Adam Nicolson On The Rule Of Philosophy & Greek Mythology

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2:02Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down. Be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:54Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. Had a bit of a crazy experience on the way to recording today's interview. We got the kids in the car. It's absolutely freezing here in Austin. We're preparing slash prepared for a very big freeze. And everyone in Texas has a little bit of PTSD because two, three years ago, the whole state's power grid basically failed and we were trapped in our houses. And here at the Painted Porch, The roof had so much snow and ice on it. It's partially caved in. Pipes froze. Even just a year ago, we had a freeze and some pipes froze. So we all have a, you know, we're a bit sensitive here to it in Texas.

3:36Anyways, we're driving down the dirt road where we live. We see these two deer standing out in a field. We point them out to the kids who roll their eyes. They're not interested in deer at all anymore. And then my wife goes, stop this car, stop the car. And she's like, pull up to the side. Don't let the kids see. And there's this deer that's caught its leg in my neighbor's fence. And it was really caught. We rush out there. There's no easy way to get it unwedged. It's basically broken its leg around this thing. So I have to hop the fence. Thankfully, it was a panel fence, like a wire panel fence.

4:13If you know your fences, not barbed wire. So I climb and easily jump over and I have to sort of grab the deer as it's scared and whatever, flip it up over the fence and then get it. over the other side to unlock it. And tragically, both its legs were clearly broken. They were rubbed raw. And I think it had dislocated slash severely broken both hips. So it was not surviving the experience. So I had to drive the kids back home. And then I won't get into the details, but I had to dispatch the poor little thing. And then a circle of life. I text two of my neighbors because I had to run here to record this.

4:55I'm flying out tonight. And I said, hey, look, there's a deer caught in the fence. I had to put it out of its misery. Do you want it? And literally two of my neighbors, this is what it's like living in the country, two of my neighbors could not respond fast enough. One of them ended up coming and getting it before the other one texted me, hey, where's this deer? So it did not go to waste and did not suffer either. But that was my experience. That's my life. I guess sort of a timeless thing, a circle of, I guess, I wouldn't, I don't know if I want to say exactly timeless because the problem here is the metal fences, but hunting, neighbors, all these things.

5:44These are themes in the Odyssey, which we're reading as a family at my house. And that's why I wanted to have a conversation with today's guest, Adam Nicholson, who was quite sick. I've had some unique experiences with guests over the years from hotel rooms. I'm in hotel rooms, tech difficulties, whatever. I don't know if I've ever had anyone literally do it from bed, but that's what Adam was doing. So I appreciate him soldiering through. He toughed it out. You can't tell from the audio, I don't think. He sounded fine, but I could see on the video, which I won't be posting, that he was not well.

6:21But he struggled through, and we had an amazing conversation about this fantastic new book he has, How to Be Life Lessons from the Early Greeks. Adam is a award-winning English author. He writes about history and landscape and great literature in the sea. He wrote a fascinating book about the making of the King James Bible. He's the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the H.E. Heinemann Award, the Andat Chi Prize. And we just had a great conversation about the Greeks, about the ocean, about travel, and the Odyssey, as I said, which we're reading as a family. And then some of the early Greek Stoics as well.

6:58And the role of philosophy in our actual lives, which as you know, is one of my favorite topics. So here's my conversation with Adam Nicholson. Thank you for pushing through, Adam. And thank you all for listening.

7:20Well, I love the book. I'm really excited to talk. It's fitting. I'm in the middle now. I have a seven-year-old and he has become obsessed with the Odyssey and Greek myths. I don't think it had anything to do with me. I actually don't know where he got into. I think maybe video games introduced some of the characters and then he wanted to know more about them. But I just, I've been, every time he asks me questions about it, we read it, we found these songs he likes about the Odyssey. It's just so mind blowing to me to think how long people have been interacting with and talking about these same, same stories.

8:02What a grand tradition it is. Yes, well, I mean, they do say that there are only two stories, don't they? You know, either a stranger arrives, that's one story, or I go somewhere else, that's another story. And obviously the Odyssey is about the kind of, the encounter of the self and world, isn't it? You know, that is really the heart of that, that you expose a sensibility to a set of circumstances and see what happens. And that's always going to be exciting, isn't it? It's almost like cooking or something, or a chemistry experiment. You take a nodule of something and put it in conditions it's not used to, and things will fizz, won't they?

8:54And I think that that's essentially the odyssey in a word. Well, the odyssey is... With a key difference. that the little nodule of chemical substance knows, knows and thinks and feels and also resists and acts to be a kind of coherent actor in the world. And so I think that's what's thrilling, that you take this vulnerable substance of the person and he put them in a whole series of terrifying, brutal, stripping conditions. And he survives. And it's just, it's beautiful that, isn't it? The survival of the Odyssey. Well, I was going to say, what's interesting about the Odyssey, you said there's only two stories.

9:49The Odyssey is sort of both of those stories, right? It's this man traveling and then he arrives at home as a stranger, right? Yes, that's right. And so it's all of it in one, and perhaps that's why it's so endured. I'm sure that's right. And everyone always forgets that Odysseus actually gets home to Ithaca almost exactly halfway through the Odyssey. The whole half, second half of that poem is about him at home. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And what strikes me about it too, when I'm watching, because I'm getting to experience it through new eyes, because I'm watching this seven-year-old sort of take it in.

10:40And that the jokes still land, you know, I've talked about this before. He loves the joke about, you know, who put out my eye? No man put out my eye. And just the idea that somebody came up with that at some point, and we're still laughing at it thousands of years later. Well, the joke when Odysseus says nobody, the Greek for nobody, you know what the Greek for nobody is? Ootis, ootis. And it's like saying Odysseus, ootis. It's like a kind of mumbled version of his own name, that he actually is nobody. He really is nobody. He's everybody and nobody. You know, there's a wonderful English poet, a modern English poet, Alice Oswald, and she wrote a kind of long poem that took off the Odyssey, which she called Nobody for that very reason.

11:41that it's really a story about, in a way, someone who has no substance. It's why he's so slippery, but he isn't a kind of stiff, rigid item of issues. He's this slippery, half-present substance, and that is his strength, is his paradoxical strength. So it's funny, but it's also fabulously philosophical, isn't it, You know, to think that actually the greatest strength that a man, that a navigator, sailor, adventurer could have is not really to have any stiff stuff about him. That he is almost a liquid presence in a liquid world. One of the things you pointed out in the book that I didn't think about as I'm reading this story to my son is you're saying that Telemachus is learning that life is brutal and cruel and that to protect what is his, he has to be cunning and deceitful and ultimately violent.

12:45You know, he has to deceive, which he is, his father's not there yet, but he is watching his mother do that very thing. Yeah, and the great guide, the great kind of sponsor for both of them is Athene. She is both the goddess of wisdom and the goddess of war. And that she is both utterly deceitful and is always appearing. Well, she appears first as this pirate king. She turns up in Ithaca and tells Telemachus how to behave as a pirate, and he gets all his lessons from this pirate king. And only after she's left, when Telemachus is feeling kind of oddly good about life, you know, like someone who at last has got over the flu, it's really he suddenly thinks heavens that was Athene wasn't it and so she's so deceitful that you only ever half meet her the goddess of wisdom and violence is so wise because she's not there I mean I think home is absolutely brilliant for these sort of half statement of things it's so unblocky And this world where the gods are not only among you, but are among you and not telling you that they're among you is an interesting, I think, very different conception of religion than we have today, or even how we conceive of how they conceived of the gods.

14:30Yeah, I think that's right. I think that only the kind of, in Homer, only the kind of worldly powerful ever get to see that the gods are gods. Most people, nearly everyone, I mean Homer obviously knows everything because Homer is the kind of source of all wisdom. That is the poem knows what's going on. but the people in the poem kind of sense the divine, whatever, you know, bit of the divine, whatever name you want to attach to that bit of the divine, as a kind of, almost like a kind of an aura, you know. It's almost like a kind of a sense of being alive, you know. It's kind of, it's very interestingly transitional between exterior and interior.

15:22so it's it's it is as you say you know like it's another psychology that that actually you know when you feel really good perhaps you are encountering the divine i mean that's a really interesting idea isn't it that the divine is in fact a kind of well-being that is is almost self-generated all that or there's no boundary between you and the world and that the divine can completely infuse you and then leave again. A momentary experience of the divine. An epiphany is what people call it now, isn't it? An epiphanos. I mean, epiphanos means an appearing on, an appearing on the world or in the world.

16:06And I think that's an incredibly helpful idea, isn't it, about one's relationship to the metaphysical. I feel it is. that actually, if you feel great, oh my God, maybe that is godliness that you've got for a minute. I love that. Right, instead of this conception of God being above or apart, that it's woven into your daily life and that you don't know. Like, did you just fall in love with this person or were you visited by a God? Did you just have a great idea or did a God give it to you? You know, I mean, not to overstate this, you know, there is a whole, you know, Mount Olympus apparatus, you know, so, and there are images and statues and obviously temples and everything.

16:56And so I think that it would be wrong to say that this is the only Homeric idea of what godliness is, because there is definitely a sort of massive celestial psychodrama going on, which they joke about. You know, as you say, Homer is funny. He has funny when gods have sex with each other. It's just hilarious. Clumsy, great sort of, you know, pensioners fumbling with each other in the clouds. One of the things you talk about in the book that I thought was interesting is the sort of geography of it, that it's this sort of series of harbors and ports. And they're kind of traveling, like thinking of, we think of Greece as this place that was a long time ago, instead of what it actually was, was a series of places.

17:47and you're kind of constantly traveling between them and they all kind of have their different cultures and idiosyncrasies. And yeah, the idea of the traveler between the cities somehow seems central to the understanding of the Greek mind. Well, I do think it is very interesting that this book I've written is not essentially about the mythology, the beginnings of Greek mythology, which are probably earlier than the period I was dealing with. But this period, which is the early Iron Age, like about 700, 750 BC, is a moment when Greekness begins to emerge as a kind of power, really, in the Eastern Mediterranean.

18:38They have these wonderful cities and temples and athletic games and coinage and all the rest of it. law codes, they were not the first cities, obviously enough. There have been hugely powerful urban civilizations in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, running over to the Indus, you know, in the whole of West Asia, China, there had been enormously instituted urban worlds, powerful urban worlds, rich and highly literate, with literatures of their own, not only sort of bureaucracies. And the key difference is that all of those predecessor Bronze Age civilizations had been hugely centralized with very powerful god, kings, pharaohs, vast priestly and scholarly bureaucracies, all completely dominated by this idea that the centre where the king and the god and power all resided was the core of all meaning.

19:50And those civilisations, for whatever reason, no one's ever really worked out why, all quite suddenly collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age in about 1100 BC. And that Mediterranean and West Asian world entered a sort of dark age, illiteracy dropped away in many places, empires collapsed, all the rest of it. And then out of the ruins of that world emerged these independent Greek cities, both Phoenician in what's now Lebanon and the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and around the Aegean in what's now western Turkey. these independent, mercantile, commercial, sea-connected cities. And so none of them were these kind of great monarchical centers.

20:44In fact, they all hated the idea of kings. In fact, many of them hated the idea of there being a kind of divine king, a Zeus even. and instead liked the idea, as you say, that meaning is generated by a kind of bubbling independence of life and mind. And so in those earlier civilizations, all the intellectuals had really been priests or palace scholars transcribing the orthodoxies that they'd received from the past. in these Greek cities for the first time the thinkers were independent forces they weren't allied to the great power structures it was a world in which people could think for themselves for the first time, it's what is so exciting about this kind of extraordinary emergence like mushrooms all over the eastern Mediterranean or the Eastern Aegean and then in Southern Italy, people starting to think things quite like what we think for the first time.

21:58I mean, how amazing is that? Actually to think of souls or to think of what the substance of the world is or what the just society is or what the coherent self is, all those kinds of things, what the kind of vivid, fulfilled self is, all of those things appear in these cities then. Yeah, it's interesting that you bring that up, right? Because the role of a priest is such a central part of the human concept of, part of humanity, that it goes back further than we know. We don't know when the first priests to whatever primitive early religions originated. But what is remarkable is that we do know when philosopher, thinker originated.

22:47And it originated, right? Like that there was a point, I mean, you call them and people refer to them as the pre-Socratic philosophers. But kind of before the pre-Socratic philosophers, there was just no such thing as philosopher or philosophy. And so the idea that we vaguely know the period in which this kind of central self-redefining concept originates is really remarkable. We kind of glance over it, but when these guys, and they're mostly men, when they emerge onto the scene, it must have been so strange. I think it's very alarming. I think it's clearly excited by their own world. They're inventing lyric poetry.

23:42They're inventing a coinage. They're inventing the idea of the kind of well-organized city. They're inventing the idea of a city which is drawing its life entirely, as you said earlier, from its connections across the sea. They're very much sailor harbor cities. We do have to be a bit careful because there are earlier thinkers. It's not as if thinking emerged then. Sure. In India, in China, in Babylon, in the kind of Sumer, in Egypt, people had thought about things. but they'd in Mesopotamia had invented mathematics Chinese were onto the mathematics they were observing the patterns of the heavens it wasn't if suddenly the Greeks sort of acquired another half of the brain or something it wasn't that it was that I think it's about this independence of mind it's instead of it being power-related, which all of those previous civilizations thought and power were absolutely intimate with each other.

25:01For these Greeks, not actually unlike the Hebrew prophets, powerful thinking was often opposed to worldly power. You know, if you think of the way in which those Old Testament prophets were hammering away at the kings and all the kind of the idiots, that they were surrounded by and the self-indulter. In some ways, these Greek philosophers are very like them. And the other thing to say about them is that they're not sort of cool-minded rationalists either. You know, the boundary between sage and mage and prophet and philosopher and poet even is very, very hazy. In fact, there is no boundary between those things.

25:55All of these people are a kind of amalgam of that sort of figure.

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28:25Well, I guess maybe an analog is like, obviously, there's always been musicians and there was even really famous musicians. You have Beethoven, you have Bach, et cetera. But, you know, with the invention of jazz, which is not that long ago, And then the invention of rock and roll, what it means to be a musician and the role that musicians play in society, that's an invention. I mean, that transforms society, it transforms culture, and it's something new. And I think your point about it feeling like alive is exactly it. There's something exciting and generative and almost like destabilizing or revolutionary about the invention of this sort of modern Western philosopher, which, I mean, when you read it in a book, it feels like it's all happening one right after another.

29:16Of course, this is elapsing over quite a long period of time. But you get the sense by the time Socrates comes around that this is groundbreaking, revolutionary, invigorating stuff. It really is. And if you – so the first Greek thinkers came from a city, one of these trading cities called Miletus on the west coast of Turkey now. And the three of them emerged. maybe one was a pupil of the other and so on, or maybe somehow related to each other anyway, called Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. And it's exactly right what you say, that their theories of the nature of being were incredibly radical.

30:09Thales, and also so radical they sound crazy now. So Thales decided he was not a kind of madman. He was very articulate. He'd written a book about navigation, another one about astronomy. He knew how to measure buildings. He was a businessman. He'd made a corner in olive oil one year and all that kind of thing. He'd written a law code for his city and other cities and so on. And so he was a completely coherent citizen of his world. But Thales decided that when it was boiled down, when he really got down to the roots of the question, his question was, what is the world made of? And his answer was water, which is absolutely mad.

31:06I mean, clearly the world is not made of water. But his follower, Anaximander, said, no, no, no, no, no, it's not made of water. It's made of something he called the undefined, the aperon, which is the kind of the condition of existence when things do not yet have an identity. And so out of the undefined, everything emerges, and then in the end, back into the undefined, everything returns. And then Anaximity says, no, no, no, it's not the undefined. It's far, far subtler than that. It's the whole of the cosmos is filled with a breath, the great cosmic breath. and everything that lives or is just for a moment absorbs their own bit of that cosmic breath and as it comes to life it breathes in that cosmic breath and for its lifetime breathes it and then as it dies exhales it and that breath returns to the whole kind of grand fluid structure of the cosmos as a whole.

32:30And so you can see that these are not exactly, you know, they're not exactly building Teslas, these people, are they? I mean, it's not quite down that street. But it's absolutely, to me, it's absolutely visionary. And interestingly, it's not unlike the kind of Buddhist ideas that are emerging in India at the same time about the cosmic breath. You know, those things are also alive in India. But it's a very great vision because, just as we were saying earlier, that this world is not dependent on grand central fixity. This is not about building pyramids, but on recognizing that meaning is in exchange and in fluidity, that actually you kind of derive sense from a connectedness between things, that everything that is is not a kind of definable, reducible, solid object like a billion ball, but simply part of the kind of the grand flowing of everything into everything, which is, in fact, the modern recognition, isn't it?

33:51It's the modern recognition of the universe, that we are all just in process. The stuff of which you're made came from a star, from an exploding star, and will, of course, return to an exploding star. And so I think that this kind of absolutely radical understanding that stuff is fluid is one of the great understandings that human beings have ever come to. Doesn't Thales also do that experiment? Doesn't he corner the oil market, as you said, because he was trying to make the point that a philosopher doesn't just have to be a sort of academic theoretical thinker, but could be successful and entrepreneurial and financially independent, that there wasn't a contradiction between being a person of ideas and a person of the world.

34:51Well, you know, the other Thales story, which is the great story of Thales, is that he's walking around the beautiful marble streets of Miletus late at night. And he's looking at the stars. And as he's looking at the stars, he takes a step back to just get a better view of the constellation past one of the buildings. and as he steps backwards, he trips over a well head and falls into the well, bottom first, gets stuck in there. And as he falls in, standing next to the well, this is a story told by Socrates. As he falls into the well, there's a person that Socrates or Plato describes as a beautiful, witty Thracian girl.

35:45That Thracian girl is a Greek shorthand for a slave girl from Thrace, north of the Aegean. These are, perhaps we might talk about it in a minute, but these are slave-owning cultures. And the beautiful, witty Thracian girl says to Thales as he falls into the well, what is the point of looking at the heavens when you can't even see what exists at your feet? Okay, so this is in a way, as you say, the grand question about philosophy, that what really matters more? Does it matter to understand the higher things like that, the things above you, the sort of immaterial, otherworldly things among the stars?

36:39Or should you really attend to things as they are, the material actualities? What matters more, high-mindedness or doing the laundry? Where does significance actually lie? And, of course, that story has often been told admiringly, admiringly of, Plato tells it admiringly of Socrates, Socrates tells it admiringly of Thales, as that somehow to be removed from worrying about everyday realities is itself a sign of high civilization. But it's been interpreted differently that, you know, And maybe you could say that the only reason that Thales can look at the stars is that he has the Thracian slave girl doing his laundry for him or getting water from the well for him.

37:45And so this picture of a kind of hierarchy of significance that it's more important that Thales looks at the stars than that the Thracian girl gets the water is itself a symptom of a radically polarizing, often actually anti-female society, in which philosophers are male and water gatherers are female slaves. And that this, in fact, is a story about everything that's wrong with philosophy. The philosophy is a kind of awful male delusion about importance, the importance of the high. Whereas, as you say, we've got to get on with the actual and also maybe have a society in which some people, even the witty, beautiful people, are not condemned to gathering water late at night for their masters.

38:52So it's an incredibly rich and suggestive thing now, and worrying about philosophy, you know, that philosophers do tend to sort of congratulate themselves on how removed they are and how stupid the rest of us are. I can't bear that. There's a story a couple centuries later in Athens with Cleanthes, one of the early Stoics, who has this job watering the gardens. He's basically a manual laborer. And I think a king offers him a lot of money or asks him why is he sort of demeaning or debasing himself with this manual labor. And he basically says something like, is that all that I do, water the gardens or dig in the dirt?

39:39I think his point was that there was something actually philosophical about the labor, about the simplicity of his life, And that there really isn't a world in which one detaches from these things to contemplate the heavens that you can sort of be philosophical and in fact must be philosophical, whoever you are, whatever you do. It's a different conception of philosophy. And it's interesting that we've been wrestling with that for thousands of years, and we think about it even now. Is a university professor a philosopher, or is there something inherently hollow about sort of doing it from your ivory tower?

40:29Yes, I mean, all of that rings very true. And that kind of suite of questions is very vividly alive in this pre-Socratic world too. One of them is a man called Xenophanes who lived in one of these harbour cities, It's a colophon and notion, a double city, an incredibly beautiful place. And he is the first person to say that there is nothing more wicked in the world than the idea of dominant gods, that god, these sort of dreadful gods, this Olympian crew, are themselves a sort of horrible model. and that he can't bear the idea that Homer, especially the Iliad, is repeated endlessly at dinner parties and drink parties and symposia in the city because it's leading people to an absolutely false idea of what the good is.

41:51and the modern form of that that he particularly despises is athletics. How horrible that we have to watch some people winning and some people losing. What could be more destructive of communal well-being than elevating winners to be this kind of lauded beefcakes parading through the streets of the city? what we really want I mean it's fantastically what we think of as middle age middle class idea what we really want is courtesy we just want to be kind of nice and gentle with each other and tell each other nice stories and learn civility by coexistence and so this the sort of drift towards hierarchy that is in human society is itself, for xenophanies, completely destructive.

42:58And actually the drift towards hierarchy, which the professor or the champion athlete or whatever is the beneficiary of, needs in fact to be banished from the good city. Hierarchy is punishment, in a way. Hierarchy destroys a sense of well-being in those who don't win or those who don't dominate. And so, you know, that's which is so interesting because those Miletus philosophers have these very, very radical and erosive ideas about anything that means is essentially fluid. And yet Xenophanes and others are at the same time cultivating the idea that a kind of stability and easy coexistence is really the root of meaning, probably.

44:01So it's nice, isn't it, that even early on in this whole process, there is no kind of resolution. It's not as if they began with one set of ideas, which they then abandoned. Well, and originating at this same time, or not originating, but being codified is this idea that some people should be able to own and dominate and control the labor of other people. Yes. This is a very important and disturbing point, that all of these cities are setting up their colonies all around the northern Aegean and up into the Black Sea and on the shores of what's now northern Turkey, Crimea, southern Russia. all of them were slave trading cities and with designated areas of their own ports for the kind of processing of the slaves which they were then exporting largely to the big urban civilizations to the east in Mesopotamia and Persia and Egypt.

45:20And so there is a problem that this thing that the Thales stories brings to mind is sort of terrible. That philosophy, the idea that there are higher things to think about, comes at a time just when chattel slavery, tradable human beings, takes off as a business. In fact, these cities are reliant on that business for the profits which allows these people, these philosophers to exist and to be paid to exist. And so what can I say about that? Does the fact that slavery emerges just as philosophy emerges actually devalue philosophy as an enterprise? Does it mean that philosophy is fatally tainted with slavery, with enslavement?

46:23And in some ways, I think it does. I think, you know, just as you're saying, that in fact, perhaps the real civilization should banish philosophy. because only by getting rid of philosophy and the idea that there are higher things or purer ways of thinking about things will you then be able to achieve a kind of fair and just society. I mean, it's a really terrifyingly radical idea that, to say I should not have written this book. No one should read it. is absolutely nothing not to do.

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50:01It's interesting, like, you know, the military culture of Sparta is a culture that's only possible, right? Because it's supported, it's built on the back of this whole race of people that they own and control and brutally suppress and murder to keep in a place of submission. And you could argue, you know, a lot of philosophers in Greece and Rome would talk about whether philosophy should be commercial, whether the philosopher should have a job, whether they should. And all of these discussions, the sort of the ideal of the philosopher, you know, sitting in the countryside, contemplating ideas, writing these books, whatever, you know, it is facilitated by the fact that they inherited some sort of large slave plantation from their family.

50:57So, so it is kind of inextricable that the relationship between philosophy and some sort of exploitative system. Although Stoicism, interestingly enough, is founded, Zeno washes up in Athens penniless. But before he was a philosopher, he was a Phoenician merchant of Tyrian purple, which is one of the most brutal slave produced products you could possibly imagine. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't entirely embrace the question. I think, in a way, the great dominant figure of these pre-Socratics and the most sort of everlastingly suggestive of them is Heraclitus. and Heraclitus who came from one of these slaving cities from Ephesus the richest even, the most incredibly indulgent and sort of luxurious of cities with many many Phoenician connections by the way and Heraclitus will not play with power or dominance but he is from a family who has a hereditary right to the kingship of Ephesus, and he rejects it.

52:25They ask him, and he's a brilliantly wise man, to write a law code. He refuses. He says that the citizens of Ephesus are not good enough for any law code that he might write for them. He doesn't hang out in the kind of drawing rooms and salons of Ephesus. He hangs out in people's kitchens, weirdly, is the story of him hanging out in the kitchen. by the oven, and he spends his time with beggars and children playing knuckle bones, you know, like the kind of dice, on the steps of the great temple in Ephesus. And so it is not unlike Christ, say, it's an absolute rejection of, or maybe Socrates. It's an absolute rejection of power and dominance as a route to significance.

53:29And that's everything. All of these thinkers only survive in the most fragile fragments. And actually this story differs when we get to Italy later on, But for Heraclitus, his philosophy is kind of so – it disowns this power notion so fiercely that, you know, that – of course, the famous thing about not stepping – you can never step into the same river twice – is itself kind of restatement of the kind of fluidity of things, that every identity is only the shape that the wave has for the moment, that you perceive it and that. But he also, in his remarks about kind of social structure, he says for example that in the most concentrated form that strife is justice and the analogy he uses is either the bow or the lyre and both the bow and the lyre which are incidentally the kind of instruments of Apollo the great god of wisdom and refinement both the bow and the lyre consist of a frame that pulls in one direction and a string or strings that pull in the other.

55:13And that only because those two necessary elements of the bow are pulling against each other does the bow even exist. And if you broke the string of the bow, cut it, or if you broke the arms of the actual frame, then the bow would no longer exist. And so only in strife, only in argument is the coherence. And so only when opposites seem to be tautly connected to each other. So he famously says the road up is the road down. Well, of course the road up is the road down. But that is a kind of statement about the essential nature of things. And the essential nature of things is inherently self-contradictory.

56:08I mean, a lot of people have a lot of trouble with this later on. But the essential identity of something is not only what it is, but also what it is not. then that itself is highly erosive of a kind of you know dominant exploitative power and i think it's a very very very beautiful and helpful idea that a city could only be just if it allows absolutely in the top level of its existence right in the surface of its existence a kind of argument. And it is, these are not democratic cities. These are not places where everybody has access to power in any way. But they're merchant oligarchies. But leaving that aside, and they're slave-owning merchant oligarchies.

57:07So if one can for a minute set that aside, then this is a vision of a sort of permanently dynamic, tense, rather exciting coherence. Coherence is not that being nice to everyone at the dinner party. It's actually having a really blazing row in Congress. That's what beauty is, really. I always thought it was interesting to go back to the slave idea that, you know, even hundreds of years later, when you get some of the great slave philosophers or philosopher slaves, whether you're talking about Sirius or Epictetus or Terence, none of them even question the institution of slavery. They see philosophy as a means of coping with and surviving and thriving inside slavery, but they don't seem to question the fundamental injustice of being owned and exploited by another person.

58:17Or perhaps this part of their work is suppressed and it doesn't survive to us. But I always thought it was interesting that – Don't you think, Ryan, that we're guilty of the same thing? I mean, I know that we don't largely have slavery now, but we have appallingly and radically polarized lives and benefits from lives. so that to a huge extent there are large sections of the population in your country, in mine, in the world as a whole where people don't have access to this kind of conversation even that you and I are having now, do they? And so we don't get up in the morning and think, oh, that's terrible, isn't it?

59:08Do we? Or do you? No, but if I was working in a sweatshop, I think I would conceive of that sweatshop as being exploitative and evil and unjust. Do you get what I'm saying? Like Epictetus, the slave is saying nothing about slavery. I do see that as extraordinary. But the human capacity for forgetting, it could never be underestimated. Can it? Sure. That we, you know, all of us like to ignore what would be painful to consider. but but also i think it goes to your point that that there is a a sort of an irony or a paradox and the idea that even as these people were saying that everything was fluid that everything is in flux that everything is changing there was also this sort of remarkably stratified society that they lived in that they took for granted institutions hierarchies he doesn't that's the point.

1:00:12He doesn't. That he knows there is strife. He knows there is a kind of a clamor for power, significance, well-being, wealth, you know, happiness, whatever, which another group would deny. And that only by allowing that strife can you even hope for justice. That tyranny is stable, tyranny is calm, and that actually it's the denial of tyranny that is beautiful. In fact, you could think of that as an aesthetic statement as much as a political or social one, that only when things are tense is something actually vitalized. And I think that that is a recognition by him that of this, you know, we could call is an irony or a hypocrisy, maybe.

1:01:06I mean, I think it's more like a hypocrisy than an irony. Well, I think that says something about where we are now too, right? A lot of economists and theorists talk about how what a society needs is dynamism and change and disruption and that things like income inequality or stasis, things staying the same, that's the problem that you need. you need flux and change. And this desire to keep things as they are is the form of injustice, because you're preventing things from being invented, you're preventing revolutions from occurring, you're preventing change from happening, which might preserve what you have, but it fundamentally keeps other people stuck where they are, which might not be as good of a position.

1:01:54That's exactly right. And I think that the, you know, we have it in Europe, and you have it in your country, this nostalgia, sort of political nostalgia for an era where apparently, or whatever, slightly invented era, where things were not tense with competitive is an aspect of that. It's why that vision is tyrannical, because it does not allow the bow or the string to pull the bow. And so it ends up with a sort of death, actually. It's a death of society. But, I mean, it's such an interesting area. So if you can kind of connect that to those thoughts of the Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes thing, that actually maybe, and some of the later pre-Socratics do talk about this, Empedocles talks about this, that if you think that, Empedocles is the first person to make it very clear.

1:03:05He was in Sicily a hundred years later or so. that the world consists of these four elements of earth, air, water, and fire. And those are the four ingredients. And the two active principles in combining and separating those elements are love and strife. And so love is obviously a kind of agglutinating, it's the force that brings things together. and strife is the one that blows them apart. And that actually the nature of things, to use a word, the nature of things is to kind of roll through a sequence of conditions in which sometimes things are totally apart and then sometimes when strife dominates and sometimes kind of coherence and togetherness when love dominates and it is a necessary kind of role, and that even to arrive at a fixed condition of Heraclitian strife-filled justice is itself a form of stasis.

1:04:26So even that condition you were just describing or we were just talking about where forces in society are pulling against each other, that itself can become a kind of fixity. That itself maybe has to roll. I think that's a very great perception by Empedocles. As we wrap up, the question I was going to ask you, I'm starting to get excited about it, is what do you think of the idea of recovering some of the lost works of the Greeks, which they think might start to happen? And some of these things that are entombed at Pompeii and now they can take pictures of them and artificial intelligence can recover what's in there.

1:05:11I know they just found the first fragment and it says like the purple cloak, which, you know, as we were talking about, you know, brings up the idea of the Phoenicians and Tyrion purple and the cloak of the emperor. Just this one singular phrase of a couple words could potentially signify so many potentially exciting or invigorating ideas. I remember reading once that Chrysippus, one of the Stoics, wrote 700 books and none of them survived. It could be in there. We don't know. I agree with you. It's absolutely thrilling. I don't know what the timetable is on that. Do you know when they're going to get that stuff out?

1:05:57They're sitting there like croissants that have been left too long in the oven, aren't they? Yes. And when everyone's touched them in the past, they've crumbled to nothing. But now AI can read through the layers and distinguish the papyrus from the ink. And if, can you imagine if all these pre-Socratics suddenly flower into an entire library? It's genuinely thrilling. I want to write that book. I mean, it could totally change what we think about everything because it's remarkable to think, we take it for granted, that this is somehow everything they thought. Right? When really this is just a fragment of what they thought.

1:06:43We don't have any conclusive, we don't have the Bible of Socrates, the Bible of the Stoics, the Bible of Epicurus. We have these fragments from which we have deduced a picture, a sense of what they thought. But they could have said the opposite two pages later or two books later, and we have no idea what could be out there. Yeah, and yet it's rather exciting. I always think it's rather lovely dealing with fragments. I mean, how much easier is it to write a book about the pre-Socratics than about Hegel? So, you know, you're only dealing with these little pebbles who just collected from the beach, you know.

1:07:23You aren't having to kind of address an entire city block. Well, there's a – and they weren't all great writers and thinkers, right? There's a joke about Epictetus. he overhears one of his students bragging about having read through the entire library of Chrysippus, Chrysippus being dense and difficult to get through. And Epictetus looks at the student and he says, you know, if Chrysippus had been a better writer, you'd have less to brag about. And the idea is, you know, we have this sense of them being smart and articulate and on it about all these things. Who knows? Maybe they have horrific other books out there that would totally change our perception of them.

1:08:10That's always worth contemplating too. I don't want to demote these people. The person I would really love to read a lot more of is Sappho. I don't know if you ever read early Greek lyric poetry, but it is completely frustrating the way in which her suggestion just kind of disappears off into space, you know. If an entire new book of Sappho's poetry emerged, can you think of that? Well, maybe there was, you know, other Sappho's. There were other incredible poets just coming out of nowhere like this. That'll be a moment. Yeah, there could be more female philosophers. There could be – who knows what could be out there?

1:09:04Well, we don't know when. We don't know when. Have they not announced when it's going to be? I don't think so. I think it's a painstaking process, and it could outlast all of us. Who knows? Okay, next life then. when we come back. Yes. But that is an interesting, that's sort of a Heraclitian idea too, I guess, in the sense that here we are thousands of years later and it's still unfolding, still changing. You just think about, you know, he says, we never step in the same river twice. Here you have that text frozen in place 2 ,000 years ago and how society has changed and remade itself all these different times and then to suddenly be re-exposed to an idea that's been in this time capsule the whole time.

1:09:54What effect would it have? How would we perceive it? How differently would we perceive an idea that we didn't have access to for 2 ,000 years than an idea that's been evolving with us for 2 ,000 years? That's true, what he says in Greek, very beautiful Greek. he says, On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow. And that is a very, you know, it's better that you never step in the same rivers twice because it's obviously a kind of act of poetry anyway.

1:10:43is a kind of, you know, I think it could be, you could have that over the door to your house, couldn't you? I would think that that could be as essential a statement as any that could be imagined. Well, isn't that the essence of the expression, you can't go home again, which brings us right back down to Odysseus, and The Traveler. That's very good. Who said that? Who said that? I don't know who said it. Isn't it also a Bon Jovi song? I don't know. But the idea is, yeah, you're not the same and the place is not the same, even though, of course, they are the same. Yes. Good. Well, we've arrived at a very philosophical place.

1:11:32Well, I loved the book and I love this conversation and I appreciate you powering through and I hope you feel better. Thank you so much. I'm sorry to be ill and groggy. No, you can barely tell. Thank you. A pleasure, a real pleasure for me.

1:11:53Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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