mundane ontology, of what is. They are true transcendentals. And how they come into being is really what Plato is the lecture of the good. They are the clash of metaphysical principles. And these metaphysical principles are mathematical in nature. They create the principle of intelligence and also basically the ground of all the talks about what exists
or doesn't. So from this perspective, Plato, yes, is absolutely metaphysical, his stance on the form is metaphysical, and his metaphysical stance is truly transcendental in that you can't talk about where did it come from? Because where did it come from? It means that you have already identified a world, a mundane world of things existing, and then you say that it came to this world. But the very position of this world, this is the tricky part, the very position of this world in which things can be said to be existing or not, is the product of thought. And the
principles that underlie it. Mathematics in this sense, no, not essentially measurable. Mathematics in this sense, what you might call to be principles of a structuration. Literally, Plato thinks, at least in part of his life, in a very astonishingly Hilbertian
way in modern mathematics that's the structure of the world represents can can be encoded by way of some principles, and these principles are called the logoi, which in the most concrete sense there are mathematics or mathemes, that everything that is in the world represents some sort of mathematical structure. essentially intelligence is the pure form of this mathematical
structuration of the universe, of this encoding of the universe. So it's a very, from this perspective, at least as I said, not his later work, it's like a middle period toward the late, he basically, very tangible example of this is really do genuinely equate thinking with a computer program with the same way that numbers are being charmed and this is all what thought is as a computer program is a program that runs on abstract encoding materials
have been basically, that is already available in the cosmological structure. And then this encoding program is capable of reflecting back on the structure of the universe, also the structure of itself. Exactly like how mathematics encode the structure of the universe and by virtue of this encoding of the structure of the universe in physics is capable of rendering it intelligible. So from this perspective, the idea that if Plato was alive and he had access to something
like artificial intelligence, he had Red Hilbert, he would have said that thought is no distinct from a calculator. The calculator represents the most sublime forms of thought than any human being alive. Because as I said, what Plato is interested in is not really subjective experience the question of agency but a principle which is ultimately has a mathematical structure not in a modern sense but at least in sense of plato has a matter of
mathematical structure that is capable of encoding the structure of experience and by virtue of this encoding the structure of experience it can it can access the content of experience because as Kant would say experience is nothing but its content a content that needs to be a structure in order to be counted as a content and once you have access to the content of experience then you can have subjectivity once you have the subjectivity then you can have agency and practical autonomy but these are all the ramifications of something else of that encoding structure, the pure form of thought, the true transcendental, the logical autonomy of forms
as such, pure idealities, computer programs floating in the cloud of the agathonic matrix, And this is a very disturbing thought for so many of us who have been habituated to always think about thinking in terms of subjective capacities, in terms of agential capacities,
in terms of practical autonomy, in terms of experiential content. And then you see that what I said, that Plato is very disconcerting, what you see, what he's trying to say. Isn't it a more nihilistic thought than this? This is ultimately nihil-unbound in just one formula. This is what thought is, and the rest are just what you might call to be substandard byproducts of this pure form. How would thought differ so dramatically from a calculator then? Or how would thought in... It doesn't. According to
Plato, it doesn't. According to Plato, it does not. No, it doesn't. It's just basically all the same structure. Right. So then what I meant to say was, how would thought as a cognitive process in a human brain differ fundamentally from a calculator? According to, if you want to really talk about this, I think this is the idea that when we are thinking about thinking, we are essentially thinking about two things. One, the form of thought, which is absolutely irreducible. Its logical autonomy is irreducible. This is one. At that level, We are as good as a calculator, and in fact, a calculator is more free than us on the level
of logical autonomy than us, because our logical autonomy is tied to the second aspects of what we call thinking, and that's the experiential content that has perceptual and practical ramifications. And for Plato wants to start with that form, that pure form, and then bring it back, you know, kind of, you know, just build it up into basically the subjective capacities to the practical significance of the subject. To show that in fact if you unbind the form, the logical autonomy of form, you can also
unbind the practical autonomy of agency. Makes it the subject of a good life. It's like if you unbind, if the calculator had some, you know, let's not talk about calculator, robot, who had actually a kind of pseudo-experiential encounter with the world in a sentence that it has causal representational capacities. If in some way you could unbind logical autonomy, but also integrate this logical autonomy into to those rudimentary representational capacities, then you could unbind its field of experience.
But in doing so, also unbinding its practical capacities. And essentially, you see that how, basically, this is very, very much in tandem, not just with AGI, but Hegel, but Kant, That ultimately the true transcendental, the unbinding of the transcendental capacities of the subject rests on unbinding the form, the formal aspect of the transcendental.
You can't, for a calculator, you can't have just expected to do stuff if you do not have a more powerful logical program embedded in it. So you see that what is exactly formal, form is logics. It does not have any relation to any object whatsoever in the world. Once you start to expand the domain of what is formal, what is logical, under certain
essential conditions, you can also expand the domain of practical autonomy, the domain of experience. Does anyone have any remaining questions for this week? Christian, anything?
There was one thing. It was kind of the point I was making earlier. It's a part of Plato that like really interests me comes down again to the ambiguity. I think it can be reasonably understood in the context of the good, the good life. I mean, if we're talking about sort of like I guess the transcendental resources that we have afforded to us, then it's not merely about looking at it as like, oh, you're in
a certain context and you're using a certain form. I mean, I think the point of the good life is that, of like a cultivated good life, is that there's many like transcendental resources that are being used to expose like a very like multifarious aspect of the world absolutely yes yeah this is yes this is exactly what what i was trying to you know say that expanding the logical autonomy of form form, simply expanding pure formality of what these idealities can be, like justice, beauty,
so on and so forth, in the most abstract sense of them, without any connection whatsoever with the concerns of the human subject, can result in expanding the field of experience of the subject, simply seeing what can actually consist of a good life for me. Because if you do not have an expanded field of experience, you can't really say what exactly a good life for me is. But you can have an expanded field of experience if you do not have the forms, thoughts or logical structures that can give you access to the content of your experiences. Because
there is no such a thing as a given experience. That's the whole idea of allegory of the cave. The given experiences are shadows, are illusions. So even before Stellars, he has already attacked the myth of the given. This is the gesture of philosophy, that there is no such a thing as a given experience, that we just simply cannot talk about how we can make a good life using our experiential resources. Our experiential resources are always limited by our transcendental resources, by our formal resources.
Well, I have to go now, but let's try to go 30 minutes longer next week to make up for the... because we started a little bit late this week. Sure, sure. So the reading material analogy of the Divined Line in Republic and Allegory of the Cave. Sounds good. Excellent. Yeah, this is great so far. Thank you, Reza, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the course. Absolutely. Really good. Yes. Take care. All right. Bye. See you, Reza.