 What we're going to do today is going to start deep in the heart of the symposium in Deodamas' speech, which is nested within Socrates' speech, which is nested. I think you guys talked about the narrative structure. Nested within this whole story, within a story. So we're going right to the heart of the matter. And what I'm really interested in thinking about today is what is best in life and in death for Plato. And you guys all know the answer to that. You should have memorized by now the form of the good. But what is this form of the good? And how is it connected to everything else? That's what we want to explore. And what I'm going to suggest, actually, is that if we look at Plato's texts in light of each other, sometimes what we find out is that the picture isn't entirely coherent, at least not once you start dating into it. But then, if you dig further, you find that another type of coherence will present itself. And you can think about what are platonic dialogues supposed to do? Are they supposed to just be a narrative presentation of a whole bunch of ideas that Plato wanted to get across and couldn't get anyone interested in in terms of a dialogue? Well, that's what some people think. Other people focus on the very structure of the dialogues and how the ideas are sort of folded into each other. And they look at the dialogues as tools that are supposed to be embodying Plato's own philosophy. This raises some problems that we probably won't be able to get very deep into. But I would like to at least introduce you to that notion. Now, I think that there's certain tensions in Plato's thought when it comes to the notion of the highest good and how we get there. I don't think that these tensions are actually completely worked out in Plato's thought. I think there's one of the areas where Plato gets us really going down the path, but he doesn't actually have all the answers. And later, people influenced by Plato. So all of these Jewish and Christian Muslim thinkers afterwards, who called them the divine Plato and considered themselves essentially plateness, but just going beyond it. I think they had ways of making sense of this that resolved these problems. I'm not going to go into that, but that is part of the project that I'm working on here. So it's tied in with neoplatonic thought as well. And the linchpin for what we're going to look at today is the concept of personality or personhood. What is it to be a person as opposed to being an object or to be some sort of intelligible entity like a form or the form of the good? Plato, in some places, talks about the form as almost as if they have elements of personality. He doesn't talk about the form of the good, the form of the beautiful that way, the ultimate form. If you were a Jewish or Christian Muslim thinker writing hundreds of years after Plato and you see all this language about the form of the good and its generative of being, and it makes everything else good through participation, what would you call that? Exactly. And for Jewish and Christian Muslim thinkers, God is eminently personal. So is there room in Plato's thought for that? Well, there must have been some room unless these people were just completely deforming Plato's thought. Plato himself doesn't say these sort of things. But I think that actually Plato is a bit closer than some people have made him out to be. And I'm going to try to lead you through a little bit of that. So here's the case that I'm looking at. If we look at the ascent from beautiful objects in the world, bodies, all the way up to the form of the good, it looks like the process involves abstraction, getting away from the material, the particular, that which makes things what they are. So think about your own bodies. You all look different from each other. You are different from each other in many different ways. You each have a history. And your histories are interactive, right? You all know each other, I think? Maybe some of you have been in classes with each other. Some of you are friends with each other, or bitter enemies of each other. I'm not going to ask who is if anybody is. But these are features of our being. So does getting away from materiality, and even getting away from just looking at the soul, towards the highest good, does that mean we get rid of all those things? That's one way of looking at the platonic process of approaching the forms and the ultimate form of the good. And if you think about it, this picture seems to be confirmed if you look at some of the other platonic texts. You've all read the Republic. So you've all looked at the allegory that came. You looked at the material before that. How do you get to the form of the good and that and to the forms? Well, you don't look at people as people. I mean, you look at justice, but you don't look at individual instances of justice, right? What does Socrates do every time somebody brings up an example? What does he do? Every dialogue, just about. I'm not interested in examples. What were you going to say? That if they do come up with some sort of concrete, or they think it's concrete definition, he provides something that tells them that they're wrong. He cares only about the generalization, that I think is one of his biggest faults. Yeah, that may, in fact, be so. I think that there's more going on there. But that is a picture that you get of him. Say if you think about the youth from, or any of the earlier dialogues, somebody will say, here's what courage is. It's doing this, this, and this. Ah, I'm not interested in that. What is courage in itself? What is beauty in itself? What is justice in itself? So the Republic bears it out. What about the Phaedon? Did you guys read the Phaedon for this class? Enough for this class, but many of them read it in my lower-level class. All right, so philosophy is a preparation for death. And what are you supposed to be doing? Just getting your will in order, laying a nice tombstone? I guess become as just as possible. Yeah, that's a part of just and temperate. And how do you do that? What does he say about the body and materiality? Eliminate desires. Eliminating desires is a very important part of it, because most of the desires are the things that are like nails chaining us, not chaining us. That's the wrong metaphor. Binding us to the body. And ultimately, we want to get away from the body and from materiality. And that means getting away from a lot of what makes us us. So that seems to bear it out as well. Even in the Phaedros that you guys are going to be going into, you can interpret that as saying, we should get away from anything that's concrete or individual or particular. How many of you have read ahead and have read the favorites? That's OK. You're all going to read it. You're all going to study it. And one of the things you're going to find in there is that the philosopher, actually the philosopher paired off with another philosopher, is going to get themselves ready to go back to the world of the forms. And they're going to do that because the forms are so enjoyable. And they're primary. They're worthwhile to spend time with, more worthwhile than the things that we treasure here, like good coffee or clothing that feels nice or laying around in the sun, those sorts of things. So it looks like a lot of platonic texts are bearing this idea out. So we have four major platonic texts. These are not references to this minor dialogue over here. These are some of the central texts of the platonic corpus. And they all seem to bear out that to get to the highest good, that which is, I'm going to use some terms here that I think are useful for you. What is the highest good? It's something that is axiologically and also ontologically. It's there not necessarily in time before everything else, but at least in terms of being, in terms of making things what they are. This is why Christian platonists could say, yeah, that sounds like God, doesn't it? The form of the good is what makes everything else not only be good, but even be. And under the guise of the form of the beautiful, it's that which draws everything else, that which all other beautiful things participate in. Axiologically, is that a term that you guys are familiar with or not? That we're talking about value. It's coming from a Greek word, just like ontos, being, axios, worthwhile. We get the word value from something like that. And if you say that something is axiologically prior, that means it's the best thing. And it is what gives other things their value. So getting to this seems like it means stripping away every element of materiality, every element of particularity, everything that would be personality. And maybe not entirely, right? You have souls. You guys are bodies. And souls are actually played more like your soul's stuck in bodies, right? And when you're young, like you guys, that doesn't sound so hot, because you like your bodies. When you get older, then you start saying, yeah, OK. This body business is not quite so great. I can't do as many things as I used to. Yeah, the soul is probably its primary. I could do without having aches and pains that come with it. But our bodies are also how we interact with each other, right? Now Plato does talk about we could make interact with souls interacting with each other in some other realm. But that's very imprecisely sketched out, isn't it? At least in the stuff that you guys have looked at. So to get to this, does that mean we just keep stripping things away? That is a possibility. And that's kind of a worry. And if that's really the case, a plainness, would you? Think about it, here's the choice. What is most prior? What is the best thing in all eternity, in everything, all conceivable being? For you to be engaged with that best thing, that best thing has no personality whatsoever. It can't have any relationship with you other than you contemplating it. Is that what you want? Or would you rather have some other final resting place? I mean, you don't get a final resting place with Plato unless you do that, because he believes in reincarnation. But let's say you could have some other final resting place. You could just be enjoying physical pleasures all the time. Or just maybe off in a cave somewhere, not the cave, but a cave, hanging out, talking with the brilliant people from history, but there's no form of the good. Which would you prefer? I think I'm in a position that the form of the good is the best thing, that I can't help but say that I'll just use the form of the good. Just based on my own rightonality, I can't turn something down that's better than something else. So let's say you did turn it down, you're in that cave, then you'd spend a lot of time talking about how you made the wrong decision. Which presumably is what Jews, Christians, Muslims, besides take all the fire away, that's presumably what hell is like. Yeah, we missed out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think actually it would be more beneficial to oppose trying to reach the good, the form of the good, for one, because it's probably gonna kind of try to reach the probably very boring to be around. And in that sense. Yeah, I mean that is a legitimate objection that you can make to Plato. And for myself, for years, that's something that I thought when reading these texts. And it was only when I started looking a little bit closer and thinking more about them that I got away from that. If that's the interpretation that we have of Plato, yeah, we're opposed with two alternatives. Well, we do what's reasonable, even though it sounds really infinitely boring, and we tie ourselves into an eternity of contemplation. Or we go off into the world of shifting forms, and at least that's not boring. But of course we're cut off from that, which is absolutely real, that which gives value to things. Neither one sounds particularly appealing. But that can't be really what's going on. Yeah, yeah. For a long time I've made the cultural observation that popular depictions of the afterlife in our culture walk a lot more what I believe Plato's version of the afterlife should look like, as opposed to the traditional religious version of the afterlife. Because you've got disembodied souls that are kind of floating around. There's a lack of individuality. There's nothing going on. There's nothing going on. There's just sort of serene, some music, maybe something bright in the center. But it's better than being tortured in the comical depiction of hell, I suppose. But it doesn't look like very much fun. It looks like all the things that make me me are not part of this afterlife. Except that in the cartoons, you do look like you, and you say wings. Well, your face looks like you, but that's about it. But yeah, I mean, everyone's dressed alike. But true, I was actually somewhat relieved when I figured out that that was not the traditional religious account of the afterlife. There is a beautiful icon, Snyte Museum at Notre Dame University. And it depicts all the different orders of celestial beings in the grand, we're getting very far away from Plato now, but in the grand liturgy, that's supposed to be taking place in heaven. And they all look different from each other. And that's a nice depiction. You wouldn't get that from Family Guy. Yes, I don't always kind of wonder reading about Plato's views on the souls and everything like that. Does his, do you think like his, our souls being, you know, what serves us kind of eliminates the necessity for God in that sense? Because, well, that's a good question. And so let's distinguish two different things. There's what Plato actually says. Plato has Socrates talk about God and gods, and the afterlife is full of them. So if we're just going with the text alone, then that's not really an issue. Would the platonic souls on their own, the vision of the forms and the vision of the form of the good, get rid of the need for any sort of, something like the Jewish Christian, was only, you know, God who intervenes in history cares about individuals, that sort of thing. Yeah, it could. I'm gonna say though that that's not actually what Plato's texts bear out. So let me go through this and I think we'll get to that. So I don't want to entirely reject the notion that the form of the good is in some way impersonal, but I want to problematize it. I want to do this in four ways. And so if I'm doing my job well, then given the time frame that we have and given that I'm just throwing these ideas at you, you should actually experience the sort of effect that people complained about, Socrates inducing in them, which is that kind of mental paralysis and saying, oh, what's going on here? So if that happens to you, that's okay. And he talks about that in a lot of different ways and he actually talks about that in the symposium to some degree. The first thing I want to do is let's actually go through the ascent point by point by point. So we're really clear about it. What are we doing in going to this ultimate good thing or prior thing or ultimate being? So that's why I give you those passages from the symposium because that's sort of the core text. Then let's look at some other platonic characterizations of the best state that we find in other dialogues. And I'm at a bit of an advantage in this and then I've been reading Plato for a lot longer and I've read through all of his dialogues at one point or another. You guys haven't, so that's why I'm going to introduce these other textual passages to you and ideas. Well, what we're not going to do here, but it's part of my larger project is to go back down the ladder and start looking at the characterizations of the things that are not personal, directly personal, but see what their personality's involved there. And then to actually look at the characterizations that you find in Plato's text, for instance, you guys have read the Lycius. He talks about Lycius there, right? He gives him some attributes, he's attractive. What's attractive about him there? What's going on? What is the play of desire there? If we actually treat these as sort of test cases rather than just extra stuff that got thrown in there to make the dialogue fun to read, then we can see whether, even at the bottom level, is that sort of entirely out of touch with this? Or is that an absolutely necessary step? And I think that it is. A few methodological remarks. I think you guys, I'm guessing, probably talked about the Socratic question. You know, what is Socrates and what's Plato's version of Socrates? I'm going to totally put that aside here, because that's a big question. And when it comes to the early dialogues, we may have some ideas when it comes to Symposium, nobody knows. If anybody claims that they know exactly what is Plato's contribution and what is the original Socrates, I don't buy it. I'm also not focused on the question of mysticism. This dialogue has been used by mystics to say that, well, what are you supposed to do? You're supposed to be absorbed through knowledge in this ultimate good. I don't think that's actually the case. I don't think that the soul is still there. But I'm going to put that big, thorny question aside as well. I'm also not making an argument here. I'm more doing preparatory work to making an argument, which is just directing you at certain texts, certain passages. We can make an argument afterwards if you want to. We can talk about all these sorts of things. But I'm not going to do that. Okay, so when we're looking at the Symposium and we're looking at the Odoma speech, what should we focus on? I've got a few pointers here, a few ideas of what you should be particularly focused on. At each level, you want to ask, what is the object that's being paid attention to? That's being grasped as beautiful by the person making the ascent? What is loved by them? And then ask yourself, what is its relation towards value to other objects? What gives it the beauty that it possesses? Does it have its own beauty just by itself? You guys know that's not the case, right? Each thing in order has beauty based on something else. Then you have to think about, how do you proceed to the next thing? How do you actually get there? That's what we're going to go through now. So let's start with the ascent. Where does he begin? We start with loving coffee, desiring coffee. Poppies. What kind of poppies? Doggies. Young, beautiful poppies. Exactly. Yeah, because the older the body gets, unless you're into old people, the body loses some of its beauty. Will you guys be able to see if I write on the bottom part of this with a podium there? Maybe I'll do it here, and we'll go sort of in sequential order rather than ascending order, right? So we start with, do we start with bodies or a body? So you notice that somebody is attractive, and you all experience this. There's a whole other question there too, I should have said methodologically. I'm not going to approach the question of greek homosexuality, or how it ties in with heterosexuality, or any of those, that's a huge can of worms as well. You can all relate to the experience, no matter how you're oriented of loving a body, right? So this is something that Socrates can presume his audience knows incidentally. Why do you need to go away from one body to bodies? What does that get you? It frees you, doesn't it? From, as he says, the thrall to one body. You've all known what it's like to be totally infatuated with one person, and let's put all pretence aside. Not because you love their personality or something like that, because you really lost it after them. You wanted them. I mean, you've all experienced that, I think, right? I know I have. And that's built into our bodies, that's the way they work, and it's also built in from Plato into our souls, because the soul and the body are connected. That was that far. Well, loving multiple bodies that frees you from this dependence on just one. And you can start looking at them and saying, yeah, that's nice, and that's nice, and that's nice. And then you can start thinking about, well, what actually, what do you like? Now, he doesn't talk about it in these terms, but everyone has a type, don't they? They like people who look this way, and they don't look this way. And then notice, these are very different. This is why there's someone for everyone, right? And thank goodness for that, because otherwise some of us would be stuck out in the cold, wouldn't we? So if you're into people who look this way, you don't want other people to have that preference, do you? Because if they all do, then the competition's way too high for you. Now, where do we go from that? So we're all in the realm of bodies now, and this could be like a Cosmo magazine or a GQ magazine, it's at that level. Where do we go from here? I use the soul. Yeah, and now notice, is it the soul that makes the body beautiful? No. Because you can have somebody like Socrates, who is ugly, what we would call blood ugly. You all see pictures of the guy, right? You know, the thing. And Alcibiades, towards the end of it, he says, yeah, Socrates is an ugly guy, but I love him, and I love him because of his soul, and everybody wants Socrates with him. Socrates in another dialogue that you probably haven't read, he talks about another young man that way, Theotetus. And he says that Theotetus is also snub-nosed, and that he's not anything to look at, but he's got this great promise. So when you're thinking about how the older man and the younger man are connected together in the symposium and ascending through the scale, think about, once you've read that dialogue, think about Socrates and Theotetus. So now we go to the soul. And souls are beautiful, souls are ugly. You've all looked at people's actions. You can't observe their soul directly, but you can kind of see into their soul through what they do, and some people are beautiful, and some people are disgusting, right? We can even see it on TV. You can react to it through images of people. You can see people for what they are. Think about movies that you watch, right? Where the change comes, and somebody who you thought was a great character suddenly turns out to be a complete bastard, right? Well, you're observing in a certain way their soul. At a distance, of course. How do we really observe somebody's soul back and forth through words, through discourse? Of course, when we're in the afterworld, we strip our bodies away and we can look at our souls directly. Do we stop here? Is this the best thing? You know, if persons were indeed the best thing, maybe we would stop here. So let's go back to that question, right? What does Socrates say? We don't stop here, right? What does Socrates say? We don't stop here, right? So where do we go to? It's no more. More customs, more institutions are translated in different ways. So let's just say laws, understanding all those terms. And laws, you think that you're rising from the body to the soul, and you're going from the soul to the laws, but why? Well, because those laws, those are nice. They have different colored markers, I think, because the laws are what make the soul good, provide you good laws, right? Might be a terrible laws. Think about some regimes that people are born into and grow up under and how some people probably are not gonna turn out well based on where they were. There's some element of choice there, right? But not an awful lot. I mean, if you grew up in a totally brutalized atmosphere, they have laws, they're just terrible laws, terrible customs. You're probably gonna be a ruthless person, aren't you? If you grew up in a society that has good laws, you may not turn out that good either, right? It's possible for you to stray, to get left back down to it. But when the soul is good, it's good, at least in this construction, because of the social matrix that it's within. And this bears more thinking about it. I'm just gonna sort of pass over that. So we've gotten that far. Could we stop here? I mean, some people, some philosophies might. Think about some of the ideologies of the 20th century, totalitarian ideologies. National socialism and fascism, on one hand, and Stalinist or Maoist communism, on the other hand. The state precedes the individual, and the individual finds their entire value within the matrix of the state, and there is nothing higher than the state. And it is the state that gives the value to the individual as a part of it. That's a stopping point for some, isn't it? Plato doesn't stop there. Why not? We just come after this. Yeah. Here's where you wanna do a little bit of filling in blanks and interpretation. You might say, that doesn't sound like anything that's gonna come from that. Okay, well you have to have knowledge in order to know what the laws are, and you have to have knowledge in order to make laws. But what he means by knowledge is not information per se. He means knowledge that informs the entire person or informs an entire social matrix. And what's something that you know about types of moral goodness for Plato? There's not complete agreement on this, but what are they? They're types of knowledge, aren't they? What does he call those? What are things like justice and courage and temperance? Virtues. What's that? Virtues. Virtues, right. So that's something I think you have to read into this passage. The virtues are, at least to some degree, forms of knowledge. Why in the phatome is the philosopher, the only person who's truly courageous? Because he has the knowledge and that constitutes real courage. That's a little bit different than what's going on in the dialogue where he talks about courage, the lackeys. But even there, he has Socrates say, I don't know, what's wrong with us? We know, on some level, what courage is because we embody it. We just can't give it a good definition yet. In the Republic, okay, he does talk about virtues as being something more like what Aristotle talks about, habits, except for one virtue, wisdom. But think of these as things that inform all these other things, and that knowledge doesn't just inform the laws, right? It also informs individuals. If you are just, you participate in the form of justice. If you are courageous, you participate in the form of courage. If I am unjust, I do not participate in the form of justice, and there's something damaged about my soul as a result of that, right? If I'm a coward, I don't participate in the form, I don't have the knowledge of courage. And again, my soul is somehow less than it ought to be because of that, it's deprived, it's corrupted. Okay, so we've got this, couldn't we stop here? This sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Another way of thinking about these, what else is this knowledge? The knowledge of what? It's a relationship with the forms. If you know what justice is, you are almost directly participating in the form of justice. That sounds pretty good, this could be a stopping point, no? Why not? Well, we have to ask, well, where do all these things come from? We have a cosmological or anisological problem, so where do we go after this? Form of the good, or in the symposium, it's what, the form of, it doesn't say the form of good, per se, it says the beautiful, right? And also the fadress, he's going to talk about it that way. So, let's just say the beautiful and the good, which is entirely what it is. I was gonna write a Greek phrase up there, but we don't have the room. He says, this is auto, kath-hoto, meth-hoto, mon-o-a-a-s-a-o, which means itself from itself, with itself, single in form, absolutely singular, and existing through eternity. You can see why Jewish, Christian, Muslim philosophers and theologians latched onto this, can't you? Okay, so we've got all these things here. What's been going on? Well, you have to work on the soul itself to ascend to each of these levels. Now, here's a question we should ask. So, this working on the soul, what does that mean? Steering somebody away from just looking at bodies to loving people for their personality or their soul, that's something that we all, I think, are fairly familiar with. You may have been criticized yourself or you may have criticized friends for only looking at people's bodies, right? And you can relate to that. And these other things, how do you, in a platonic way, how do you actually start getting away from loving just souls and starting to love these things? That's that process of stripping away materiality, isn't it? Learning how to look to the forms. And that takes a long time, doesn't it? It's not something you just read Plato and, hey, I got it. It's something that Plato actually thinks you have to experience. Now, as we're working on this, is the goal ultimately to become these purified souls that just exist in a sort of timeless contemplation of the form of the good? Well, that does sound a little boring, doesn't it? Let me, let's be frank about it. Doesn't that sound boring to you? How many of you would like to just do that for the rest of eternity? Nobody? No takers? One person, okay. And that's only because your reasoning has convinced you that even though you don't really want it, you must, because you're a rational person. So you're actually, in some ways, more conflicted than the rest of the class by being more rational. Well, there must be some sort of misunderstanding there. So let's think about this. How would personality come into this? Is the form of the good itself personal for Plato? No, clearly not. How would personality come? You don't have a personality as a soul, yeah. It would have to be on the side of the person interacting with them. I don't know if there's necessarily room for an individual to react differently to the absolute nature of the form of the good. But if there's any variance, I feel like- That's an interesting idea. How would you know whether your reaction to the form of the good, let's say we're both, we made it. Reach the end. How would you know that your reaction to it is different than my reaction? Well, you could, because there are- Why not? As far as I know, you're to participate with anyone else, with any other individuals, would be stepping down from interacting with the form of the good. Well, let's go on, because we'll see, is that the case? Let's take a very, very different depiction. Socrates and the Apology, that's the last thing that I put in that handout that I gave you. He's not talking about the form of the good there. How does he console himself with the fact that he's gonna die? He says, well, it could be the big sleep. And his argument there is totally unconvincing. It's pure sophistry. And then he gives this other argument and he says, well, you know, I'll go down to Hades and it's not gonna be that bad. Actually, it's gonna be really good. Because I am going to get to meet all of these great individuals, notice he names them by name, personalities. And you know what? They're not gonna be able to kill me to shut me up. They're gonna have to answer my questions. He doesn't actually say it quite like that, but you can imagine him doing that. They're not gonna try to evade his questions because they're the blessed. They're there and they have made it, they've gone through this stripping away the body and all the motives that we might have for self-delusion. And it's going to be pretty good. He thinks that this is gonna be a great time because he's gonna be able to think about things like this with them. He's gonna converse about absolute justice with them. Now the form of the good's not there explicitly, but why couldn't it be if he's gonna talk about all these other things? Why not? The gorgias, same sort of thing, not very well sketched out. He spends more time sketching out the punishment of the bad person in Tartarus than what going to the Isle of the Blessed will be like, but he talks about it as a communal thing. You're gonna be there with other people if you make it, right? There's a lot of ifs there. You gotta be attracted to the right things and you gotta follow through and all that, otherwise you're stuck going around the cycle after you get some new punishment. Are you kind of, is he kind of saying like your personality transcends after you did it? Yes, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying that he's saying that. Let me give you a few other texts. Let's think about these other great dialogues where there's mentions concerning the afterlife. So in the Phaedon, which is the most anti-material, anti-body texts there is in Phaedon, you have the purification of the soul from the body and when you die, you get to go dwell with the forms if you've actually done enough of that. Now Socrates actually talks about reaching the company of others like ourselves and then we gain direct knowledge of all that's pure and uncontaminated. So it's not individual. It's not, you know, each person is subsumed or disappears or anything like that. You reach the company of those who have likewise done the same thing. And he says, he who has purified himself with philosophy shall dwell among the gods perhaps and they'll join the company of the other philosophers. So again, who are you going to get to be with? Those who are actually most structured by these things. That doesn't, again, it doesn't mean the form of the good is personal. But you're interacting with it in part through the, you know, we could compare, how do you see the form of the good? Well, I see this aspect. I'm enriched by understanding your vision of it. You're enriched by understanding mine. It's presumably we're not going to disagree and say, form of the good is what I say. No, no, it's what I can say. Let me kill you. You know, there's nothing like that. We're not going to get angry. We're not going to get dispute. We're going to actually rejoice. Yeah, this is going beyond play to but it's sort of reading some things in. What about the fadress? How do you get to the ultimate place? There you do it through a, through a pairing. You're going to read that, you know, you don't do it all by yourself. You are paired with another person in love in doing philosophy and becoming more and more good. And hopefully you die together. And then when you do, as he says, they shall walk together in a life of shining bliss and be furnished in due time with, you know, new plumage, you know, the wings of their soul. Well, again, there's togetherness. What about the Republic? The Republic doesn't actually talk so much about the form of the good in terms of the afterlife or the forms in terms of the afterlife. Does tell you about punishment for bad people in the afterlife. But what does it tell you? What's the context in which the guardians are coming to know the forms and the form of the good? The education system. Education system, which means what? That it's theoretically reachable in the slight. There's that, and you do it with other people. And you do it through interaction back and forth with other people. So initiate others into it. And then, you know, the reward for having reached the end they kick you back downstairs to go arrange society for all those other people who haven't seen it. But you're able to do that because your soul has been rightly structured. You really understand what's going on compared to the other people. Well, what about the symposium itself? And in the reading selection that I gave you there, he talks about becoming the friend of God and being a mortal. Now, again, is God the form of the good? No, God is, or the gods are some sort of beings. It's never quite clear exactly what they are, other than they enjoy a really good life and they get to see the forms and the form of the good directly all the time. But being the friend of God would be part, being part of a company would be having personal relations. Friendship is a personal relationship. Yeah. I was wondering if you could comment on the part of Socrates' speech where he portrays love as a daemon, as a medium, an in-between. How does this fit in with your skimata here? Does that strengthen that they can't forgive him or is that something that needs a proper service? Well, if you think of it in terms of a personification, it actually makes matters much more complicated to be in love with love, I guess not, because love isn't itself beautiful. A love dwells within us and makes us desire the things that really are beautiful. I don't know, I really haven't thought that out. That's a good question. What I'm primarily interested in is this question of whether the enjoyment of these involves this sort of boring, I'm just gonna go hang out with the form of the good, okay, well, that's great. Or whether, I mean, think about, when we talk about these sort of things, just in this life, how excited we can get about it. Think about the joy, maybe you didn't feel the reading played out, but all of you, I guess, are here because at least when you read some philosopher and you're exposed to some ideas, you felt a sense of excitement and joy as well as wonder and you wanted to share that and I'm willing to bet with somebody else, yes? So, you know, the best experience, unless that's something pathological, unless that's something that actually distracts us from that, you would think that getting to the end, that sort of thing would have to be part of it, wouldn't it? And he does talk about it that way in these other texts. So, I think that this is one of those cases where reading the symposium in life of the other texts makes us more careful readers and it makes us more careful thinkers about Plato. And it can make Plato's theories a lot more attractive. I know that it did for me and perhaps it has for some of you as well. Actually, so let me pull you, so, how many of you still think that Plato's visions of the afterlife or the best are still ultimately unsatisfying? Okay, so, oh, you and you. The teacher thinks that it is. So, about two thirds of the class, how many don't know? How many are still unsure? How many definitely think that this is for them? They're gonna become a playlist. One person. Okay, well, not bad for a 50 minutes talk. Maybe if I had an hour and a half, I'd have turned it a little bit more.