09/19/2024
The Dark Places of Wisdom with Grant Bartolomé Dowling
A conversation about the work of Peter Kingsley, the thought of Parmenides, and everything in between, with Grant Bartolomé Dowling, a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at Stanford University, who is currently finishing his dissertation on elenchus in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. Songs in this episode: “La nuit du rat” by La Féline and “End Of The […]
| 00:00:00.000 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:00:02.580 |
- This is KZSU Stanford.
|
| 00:00:16.080 |
Welcome to entitled opinions.
|
| 00:00:18.960 |
My name is Robert Harrison.
|
| 00:00:20.640 |
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
|
| 00:00:23.960 |
While the world travels the way of folly,
|
| 00:00:28.480 |
entertainment and distraction,
|
| 00:00:30.840 |
entitled opinion sets out today with Parmenides
|
| 00:00:34.200 |
on the far fabled way of the divinity
|
| 00:00:37.280 |
into the godly realm of night.
|
| 00:00:39.480 |
Here is our team of mayors.
|
| 00:00:42.840 |
Here's the golden chariot with glowing axles.
|
| 00:00:46.760 |
Here are the maiden daughters of the sun
|
| 00:00:49.560 |
who know their way back home to the halls of night.
|
| 00:00:53.000 |
And here is the immortal opening
|
| 00:00:55.600 |
of the ancient Greek poem that will take us there.
|
| 00:00:58.680 |
The mayors that carry me as far as longing can reach,
|
| 00:01:05.800 |
road on, once they had come,
|
| 00:01:08.560 |
and fetched me onto the legendary road of the divinity
|
| 00:01:12.880 |
that carries the man who knows
|
| 00:01:15.120 |
through the vast and dark unknown.
|
| 00:01:17.640 |
And on, I was carried as the mayors
|
| 00:01:22.120 |
aware just where to go kept carrying me,
|
| 00:01:25.800 |
straining at the chariot and young women led the way.
|
| 00:01:30.000 |
And the axle in the hubs led out the sound of a pipe
|
| 00:01:35.120 |
blazing from the pressure of the two well-rounded wheels
|
| 00:01:39.840 |
at either side as they rapidly led on.
|
| 00:01:43.440 |
Young women, girls, daughters of the sun
|
| 00:01:49.360 |
who had left the mansion of night for the light
|
| 00:01:52.840 |
and pushed back the veils from their faces with their hands.
|
| 00:01:56.480 |
There are the gates of the pathway of night and day,
|
| 00:02:03.800 |
held fast in place between the lintel above
|
| 00:02:08.000 |
and the threshold of stone.
|
| 00:02:09.680 |
They reach right up into the heavens
|
| 00:02:13.080 |
filled with gigantic doors.
|
| 00:02:16.520 |
And the keys that now open, now lock, are held fast by justice.
|
| 00:02:21.520 |
She, who always demands exact returns.
|
| 00:02:26.760 |
And with soft, seductive words,
|
| 00:02:31.280 |
the girls cunningly persuade her to push back immediately.
|
| 00:02:36.120 |
Just for them, the bar that bolts the gates,
|
| 00:02:40.520 |
and as the door flies open,
|
| 00:02:43.040 |
making the bronze axles with their pegs and nails spin.
|
| 00:02:47.960 |
Now one, now the other, in their pipes,
|
| 00:02:51.880 |
they open a gaping chasm.
|
| 00:02:54.000 |
Straight through and on, the girls hold fasts their course
|
| 00:03:01.000 |
for the chariots and horses.
|
| 00:03:03.520 |
Straight down the road.
|
| 00:03:04.880 |
Thus begins the poem of the philosopher, healer,
|
| 00:03:11.500 |
the harmonities whom we join today,
|
| 00:03:14.200 |
as he gains admittance into the halls of night,
|
| 00:03:17.760 |
where the entitled opinions brigade is welcomed
|
| 00:03:20.720 |
along with him by justice.
|
| 00:03:22.880 |
And the goddess welcomed me kindly
|
| 00:03:27.120 |
and took my right hand in hers
|
| 00:03:29.080 |
and spoke these words as she addressed me.
|
| 00:03:31.520 |
Welcome young man, partnered by immortal charioteers,
|
| 00:03:37.280 |
reaching our home with the mares that carry you.
|
| 00:03:41.000 |
For it was no hard fate that sent you traveling this road,
|
| 00:03:44.760 |
so far away from the beaten track of humans,
|
| 00:03:48.640 |
but rightness and justice.
|
| 00:03:51.080 |
And what's needed is for you to learn all things,
|
| 00:03:55.920 |
both the unshaken heart of persuasive truth
|
| 00:03:59.440 |
and the opinion of mortals in which there is nothing
|
| 00:04:03.440 |
that can truthfully be trusted at all.
|
| 00:04:06.880 |
But even so, this too you will learn,
|
| 00:04:10.240 |
how belief based on appearance ought to be believable
|
| 00:04:14.240 |
as they travel all through all there is.
|
| 00:04:36.880 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:05:06.880 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:05:37.880 |
Here we are in the mansion of night,
|
| 00:05:40.080 |
deep in the caves of KZSU,
|
| 00:05:43.080 |
ready to begin our show about the dark places of wisdom.
|
| 00:05:46.560 |
I'm joined by Grant Bartolo-May Dowling,
|
| 00:05:50.300 |
a scholar of ancient philosophy
|
| 00:05:52.260 |
who is finishing his dissertation on Plato's
|
| 00:05:54.360 |
Socratic dialogues and who is especially interested
|
| 00:05:57.800 |
in Parmenides, the thinker who loomed large
|
| 00:06:01.440 |
for Plato's philosophy, as well as Plato's psyche,
|
| 00:06:05.200 |
Grant, welcome to the underworld.
|
| 00:06:07.040 |
I'm glad you could join us today on entitled opinions.
|
| 00:06:10.080 |
- Thank you very much Robert.
|
| 00:06:11.480 |
- So our topic, Grant, is the dark places of wisdom
|
| 00:06:15.620 |
and it's somewhat recognized as Oteric topic, I'd say.
|
| 00:06:20.320 |
And we're gonna be talking a lot about the ancient Greek
|
| 00:06:23.120 |
philosopher Parmenides, who's philosophical poem on nature.
|
| 00:06:27.320 |
I know that that's a title that was given to it,
|
| 00:06:30.520 |
probably not by him, but it's called known as on nature.
|
| 00:06:34.760 |
It's a poem that begins with a prologue from which I quoted
|
| 00:06:37.920 |
just now at length.
|
| 00:06:39.720 |
So let's start with Parmenides.
|
| 00:06:42.440 |
Who he was, what kind of philosophy he espoused,
|
| 00:06:45.960 |
and is enduring relevance.
|
| 00:06:47.200 |
What do we know about this rather mysterious figure,
|
| 00:06:50.000 |
Parmenides?
|
| 00:06:51.320 |
- So we know that in the ancient world and afterwards,
|
| 00:06:54.400 |
Parmenides was primarily understood to be a fussy coast,
|
| 00:06:58.520 |
a naturalist, and so that goes with the title of the poem
|
| 00:07:01.240 |
you mentioned on nature, he was most well known amongst philosophers
|
| 00:07:05.800 |
and in intellectual history for studying nature.
|
| 00:07:09.800 |
The way we'd refer to the Greek naturalists from Parmenides
|
| 00:07:14.280 |
is period today, is as pre-socratic philosophers.
|
| 00:07:18.440 |
I think this is especially attributable to Aristotle
|
| 00:07:21.760 |
and his histories of philosophy, especially at the beginning
|
| 00:07:24.960 |
of the physics and the metaphysics, where he places
|
| 00:07:28.760 |
thales at the beginning of the tradition of philosophy
|
| 00:07:33.120 |
and of pre-socratic philosophers, philosophers who
|
| 00:07:36.920 |
are practicing philosophy before Socrates.
|
| 00:07:39.760 |
One reason we distinguish pre-socratic philosophers
|
| 00:07:43.320 |
from philosophy after Socrates is that pre-socratic philosophers
|
| 00:07:46.960 |
didn't consider themselves philosophers, at least in name.
|
| 00:07:50.400 |
They were fussy, they were studying the natural world,
|
| 00:07:53.560 |
thales who Aristotle identifies as the first pre-socratic philosopher
|
| 00:07:57.400 |
only has one sentence that's been transmitted through the ages down
|
| 00:08:01.480 |
to us for his philosophy, and it is that everything is water.
|
| 00:08:05.480 |
And shortly after thales in the subsequent generations
|
| 00:08:09.200 |
of pre-socratic fussy-coi natural philosophers,
|
| 00:08:12.280 |
we got claims like everything is air and everything is fire.
|
| 00:08:17.640 |
Eventually more subtle pre-socratic naturalist theories
|
| 00:08:20.440 |
emerge such as everything is unbounded or unlimited.
|
| 00:08:25.440 |
And Parmenides was a pre-socratic naturalist
|
| 00:08:28.400 |
who held the theory that everything is won.
|
| 00:08:31.000 |
He's most famous for his monadic philosophy.
|
| 00:08:34.880 |
To round out the background context on pre-socratic philosophy,
|
| 00:08:39.800 |
the word philosopher before Socrates was a pejorative term
|
| 00:08:44.280 |
that meant someone who was too caught up in obsessed
|
| 00:08:46.960 |
in irrelevant technical details, because the prefix
|
| 00:08:50.400 |
Philo lover was used as someone who had an inordinate love of whatever then it was attached to.
|
| 00:08:56.280 |
Philo Oinos, wine lover was a drunk of Philo Epos,
|
| 00:08:59.720 |
a horse lover spent too much money gambling and would go broke betting on the horses,
|
| 00:09:04.360 |
and a boy lover, let's say, had a penchant for romantic partners that was too young,
|
| 00:09:08.760 |
something like that.
|
| 00:09:09.480 |
So Socrates owned this pre-socratic term before Socrates,
|
| 00:09:13.360 |
the people doing what we recognize now as philosophy,
|
| 00:09:15.560 |
were by and large, called fussy-coi.
|
| 00:09:18.640 |
So you mentioned that Parmenides was a monist.
|
| 00:09:23.240 |
So let's tell our listeners, OK, a monist is someone who is not a dualist.
|
| 00:09:27.560 |
It does not believe in the dual distinction,
|
| 00:09:29.840 |
either between mind and body or spirit and matter and so forth.
|
| 00:09:36.200 |
So I'd like some help from you, because Parmenides is known,
|
| 00:09:40.560 |
even though he says all is won, he makes even more radical distinction
|
| 00:09:44.960 |
than Plato from what I can tell between the world as it appears to us,
|
| 00:09:49.440 |
or it seems what seems to us to be most true,
|
| 00:09:52.520 |
which is what comes to us through our senses and our experience of the external world,
|
| 00:09:58.160 |
and this higher order of truth, which can only be reached not through the body,
|
| 00:10:03.160 |
but really through the mind.
|
| 00:10:04.800 |
Why is that not the archetype of dualism?
|
| 00:10:08.200 |
Why is he called a monist?
|
| 00:10:11.200 |
So one thing we can pretty surely attribute to Parmenides is the claim that everything is won.
|
| 00:10:17.080 |
He repeats that a couple times throughout the poem.
|
| 00:10:19.440 |
Later on in the poem, he lives up to his name as a naturalist of fussy-coi,
|
| 00:10:24.080 |
and he goes into all kinds of different, specific scientific theories of embryology,
|
| 00:10:30.320 |
of the weather and meteorology, of cosmogony, all kinds of different natural theories,
|
| 00:10:35.840 |
but there seems to be a subordination of the natural, the physical, the Greek word is fusis
|
| 00:10:43.360 |
for Parmenides to some kind of higher truth, and the material that might be most interesting
|
| 00:10:49.200 |
to us moderns insofar as it's groundbreaking and revolutionary in the history of science,
|
| 00:10:54.720 |
Parmenides is a scientific part of the poem.
|
| 00:10:57.280 |
He says as the matter and topics most fitting for the days confused, wandering two-headed
|
| 00:11:03.840 |
mortals as opposed to the higher truth of the gods, which he receives earlier in the poem,
|
| 00:11:09.200 |
and which is pretty austerely monadic.
|
| 00:11:11.920 |
I will say that there's a lot of scholarship on Parmenides,
|
| 00:11:15.760 |
and the claim that everything is won can be interpreted in many ways.
|
| 00:11:19.120 |
You could have many entities that are all the same kind of thing.
|
| 00:11:22.240 |
So all the things that exist are one substance.
|
| 00:11:25.440 |
You could also have a strict single entity view of monism where only one thing exists,
|
| 00:11:30.480 |
and there's other interpretations as well, and so while Parmenides does attribute it a pretty
|
| 00:11:36.880 |
austere monism as the higher immortal truth, scholars still debate exactly the kind of
|
| 00:11:43.520 |
monus that he was, and you should probably start your interpretation guided by the poem,
|
| 00:11:48.000 |
but as Kingsley and other scholars have done historicist research, there's other avenues to
|
| 00:11:53.280 |
guide exactly the specific monistic theory that you're attributing to the monies.
|
| 00:11:59.120 |
Well, I'm thinking just as a parenthesis, Nietzsche wrote that wonderful little book called
|
| 00:12:04.560 |
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, and he said that what made them all of them,
|
| 00:12:10.640 |
philosophers, is that each one had an understanding of the oneness of all things.
|
| 00:12:16.400 |
So Thailey said all is water, Heraclitus all is fire, an axamander,
|
| 00:12:22.480 |
or an examinees, I don't remember, that it can also be a combination of the four elements,
|
| 00:12:28.400 |
but there is a sense that everything is one. So he does belong to this tradition, I guess, of
|
| 00:12:33.920 |
they didn't call themselves philosophers, but philosophy as Nietzsche defines it in that
|
| 00:12:39.120 |
Texas, when you try to think the totality of what is as unified.
|
| 00:12:44.720 |
We're going to get more into the rivalry between subsequent generations of philosophers and
|
| 00:12:50.320 |
contemporary philosophers against one another, but a pervasive feature of ancient Greek culture is
|
| 00:12:56.000 |
agonism, competition. And we see this just as much between the poets, let's say, as we do between
|
| 00:13:01.440 |
the philosophers, where a later generation of poet will take the images, metaphors, and tropes
|
| 00:13:06.560 |
of a predecessor, and then invert them, put them on their head to somehow one up and win the battle
|
| 00:13:12.240 |
with that influence, which they're struggling with. And so can see this already with
|
| 00:13:16.720 |
Parmenides and his predecessors, where they were making claims like everything is fire,
|
| 00:13:21.680 |
everything is water, he gets to the next level of generality of abstraction, everything is one,
|
| 00:13:26.480 |
this more capacious claim that kind of subsumes what was made before, while also continuing to
|
| 00:13:34.000 |
preserve elements of the tradition. And so we'll see Parmenides himself gets reinterpreted
|
| 00:13:39.600 |
and reimagined by his predecessors, just as he was reinterpreting, reframing the
|
| 00:13:45.120 |
presocratic naturalist theories that had come before him. A lot of interesting questions that I very
|
| 00:13:50.560 |
much tempted to ask you, but I think I'm not going to because he's going to get us into the
|
| 00:13:54.240 |
arc kind of platinus and other subsequent thinkers of the one. But the title we're giving to our
|
| 00:14:01.200 |
show today is in the dark places of wisdom. And that comes from a book that you introduce me to,
|
| 00:14:07.360 |
and I will be forever grateful for you having opened my eyes to this book by Peter Kingsley in the
|
| 00:14:14.640 |
dark places of wisdom, which is Parmenides is a central figure of this, but he is also Kingsley arguing that
|
| 00:14:23.840 |
prior to the advent of Socrates Plato Aristotle, where philosophy traditionally understood to begin
|
| 00:14:33.920 |
with these thinkers and the others are presocratic, as you mentioned, that there is this other tradition
|
| 00:14:41.040 |
of which Parmenides is kind of the ultimate let's say champion, where it wasn't a linguistic
|
| 00:14:47.840 |
turn, it said truth is not to be found in the way we speak about things, or it's not in language,
|
| 00:14:52.800 |
but it's in finding a way to commune with, touch, have access to a divine order of being,
|
| 00:15:02.160 |
which requires certain kind of techniques, if you want to use or practices, if you want to use
|
| 00:15:09.680 |
what Piet had doe, that philologist philosopher of ancient schools, Greek schools of, and the practices
|
| 00:15:16.800 |
would require meditation, would require certain kind of altered states of consciousness, and maybe
|
| 00:15:24.800 |
other kinds of incantation. Kingsley makes this very provocative argument that that is the true
|
| 00:15:30.640 |
matrix of Western culture, certainly Greek culture, but that thanks largely to Plato, tell me if
|
| 00:15:38.720 |
I'm getting this wrong or not, but thanks largely to Plato, there was a kind of hostile takeover
|
| 00:15:45.520 |
of Parmenides philosophy and a kind of either deliberate or non-deliberate covering up
|
| 00:15:53.040 |
burial, a kind of consigning to oblivion, this other pre-Plato version of what philosophy was,
|
| 00:16:02.960 |
which was had much more in common with prophecy than it did with logos, so could you say something
|
| 00:16:10.080 |
about this book by Peter Kingsley in the dark places of wisdom and his thesis on this particular
|
| 00:16:16.160 |
issue? Sure, so one thing that I failed to mention in my opening introduction about Parmenides
|
| 00:16:22.800 |
is he's widely credited as the father of Western rationality, that rationality in the philosophical
|
| 00:16:29.360 |
tradition really begins with Parmenides, we see arguments of proof, especially indirect negative proof
|
| 00:16:36.080 |
for the first time in extant recorded European history, and in the immediate subsequent generations
|
| 00:16:44.480 |
after Parmenides, Plato represents Socrates as receiving his most rigorous dialectical rational
|
| 00:16:53.360 |
abilities from his encounters with Parmenides, and so Parmenides from the very beginning
|
| 00:16:59.360 |
was at least championed as this important father of rationality and logical thinking. Kingsley's
|
| 00:17:06.160 |
thesis argues that that only credits Parmenides with one half of what he was philosophically
|
| 00:17:14.480 |
significant for, and the other half touches on topics like magic, irrationality, hallucination,
|
| 00:17:21.280 |
topics like that which are traditionally rejected by rationalist philosophers,
|
| 00:17:26.640 |
and therefore the strong rationalist emphasis of philosophy ever since Plato has either
|
| 00:17:33.440 |
through no fault of its own, because of its presentation by the earlier generations of philosophers
|
| 00:17:40.160 |
just adopt today, rationalist understanding of Parmenides, but occasionally when some of these historical
|
| 00:17:45.600 |
facts surface or speculative interpreters start pondering these more shamanic, magical techniques
|
| 00:17:53.200 |
of ecstasy that seem to be suggested even within Parmenides' poem, there's a deliberate effort to
|
| 00:17:59.440 |
reject those sorts of narratives, and Kingsley is vociferous about this, and it may have led to,
|
| 00:18:06.240 |
I'd say, harmful repercussions with the reception of his scholarship, the fact that he's
|
| 00:18:12.160 |
so insistent that there's this widespread occasionally coordinated effort to obscure
|
| 00:18:19.360 |
this fact of the history of the birth of philosophy and western rationality through Parmenides
|
| 00:18:24.720 |
is a guiding star of his book and one of the main theses he's trying to set right in the dark
|
| 00:18:30.560 |
places. So Kingsley is a classicist, and yet as you mentioned, he has a controversial reputation
|
| 00:18:38.320 |
to say the least, no, because this book is, it's not shrill in any way, but it is polemical against
|
| 00:18:45.440 |
not only the history of philosophy that begins with Plato and Aristotle, I can read you,
|
| 00:18:51.040 |
just sentence here where I love it, he said that philosophy is supposed to be the love of wisdom,
|
| 00:18:56.080 |
but he says, "Instead of the love of wisdom, philosophy turned into the love of talking and
|
| 00:19:01.440 |
arguing about the love of wisdom, and since then talking and arguing have pushed everything else
|
| 00:19:07.840 |
out of the picture until now we no longer know anything else and can even imagine that there could be
|
| 00:19:13.680 |
something else." So how do you evaluate his claim that the true ground of western, let's say,
|
| 00:19:24.640 |
wisdom was not logocentric and that it was very promiscuous with magic shamanism, hallucination,
|
| 00:19:32.720 |
prophecy, and so forth, and whether Kingsley has good evidence to base this claim on.
|
| 00:19:39.760 |
So I recommended the book to you, and I go around recommending it to many other scholars and
|
| 00:19:45.760 |
friends that I encounter. So for the most part, I'm a Kingsley supporter and that sort of thing.
|
| 00:19:51.360 |
So from what I understand, so I've talked to Tony Long who taught Kingsley as an undergraduate,
|
| 00:19:56.400 |
it was a super bright undergraduate, very successful graduate student. His first book is published
|
| 00:20:01.440 |
with Oxford University Press on Pythagoras and was really well received. This is the first book published by,
|
| 00:20:08.400 |
I think it's the golden two fee center publishing, and he hasn't returned to mainstream academic
|
| 00:20:15.760 |
publishing since in the dark places of wisdom. And I think it's open to question the degree to
|
| 00:20:21.200 |
which his exile has been kind of self imposed, first imposed from without. I know scholars,
|
| 00:20:27.760 |
and I won't name names that in San Diego and University of New Mexico, etc. who are giant Kingsley
|
| 00:20:33.360 |
fans. And I'll say on my dissertation committee, one of the scholars here at Stanford who's
|
| 00:20:39.120 |
taught me the very most about ancient philosophy. And anything insightful, I say here,
|
| 00:20:44.000 |
it's thanks to him, of course, all the errors and less insightful materials my own. His name
|
| 00:20:48.720 |
Alan Coad, I took his course on Plato's late epistemology, that is his theory of knowledge and
|
| 00:20:55.360 |
metaphysics, that is his theory of being. And we read the dialogues, The Softest, which discusses
|
| 00:21:00.080 |
Parmenides and features the parasite of Parmenides by the visitor from what gets translated now
|
| 00:21:04.480 |
as LA, but we'll be calling Velia, and the dialogue Parmenides, where Parmenides is the eponymous
|
| 00:21:10.880 |
character and the main speaker. Coad introduced his split level undergraduate,
|
| 00:21:16.320 |
ancient philosophy course on Plato's late epistemology and metaphysics by presenting
|
| 00:21:21.680 |
Parmenides as an eachromontist, that is to say a su-saying prophetic doctor. And this blew my mind
|
| 00:21:28.960 |
because I'd already gotten a master's degree, I'd taken many courses on pre-socratic philosophy,
|
| 00:21:33.040 |
I wrote my master's thesis on another pre-socratic philosopher and exegorist. And I'd never
|
| 00:21:37.120 |
heard anything like this. Parmenides may have been my favorite philosopher at the time, and I'd
|
| 00:21:42.080 |
never heard anything like this. So yachromontis, the Greek word, what does it mean literally?
|
| 00:21:48.960 |
Yachro is doctor, doctor, my thesis, prophetic. Yeah, exactly. So prophecy, healing.
|
| 00:21:56.880 |
And the reason this is significant for Kingsley is because of a variety of archaeological discoveries,
|
| 00:22:03.280 |
the first important ones being made in the 1830s, and then many more, which have been made in the 1960s,
|
| 00:22:10.080 |
connect Parmenides to these more magical, mystical, divine cult-like healing and prophetic
|
| 00:22:21.200 |
techniques. And it's the Italian scholars, particularly the Italian classes, who only work on
|
| 00:22:27.200 |
archaeology as opposed to philosophy, who are the most receptive and supportive of Kingsley scholarship.
|
| 00:22:32.960 |
And it seems to be the anglophone ancient philosophers who don't have training in archaeology,
|
| 00:22:38.240 |
and aren't even really familiar with the material record in allia,
|
| 00:22:41.600 |
who are the most skeptical and the most resistant to Kingsley's main point. You ask me to evaluate
|
| 00:22:47.280 |
it myself. I will say that I don't completely agree with Kingsley's reading of Plato. I think
|
| 00:22:53.760 |
Plato is one of these philosophical literary artists on the level of Dante or Shakespeare or Joyce,
|
| 00:23:00.000 |
where it's very hard ultimately to ever figure out what exactly their intention is with a
|
| 00:23:05.200 |
work of philosophical literature. You almost have to see yourself as a philosopher artist on the level
|
| 00:23:11.360 |
of those writers to confidently ascribe intentions to their work. And so I have my own ideas about
|
| 00:23:18.240 |
the way that Plato is interacting with Parmenides, and while I completely agree with many of
|
| 00:23:24.800 |
Kingsley's specific claims about how Plato misrepresents Parmenides, I take a slightly less
|
| 00:23:32.960 |
conspiratorial, nefarious,
|
| 00:23:35.760 |
accusations. The accusation is that Plato committed parasite. Namely, he set out to kill the father,
|
| 00:23:44.640 |
Parmenides, and that is a provocation. Let me read a passage from the bottom of page 212.
|
| 00:23:51.680 |
It's only a couple sentences to the top of page 213. So this is Kingsley from in the dark places
|
| 00:23:57.520 |
of wisdom. Always Plato is praised for his extraordinary creativity as a writer, for the wonderfully
|
| 00:24:04.400 |
evocative quality of his myths and mythical imagery. What's never noticed is the ways he chose
|
| 00:24:10.000 |
to take over older mythological traditions and through lack of interest or simply as a result of
|
| 00:24:16.480 |
misunderstanding, obscure their significance, jumble the details, blur the edges of what once had
|
| 00:24:23.600 |
been their finest of distinctions. What's never even mentioned is just how much was covered or lost.
|
| 00:24:29.360 |
So I agree with Kingsley that Plato jumbles details, blurs the edges, and will insert his own
|
| 00:24:36.720 |
philosophical distinctions and concepts in the voice, in the name of his predecessors.
|
| 00:24:41.120 |
What I don't agree with is it's necessarily nefarious through a lack of interest or through
|
| 00:24:45.280 |
misunderstanding. I think it's deliberate, artistic, and philosophical, mostly in the dynamics of
|
| 00:24:51.120 |
this agonism that I brought up earlier. What do we know about the the doctor's side of
|
| 00:24:59.040 |
permanence? What sort of techniques or recipes or practices is he and his school or the school,
|
| 00:25:08.960 |
the tradition that he comes from, because one of Kingsley's main points also, he does a geography
|
| 00:25:16.240 |
of Vedlia, which is a place in southern Italy, but Vedlia was founded by Greek-speaking
|
| 00:25:22.240 |
colonists from a place called Fokaya, which is in Asia Minor, present-day Turkey, and he
|
| 00:25:29.200 |
reconstructs the way in which Fokaya had many contacts with the east and that there were traditions
|
| 00:25:37.040 |
associated with the cults of the dead, with the practices and so forth, that he finds that
|
| 00:25:43.040 |
permanent days is in many ways the inheritor of some of these traditions and that his work as a
|
| 00:25:50.800 |
physician in the profound sense of the term "physician" was connected to them.
|
| 00:25:56.400 |
So I'll start on the Greek Peloponnese mainland because that's what's the most studied, the most
|
| 00:26:00.960 |
research, the most well-established, then I'll move towards what's less well-established and what's
|
| 00:26:06.080 |
more unique for Kingsley on incubation. So one of the main theses of this text is that
|
| 00:26:12.480 |
central to Parmenides's philosophical perspective on the world and his poetry was informed by what he
|
| 00:26:20.640 |
spent his time doing day-to-day and his day-to-day job was being in charge of incubation rooms.
|
| 00:26:28.160 |
So incubation is a somewhat clunky clumsy term. There's no one Greek word that was ever
|
| 00:26:34.560 |
kind of established as the kind of technical term for usic he stillness comes up a lot.
|
| 00:26:39.600 |
It was pervasive and extremely common in the Greek world from the 9th, 8th century to at least
|
| 00:26:47.680 |
second, third century AD. So for at least a thousand years it was an extremely cultural ubiquitous
|
| 00:26:53.600 |
practice and it was particularly associated with medicine, both the Asclepian and its rival
|
| 00:27:00.560 |
Hippocratic traditions, both endorsed incubation for medical treatment. And so because it lasted for
|
| 00:27:08.640 |
over a thousand years and because there were different medical schools and traditions which were
|
| 00:27:15.440 |
using incubation for medical purposes, there's not just a one-size-fits-all description of what would
|
| 00:27:21.200 |
go on. We have excellent sources that were from the temple of Epidaris which were carved onto
|
| 00:27:29.600 |
the walls with success stories for incubation.
|
| 00:27:32.400 |
Okay, so incubation is at its most basic level when humans hibernate. So when human beings
|
| 00:27:42.000 |
find a dark, still room and lie in silence maybe with occasional incantations for as long as possible,
|
| 00:27:51.280 |
at least hours, but typically days. And some of these medical traditions priests would incubate
|
| 00:27:58.560 |
on behalf of sick patients and in some of the patients were sent in themselves. In these cases,
|
| 00:28:04.240 |
the patients could either be cured directly. For instance, someone who had been
|
| 00:28:08.160 |
say stabbed with a spear in their sternum and the spear tip had broken off,
|
| 00:28:13.280 |
record on the walls of the temple of Epidaris that in their hands in the morning after their
|
| 00:28:18.640 |
hallucinatory dreamlike experience with the god, they were holding the spear tip. They'd been
|
| 00:28:23.040 |
directly cured by a miracle. The kind that's more relevant to paramedics though is receiving guidance
|
| 00:28:28.720 |
from the gods in these hallucinatory dreamlike states. We started to mention Anatolia in the Eastern
|
| 00:28:35.760 |
influence on incubation in Greece. I'll pause here to say the earliest incubation seemed to be
|
| 00:28:41.520 |
occurring within caves to find this kind of dark, still space, but very quickly as incubation was
|
| 00:28:46.960 |
incorporated into Greek religion, temple complexes featured incubation rooms at the very farthest
|
| 00:28:54.320 |
back recesses of the temple. These rooms were called abatons and they were put back there because
|
| 00:28:59.440 |
there would be the least light, the least motion, the least interruptions from entering into a dream
|
| 00:29:06.480 |
like hallucinatory state by depriving oneself of any site or emotion or food or sound for all
|
| 00:29:13.520 |
this time. Yeah, so very interesting, the way Kingsley insists mostly on the caves as the original
|
| 00:29:21.120 |
places and the caves are important to him because the beginning of Parmenity's poem, which I read
|
| 00:29:26.960 |
from, talks about the halls of night, about the mansions, the world beyond, and that you're going
|
| 00:29:33.440 |
into what Kingsley claims is Tartarus, namely the world of the dead, and that Parmenities at the
|
| 00:29:41.200 |
beginning of his poem has this extraordinary privilege like Orpheus, with whom he's associated
|
| 00:29:46.560 |
later, of undertaking a journey into the realm of the dead, and she says justice says to him
|
| 00:29:54.160 |
it's not because of any hard fate that you're doing this, but you're privileged, and therefore,
|
| 00:29:59.440 |
if I understand Kingsley correctly, that part of the therapeutics of incubation was that you
|
| 00:30:06.480 |
were getting in touch with the shadow world of the night, which is also strangely the home of the sun.
|
| 00:30:16.080 |
So we don't hear, I understand, monism better when night and day, sun and darkness have a common
|
| 00:30:25.200 |
nature and that to descend a kadabasis into this other world was part of the cure that was being
|
| 00:30:35.920 |
practiced. Absolutely. So now we'll connect Parmenities' practice to underworld cults. It's worth
|
| 00:30:43.440 |
noting that Parmenities was the first generation in Velia. He was among the first children ever
|
| 00:30:51.360 |
born to this new colony. He was born, therefore, to parents who are not native to Velia. In fact,
|
| 00:30:58.080 |
they were native to this island we've mentioned on the western coast of modern day Turkey called
|
| 00:31:03.200 |
Focaya, and Focaya was an extremely conservative and unique culture unto itself. A big claim
|
| 00:31:12.480 |
that Kingsley makes is that Parmenities preserved elements of Focaya and Anatolian cult worship
|
| 00:31:21.760 |
in his practice as Fullarchos, the incubation guide of these abaton rooms in medical religious
|
| 00:31:30.880 |
complexes in Velia. So within Focaya itself and within neighboring cities like Istria and Caria,
|
| 00:31:39.440 |
Greek travel writer, such as Stravo, record pervasive underworld cult complexes, the most
|
| 00:31:47.120 |
impresses of which was called Heropolis, in which priests or occasionally sick patients themselves
|
| 00:31:54.080 |
would be led down into caves to receive or regular guidance to help with their healing from
|
| 00:32:01.360 |
either Hades or Persephone or this sect of Apollo worshipers called Apollo Uliades. And something
|
| 00:32:09.920 |
that's very significant is that nowhere besides Velia in the archaeological record is there any
|
| 00:32:16.880 |
mention of Apollo Uliades besides in Velia and then also in these cities in Anatolia that I've
|
| 00:32:23.040 |
just mentioned. So that's one of the greatest pieces of archaeological evidence Kingsley uses
|
| 00:32:28.160 |
to show that Parmenities preserved these incubationary techniques of getting in contact with the
|
| 00:32:36.080 |
underworld gods that come from Western Anatolia, the place that his colonial parents and the entire
|
| 00:32:43.600 |
older generation that was founding Velia would have brought with them and he was one of the
|
| 00:32:48.560 |
priests of the new colony that was charged with preserving these techniques and they ended up
|
| 00:32:55.680 |
blasting for five or six hundred more years in Velia after the generation of Parmenities.
|
| 00:33:00.160 |
Two more words that you mentioned, Fullarcus and Apollo Uliades, right? So Fullarcus is interesting
|
| 00:33:09.920 |
because I gather it means the den where animals retreat. Dinner layer,
|
| 00:33:16.960 |
dinner layer where they retreat, especially if they've been wounded or where they go and they
|
| 00:33:22.000 |
hibernate. This is how it was described in antiquity. So a Fullarcus was someone who would be
|
| 00:33:28.400 |
in charge of the place of the den which would be the cave and then the other
|
| 00:33:35.280 |
Apollo had placed a huge role in Kingsley's interpretation of Parmenities because he also there again
|
| 00:33:45.840 |
like what he wants to do by showing that there was a lot more to Parmenities and just
|
| 00:33:51.680 |
reason and rationality. He argues that there was a lot more to Apollo than what has come down to us
|
| 00:33:58.640 |
through the more recent traditions which is the God of light, the God of restraint, of
|
| 00:34:04.320 |
individuation and of reason and even Nietzsche, you know, divides Apollo from Dionysus.
|
| 00:34:12.320 |
Kingsley says that Apollo is also the God of night and a God therefore of prophecy,
|
| 00:34:23.520 |
he is the God of the oracles, we know that. But he has this completely other side to him
|
| 00:34:30.000 |
that Parmenities is particularly connected to, right?
|
| 00:34:33.840 |
Yes, that's right. And the kind of just as Plato is the main bad guy in the story that Kingsley
|
| 00:34:41.120 |
setting up about the misdirection that the history of Western philosophy goes into when it comes to
|
| 00:34:46.480 |
Apollo, Plutarch is the fall guy who accurately according to Kingsley describes the views of Delphi
|
| 00:34:53.440 |
in which Apollo had nothing to do with the night that Apollo was the God of day and the God of light.
|
| 00:34:59.520 |
But according to Kingsley, by Plutarch's time, there was a misunderstanding of the role that
|
| 00:35:05.600 |
Apollo played within Greek religion insofar as he was almost always associated with some
|
| 00:35:12.000 |
incubationary temple sites that dreams, hallucinations, etc., were intimately tied up with
|
| 00:35:18.400 |
Apollonian worship. Apollo also is connected with the figure of the Quaros and Parmenities in the very
|
| 00:35:24.480 |
beginning of the problem of on nature, the very beginning lines, identifies himself of Quaros,
|
| 00:35:30.400 |
therefore, connects himself to Apollo and all this Greek material about the Quaros journey.
|
| 00:35:35.680 |
Finally, I would mention that Apollo, Uliades, those are followers of Apollo Ullis,
|
| 00:35:41.840 |
wasn't, it's a rarely attested word for healer, which shows its eastern influence.
|
| 00:35:50.400 |
And as I maybe mentioned briefly, just a little bit earlier, isn't attested in any archaeological
|
| 00:35:56.720 |
record anywhere else in modern-day Greece or Italy, besides Valia, modern-day turkeys,
|
| 00:36:02.160 |
the only other place where you can find archaeological records of this Apollo Ullis cult.
|
| 00:36:07.280 |
So it's strong archaeological evidence that Kingsley can draw on that Parmenities is preserving
|
| 00:36:13.280 |
these techniques of ecstasy that were very common to the colonial origins of his community,
|
| 00:36:19.520 |
but weren't so common to the atruscan context in which they found themselves when they founded their
|
| 00:36:24.400 |
colony. One last word on this and maybe we'll expand a little bit more, but Kingsley has a story about how
|
| 00:36:29.840 |
these techniques were transmitted from pretty far east beyond India from Siberia, from Central Asia,
|
| 00:36:36.560 |
via trade networks and the Silk Road, etc., all the way to the terminus of Western Anatolia,
|
| 00:36:42.560 |
and then it was the seafaring Anatolians who took these eastern philosophies, eastern techniques of
|
| 00:36:48.960 |
practices of ecstasy, hallucination, prophecy, etc. and then dispersed them across the Mediterranean.
|
| 00:36:54.800 |
I'm sure a lot of people are going to be asking themselves now exactly that connection is
|
| 00:37:00.560 |
there some transmission of eastern kind of Buddhist, you know, transcendental meditation type
|
| 00:37:07.280 |
philosophy in the philosophy of Parmenities. Kingsley seems to suggest that the actual roads
|
| 00:37:13.840 |
were well trafficked between Fokaya and the far east, so maybe there is indeed as Nietzsche himself
|
| 00:37:20.560 |
in the birth of tragedy that Dionysus has an asiatic origin, you know, so there's something for the
|
| 00:37:25.680 |
east. So Apollo as a god not only of light but of darkness, so that's very important.
|
| 00:37:32.960 |
Stillness, can you say a word about stillness grant because it is what incubation is focused on,
|
| 00:37:40.400 |
no, darkness and this lack of activity and motion around oneself. What is the healing power of
|
| 00:37:49.040 |
stillness and how much are we in, I don't know, want to jump out of the historical context,
|
| 00:37:53.840 |
but if there's something that's relevant in all this kind of incubational philosophy is that
|
| 00:37:59.680 |
we are so far from any kind of stillness in our own frenetic world that we might want to hear
|
| 00:38:07.200 |
more from you about the therapeutic power of stillness. Sure, you were mentioning stillness has an
|
| 00:38:12.560 |
end of incubation and it's not clear to me the extent to which stillness is a technique of ecstasy,
|
| 00:38:18.480 |
a means for arriving at these kind of manic prophetic healing. We'll get to log giving
|
| 00:38:24.880 |
abilities first being an end in itself. I think that's a pretty profound question. I'm not sure I
|
| 00:38:29.520 |
have a direct answer to right now, but there is something stillness is one route that was used in
|
| 00:38:36.640 |
pervasively across the ancient world to get into these hallucinatory ecstatic head spaces,
|
| 00:38:44.160 |
which were especially valuable for making big decisions, whether to go to war,
|
| 00:38:48.800 |
whether to found a colony, et cetera. When you reach a crisis that wasn't really clear,
|
| 00:38:53.120 |
you'd have to appeal to the authority of the gods and these states were believed to be
|
| 00:38:58.160 |
how human beings were able to achieve that connection for authoritative guidance.
|
| 00:39:05.040 |
It's that contact. Yeah, and King's Lee says that stillness is also the condition of death,
|
| 00:39:10.080 |
but not death as the termination of life, but death as this other side and perhaps even, you know,
|
| 00:39:15.600 |
origin of life, where one goes into the incubation chamber or into the caves in order to,
|
| 00:39:23.040 |
in a certain sense, die or cross the threshold into the realm of the dead and commune with the dead
|
| 00:39:34.320 |
and the divinities that belong to the underworld, because through the power of death,
|
| 00:39:40.960 |
there was healing to be had, and that if you don't die before you actually biologically perish,
|
| 00:39:47.840 |
then you haven't understood anything about life. And it's that sort of psychic descent,
|
| 00:39:56.320 |
which is important to the myth of Orpheus with whom power manides gets associated. But I want to,
|
| 00:40:05.440 |
we don't have all that much time remaining focus on Persephone, the figure of Persephone,
|
| 00:40:12.400 |
because she's the queen of this underground, and there's a mysterious goddess or that there's,
|
| 00:40:18.400 |
it's not clear in the prologue and the Paul, who is the divinity with whom
|
| 00:40:25.040 |
for many days or the young man, the kudos, is received by. And one of a very persuasive argument
|
| 00:40:32.560 |
that you have in the dark places of wisdom is that it's actually Persephone, even if she's not
|
| 00:40:38.160 |
named. And that would make sense, because as King's Lee also points out very insightfully,
|
| 00:40:44.320 |
there are no men, there are only women in this poem, divinities. I mean, you have the maidens,
|
| 00:40:51.600 |
you have justice, you have the goddess of the underworld, and so forth. The horses, the mares,
|
| 00:40:56.640 |
even the mares, even the horses are feminine. So first, a word about Persephone,
|
| 00:41:01.840 |
and then I'd like to ask you about real women in the real police of certain Greek things and
|
| 00:41:06.800 |
log-giving, okay? So Persephone, are you persuaded that she is one of the principal divinities that
|
| 00:41:15.600 |
this poem descends into contact with? I'd say I am persuaded King's Lee is excellent here going
|
| 00:41:21.520 |
into philological detail about small mentions, like the mansions of day and mansions of night,
|
| 00:41:27.360 |
and then looking at the Greek literary and religious tradition to find where over and over again these
|
| 00:41:34.400 |
geographical landmarks in the underworld are associated paradigmaticly with Persephone, so that alone
|
| 00:41:40.480 |
is very compelling. The cultural origins in Anatolia, in these complexes like Heropolis,
|
| 00:41:47.200 |
which were underworld cults, which were worshiped Persephone, and used very particular vocabulary,
|
| 00:41:52.800 |
which then show up on inscriptions in Velia, also fantastic evidence, and then there's the
|
| 00:41:59.200 |
level of the meaning of the poem, and it the ways it helps to understand what
|
| 00:42:04.180 |
Permanides is getting at once you posit Persephone as the goddess, and so I think through making
|
| 00:42:09.600 |
sense of the poem, through its historicist context, and through the philological, poetic, religious
|
| 00:42:18.960 |
details that King's Lee points out, he makes a very strong argument that the unnamed goddess
|
| 00:42:24.640 |
is Persephone, he also really puts really nicely how, when we're dealing with stillness and the
|
| 00:42:31.840 |
profundity of getting in touch with death, there's only so much you can say, and there's a power in
|
| 00:42:40.800 |
silence, and sometimes even more powerful than invoking a goddess is not invoking her by name
|
| 00:42:49.200 |
and leaving space for that power to be felt psychically as you say.
|
| 00:42:52.720 |
Exactly, and yeah, King's Lee says that the gods are named very sparingly by the Greeks,
|
| 00:42:57.280 |
and especially the gods of the underworld are usually not named at all because somehow their power
|
| 00:43:01.760 |
resides in their remaining unnamed, not nameless unnamed.
|
| 00:43:05.520 |
Female gods in particular, because oftentimes it was women who were the biggest demographic
|
| 00:43:12.080 |
practitioners of cults around females, and that there's the least material record, least written
|
| 00:43:18.000 |
record of these things, because women are for obvious reasons in the ancient world systematically,
|
| 00:43:23.280 |
written out of male written accounts of culture and society, and so there's many reasons
|
| 00:43:28.400 |
why there's more silence and darkness around the role of Persephone in the poem,
|
| 00:43:34.880 |
some relating to gender, some relating to the profundity of stillness and death, and some relating
|
| 00:43:41.760 |
to the silence we give the dead and the afterlife. Okay, great, so we're winding down now,
|
| 00:43:49.360 |
we just have a few minutes left. We talked about gender, women, darkness, there's one more claim,
|
| 00:43:55.600 |
very important, which is that, for many days and others, we're associated with legislation,
|
| 00:44:02.240 |
and log it, that Parmenis might have been a log ever himself, and that there was
|
| 00:44:07.680 |
recommended, there's records of some of these forlarchy who recommended that the city in order to be
|
| 00:44:17.120 |
cured of a plague, liberalize its laws against women, and kind of free them up to, if not
|
| 00:44:23.280 |
equal rights of citizenship, at least going a long way towards the enfranchisement of women,
|
| 00:44:30.720 |
hugely important, if that is indeed the case, because it would also connect to the predominantly
|
| 00:44:37.280 |
and, in fact, exclusively feminine presence in Parmenidé's poem, can you say something about the
|
| 00:44:43.040 |
legislation on this topic? Absolutely, so there's two parts to this answer, there's one about how in
|
| 00:44:48.560 |
Parmenides' specific community, the eachromontis was given special rights as ambassador and lawmaker,
|
| 00:44:57.360 |
and then there's the broader answer about how incubation in the ancient world in general was
|
| 00:45:03.280 |
bound up with log giving, so I'll start with the second one, and then zoom in on Parmenides,
|
| 00:45:07.120 |
the story really goes back to this prevenience kind of mythical prehistoric, kind of on the level
|
| 00:45:13.520 |
of the Trojan War where there's maybe some historical connection to a real person, but we certainly
|
| 00:45:19.280 |
don't have any evidence that could vindicate any certain facts, and this character was named
|
| 00:45:25.440 |
Epimenides, he was Sicilian and he was the Greek Rip Van Winkle, he slept in a cave for many years,
|
| 00:45:32.720 |
so textbook incubation, so in this, this Rip Van Winkle character sleeping in a cave for many years
|
| 00:45:39.200 |
was visited by the goddess justice of female goddess on behalf of the dead who informed Epimenides
|
| 00:45:46.880 |
that hundreds of miles away in Athens, there was a raging plague, he had fallen asleep before the
|
| 00:45:51.440 |
plague started, and they had the goddess justice had a message for him, to heal Athens of its plague,
|
| 00:45:58.080 |
there were three things Epimenides needed to do, first, encouraged the Athenians to pay more
|
| 00:46:03.360 |
attention to animals and study animals closer, second, to liberalize conditions for women and
|
| 00:46:09.600 |
increase women's rights in Athens, and finally to create a formal law code, then the goddess justice
|
| 00:46:16.320 |
woke up Epimenides in this cave and Sicily after his multi-year sleep, he got on a boat, went to
|
| 00:46:21.600 |
Athens, told the Athenians they were so desperate they followed his advice, and lo and behold,
|
| 00:46:26.080 |
the story goes, it worked, Athens was cured of this dangerous prehistoric mythological plague that was
|
| 00:46:33.040 |
haunting it, and therefore ever since then, in the Greek imagination, especially in the Athenian
|
| 00:46:39.920 |
imagination, there was a strong connection between the goddess justice, incubation, and law giving,
|
| 00:46:46.880 |
because those were the instructions that the goddess justice gave Epimenides during about of
|
| 00:46:52.080 |
incubation. The other part on Epimenides I can say quickly is that Valia, as we've been saying,
|
| 00:46:57.600 |
was a very conservative colony, it tried to, for hundreds of years and succeeded, at preserving
|
| 00:47:03.520 |
its Anatolian religious cult practices. The group that was most charged with doing this in these
|
| 00:47:12.240 |
Anatolian communities were called the Mole Boy, and they're best documented in a kind of sister
|
| 00:47:18.960 |
city that was kind of co-colonized by the Fokayans called Miletus, the Mole Boy were these political
|
| 00:47:24.960 |
elites that had special rights in the city to make laws, to be ambassadors, etc. And those
|
| 00:47:29.680 |
traditions of the kind of initiated priests, having special political rights and statuses,
|
| 00:47:37.360 |
continued in Valia. These, so, Parmenides was part of this inner political elite that his
|
| 00:47:44.960 |
priestly status granted him. And so, therefore, in Anatolia and Valia, not only was incubation away for
|
| 00:47:53.680 |
the goddess justice to come and suggest legal reforms or something like that, but it was those
|
| 00:47:59.200 |
priests who knew the ecstatic techniques of incubation, or regular dreaming, hallucination, etc.,
|
| 00:48:05.920 |
which were given special status to act as ambassadors and to reform laws, etc.
|
| 00:48:12.000 |
Grant has been a fascinating discussion. I want to now invoke someone that might not be very well
|
| 00:48:18.400 |
known by the audience of entitled opinions, because I don't know how many of our listeners are NFL fans,
|
| 00:48:24.080 |
but one of the great quarterbacks of not only the active group of quarterbacks, but maybe one of
|
| 00:48:34.400 |
the great quarterbacks in the history of the NFL is Aaron Rogers, who played for the Green Bay
|
| 00:48:40.000 |
Packers for several years, won multiple MVP awards, won a Super Bowl as well. And he had to make a
|
| 00:48:50.000 |
decision a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, after he left the Green Bay Packers,
|
| 00:48:56.800 |
whether he was going to retire, or whether he was going to continue playing for another team.
|
| 00:49:05.200 |
And all the commentators were anguishing over his indecision, and you talked about decision-making,
|
| 00:49:13.280 |
you've taught a course on decision-making and its connection with incubation. Isn't it
|
| 00:49:18.560 |
bizarre that Aaron Rogers went into what he called a solitary retreat, where he actually went
|
| 00:49:27.440 |
into a room completely dark, no light at all, for four days alone, and incubated.
|
| 00:49:39.120 |
Came out of that, deciding that he was indeed going to play in the NFL again, and joined the
|
| 00:49:49.360 |
New York Jets. And it was huge expectations by the New York Jets that have failed miserably in the
|
| 00:49:59.520 |
last decade or two decades in the NFL. And their season began last year, and within four plays,
|
| 00:50:07.440 |
Aaron Rogers tore his Achilles tendon. And so we had a suspended animation, which is what
|
| 00:50:14.880 |
the state of incubation is, the state of suspended animation. I mentioned this because we're recording
|
| 00:50:21.040 |
this show just a couple of days before the Monday Night Football game of the first game of the
|
| 00:50:27.520 |
San Francisco 49ers, of which I'm a huge fan, and the New York Jets. Aaron Rogers, the incubator,
|
| 00:50:35.520 |
is back now, has been healed of his Achilles tendon rupture. And the whole nation is absolutely
|
| 00:50:45.840 |
riveted by what is going to happen on Monday Night when Aaron Rogers faces the San Francisco 49ers
|
| 00:50:52.480 |
and his top ranked defense. So all this is not just the past. There is such a thing as
|
| 00:50:58.480 |
solitary confinement, which is exactly what incubation was for permanent days.
|
| 00:51:03.680 |
So the choice by Aaron Rogers to join the New York Jets makes me want to leave our listeners with
|
| 00:51:11.360 |
a warning that this isn't a complete endorsement that I can't say every time you turn off the
|
| 00:51:16.800 |
lights and stay still for three days. You'll come up with the best decision. I will say that
|
| 00:51:20.720 |
this was absolutely ubiquitous in the ancient world. It seemed like second nature to approach
|
| 00:51:26.080 |
critical decisions this way. Marcus Aurelius' teacher, Franco, followed his dreams for medical
|
| 00:51:32.000 |
advice, for instance, and just as a last cautionary tale of the incredible highs or potential
|
| 00:51:39.520 |
tragic lows of incubating in contemporary times, I'll mention this figure, John Lilly,
|
| 00:51:44.640 |
who was affiliated with Stanford University and invented the sensory deprivation tank, had
|
| 00:51:49.680 |
incredible breakthroughs about superintelligences and the potential of the human brain, but also became
|
| 00:51:55.200 |
an addict to research chemicals and seemed worse for the wear ultimately for spending so
|
| 00:52:01.280 |
much time in these sense deprivation tanks and if you're interested in a Hollywood sensationalized
|
| 00:52:06.320 |
version of what can go wrong, I'd recommend the movie altered states.
|
| 00:52:09.840 |
So I want to thank you for coming on in title opinions again. Remind our listeners who've
|
| 00:52:16.000 |
been speaking with Grant Bartolome Dowling, finishing a dissertation in ancient philosophy is
|
| 00:52:22.720 |
particularly Plato and the Socratic dialogues for coming on to in title opinions. So thanks again,
|
| 00:52:29.600 |
Grant and remind our listeners that I'm Robert Harrison for in title opinions. Thanks for listening.
|
| 00:52:59.600 |
[Music]
|
| 00:53:29.600 |
[Music]
|
| 00:53:59.600 |
[Music]
|